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There was a time in Africa—
when culture was not decoration,
not costume,
not something we dusted off for tourists—
culture was the spine.
It stood us upright.
It taught us how to greet,
how to mourn,
how to celebrate,
how to love without contracts
and correct without cruelty.
Back then,
the beauty of Africa
did not live only in crowns,
thrones,
or royal regalia shimmering in the sun.
No.
It lived in relationships.
In how one village breathed as one body.
Culture was not tribes alone.
Not clans.
Not taboos whispered in fear.
Culture was the moment—
the give-away,
the wedding,
the initiation,
the harvest,
the coronation.
Those were not events.
They were memory factories.
To be invited
was an honour.
To attend
was belonging.
To dance
was to remember
who you were
before the world told you otherwise.
The drum spoke
before mouths opened.
Feet answered
rhythms older than history.
And prayers rose—
Let the dancers not tire,
because as long as the dance continued,
the people felt eternal.
Ubuntu whispered:
I am because we are.
Sharing was not kindness—
it was duty.
Leadership was not accumulation—
it was service.
Africa did not need constitutions
to know justice.
Culture was law.
Shame was court.
Elders were libraries.
Dance was archive.
Bakísimba told stories of kings.
Larakaraka taught love with dignity.
Intore sculpted discipline into flesh.
Indlamu stamped unity into the earth.
Weddings were sacred.
Give-aways were holy.
Coronations were prayers
with moving feet.
Then, the drum fell silent.
Machines arrived.
Voices auto-tuned.
Memory digitised.
Community reduced to audience.
We traded rhythm for noise.
Meaning for volume.
Soul for applause.
We were told tradition was backwards.
That culture was primitive.
That modernity meant forgetting.
And we believed.
Now, only a few still dance
with roots beneath their feet.
And when we enter those spaces,
we bleed quietly inside—
mourning what we lost
as Black people.
Not only beauty.
But identity.
Achebe warned us:
When the centre can not hold,
things fall apart.
Mother is supreme—
roots are sacred—
but our leaders forgot the mother.
So the ground cracked.
Now we count coups.
We catalogue corruption.
We normalise dictatorship.
We bury governance.
This is not politics alone.
This is culture collapsing.
We replaced generosity with greed.
Unity with envy.
Kinship with tribalism.
Dialogue with blood.
Africa messed up
when it despised itself.
When it replaced
instead of complemented.
When it failed to teach children
where they came from.
Political freedom arrived
without cultural independence—
and that freedom limped.
But hear this—
the drum is not dead.
It is waiting.
Waiting in classrooms
that must remember.
In elders
who must speak.
In youth
who must stop apologising
for being African.
Let tradition innovate.
Let modernity remember.
Let culture return
to the centre.
Because Africa does not need imitation
to rise.
Africa needs memory.
Let the drum speak again.
Let the dance return home.
Let culture bind us—
again.
So the young can rise.
And walk.
About the writer
Sande Evan Ndahura is an African socio-political and cultural writer, poet, and public intellectual whose work interrogates power, leadership, and identity through the lens of memory and culture. His writing spans newspapers, public discourse, and poetry, where he challenges corruption, questions governance, mourns the erosion of African values, and calls the continent back to its cultural foundations. Ndahura’s work sits at the intersection of politics and culture, arguing that true development must be measured not only in infrastructure and economics but also in dignity, morality, and collective identity.
Influenced by thinkers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, and Cheikh Anta Diop, Ndahura’s writing blends grief with hope. His poetry laments lost traditions, forgotten dances, and shamed languages while affirming that Africa’s cultural soul can still be reclaimed. For Ndahura, culture is not nostalgia but a mission—an essential force for survival, renewal, and the restoration of Africa’s future.
Torch Media Africa
