22/07/2026
When we were children, we didn’t know the difference between Annang and Ibibio , we didn’t ask if you were Igbo or Yoruba before inviting someone to play. We never cared about the colour of someone’s skin before sharing a football, climbing trees, or chasing one another until sunset.
We simply saw another child.
It is obvious that tribalism and racism are not our natural state. They are learned. They are inherited. They are passed from one generation to another through fear, prejudice, politics, and painful history.
This picture reminds me of this almost forgotten truth. They are not calculating differences. They are not debating superiority. They are simply being children.
Somewhere along the journey to adulthood, we teach ourselves to notice what never mattered before. We begin to divide ourselves by race, tribe, language, religion, and nationality. We allow the colour of our skin and the twisting of our tongues to become reasons for suspicion instead of reasons for curiosity.
We have traded our common humanity for narrow identities. In doing so, we have lost much of the essence of what makes us human.
Before we belonged to a tribe, we belonged to humanity.
Before we carried a surname, we carried a heartbeat.
Perhaps the world does not need us to become something new. Perhaps it simply needs us to remember what we already knew as children: that friendship does not ask for your tribe, and kindness does not recognise the colour of your skin.
Maybe the children have been right all along.
