Description
I did not sit down to write this book the way I imagine most books are begun, with an outline and a quiet room and nothing else pressing on me. I began it the way most of the important things in my life have begun — as an argument I could no longer have only in my own head. For the better part of my working life, I have stood before congregations, sat across boardroom tables, and lectured in halls on more continents than one, always as a Pastor first, whatever else the day required of me. In every one of those rooms, on every one of those continents, I have watched the same quiet drama play out in African men and women who had every reason to hold their heads high: a flicker of apology, barely visible, whenever the subject of home came up. I have felt that flicker in myself, in years long past, before I did the work this book represents. My first book, World Peace — Let’s Make the World a Better Place, grew out of a conviction that peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, dignity, and opportunity for every human being. I have not left that conviction behind in writing this one; I have simply turned it toward home. I do not believe a continent can walk fully into its purpose while it is still, in ten thousand small unspoken ways, apologising for itself to a world that never troubled to ask the right questions. This book is my attempt to ask those questions, and to answer them, on Africa’s behalf and in Africa’s own voice. I offer it to you not as a finished argument but as an honest one — researched as carefully as I know how, and written, I hope, the way I would speak it to you directly, were we given the time.
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