Still We Rise: "Don't Be Ashamed of Africa or Your African Roots. Africa Has a Rich History, and an Even More Promising Future," Zambia's First President, Kenneth Kaunda, Tells African-Americans

Kaunda, Kenneth, New African

THIS IS A CRITICAL TIME FOR African people. We are at a unique place in our journey to claim our place in the sun, as equals, as God created us all. In South America, African peoples are dealing with the disparities defined by race in ways they never have before. In Europe, you see the same. In the United States, African-Americans have reached a status unimaginable 50 years ago.

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In Africa, we are moving beyond the days of despair and deprivation, and embracing dreams we will no longer be content to defer. For my generation - from Martin Luther King Jr to Mandela - the challenge was to redefine the political landscape of our time. For this generation, the challenge is to build on our efforts and fashion new vistas of economic hope and opportunity.

Africa has been central to the global economy of the last 400 years. Black gold, in the form of our ancestors torn from the motherland, helped build the agrarian economies and industrial foundations of the New World and Old Europe.

The colonisation of Africa provided the raw materials and minerals that literally fuelled the expansion of Western economic pre-eminence. The high-tech economies of the present would not exist without coltan from DRCongo, so essential to making computer chips. The most highly educated immigrant group in America, which add to the talent pool, essential to running modern economies, are Africans.

A new generation of corporate leaders like Ken Chenault, Stanley O'Neal and Dick Parsons represents infusions of new blood and ideas that keep America's economic engine humming.

Africa and African peoples have been, and are, essential to the vitality and growth of the global economy. The only issue is, will we benefit from what we bring to the …

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Publication information: Article title: Still We Rise: "Don't Be Ashamed of Africa or Your African Roots. Africa Has a Rich History, and an Even More Promising Future," Zambia's First President, Kenneth Kaunda, Tells African-Americans. Contributors: Kaunda, Kenneth - Author. Magazine title: New African. Issue: 500 Publication date: November 2010. Page number: 90+. © 2005 IC Publications Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale Group.

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