The Amnesia of a Liberated Nation
By A Concerned Ghanaian · 23 April 2026 · General
I hope the air where you are is clearer than the atmosphere currently brewing in the south of our continent. I write with a heavy heart and perhaps a mild headache, after watching the peculiar brand of “brotherly love” unfolding in South Africa.
It feels as though a very dark play has been revived. In 2008, a switch seemed to flip, and suddenly the Black South African decided that their neighbor from across the Limpopo was the architect of all their misfortunes. Fast forward to 2026, and the script hasn’t just been dusted off, it has been remastered in high definition.
It is a masterclass in misplaced frustration, Osagyefo. Somehow, the narrative has taken hold that the fellow African the one who shares the same sun and often the same struggle , is the sole reason the economy is wheezing. They look at a brother from Ghana or a sister from Zimbabwe and see not a partner, but someone who has supposedly “stolen” the land and the jobs. It is quite the mathematical feat to blame a man running a small kiosk for the fact that vast, mineral-rich lands remain in the hands of the same few who held them during the days of your youth.
But the real theatrical twist is happening in the hospitals. We now have self-appointed “immigration officers” patrolling clinic corridors, demanding that the sick and the pregnant prove their lineage before receiving so much as a bandage. They shout for foreigners to “go back and fix their countries,” apparently forgetting that a hospital bed is meant for healing, not for delivering political manifestos. It is a strange logic indeed expecting a woman in labor to resolve the geopolitical instability of an entire nation before she can safely deliver her child.
This is a nation that has walked through fire, a country traumatized by the cold, calculated cruelty of apartheid. They, of all people, should understand the sting of being told where they do not belong. Yet there is a convenient collective amnesia about how the rest of Africa stood as a fortress for their liberation. The maps showing training camps in Tanzania, the funds from Nigeria, and the diplomatic storms weathered by Ghana have all been tucked away.
Nelson Mandela spoke of a Rainbow Nation and the power of forgiveness, but some seem to believe that the rainbow has room for only one shade of African. Christianity and Ubuntu are being treated not as ways of life, but as outdated theories that no longer apply to the modern “struggle” for a parking space or a nursing job.We are watching a people who fought so fiercely for their own dignity now attempting to strip it from others. It forces one to ask: if all our energy is spent guarding hospital gates against our brothers, who is left to actually fix the house?
When the migrants are gone, and the kiosks stand empty, who will be left to blame? The same voices shouting “go home” may soon discover that the people they chased away were not the obstacle to progress, but the ones quietly keeping parts of the local economy alive. And when the excuses run out, the mirror may become a very uncomfortable place to look.
So long,
Ato_KD