O God,
creator of our land, . . .
You have also pulled other continents
out of the sea.
What a wonderful world you have made
out of wet mud,
and what beautiful men and women! . . .
The grace of your creation is like a cool day
between rainy seasons. . . .
Bless us.
Bless our land and people.
Bless our forests . . .
Bless our fields . . .
Bless the waters . . .
Be with us in our countries and in all Africa,
and in the whole world.
Prepare us for the service that we should render.
We all — adults and children, writers and readers — have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.