The race is the cheetah's and stealth belongs to the leopard. No cultural identity can be taken over by those to whom it does not belong, and no one can have his identity taken over by another. There is a force to be drawn from in our cultural identities, a force whose potency we lose in letting go of our cultural self. If Atandi took to walking about in Asian, Russian, Australian or Scottish cultural garb, as beautiful as these threads may be, and as stately as they may make Atandi look, they will not fit my identity on account of their alien weaving. I will walk as a man unsure of his consciousness; why? Because they do not, culturally, belong to me. They denote an identity, an ipseity that is linked to a history somewhere, to a soil somewhere, a people, music; traditions that are treasured for their beauty but that are also profoundly incongruous with my spirit, with our spirit.

A short twist in the scenario brings on wholly different consequences. Crown Atandi's head with Dogon head-dress, adorn his ears with the beads of the Nandi, brace my torso with body patterns from the Dinka, cover his shoulders with the Kente of the Ashanti, tie a roa warrior skirt from the Gusii round my waist, and shoe my feet in Basotho sandals. Adorn me with such and I will tread the streets as a freshly crowned Kabaka. Have you seen a leopard prance about his territory or a hippo wallow in his waters?

It is not that cultural exchange is wrong, or even that it is harmful. Indeed I believe the exact opposite, that in these cultural transactions are exchanged the threads that make for an even richer fabric. However, it is crucial that we do not confuse assimilation and integration. These are not twins either in mode or in meaning; they are the difference between absolute cultural success and outright poverty.

The notion of 'purity of identity' should itself be expunged from our thinking. History chronicles that all such efforts at cultural purity ended up weakening rather than strengthening the aggregated peoples.  In our particular African experience, the colonial doctrine of ‘divine and conquer' utilised heavily such sentiments, placing a wedge between communities, placing the one culture above the other, creating rivalries where before was a seamless osmosis of customs and traditions. So it is that even now, we are instilled with pride in the purity of our roots, our tribe, our town, our country and the over-arching unconscious pride in our blood, whatever that means. And it is this spirit of vanity, the purity of blood that then graduates into a separatist arrogance in being Kikuyu or Zulu, Akan or Wolof. It leads us to forgetting that our ancestors harboured no such pretensions, that your great grandfather was Tswana, your grandmother Rendile, your niece Oromo and her father Twa.

The danger in this philosophy lies in its seductive powers, the way it quickly takes over society, bringing rifts where we would have been laying bridges. Two lions cannot rule the same pride; two bulls do not rub their backs on the same tree.  The previous mores of cultural mixing and interaction, the retention of identity even as we happily borrow from others are set aside, and in their place come the tragedy of the Rwanda experience, of Molo and Kuresoi, Bantustans are formed and if a factor like Bismarck should be employed by the hand of history, we are soon waving proud flags and erecting border posts.

And it is in these cracks that those who would want to cause us harm drive their wedges, those visitors who would much rather break into our houses than knock on our doors. And it is then that we find that our zones of exclusion, and our purity of origin is off little aid, we are in our little enclaves, cultural or actual, picked apart and devoured as easily as the lion does a gazelle strayed from its herd.