Beyond the Colonial Mirror: An African Awakening
The Great Deception
We celebrate mirror-reflecting high-rises in the city while children sit in broken-down structures called "schools" with pit latrines. We celebrate millionaires and billionaires before community leaders. We measure our success by how much we have achieved, not by what we have contributed.
This is the world we've been sold—a system that wasn't made by us, isn't for us, and exploits us at every turn. Yet we continue to chase its false promises, benchmarking our worth on scales designed to empower individuals while communities crumble.
The Language of Exploitation
When mainstream media speaks of "the poorest people in Africa," they reveal their colonial lens. The truth is simpler and more damning: we are "the most exploited people in the world." This shift in language matters; it moves us from victims of circumstance to survivors of systematic extraction.
The same media spins narratives about "war-torn" regions and "rebel forces" while ignoring the geopolitics behind the violence. What they don't report are the international mercenaries, foreign-funded armies, and external forces systematically undermining peace and stability to secure African resources. It's the oldest strategy in the colonial playbook: divide and conquer. Outside powers need Africa's wealth, and they'll destabilise entire regions to get it, regardless of the human cost. Mainstream media remains complicit in this deception, hiding the puppet strings while reporting on the chaos.
Geopolitics has pitted brother against brother, dividing and conquering as it manipulates our understanding of ourselves. If you're white and work in another country, you're an "expat." If you're brown or black, you're an "immigrant." The language shapes the narrative, and the narrative shapes our reality.
The False Idols of Success
We hang on every word of Africans who speak with private school accents, even paying money to hear their Western narratives. We worship conspicuous consumption like a badge of honour, aspiring to plastic worlds and botoxed smiles while hiding debt and bloated egos behind Instagram filters.
Meanwhile, visitors come from their gated mansions to experience the "simplicity" of Africa—tented safaris in the Serengeti, gorilla treks in the Congo, and white sands of Zanzibar. They come for what we have and they lack: authentic beauty, real community, genuine connection to life itself.
The Wisdom We've Forgotten
We measure educational success through arbitrary subjects in colonial school systems, ignoring our wealth of generational wisdom. We are hunters, gatherers, warriors, pastoralists, craftsmen, linguists, scholars, artists, and most importantly, survivors. We have resources, fertile soil, resilient people—everything needed for true prosperity.
Yet we've been convinced to abandon these strengths for a system that keeps money-lenders afloat while communities sink. Politicians make empty promises with no accountability. Corporations control the narrative in this B-grade movie called "Living in Dystopian 2025."
The Reality Check
When the electricity stops working, when the water runs dry, when the sun burns holes through our plastic veneer of prosperity, I'd rather walk hand in hand with a resilient African woman than an Ivy League graduate. Because when survival matters, community matters more than credentials.
This moment, watching morally bankrupt leaders of the "first world" self-implode while they call our leaders "corrupt" and theirs "democratically elected", reveals the hypocrisy we've been told to admire.
The Ubuntu Alternative
Our lives should be rooted in Ubuntu, the fundamental principle that acknowledges each individual's inherent dignity and value. This understanding fosters respect, compassion, and empathy as the foundations of society.
In Somaliland, I witnessed people who have nothing in Western terms but have everything that matters to them. In Tanzania, living in a township, washing clothes in a bucket, counting pennies for market visits, I see Ubuntu lived daily. Children play with stones and empty bottles in dusty streets, finding pure joy. Neighbours greet each other genuinely, asking how you are and meaning it.
The sound of community fills the streets because life happens collectively, not hidden behind walls protecting private consumption.
What It Means to Live Ubuntu
Ubuntu isn't a philosophy to discuss; it's a way of being that transforms daily life. When your neighbour greets you on the dusty street, they don't just say hello; they stop, look you in the eyes, and genuinely ask how you are. They wait for the real answer.
Children play together in the street, transforming anything into entertainment; empty bottles become racing cars, discarded tyres into wheels of fun, creating elaborate games with nothing but stones and imagination. Their ingenuity turns scarcity into abundance, waste into wonder. Their laughter fills the air because joy doesn't require ownership; it requires the creativity to see possibility everywhere.
When we have a little extra food, it finds its way to someone who needs it. When we're counting pennies to see if we can go to market, someone else might slip us what we need. Not as charity, but as the natural flow of community caring for itself.
We feed the feral cats even when we're scrimpimg on our own meals because in ubuntu, all life is interconnected. The boundary between "mine" and "ours" dissolves when you understand that your well-being and mine are inseparable.
Living space becomes shared space. Instead of retreating behind walls to enjoy private possessions, life happens collectively. The boundaries between households blur because the community is the real home.
This isn't poverty, it's abundance measured differently. It's freedom from the exhausting pursuit of more, and the discovery of richness in enough.
A Personal Reckoning
As a descendant of colonisers, I recognise that this awakening represents a deliberate choice to reject the legacy I inherited. The mindset shift wasn't accidental; it was a conscious decision to step away from systems of exploitation my ancestors helped establish.
I understand that not all black Africans consider white people born in Africa to be truly African, regardless of birthplace. This perspective carries the weight of history and ongoing power imbalances. What I can offer is not a claim to African identity, but a commitment to living by African values, to choosing Ubuntu over individualism, community over consumption, connection over competition.
The Choice Before Us
Africa, we are better than the shallow materialism being sold to us. We don't need to benchmark ourselves against systems designed to exploit us. We can cultivate our own way of thinking and being, rooted in the wisdom of our ancestors and the reality of our communities.
This doesn't mean rejecting all progress or living without basic needs. Everyone deserves a roof overhead, access to clean water, electricity, education, and healthcare. But the models for delivering these necessities must fit African realities, not Western templates.
Ironically, as the world now scrambles toward "herbal" and "natural" remedies, Africa has always possessed this wealth: sea moss, baobab powder, moringa, rooibos, and countless other natural alternatives that the West is now bottling and turning into expensive smoothie powders. Many people still prefer traditional medicine alongside modern healthcare, and that wisdom should be honoured, not dismissed as primitive while being repackaged and sold back to us at premium prices.
As I told my son when he wanted to make me proud: "What was the first thing I taught you?" "Be kind," he replied. "Son, you've made me proud."
That's Ubuntu. That's our strength. That's our path forward.
The culture we inherited from colonisers was never the only way to live. Now we know we can choose something better, something that honours our humanity instead of commodifying it.
