Million Voices Uniting Africa

Million Voices Uniting Africa

"Million voices", a song by Wyclef Jean, criticizes ex-colonial powers for splitting Africa into so many countries and thus, making them very weak economically. In the lyrics; "Why can't Africa be the United States of Africa",(An example to the U.S.A) refers to the unnecessary division of the continent, which would be much stronger if it were unified.

Wyclef Jean born in Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti was named Wyclef Jean by his adoptive father, a pastor who re-named him after John Wycliff, (was an English theologian and an early dissident in the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century). He moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York when he was nine, then to northern New Jersey. Wyclef Jean and many of the people in his home country as well as other Caribbean including many Latin American countries, are originally from Africa, brought to the Americas by slave traders from Europe. Many African-Americans and Caribbean’s do not know their ancestral heritage, yet are curious about where they came from. They may never know but they still feel connected to Africa. This is why Wyclef Jean wrote “Million Voices”, it is a song that revolves around the Rwandan Genocide too and the Haitian political history during his time of birth in the1970's. He sings, "these are the cries of the children, yeah. Can anybody out there hear our cries?" As experienced what happened to Haiti in the 1970's and how the country is still affected, i didn't like what was happening to Rwanda.

Rwanda, an African nation that was once under the control of Germany, was later given to Belgium after the First World War, when Germany was forced to surrender its colonies. The Belgians went in, and separated the Rwandans into two different groups. The Tutsis were the more "white"-looking in appearance, taller and with thinner noses, and the Hutus being darker, were therefore oppressed by the Belgians along with the help of a group of elite Tutsis. After years of oppression, and once independence was given to Rwanda, the Hutus were given power, since they were the majority, and eventually took revenge on the Tutsis in 1994 after years of propaganda by the Hutus that paralleled the Nazis' hatred against the Jews.

Wyclef Jean, looks at colonialism as a destabilizing effect on a number of ethnic groups that is still being felt in Africa and her ancestral heritage in their politics and development. Before European influence, national borders were not much of a concern, with Africans generally following the practice of other areas of the world, such as the Arabian Peninsula, where a group's territory was congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence of drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, although the Congo River appears to be a natural geographic boundary, there were groups that otherwise shared a language, culture or other similarity living on both sides. The division of the land between Belgium and France along the river isolated these groups from each other.