"It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture"

Wangari Maathai calls for a double movement of self-acceptance and cultural reclamation that resists the lingering pressures of colonial judgment and imported standards of worth. Accepting ourselves as we are is a refusal to measure African identities, bodies, languages, and aspirations against external ideals. It is an affirmation of dignity that frees people to create, organize, and govern from a place of confidence rather than mimicry. Such acceptance is not complacency; it is the grounding needed to undertake change on one’s own terms.

Recapturing the positive aspects of culture points to a discerning return, not a romantic retreat. It invites communities to sift tradition with ethical clarity, retaining what nurtures life and discarding what harms. Ubuntu’s ethic of interdependence, consensus-building in public life, reverence for elders alongside the energy of youth, and the arts, music, dance, storytelling, as vessels of memory and moral education all offer resources for contemporary challenges. Indigenous ecological wisdom, agroforestry, water harvesting, seed diversity, aligns with Maathai’s environmental vision and provides practical responses to climate stress and food insecurity.

Such reclamation can strengthen education by valuing mother-tongue learning and local histories, enrich entrepreneurship rooted in real needs, and embolden fashion, film, and design that celebrate African aesthetics rather than imitate global trends. It can also reframe gender relations by retrieving traditions of complementary roles and leadership while firmly rejecting practices that undermine human rights. The goal is a living culture: adaptive, self-critical, and creative.

For diasporic Africans and those on the continent, this stance enables dialogue with the world from a position of equality. It turns culture into a toolkit for modernity rather than a museum. Acceptance anchors identity; reclamation supplies methods and meaning. Together they cultivate resilience, ecological stewardship, and social cohesion, allowing African futures to be authored by Africans, rooted, confident, and open to the world.