THE AFRICAN PROPHETS THEY TRIED TO SILENCE

THE AFRICAN PROPHETS THEY TRIED TO SILENCE

In the spirit of Sankara, Achebe, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, I write on this topic

THE AFRICAN PROPHETS THEY TRIED TO SILENCE

(A Reflection on Misunderstood Voices and the Price of Truth)

Africa has never lacked prophets. From the Nile to the Niger, from the Cape to Cairo, the soil of this ancient continent has birthed voices too powerful to be ignored and too truthful to be tolerated.

Yet, each time a prophet rises to awaken the sleeping giant of Africa, the powers of the world unite — not to listen, but to silence.

They come in different garments — the journalist’s pen, the government’s decree, the colonizer’s whisper, the local traitor’s grin.

They label, they twist, they distort — and by the time they are done, the liberator becomes the villain, the patriot becomes the problem, and the visionary becomes the accused.

That is the curse of the African prophet: to love his people so deeply that the same people, deceived by propaganda, turn against him.

The colonial project never truly ended; it merely changed form.
The gun gave way to the camera. The whip gave way to the word.
And the battlefield shifted — from the fields of war to the screens of media.

Western media became the new missionary, preaching a gospel of confusion. Our heroes became “radicals,” our revolutionaries “terrorists,” our freedom cries “hate speech.” And local media — hungry for crumbs from the same table — became the echo chambers of our own destruction.

Kwame Nkrumah wanted Africa to rise beyond dependence, so they called him a dictator. Patrice Lumumba wanted Congo to stand in dignity, so they branded him a communist and buried him in secret. Thomas Sankara taught his people to walk tall without begging the West, so they silenced him with bullets fired by his own brother.

Nelson Mandela was called a terrorist for decades — until his truth outlived his chains. Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged for demanding clean air and clean water for his people. The pattern never ends. The voices that call for Africa’s resurrection are always the ones condemned first.

And today, in our time, the same drama unfolds again — only with new actors and new headlines.
Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, a man whose voice rose from the East of Nigeria, stands as a continuation of that ancient struggle — the struggle for dignity, identity, and justice.

He looked around and saw a system rigged against his people.
He saw decades of silence where there should have been outcry, and poverty where there should have been prosperity.
He saw the same old playbook of oppression dressed in new democracy — and he refused to clap.

For that, he became “the problem.”

The same media that glorifies looters calls him dangerous.
The same state that pardons corruption calls his truth “hate.”
The same world that celebrates “freedom of speech” pretends not to hear him.

But strip away the propaganda, and what remains is a man who wants justice — not just for himself or his tribe, but for everyone suffering under a broken structure. His cry is not for separation, but for self-respect. His message is not rebellion, but remembrance — that we were once a people of order, dignity, and pride before the borders and lies of colonial cartographers tore us apart

It is a dangerous thing to be awake in a land that loves sleep.
When you speak truth in a society built on deception, every word becomes a weapon — not against the oppressor, but against you.

That was Lumumba’s sin. That was Sankara’s sin. That was Kanu’s sin.
They spoke of freedom before their people were ready to understand its price.
And so, the system must brand them — because the easiest way to destroy a message is to destroy its messenger.

But time is a merciless judge.
The same media that mocked Nkrumah now calls him a visionary.
The same hands that killed Sankara now write books about his genius.
The same world that ignored Lumumba’s cries now teaches his name in history classes.

History always returns to vindicate its prophets.

Africa’s tragedy is not that her heroes die young — it is that her people realize too late that they were heroes.

We only begin to love them after they are gone — when the lies have faded and truth has found its own stubborn voice.

We regret Lumumba when we see the chaos that followed his death.
We regret Sankara when we count how much we import what we could have produced.
We regret Saro-Wiwa when we see that our oil wealth still burns our forests but not our poverty.

And one day, we will regret Nnamdi Kanu — when the silence of the oppressed becomes louder than his words ever were.

THE CALL FOR AWAKENING

The struggle of these prophets is not about ethnicity or geography. It is spiritual.
It is a battle between awareness and ignorance, between courage and cowardice, between dignity and submission.
And until Africa learns to listen to her own voices instead of foreign approval, the cycle will continue — new prophets rising, old systems crucifying, and future generations weeping over what could have been.

The time has come for a new consciousness.
A consciousness that sees beyond the labels and the propaganda.
A consciousness that remembers that truth is not defined by the headlines of CNN or BBC, but by the heartbeat of the people who live the reality every day.

Every age produces its prophets, and every prophet is first misunderstood.
But truth has a strange habit — it never dies, it only waits.
Waits for the world to catch up.

So let them mock, let them jail, let them twist the narrative — the story of African liberation is not over. It is only being rewritten by a new generation that refuses to be blind again.

Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, like the prophets before him, will one day be remembered not for the controversies around him, but for the courage within him.

He may be silent now, but history has already begun to speak his name in the same breath as the giants who came before him.

And when that day of awakening comes, Africa will finally understand that its prophets were never the problem — they were the solution we were too blind to see.