A Message to My Black African Brethren: Let’s Stop Bullying other Black people, Who don’t Want Kids & get Married

Respect other people’s decisions, and mind your own business.

I am sick and tired of many Black Africans who don’t take the time to analyze their life situations and are too busy wasting too much time minding other people’s business 90% of the time, it’s about putting other Black Africans down; I have witnessed personally in my own family and the circles of friends my parents associate with: I’ve stated many times that Black Sub-Saharan nations value the group over the individual, which means that we know about each other’s lives, jobs, relationships, and even deeply personal details.

This mentality irritates me to the core because it makes us susceptible to acting like ships that can’t stand up and become leaders who inspire. This question is for Black Africans or any other community that values the group over the individual; so, my Black African brothers and sisters, why do you have this low-life mentality? Don’t you understand what I mean? We are in 2024, and your mentality is sick and deplorable. I don’t care if you report this message to Medium for hate speech; we need to start calling out our own beliefs and mentalities that are preventing us from moving forward and being respected: if someone decides not to marry, or if someone decides not to have children, why do you decide to make it a beef? Why did you choose to make this a problem?

Why is it bothering you that another Black individual, whether from a specific African country or the diaspora, is unmarried and hasn’t been in a relationship for a long time? I know the answer to this question; I’ll tell you later; please be candid. You guys have many skeletons in your own freaking closets, but you’re too busy minding the business of other Black people. We don’t have the only cultures where people are communal; we are very insecure about ourselves and how we present ourselves to the world; this is how we freaking complain and cry about not being respected by those who don’t look like us and not being liked by other Black people. What’s wrong with you?

You guys decide to bully people online or in person because they have reached out to a specific group of Black people who do not share your lifestyle. I witnessed it in Denmark when my mother lost her husband, who was a Dane: I went to Denmark to be very supportive of my mother and my siblings who live in Scandinavia; then I met my cousin, Lizette, whom I haven’t seen since 1993; she moved to Chicago, but she lives in Iowa City, in IA with her husband, Mamadou, who is an American of Senegalese and Congolese descent (from the Democratic Republic of the Congo); as my young cousin, Lizette, and I were looking after the kids, Lizette told me that she was looking forward to come at my wedding at someone point in the future. Lizette is also originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but this is just a side note. Mamadou went on to tell me, someone, whom he just let yesterday, that I am getting up in age, I must get married and have kids; I decided to set both him and Lizette straight, especially Mamadou, who is two years older than me because he decided to compare my life to his by denigratting me. If I stood in Mamadou’s shoes, I would have kept quiet and let my wife speak about these personal matters with her cousin, since I don’t really know the individual.

I also went on to tell my maternal uncles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere, since Lizette is one of my mom’s nieces, that if Mamadou sticks his nose in my personal life again, I would use physical violence to get my message across to him; in fact, I would get my German-American Caucasian friends, who politically right-leaning individual involved and we would beat the crap out of him; my German-American friends don’t mess around when it comes to a physical altercation: they may be 44 this year and a year younger than Mamadou, but these are real Tea Party aggressors(I’m talking about my German-American friends).

If there are people out there who don’t want to get married or be in a relationship, and if there are people out there who don’t want to have kids, why do some Black Africans like myself choose to make a big deal out of it? Why do Black Africans believe that everyone must get married, and everyone must have children? Understand this: Everything happens for a reason; everyone’s path is different, given that we’re on this planet for different ideals. We all don’t want the same things, you guys have to respect that. It’s not my job to look down on another Black man or woman who doesn’t want to get married or have children; life is too short to waste too much energy on such small stuff; we should be better than this. Another thing that we, Black Africans need to understand is that we need cleaners, street sweepers, teachers, bricklayers, and other people who are involved in unskilled jobs, and we must treat them with respect and dignity. Just because you’re married, rich, and have kids this doesn’t mean that you’re superior to another person who’s not: remember that we’re all dust in the wind.

Africa is the world’s poorest continent, where most Black Africans bring children in this world in homes that aren’t financially and emotionally stable: the relationships between the parents and their respective families are usually not stable and children watching will grow up with this mindset that continues for generations.

Please, stop typing before you start blaming the White man, Arabs, Turkic people, Iranians, Chinese people, Indians, Japanese people, etc. Stop typing when you say that it’s colonialism; cry me a river because this mentality existed even during pre-colonial times, because our ancestors back then, did not question beliefs that were destroying us as a community. I know this may hurt your feelings, but someone has to start calling our own out for shit. Having children in this world requires that you’re fully committed to nurturing them, loving them, offering them shelter, teaching them the world, and preparing them for adulthood so that they in turn become responsible members of society. The problem that we, Black Africans have is that we don’t live for ourselves, we live for other Black folks by impressing them. This is how we keep begging for acceptance within each other, as a set of communities.

While there are communities around the world that are getting up and taking action to develop their countries, we are waiting on prayers alone to solve our problems, and we’re not willing to invest in ourselves and create legacies that our communities can be proud of. Instead, many of us waste too much time gossiping about the personal lives of other Black people when we gather at parties, where we could have used those events to lift each other up and celebrate each other’s accomplishments.

We even forget that tomorrow is not guaranteed, and we cannot keep praying for the same problems for decades while failing to take action to achieve our goals. According to Outreach International, Africa has the world’s highest extreme poverty rates, with 23 of the 28 poorest countries experiencing extreme poverty rates of more than 30%. Using the poverty line of $1.90 per day, Africa’s extreme poverty rate was recently estimated to be 35.5%. There are many Black men on the continent and elsewhere who have made choices to establish large families — by having as many children as they can; sometimes with different women, yet, they are unable to support these women and the children they chose to bring in this world; aren’t you offended by that? Aren’t you offended about the cycle of poverty that is destroying Black-majority countries, which we’re running?

Guess what? We, Black people, run 50 countries throughout the world, the majority of which are virtual disasters, yet we choose to waste time on trivial matters, such as focusing our attention on our brothers and sisters not marrying and having children, lol. The reason why some of us waste too much time on trivial matters when it comes to our Black brothers and sisters not dating, getting married, and having children, is because we don’t want our brothers and sisters to be perceived as being Queers, which most Black people find abnormal, unnatural, and a Western importation: as sad as it is as a Black man, I have to expose the mentalities that are keeping us Black people stuck in ideas of the bronze age, and I don’t care if some Black people and Progressives of other races see me as a sellout because I am not going to subscribe to ideas that keep us, Black people stuck in the dark age to point where we keep sending negative signals about ourselves to the world. No one will respect a Black African individual, as long as we, Black Africans lack the courage to confront uncomfortable truths about things that are keeping us away from creating successful societies.

You can blame colonialism, slavery, the Freemasons, neocolonialism, and everything else you want all your life, and you can blame Wall Street all you want, but nothing will ever change in Africa and the rest of the Black world unless we decide to take a hard look at ourselves and decide to change and walk away from mentalities and beliefs that do not benefit us as individuals and communities. Poverty in Africa is caused by a lack of supply to meet the basic human requirements of certain individuals in Africa; we are not good enough, and we refuse to improve because we’re not willing to acknowledge that most of the issues in Africa are caused by us, given our way of thinking and actions. Nothing worthwhile requires sacrifice and hard work. So, to my Black African brethren: Mind your own business and stop using collectivism as an excuse to run other Black Black people’s lives. The more you try to run other people’s lives, the harder life makes it for you, until you freaking croak.