By Ebunoluwa Sessou

Africa Memorial Day is not just an act of remembrance, it is a return. A return to truth. A return to self. A return to the heartbeat of our history.

The just concluded 2025 Africa Memorial Day, AMD, organised by Correct Connect Africa Foundation (CCAF) vision was held to remember the struggles, sacrifices, betrayals, and bravery of the heroes and heroines, kings and queens, our martyrs, visionaries, and freedom fighters, people of all walks of life who stood, and often fell, for Africa’s liberation.

The convener of the CCAF, Father Aleakwe Odior, in his speech disclosed that the names of those and even those who were never recorded are in the hearts.

According to him, “The idea for Africa Memorial Day was born eight years ago, when a group of us, students in the Diaspora, felt a burning need, a duty, to honour our ancestors, to commemorate and celebrate our heroes and heroines, kings and queens, martyrs, visionaries, and freedom fighters, people of all walks of life who stood, and often fell, for Africa’s liberation.

“The name of those who came before us, the ones whose names we remember with pride and the ones history tried to erase. Today, we stand on sacred ground watered by their blood, lifted by their dreams and shaken by their resistance.

“Their legacies should be ever-present in our consciousness. As the great Marcus Garvey once said:“A people without the knowledge of their history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

“The theme for this year’s Africa Memorial Day is “Historical Consciousness and Human Justice” calls on us to wake up and develop a historical mindset that questions, challenges, and transforms. It is not just to know history but to interpret it, to understand the present, and to boldly shape the future.

“There must be a historical consciousness for the existence of an awakened Africa. Without it, we cannot truly honour the legacies of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Queen Amina of Zaria, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Chinua Achebe, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah, Harriet Tubman, Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, and so many others who dared to imagine and fought for a free, just, and united Africa.

“Thomas Sankara reminded us: “We must choose either champagne for a few or safe drinking water for all.” Justice begins with choices rooted in truth. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti warned: “Colonialism is not just political; it’s mental.” And until we free our minds, the chains remain.

“The truth of our ancestors’ lives is in our DNA. We may try to deny it. We may run from it.

But we can never erase it. It is part of our essence. And we can only be whole, truly free when we align with it.

“This is the 7th edition of the Africa Memorial Day Festival, from Rome to Lagos, and still growing. But we must dream bigger. We must fill stadiums, not just halls. We must host AMD in the great cities of Benin, Kano, Ibadan, Enugu, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Harare, Accra, Cotonou, and beyond.

“Let us make Africa Memorial Day a public holiday across the continent, a day of remembrance, unity, and pride.

“Let our schools teach it. Let our children prepare for it. Let us celebrate it with poetry, parades, pageants, and football matches, all in honour of our ancestors and shared legacy. Let AMD become a uniting force, a history that started in Lagos but belongs to all of Africa. This is not wishful thinking. This is our responsibility. Let us commit to making it real.

In his contribution, human rights activist, Mr. Femi Falana, SAN, charged that the syllabus of our schools will have to be critically examined.

The history of how Mungo Park discovered would have to be retold. Our people have to be informed that around the confluence of River Niger, people were living there before Mungo Park came.

We must teach a new history of the struggles of our people. We must teach the history of slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism.

Our children must be made to appreciate African values, as opposed to imported values.

The government has a duty to ensure that the history of our people is taught in all schools.

We need to celebrate our heroes and heroines, those who fought for our people, traditional rulers who were exiled by the British colonial regime, traditional rulers that were deposed.

Women and workers that were killed in 1929 following the protest by the Aba women, 55 people were killed.

In 1949, 21 workers were killed in Iva Valley in Enugu while they were asking for better conditions of service.

Our people must be taught history of the struggle of our people, how the African people fought for independence, as opposed to the discussion of history whereby we are told that we got our independence on the platter of gold.

The British colonial regime waged wars against the Benin kingdom, the Benin Empire, they fought wars against the people in the North, West. King Jaja of Opobo was thrown into an island in the West Indies. He never came back to the throne.

So it is important for our people to know our part. What is more important is to let our children know that this country is naturally endowed and that we can rebuild Nigeria and overtake countries that have left us behind.

We were ahead of many countries in 1960, Malaysia, China, all of them, Nigeria as a Western region had television before some countries in Europe.

“But without our enormous resources, we can still recover, and that is what we must let our children know that their generation has a duty to put Nigeria, on a firm footing, so that we can compete with other nations”, he said.

Also, in his contribution, an activist, Dede Mabiaku, said, “History is everything that has to do with present day world science, ethics, content, structure and format of everything that we have to do today, be it aerospace, be it the computers, be it medical science is controlled by what they call the binary code.

“The truth about everything you see as inventions came from us as a people. If you go there and you check these things, you will find that we have been the people, and we still are the people, but we are following what they call his story, whose story, until our story becomes pertinent in the minds of our children, who are now present this day, we are losing the essence.

“Because the people who have grown to follow his story, which is, the story of the hunters of the West, are now docked and poisoned in our mind.

“We need to start to correct the generation of children, so that the future we have will grow stronger, better and with content and quality to control the narrative the right way round.

“When you respect the people, when the people learn to respect themselves, their values grow. Until we teach the truth to the children and stop to follow the dogma of the West in its entirety, we are losing.

“We do not have leaders right now. We have bleeders. We have people who we can simply class as execu-thieves and legis-looters, who do not see value in the citizenry because there are no citizens in the system anymore.

“They do not respect your views or my views. So we are not valued until we start to culture our children, to prepare themselves, to understand truth, essence of who and what they are, and to see values in what will be the system. We have lost it, but it is possible”, he said.

Also, Ambassador Nneka Isaac Moses of the Goge Africa urged said, African children must be taught their history.

“What sort of education are we giving our children? We need to give them African education.

“Every home, every parent, should be able to, first of all, speak to your children in your native language; let them be able to understand it.

“Do not feel that it is cheap or demeaning for them to speak your native language, because in our language lies the thread of our culture. Every language embodies a lot of cultural elements, so as you speak the language, you are able to learn the culture within the language.

“The Chinese people have every subject in their language. When would that happen here? The best that has been done is maybe translating the Bible into Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa”, she said.