“Throughout history, there have been only a handful of moments so transformative that they redefined what it means to be human…(They) were profound inflection points, moments when the trajectory of civilization bent so sharply that the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ became fundamentally different worlds….
“Ten thousand years ago, the first tipping point reshaped human existence as communities *transformed from
hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies. This profound shift allowed permanent settlements, surplus food, population growth, and the birth of governance, religion, and trade. Yet it also introduced heirarchy conflict , and disease – an irreversible pivot shaping humanity’s trajectory for millennia….
” The second tipping point came with the Industrial Revolution. Machines powered by steam and electricity redefined production, transportation, and communication. Urbanization surged, economies scaled rapidly, and societies adopted new conceptions of time and labor…
“Today, we stand at the precipice of a third tipping point , redefined not by our mastery of machines, but our potential to merge with them – and to engineer life itself. Three extraordinary domains converge at this unprecedented juncture: artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and quantum computing…” (Will Technology Change Who We Are? https:///frankdiana.net/2025/03/26/the-next-human-revolution-will-technology-change-who-we-are).
To grasp that above quotation, read the title of this article again. What is the “Cry of my People “? Who are “my people”? Is the “cryosphere ” a huge stadium-like place where people cry?
My people are 99% of the 8 billion people among humanity trapped in global systems that have run their course, trapped in the false beliefs that their leadership would help them improve on their livelihoods, to live longer and healthier lives. That is a lie. Most of humanity is careening towards the abyss of climate Armageddon. Africans are ahead in this race of mass suicide, especially Africans in tropical rainforests countries.
Why should my people cry? About 1% of humanity, especially in the richest nations of the world – those US Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent) demonize as “oligarchs” – have orchestrated the mass murder of humanity on Planet Earth. It’s a mass murder not in stark and blood-cuddling torture and murder as it was in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany’s FINAL SOLUTION of Jew’s torture and mass murder inside gas chambers between 1938 and 1945. It’s not mass murder as in the 21st century bombing of Gaza by the Israeli Defences Force, and babies and children dying; or, Palestinian freedom fighters/terrorists attacking Israeli musical festivals and hacking them to death, and kidnapping others. It’s subtle mass murder. It’s mass murder integrated into the global economic systems; embedded in internal and international trade; in global relations, it’s mass murder being done in plain sight in 100-storey glass buildings; mass murder in Utopian mansions that display awesome wealth; mass murder inside the United Nations headquarters in New York; it’s mass murder of the type where we hail the most vicious of the mass murderers who are billionaires and presidents and kings and parliamentarians. A few countries – largely in Western Europe; lately, joined by newly-industrialized countries like China and India with populations of about 3 billion people – that have grown extraordinarily rich over the past about 250 years since the advent of the Industrial Revolution are the main culprits of the global warming and man-made Climate Change. As they get richer and richer, they pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The earth gets warmer and warmer – stimulating dramatic Climate Change. That has stimulated floodings, droughts, wildfires, lower agricultural yields. About 8 billion people on Planet Earth, especially, the 1.2 billion people in Africa, are the victims – dying with starvation and dehydration, dying with unemployment and frustration. Finally by early 1990s with the Earth Summit in Brazil, the world resolved to take necessary action against global warming. Almost every year since 1994, nearly all nations of the world would meet to address, mitigate, or solve, the complex and worsening problems of man-made Climate Change in the Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This November, 2025, COP-30 will be held at Belem, Brazil. Again, nearly all the nations of the world – including the leadership of tiny Sierra Leone leading 8,000,000 people in a global population of 8,000,000,000 people – will attend. The poor countries will make powerful speeches again hoping to strike at the consciences of the richest nations. Like from COP-1 to COP-29, the richest nations are likely to make token concessions, throw a few more billion dollars into the begging bowls of the poor countries. This implicitly murderous condescension is certain to continue until the developing countries realize that they must be more intense and relentless and imaginative in getting their voices heard. Not much would be achieved if they think sitting down inside conference halls to talk and be heard by the cream of elite with callused consciences is a serious option. The developing countries must explore imaginative ways to get their messages to the masses of people in the West, in India, in China. That’s where my imaginative thrust comes in.
First Lady!! The SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP
Imagination based on cogent analysis of facts and figures realistic are embedded in my idea of a slave ship to travel to Brazil for COP-30 in November, 2025. It’s a continuum of the SLAVE SHIP-FREEDOM SHIP concept which I hatched in Calabar, Cross River State, in Nigeria in 1992. On March 24, 2025, inside her capacious softly-lit office at Goderich, Freetown, I met the First Lady of Sierra Leone, who’s also the current President of the Organization of African First Ladies and Development (OAFLAD), Mrs Fatima Bio, to solicit her support on my slave ship idea. I am optimistic still, as the clock ticks towards November, 2025. Importantly, my idea transcends conference halls. It’s to dramatically increase the awareness of billions of humanity to rise up and compell preventative and curative action on climate change.
