We need more black heroes

I grew up in Africa, in an impoverished suburb of Kampala, the Ugandan capital. Like many who have spent their formative years in Kampala, I had to make an effort to find beauty. But one place was reliably like no other in my search: books.

I received a special kind of education that came in the form of smuggled books. Early in my mother’s career as a kindergarten teacher, shortly after becoming a widow, she secured a job at one of the nation’s finest schools, the Kampala International School. This was not a place that she could afford to send her own children, it was a school for the children of foreign envoys and the one percent of my country. Although my siblings and I underwent the standard education common to those somewhat impoverished Kampala suburbs, we also had the books that my mother would bring home after class.

It all started with my mother’s sonorous voice reading Rudyard Kipling‘s “The Jungle Book,” at my pre-ripened age of four. I was taken by Mowgli, the young boy and protagonist who was raised by animals. The impact of that story was so significant that I began a pursuit of literature.

While the books I read had an immeasurably lasting impression on me, no rays came from the literature that Africa had to provide.

I found it difficult to read and appreciate any of the books that were local to Kampala or to the region, which were seemingly boring and poorly written. Perhaps non-surprisingly, my earliest attempts at writing stories included characters whose skin was “white as snow,” akin to the characters that I’d been exposed to time and time again in Western books. Nowhere in my imagination did I conceive even the possibility of writing about strong, independent and self-sufficient African characters, like myself. As I set out to begin a story, never did I think, the hero will be African.

Tragically, this complex affects millions of young people in Africa today, and many have chosen to emigrate to the U.S. and Europe and leave their homelands in the past, abandoned and forgotten, to chase an unattainable sense of self. I have finally defeated the toxic notion that I inherently measure up as less than white society, but the power of Western pop culture may explain why some will go to the extent of bleaching their skin, the ultimate submission to the impression that being black means being inferior. As my quest for knowledge pushed me away from Hollywood and the bone whiteness of Europe, I came upon art from places much closer to the Kampala suburbs. Through African authors like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka from Nigeria, Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya, Senegal’s Mariam Ba, and Uganda’s Ogot P. Bitek, I finally discovered the heroism of blackness. Through their writings, these authors uncovered what had recently been festering in my mind: they brought the evils of colonialism and its devastating effects on Africans to life on the page; they exposed the lie that African culture was inferior to that of the white man and his God-given right to the world.

My inner child began to rethink the fairytale world of “Neverland” and Prince Charming. Eventually, the stories that I crafted began featuring black characters. The pop culture that had always influenced the imaginative world that I drew from finally transformed. But getting there had not been easy. It took years of deconstructing the mindset that had been instilled within me from an early age. I still am called out for a emulating a certain kind of “whiteness” in the way I carry myself, the way I speak. But if my writing serves as a representation of who I am, I believe that it reflects not only a world that’s expanded past the confining influence of Hollywood, but a world that continues to expand within Africa and beyond.

It’s obvious that the cultural influences from Western pop culture did not only affect me. People in my country have been majorly influenced by leading films, soap operas and telenovelas to the extent that they’ve named their children after such characters, but also after English Premier footballers, and Western musicians playing on television in stylized music videos that conform to the American doctrine of MTV. This makes for a culture that turns away from the pride and beauty of its own traditions in exchange for a vulgar pursuit of shallow mimicry.

But there has been a kind of cultural revolution bubbling in Africa. The success of “Nollywood” has established Nigerian pop culture as a much more dominating force across the continent than perhaps it’s ever been. Its films and music fill our libraries and populate our screens.  This is likely just the beginning of a continent-wide movement that results in not only Nigeria breaking out of its cultural chains, but many African nations as well. And the world is ready.

The tremendous global success of a film like “Black Panther,” for example, even with its origins being in Hollywood, is clear evidence that the hero identity in popular culture is changing.

Today it is still easier to access American and European literature, music and film for someone living in Africa than it is to receive works of art created in Africa by Africans. The call for diversity must continue to louden and in turn be heard. Can you imagine a world in which pop culture grew from a multitude of cultures rather than a conglomerate of media companies that cater first and foremost to the streaming-subscribing masses of comparative affluence? A world with a more diverse collection of heroes would be a more empathic world, and an empathic world is a world closer to equality. In a world like that, young girls and boys living in the suburbs of Kampala will be able to always find beauty, even beyond books, perhaps in the smile of a friend whose skin is the skin of heroes.                                                                        

Jerry Sesanga, Journalist and Film maker.