The Awakened African…A Design Perspective
TO EACH HIS WILDERNESS…
Everyman walketh a path or paths in his wilderness to find treasures lost in the participatory game of Life and Living. Cutting through thorns and roses to discover a crocodile infested swamp or a Gold Field, navigating through time worn paths to discover or rediscover by vision or mission the forgotten tracks to the Lake of the Sun gods.
At the threshold of greatest pain or the point of deepest darkness before the edge of dawn the seeker turns on his inner lights where roses and thorns, joy and pain melt into rain drops to water the gardens of Endeavor…
The dark nights of soul purifies man’s essence to light the glory of upliftment and the shinning experiential definitions that call out a presence that has no past or future but now in the strongest terms.
Every sage comes into his wilderness carrying frozen realities of a past that thaws to light lampposts unto the path or paths. These lampposts are filled with very strong energy fields which serve as recharge sources along the path and the seeker draws in direct proportion to purity of his being, love center and mental definitions interfacing with other extraneous variables that govern his known and unknown worlds.
In the darkness of this search each seeker turns a virgin carrying a candle and rushing against the wind to embrace an unknown lover. The consequences of this encounter can be the pleasures of victory or its crown of thorns, which sets the seeker on the mount upon which he stands to see paradise lost or gained.
The music of this search is solitude tuned to the heart-song of the man seeking to walk through his wilderness. The drumbeats of time set the rhythm for this enchanted dance. The Awakened Africa shines in the distance as we step on the rosary that tells the beads of our journey to rediscover our sun setting in our own rainstorm.
Within the boundaries of each Nations wilderness which carries the inextinguishable definitions of its mutations and the rigors on the journey of self discovery is its salvation, emancipation and otherwise which becomes etched in facial masks like ICHI: The deep incisions and the free flow of blood through the rites of passage marks the arrival at the gates of the Awakened African paradise.
The following applications resonate knowingly and unknowingly in its Design context. Methodology and studied principles bound in ceaseless search will wet the paths already strewn with spikes and venom of Eurocentric attempts to cast into disastrous diminish our beings. Every conscious search must yield a path no matter the rape, torture and twists foisted on it, but the seeker shall put into contention all indices and variables bombarding its present perceptions or being.
In line with our nature and contemporary fusion thrust on us by global emancipation the Awakened African must find the threads and beads of experiential connections to the past ways and methods (civilization) to reshape, rework, envision and integrate the lights and darknesses of our sojourn in the wilderness as a man or a Nation.
With the realities of contemporary definitions Africans need understand the ever-unfolding dialogue from a point of view of originality, sacred, cultural imperatives for a holistic discourse at the awakened stage. In the cycles of life and living a constant connect of tiny threads and tissues firm up the views of substance to unlearn the lies and find in deeper definitions the path we use to call our own.
Our own will not be the journey of the son in the PLIGHT OF ICARUS by CHIKE AMENE as dangers in disharmony of designs in the post colonial Africa. In the interface of food, religion, fashion, and other creative efforts may we keep our distance from the sun to be Black and or Africans.
Every path in the wilderness of Design leads knowingly or unknowingly to an inner composition before its rendering and reaches of every turn does not push the Sunshine farther it only aligns our presence before the almighty Sun like the great pyramid of Egypt.
The fate of the Awakened African in design will be determined by cognitive posturing when walking his wilderness, to tell his past with broken clay pots and gourds from the stream and the shield of comparative knowledge he carries is his amour against global torque.
We are the roses with thorns; we are the OMOEKO from different tribes of Nigeria, the Mbaise man in the Niger Delta militants’ camp and the face of the child in awe and imagination watching the commercial of Eko Atlantic City.
We are the Awakened Africans some of us where sleeping when Molue carry them pass, others no get correct change but still shine your eyes you cant go back to your mothers womb we must reach the Lake of the Sun gods.
The Awakened African is the Oyibo Rasta, The Ofe-Akwu (Banga Sauce) with tomapep; Lebanese wey dey in Pers speaks Hausa and Yoruba and eats amala and suya.
They are the Eurocentric Definitions and the African viewed to protect, uplift and take advantage of the global bombardments of culture, styles, motifs and principles cut in in us causing blood and pain which the whiteman calls scarification but we know it goes deeper than the cut in beauty and definition to produce the Awakened African in Perspectives like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Nelson Mandela, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, E J Allagoa, Frank Ugiomoh, Fela etc.