Let’s take another read if that opening quote. And think. With the exception of about six or so African countries, nearly all the 54 African countries have not reached the stage of the “second tipping point” – the Industrial Revolution. Not even Nigeria, with its almost half trillion dollars GDP, the largest in Africa; it’s still more of a mineral exploitation and trading economy, not an industrial and manufacturing economy. That’s the same with countries like Sierra Leone. Now, the world is moving fast into the Artificial Intelligence Revolution. Almost 50 years ago, futurologist Alvin Toffler called the emerging era “The Third Wave”.
Third Wave
“Futurologist Alvin Toffler captivated millions worldwide with his profound forecasts on everything from the rise of the internet to a new wave of drugs and crime…(Toffler) was most remembered for his books Future Shock and Third Wave…
“The author rightly predicted a knowledge-based economy would eclipse the post-industrial age, shifting focus from manufacturing and labor to information and data.
“…’ The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn ‘, he wrote in one of his observations.
“Toffler also predicted the spread of interactive media, online chatrooms…
“…’Advanced technology and information systems make it possible for much of the work of society to be done at home via computer-
telecommunications hook-up’, he wrote” . (SOURCE: Alvin Toffler, what he got right – and wrong; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36675260; 1 July, 2016; BBC News, Washington)
Sierra Leone, like most of the poverty-stricken countries of Africa is too far behind the race of humanity. When with our GDP of about $4 billion we sit on negotiating tables with the United States with its $26 trillion GDP, what do we negotiate with?
We cry!
If we can get about 8 billion people to cry together every week for a year, even Satan in Hell would be softened.
There are other cards that we can use as ace.
We are one human family, we either fight together as intelligent beings or die together as foolish nations
“In the midst of a record-breaking heatwave in Europe, the UK city of Exeter recently played host to the second international conference on ‘tipping points’
“The event was billed as a ‘ call to action ‘ to the ‘research community, policy makers and business to raise awareness and understanding of the importance of tipping points and to accelerate the required action’.
“As human activity drives global temperatures to record highs, multiple parts of the Earth’s system are at risk of being pushed beyond thresholds that could see them shift irreversibly into a new state.
“The conference also focused heavily on ‘positive tipping points’, where large-scale, self-propelling social change can reduce the impact of humans on the planet.
“Hosted jointly by the Global Systems Institute of the University of Exeter, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, the conference was the second event dedicated to global tipping points, following the first in 2022
“A statement issued by conference conveners – and endorsed by hundreds of delegates – warned that the window for preventing tipping points’ is ‘rapidly closing’…” (SOURCE: https://www.carbonbrief.org/tipping-points-window-to-avoid-irreversible-climate-impacts-is-rapidly-closing; 8 July, 2025)
For most of the educated elite who appear to think that Climate Change can only be solved by the white man alone, the quote above would be meaningless. I need urgent financial resources to dilute most my pedantic articles like this one into video drama that can be used in three minutes bits in social media platforms like TikTok. In my early years in environmentalism in the early 1980s when my brainchild, the SAVE MY FUTURE CONSERVATION SOCIETY (SAMFU) was given legal force as a NGO in Monrovia, Liberia, when I was in my early 30s, I would work with a Liberian cartoon genius, Ronnie Siakor, in his early 20s.
Cry of My People
One of the cartoon stories drawn by Ronnie Siakor, and scripted by Oswald Hanciles, in GREENLOVE magazine in 1989 (financed for SAMFU by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-International and German Forestry Mission to Liberia) was titled ” The Cry of People”. It revolved around the traditional rite-of-passage school, the “Poro”, of the Kpelle people of Bong County in central Liberia. A similar Poro society exists in Sierra Leone and Guinea. There, inside dense tropical rainforests, young people being initiated would be taught the lore and laws of their people, which includes the use of plants and animals to cure tropical diseases. “The Cry of My People” carton story was that with rapid deforestation in Liberia, the species in the tropical rainforests would be lost, and parts of the essence of the tropical rainforests – the “Poro Society” – could be lost forever. It would be a loss to not only the Kpelle people, or, the Mende, Temne, Sherbro, Vai, Gbandi people in Sierra Leone, and other forest tribes in Guinea, but a loss to all humanity. (Ironically, since 1989 when The Cry of My People was published, there have been accelerated destruction of the tropical rainforests in Liberia, partly fueled by the nastily brutish 16 years civil war in Liberia in the 1990s to the early 2000s). Though tropical rainforests are home to about 46% of all species found on earth, humanity knows less than 2% of the use of these species for medicinal purposes. For about 47 years of my post-university professional life, I have argued for this rarity found in the tropical rainforests to be used as an ace, an economic weapon, on the global negotiating table for global equity. In Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Cameroon, Congo; in Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia… Brazil, these forests – also recognized as the “lungs of the earth” for absorbing the excess carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – are being rapidly lost. We must urgently save them. How? With more crying?
The cryosphere
“As the world’s snow and ice vanishes and permafrost thaws, the cryosphere calls for urgent global attention…
“Every living being on Earth is connected to the cryosphere in one way or the other . It’s therefore a shared responsibility to keep the majority of the frozen part of the world intact, before irrevocable changes alter the world as we know it. To share this message, the Norwegian Chair ship of the Artic Council brought some of the strongest voices on the stage during COP-29 to speak on the cryosphere. This is their call for action.
