Wrestling for the Shalom That Still Haunts Our Lands
There is a night that our generation of this continent knows very well, a night where two figures stand locked in struggle on the muddy bank of a river that will not wait for daylight. One carried the weight of long labor and old wounds, the other carried the weight of heaven and refused to release its grip. Feet dug into the earth, and as no one was watching except the darkness itself. There was only the stubborn refusal to let go until something true was invoked, until a name was changed, until the blessing that had been withheld finally arrived. Genesis 32:22–32 (in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament).
This is the struggle of a people who have labored for generations and still wait for the dawn that was promised. This is Africa!
We have been the ones who grasped at birthrights that were never fully ours to hold. We have fled the consequences of our own compromises and the heavier consequences of those imposed upon us. We have served under shifting terms, counting years that stretched into decades, building what others claimed, watching the fruit of our labor carried away while the land itself remained restless. Now the long road turns homeward, and the past rises to meet us, not as a single brother, but as the accumulated weight of unfulfilled promises: independence that did not deliver justice, peace agreements that left trauma unhealed, development that extracted more than it restored, theologies that arrived with chains still attached and now return in the language of private jets and domination.
The one who wrestles through that night is not seeking a private favor. He is demanding the shalom that has haunted these lands for centuries, the comprehensive peace that includes right relationship with God, with the self that has been fragmented by history, with the neighbor who was once brother and is now stranger, and with the earth that still bears the scars of division. That shalom is the blessing withheld. It is the name that has not yet been fully spoken over us. It is the reason the struggle continues past midnight and into the hours when strength fails and only persistence remains.
And this same struggle is alive right now in a new generation. It is not the old folks who are leading the charge this time. It is the Gen Zs who are rising with a fierce Africanism that refuses to apologize for itself, who are decolonizing not only the political and economic maps of the continent but the faith itself. They are questioning the inherited theologies that still carry the fingerprints of empire, rejecting the prosperity messages that treat the poor as spiritual failures, and insisting that the gospel must speak with an African tongue and walk with African feet. Their refusal to let go is part of the same night at the ford. They too are wrestling for a blessing that has been delayed too long, demanding that the name spoken over this continent and over its faith be one of dignity, justice, and belonging rather than borrowed shame.
The touch has come at daybreak. You see somethings dislocated. Our limp has become permanent but this is not defeat. It is the mark of those who have stayed in the contest long enough to be renamed. The old identity; survivor, victim, collaborator, refugee has given way to something harder and more honest: the one who struggles with God and with the structures of men and refuses to release the claim until the blessing is given. Only then does the face of the brother become visible again – a one new Humanity. Only then does reconciliation become possible, not the erasure of history, but the intimate facing of it without denial or flight.
This is the mirror held up to every household, every community, every generation still standing at the ford. The unfulfilled promises are not abstract. They live in the camps where children grow up without the security their parents once fled to find. They live in the land still divided by the old maps and the new ones drawn in the same ink. They live in the silence of churches that have learned to spiritualize suffering while the structures that produce it remain untouched. They live in the quiet exhaustion of those who have carried the work of healing for decades and still watch the next wave of displacement rise. And they live in the restless energy of a young generation that will no longer accept a faith or a future that does not fully belong to them.
Yet the night is not empty. Heaven is involved. The struggle is not merely against flesh and blood or against the memory of empire. It is the place where the old name is broken and a new one is spoken. The limp is the cost. The blessing is the shalom that has always been the true inheritance; justice that restores, truth that does not flinch, reconciliation that does not forget, and a future that no longer requires the next generation to inherit the same unfinished fight.
We stand in that night together. Some of us carry the ancestral memory of warriors who were used and then discarded. Some of us carry the more recent memory of young families who crossed borders into places the world said were not meant for children. Some of us simply carry the ordinary weight of remaining human in a landscape that keeps asking for more than survival. The river does not care who we are. It only requires that we stay until the dawn reveals what the darkness has been trying to give us all along.
The ford is not finished.
Neither is the blessing that still waits to be claimed.
Read more about the author: Philip Kakungulu
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