Passport lottery
Published: 4/Mar/2010
Source: BBC
In our series of viewpoints from African journalists, Zimbabwean filmmaker and columnist Farai Sevenzo considers the implications of nationality as he flicks through his passport.
You must have seen the queues around crumbling official buildings, or agonised over how to acquire yours or renew it or get a few extra pages, or bribed a bureaucrat.
You must have seen the queues around crumbling official buildings, or agonised over how to acquire yours or renew it or get a few extra pages, or bribed a bureaucrat.
Passports are proof that us human beings have perpetually itchy feet and must keep moving, proof that we in Africa hate our borders almost as much as the elephants and the buffalo and the lions do.
Why can’t we go where we want when we want?
In ancient Africa, I am reliably informed, tribes carried masks to identify themselves, or marked their faces in certain ways.
But human beings being human beings, this obviously became a signal to identify friend or foe and much blood was spilt at the sight of a wrong looking face or mask.
In the 21st Century some of us still hate these little booklets which can identify an individual by the deeds of his or her leader, by the acts of a fellow countryman.
Link to BBC website: Passport Lottery