Overtaking

White people are on their way out you know. They’ll be finished within a lifetime. It’s the century of the brown man and the yellow man; God save everybody else.

Ashok Sharma

I recently agreed to disagree with a special someone on whether Africans are black or brown. More on that later. To the topic at hand; overtaking.

Africa will soon overtake the “developed” world, or more specifically, America, the U.K., and Australia. Why do I say this? I have made a bulk of my income doing homework for students in these countries. Students in high school to those in various levels of tertiary education, from undergraduate to PHD. It’s big business. Unethical yes, but big business. If you’re reading this, you probably know at least one person who’s made money from this industry, presently, or in the past. I haven’t included non-English speaking white countries such as Germany or the Nordic countries, since I believe that they are far more enterprising than the aforementioned regions. Furthermore, developed nations in the Orient are not included in this list since countries such as Japan and South Korea have hard-working and resourceful cultures, quite unlike those in the English-speaking developed world.

The fact that ‘homework’ is such a large industry led to the conclusion that a significant percentage of people who have graduated with one degree or another, are not qualified in that particular discipline. Even though we have similar cases in Kenya and the world over, where students cheat their way through the system, this is often the exception rather than the norm. Therefore, in the next decade or two, the professionals that emerge from universities in the earlier mentioned regions will be of a markedly lower quality than those emerging from the Orient, non-English speaking Europe, and Africa.

Which brings me to the earlier quote. It came from the movie The White Tiger, a 2021 Netflix film based in India. The caste system is quite something, eh? That aside, as Africans, we are part and parcel of the ‘brown’ world. As I mentioned earlier, I agreed to disagree with ‘smiles’ over whether Africans are black or brown. To be fair, she was right. There is no black skin tone. Reminds me of a clip from the film Cry Freedom, when a judge asks Steve Biko in court why we refer to ourselves as black when we are more brown than black. Biko (played by Denzel) retorts asking the judge why they call themselves white, yet they are more pink than white.

Think about the origin of the term human. It literally means ‘man’ with ‘hue’; basically, man with color.

So, undoubtedly, it is the century of people of color; God save everybody else.