What is 'leadership'? Is it a preserve of the few? If yes, then the rest are the herd, the slaves. Now what is the slave crying about? What ought to be?
Poor grumblers! Achebe seems to have forgotten this, and I see many here are joining in this suicide.
Only a slave can crave for 'true emancipation'. He seeks a better life though now he has no power. He hopes for a Messiah from the clouds that are not him, distant. The only problem is, if such an assumption is true, how then can one spot the Messiah? The slave is always looking down.
Looking down on their leadership, their own sense of initiative and power to create, and to relate on mutual terms.
Revolution is when we come back to the foundations of Man and creating the mutualist city, where Man and God rule together.
Revolution is about coming back to Africa where it all began. Understanding the steps humanity has trodden thus far, and reconciling it with the beginning. The African.
The problem with Africa is that it no longer has Africans. Maps, and nations are now European. And in European language we attack the African. We accuse the initiator of progress of not being progressive. We are completely alienated from ourselves.
I remember Tom Mboya asking what it means to be African; is it wearing animal skins? Or piercing your ears? Or drinking Mursik?
To be African is to remember the foundation of Man; the essentials that glue him to the dead, the living, and the unborn. To be African is to be Man God, and though the continents and conditions transform the color of Man, the foundations still persist.