Laureen Akoa Wesonga

As Uhuru Kenyatta mounted a political comeback by campaigning against corruption, his family’s secret fortune was growing offshore, a massive new leak shows. At his annual State of the Nation address last fall, President Uhuru Kenyatta mounted the podium at Kenya’s Parliament to acknowledge that too many Kenyans live in poverty and too many officials loot the country’s public resources.

Growing up down south in the aftermath of the 1960s Negro Revolution in America was truly the best. During that period, three out of every four Black children in America were born in a two-parent home. By the 80s, that number would drop to one in every four. Education and opportunity were becoming more accessible to black and brown communities everywhere. It would be the force that would get us out of the hole history had placed us in.

I was born in 1988, eight years after Zimbabwe’s independence from British colonial rule. I am thus considered a “Born Free” — meaning one born after the liberation war. For a long time, particularly over the last two decades and the fraught turmoil we have endured as Zimbabweans, the term has been used to denigrate those of us who were born into freedom from colonial rule and did not experience the struggles of the liberation war. Robert Mugabe, for me, has always been a figure of ambivalence.