I am an African Vegan.

Pep words for Afrikan vegans: You can come out. Be visible. Show your healthy glistening black self and stand up proud. You are an African. Your skin is some awesome shade of anything sienna to super dark-chocolate. Your hair is tightly curled, strong, black as the universe. You own it like a million dollars. We are Africans. We come from the most beautiful land on this beautiful planet. We have a deep and profound responsibility to the people, sentient beings and land of our continent and planet, but we walk harder because we know we will save the world, full and proud in our blackness.

And we are vegans. We are vegans. We are the black vegans. Okra and spinach stews all day for me. All y’all West African vegans make that egusi soup tight and chop with the best fufu. You know how hype that meatless joloff rice is. I used to roll gari all day in Ghana. Brown rice and groundnut stew. Ethiopians be rocking that njera with black bean stews and all. Then raw vegan fruitarian types like me eat warrior-class mangos in the middle of New Jersey on a warm sunny day and instantly recall a hundred  days in Ghana and Nigeria three years ago. Have to get back to Afrika ASAP and eat all the colorful tree-grown orbs and pearls that make us superhuman.

Eleven years strong as an Afrikan vegan. I’m only 26 so I’m just off the starting line. I maintain beginner’s mind – Zen mind, beginner’s mind. In the beginner’s mind anything is possible, including the will to practice the healthy and happy life nonstop. Struggle does not need to negate happiness. We are Afrikans, we WILL struggle. Yet young Afrikan vegans know how good they feel. Thus they should feel so proud and powerful. Young, gifted, black, vegan!

I’m a Nigerian vegan. We exist. We can come out. All that pastureland chewed off by browsers, we could feed so many more Africans with what we could grow on it than what is fed by the brutally slaughtered animals. Spare their lives. Make Africa the garden that can feed ourselves and the world. Not by giving Nigerian land to white Zimbabwean farmers and displacing black folk all over again. Not by bulldozing the rainforests, nor flooding the Delta with blood and oil.

Maybe African vegans are too sophisticated, too futuristic, too iconoclastic for this world right now. But we are coming out. We exist. We are dedicated. We know about racism and speciesism and sexism and patriarchy and neocolonialism. We know how awesome eating stacks of fresh veggies and fruits makes us look and feel, preventing disease, preventing the African dictator-/ corrupt official-gut. Africans not addicted to meat, nor to rage and anger. Africans loving their own selves, their land, their bodies, their families, the collective Afrikan.

Our body is the temple. Can’t fill it with junk. If we do that we won’t feel like Africans anymore, we won’t have the vigor to do that mandyani, that sabar dancing, that iron sculpting, that inventing. African vegans know this.

African vegans are here. From Dakar to Maputo, Africans are becoming vegan. From Lagos to Lusaka, fresh fruits and vegetables are being taken very seriously. In the lands between Abidjan and Addis, Africans are staying away from the meat. In Kinshasa and Kumasi, black people are getting down with some veganism. I’ve seen it. I’m one of them.

What is awesome?

To be Afrikan, to be Vegan, and proud.

We are not from the future. We are here.