Ory Okolloh grew up in Africa.

She admits that she didn’t belong to the poorest of the poor but by no means did her family live the way a middle class European or American lives.

She gives a touching talk about how it’s up to us to change the world. That is so up my alley. It’s up to us.

So okay I’m not African. I don’t have black skin and black curly hair. I don’t even live in Africa any more. (But I have a lot of friends that do, so I hope that counts for something). My friends range from an assortment of skin colors.

An African Activist is born by not accepting the status quo just as any activist is born that way. I’m an activist.

This reminds me of the statement Gandhi appropriately made, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Following that statement has to be the biggest challenge ever even if you’re a whitey like me. All too often it is easy to blame the other or even worse make excuses for mistreating people.

I believe underneath our skin colors and our entrapments of culture and society we are all the same.

I hear it all the time - even here in Europe - black people are lazy bastards, Turks are primitive, Americans are stupid bla bla… But all you need to do is look and you see the the same degress of laziness, primitiveness and stupidty here amongst us so called civilised people.

Yeah there are things that make me raving mad where I feel racism announcing itself to me.

Things like female circumcision and making women hide them selves. But when that happens I see past their cultural beliefs and identify with the person within. And that doesn’t come easy.

You have to train yourself to let go of all that crap which you think makes you superior to some one else. I certainly have believed it on many occasions. And because I believed that, many times I was also made to feel inadequate.

Yeah Robert Mugabe still pisses me off, just like John Vorster did back in white South African days.

Any way I could go on and on about this but I just wanted to introduce you to Ory Okolloh. Watch this video of her giving a talk on the making of an African Activist.