“The cryosphere is the frozen part of the world; its glaciers and mighty snow sheets, snow, permafrost, and river, lake and ice.
” While seemingly distant to many, these icy masses bind people across the globe together in many ways; mountain glaciers supply freshwater to millions. Ice sheets, snow, and ice play a crucial role in stabilizing the Earth’s climate system, while also serve as a basis for culture and well-being, supporting livelihood of indigenous peoples in particular. Permanently frozen soil protect rich carbon storage and the shores of coastal communities, and many ecosystems rely on snow and ice.
“However, our frozen world is under threat. As global temperatures increase, two of the ice-rich regions are warming faster than the rest of the world: the Artic three times, and the Antarctic, at twice the global average.
“The consequences of the shrinking ice are global, including sea level rise , coastal erosion , contaminated freshwater, damaged infrastructure, a self-perpetuating “warming cycle. These changes threaten not only the environment and the Earth’s climate systems, but also the rights of Artic Indigenous Peoples, who have relied on frozen landscapes for time immemorial.
” …The Minister of Environment for Chile, Honourable Maisa Rojas Corradi, as she took the stage during an official side event focused on the cryosphere hosted by the Norwegian Chairship of the Artic Council, during the 29th Conference of the Parties (COP-29) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Baku, Azerbaijan… issued the warning on the cryosphere.
“Representatives from Chile, Pakistan, Germany, Bhutan and Norway; the Inuit Circumpolar Council, and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, as well as polar scientists, shared the stage to bring a message from the frozen world to global leaders. In their words, this is how the Artic, the Antarctic, and the Hindu Kush Himalayan region are changing and why global action is needed…
” Since the 1980s, the loss of the Artic cryosphere has been dramatically accelerating . At its lowest annual extent, the Artic Sea ice cover has decreased by 58 percent since 1972.
“If this trend continues, the Artic Ocean could be considered ice-free in Summer as early as by the 2040s….
“All regions of the Artic are now experiencing net loss of land ice….
“In addition to contributing to coastal erosion…thawing permafrost releases greenhouse gases as microorganisms awaken in warming soils and feast on one of the largest, millennia-old carbon storages in the world…
“If we lose the Artic ice, not only we catalyze the warming of the Artic, but we will also threaten the stability of the entire climate system”, said Dr Heidi Sevestre of Artic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) Secretariat…
“Glacialogist Heidi Sevestre from the Secretariat of the Artic Council’s Working Group (AMAP) …put the consequences into perspective by comparing the potential greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost to those of countries: ‘If we reach 1.6 degrees Celsius temperature increase, permafrost will emit as much greenhouse as the country of India by the end of the century…At three degrees, they would equal to the United States’ emissions”…(SOURCE: A Message From A Frozen World, May 12, 2025; https://artic-council.org/news/a-message-from-a-frozen-world; article by Kristina Bar, Artic Council Secretariat)
There are no easy solutions to prevent the looming mass murder that would result if Climate Change is not dramatically checked.
It is unlikely that most of the educated elite among Sierra Leoneans would read that quotation on the “cryosphere”. For too many of them, they attend international conferences to earn foreign currency allowances. They are mostly obsessed with earning or stealing public monies to build more and more $500 mansions. Most of them appear serious about politics only to effect state capture by their favoured political party to position themselves in senior government positions to steal public monies. Precedence shows that most of our bureaucratic elite and political elite would have plans to flee to Europe or Europe when things get too bad in Sierra Leone, like it was during our civil war era between 1991 and 2002; or, flee to the West when their political party loses power. Mos are unperturbed by the data I present here, and could be sneering at my prophetic warnings. I have hope that with the unprecedented rarest of opportunities in the leadership of Sierra Leone today – with the President, Retired Brigadier Maada Bio, being Chairman of ECOWAS; and the First Lady, Mrs Fatima Bio, being President of the Organization of African First Ladies and Development (OAFLAD ) – Sierra Leone would provide leadership for a more robust, more imaginative, pan-African and Southern Hemisphere-approach to COP-30. My message is not limited to them. All the leadership in the executive, legislative, judiciary; leadership in the private sector, civil society and the media of Sierra Leone, and other African countries, should reach out to me to mobilize resources together to take timely action. My message is to Europeans and Americans; to Chinese and Japanese and Koreans and Indians, etc.
Take action!! We are one humanity
As I forward this article to the about 20 pan-African Whatsapp groups I am subscribed to, I plead with members in other African countries there to send this article to their leaderships at all levels, and urge them to get to me. I seek resources for an enlightened team to talk to people directly in other African countries like Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, etc. This idea is ours. It’s not mine alone. The issues at stake are a thousand times more than the liberation wars of liberation leaders like Robert Mugabe and Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure; more than the moral fights of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Climate Change War is the ultimate war.
The Cry of My People was (is) on the tropical rainforests of Liberia (and the whole world); the cryosphere is about the frozen parts of the world: they are intertwined; we cannot save one without saving the other. We must move with the new global ethic of one world to save humanity and most of higher life.
By
Oswald Hanciles,
