Greetings. As we commemorate Mother's Day this year, it is the Afrocentric nature of this blog to share some famous Africans' thoughts on their mothers, and motherhood in general.
Cecilia Dunbar
I looked around and saw the lives of so many Liberian women, all of these incredibly hardworking market women and housewives and mothers, and what I saw was that their lives were drudgery, a simple trudging from day to day to day. I did not want that; that was not the life for me. My own mother had struggled and beat the odds, clawing her way up from the unrelenting grind of rural African poverty, and I was not about to fall back into the hole.
As described by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great, pp. 33
Veronica Katongole
As a peasant single mother, only depending on subsistence agriculture, my mother was faced with hard decisions. She valued education, although she never had any.
I had lost my father and my sisters, but my mother, that paragon of a woman was still alive. I was therefore going to live for her. My achievements were her achievements, and although she could not forget the pain of losing a husband and three daughters, I would do everything in my power to make her happy. I wanted to give her the life of a queen. I was also determined to be a responsible Ugandan and make a contribution to society and my country as a whole.
I thank God that when she passed on, she had not only seen me as an accomplished citizen of this lovely country, but she had also received a beautiful daughter-in-law and four wonderful grandchildren from me. Veronica Emily, the last of our four children, is named after her and indeed, one of our Investments, Vero Food Industries Ltd carries her name, Vero from Veronica. part of the proceeds from my shareholding go to charity in her honour.
As described by Emmanuel Katongole, The Gift of Service Above Self, pp. 3, 7-8
Nosekeni Fanny
After games such as these, I would return
to my mother’s kraal where she was preparing supper. Whereas my father once
told stories of historic battles and heroic Xhosa warriors, my mother would
enchant us with Xhosa legends and fables that had come down from numberless
generations. These tales stimulated my childish imagination, and usually
contained some moral lesson. I recall one story my mother told us about a
traveller who was approached by an old woman with terrible cataracts on her
eyes. The woman asked the traveller for help, and the man averted his eyes. Then
another man came along and was approached by the old woman. She asked him to
clean her eyes, and even though he found the task unpleasant, he did as she
asked. Then, miraculously, the scales fell from the old woman’s eyes and she
became young and beautiful. The man married her and became wealthy and
prosperous. It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and
generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.
As described by Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, pp. 22-23
