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Many Africans in the motherland display open scepticism when it comes to the great African family reunion, meaning the oneness of all the children of Africa scattered all over the world. The recurrent question is : "do they say they're Africans? Do they acknowledge themselves as Africans?". The question I venture to ask is whether the Africans from the motherland acknowledge their brothers and sisters from the diaspora as Africans? Do they remember them? Have they not forgotten them? The blame can so be put on each side. My opinion however is that them Africans done remained inside are affected in the same way as their abducted brothers and sisters. That disease can be identified as the loss of self consciousness, or the destruction of our identity.  

More and more Africans from the diaspora are becoming aware of their identity as Africans. It is from the part of the brothers and sisters outside the motherland a heroic process of quest and conquest of a stolen, a confiscated, a lynched self. The African brothers and sisters in the motherland should not take for granted the violence extreme exerted for centuries on on the bodies, the hearts and the mind of their brothers and sisters so as to deprive them of any awareness of their identity or humanity. That violence has reached peaks beyond what is even conceivable. When the son of Nzali thinks it is absurd for our brothers not to spontaneously embrace Africa, I hope he is not oblivious of that that our people did go through. When Habiba accurately says that if ever somebody happened to take her  away from her people she would do everything to found her way back home, I hope she bears on mind that that our people did go through. If she was placed in an environment who forbid her the use of her language, the mention of her ancestral name, any cultural manifestation that could connect her to her culture, her children and her children's children would have but a very small awareness of that culture. It was predictable that the inhumanities the abducted Africans endured produce the result we witness today.  

An elder was telling me the brothers and sisters from the diaspora were the ones had to come back to Africa since they are the ones done left. No, our parents never did leave: they been abducted, enslaved, chained, tortured, put inside ships and taken far far away. They fought, they revolted, they even won battles but the enemies' weapons were stronger. Would that elder sit down and coolly cross his legs waiting for his children, his brothers to find their own way back home if ever he was told that after having been imprisoned and abused somewhere they were now abandoned in a distant place with the families they have founded there?

If everybody keeps thinking it is for the others to make the first step nothing will ever happen. Africans from the diaspora gotta right to wait for their brothers in the motherland to make the first step knowing that after the mind manipulation by the enslavers our brothers think them of Africa must repent for what been happening. My father confessed to me he had once been confrontedby an African from the West Indies who angrily told him: "look what you have made me, a b*!#%ard". No, we do not have to wait no more. Each and every one of us when they can must go to the brothers and sisters from the other side of the ocean. There ain't no use in waiting. The decision and the power to act are yours and mine and his and hers and ours.

Let us not wait. Let us not wait no more. Let us not wait for nothing . Let us not wait for nobody.

The "D" day, the "F" factor are none but anyone of us.  Let us use all the science we are the possessors of. Let us use the great science of the word that generates global scale harmony in order to build roads, open paths, build bridges of the reunited panafrican family. The first step sure enough is the winning one. The first that makes our history and History. One step plus one step plus another step make a march, a mighty movement. Let us mightily march and move together towards our victory, the victory of the children of Kama, Farafina, Africa. This is time for  action not time for waiting. We are the actors and the factors of our history. Let us make our history then. Let us wait no more.

                                                      Dee Dee Bridgewater