INSPIRING AFRICA

By Lou Bognon Johannesburg, South Africa

Absolutely nothing could have convinced a gypsy man pulling his own caravan filled with fake silk and "made in Taiwan" kitsch, to accurately predict that I would some day teach the world.

Growing up in the rural areas of Northern Mozambique, without electricity or running water, his monthly visit became a sort of one-man show in a time when television was not even a seed in any African mind. I was five years old then and this year I celebrate my 50th birthday.

My first sharing of knowledge, as I prefer to call it, happened right there around our well, which for the next five villages, was the sole source of water. The well was a hub of excitement and news, and as a child I soon learned the various languages spoken there in order to teach what was then my world. In less than a year I had become a child interpreter and all the events of all the villages was my life: who was born to whom; who died where; and especially when was the caravan man due again with all his colorful goodies.

The flow of life took me away by the time I was seven - and by my 17th birthday, Mozambique had had its communist revolution and I had completed my first year at university. I became the youngest teacher of the revolution and found myself teaching students my age and older subjects such as English, French, Portuguese, Geography and any other subject I could study beforehand.

Three years later at the tender age of twenty, I was crossing the border into South Africa, pregnant, illegal and alone. Johannesburg then looked to me like a house of horrors: blacks on one side, whites on the other, and the town itself looked like a cement abortion without trees. Where was the green of the mango and coconut trees of my beloved Mozambique?

Why was everything brown and yellow? I soon learned the answer was the high altitude and the winter. That was a winter of great discontent; the Soweto riots had just happened and the children had been killed like doves. The baby I brought with me died even before living -- perhaps because I had intended to call her Paloma (dove). I became a Tour Guide for the whole region and traveled with people from all over the world to places of great beauty: Victoria Falls, The Kalahari and the Namib Deserts, the Okavango delta in Botswana, Cape Town and the Kruger Park -- places that inspired and shaped my eager soul.

I worked in France as a diplomat for seven years and then returned to the big city -- the New York of Africa. The City of Gold, as most here call Johannesburg, is a place I have come to love and call home, and where I have written my trilogy of spiritual books, How to Light A Candle, We Are Here To Learn, and The Divine Laws, which I am going into the mountains to complete soon. It was not so much the gypsy man as my own inner knowing that I had to make a difference and touch great numbers of people; which kept me working towards all I do today. I am deeply grateful for this innate capacity to stay connected, to listen to my inner voice and follow it blindly wherever it tells me to go.

My radio program, which I produce and present currently to inspire Africa and the world, both in English and French is appropriately called The Inner Voice/La Voix Interieure. And so it is that the gypsy man's words came into perfect resonance with the inner knowing that I had indeed come here to make a difference, to share myself with the world, to teach and pass on that which I have learned over many lifetimes, some of which I recall well.

All is unfolding according to the Divine Plan. My gift of languages serves me well for English is not my mother tongue and yet it is the language I love the most and write the best; it is my door into the world, it made my greater number grow from the five African villages of my childhood well to the global village into which it has transformed our world.

Lou Bognon produces and presents The Inner Voice, an inspirational, motivational and spiritual program broadcast internationally on Channel Africa, the Voice of the African renaissance.