Black children born in the Diaspora, or taken there at an early age are especially vulnerable to the evil of having their African identity, culture, language and ways of life completely vacuumed out of them, writes Andrew Wutawunashe in his book Dear Africa — The Call the African Dream that The Patriot is serialising.

IT is parents — you the father, the mother, who are best placed to build love and commitment to Africa in your children. How?
By training them to love the simple things of the African way of life.
Deliberately change the foods you serve in your home to reflect a heavy bias towards African foods.
Train them in the simple respectful manners as well as in the wholesome morals of the African culture.
Take them to the African village and countryside from time to time and teach them to bond with the soil, the cows, the chickens and the goats — and of course, the grandparents and extended family.
Teach them what you know — the stories, the games, their identity and history. Deliberately require them to speak their mother language fluently.
Affirm Africanness to them and teach them to love telling people of other colours who they are and where they come from.
Begin to include items of dress that reflect Africanness in your and their wardrobe.
Do not leave them at the mercy of the Western media mammoth, but train them to discern decent things from indecent, and to challenge agendas and editorial lines that falsely elevate politicians and people of other colours above black people.
Create in them zeal to learn about Black people. Train up the children in the way they should go.
Black children born in the Diaspora, or taken there at an early age are especially vulnerable to the evil of having their African identity, culture, language and ways of life completely vacuumed out of them.
The responsibility for this atrocity lies ironically on the shoulders of apathetic parents. Or parents who suffer from the misconception that embracing the Western way of life and values is a form of cultural ascendance.
I recently visited a church in one of the European countries which has Africans as the bulk of its membership.
The black pastor told me how they had decided to initiate in the congregation a programme that would enhance Africanness in the congregation and particularly in the children.
As part of the programme, they take 20 minutes after every service to teach from the pulpit the four main African languages represented in the church.
After this they serve a lunch made up of African dishes from various areas of the continent.
He excitedly told me how this simple programme had boosted the confidence of the black children in the church within this society in which they are a minority.
In the home and in any other useful forum black parents in the Diaspora need
to take deliberate steps to train up their children in Africanness, African languages
and ways.
These young people will grow up with a love and attachment to Africa, love which is the basis for patriotism.
There are, of course, other Africans — for example those displaced into western nations through the slave trade — who do not have an idea of where they came from, their language or the way of life.
For most of these black people, an assimilation born out of despair is the choice they are forced to make.
However, it was heartening to see black people, for example in America during the latter half of the 20th century, insist that they be referred to as Africans (hence the emergence of the appellation “African-American”).
In some religious circles there are also impressive programmes to enhance Africanness among African-Americans.
This is as it should be and black people all over the world must network and initiate focused projects and modules which will help African-Americans and other black people to learn about the continent, its ways of life and even some major languages, so that Africanness may once again be expressed by those from whom it was violently snatched.
There must certainly rise up a love for Africa and a patriotism that will cause many black people in the Diaspora to return to the continent and build it up.
This latter day exodus is sure to come as an African consciousness gains momentum.
I am, of course, obliged to acknowledge that it might not be realistic to expect every black person to return to Africa.
The global village is an abiding reality, but black people must fight to express Africanness and a love for it in every nation on the earth where they happen to be.
The Jews for example, scattered as they are as citizens of the many nations of the world, clearly manifest a Jewish patriotism — a love and commitment to their identity and motherland akin to that of David and Solomon.
So too do some other nationalities.
The season has come for the aggressive rise of an African international patriotism, which will gain in momentum as we Black people learn to train
up our youth and children in the way they should go-the way of Africanness.