#SomeThoughts:

I think about colonization and slavery a lot and it is obvious that there is more to meet the eye. Popular discourse around these institutions have made it literally black and white. The blacks were docile, the whites were awful. We don’t go into depth about

phenomena like the black slave owners, or even the tribal conflicts that European powers used to capture land. The folks that talk of docility don’t factor in the wars and the protests and the riots and the guerrilla conflict that occurred through out the continent to counter

European influence. As I have study these institutions over the years, I have noticed that there is this belief that if Africans were not colonized or raided of its people that the continent would not be where it is at the moment. It is an optimistic thought process. It is one

that could inspire a speculative work of fiction where a protagonist goes back in time, builds local African capacity and fights against the invaders. If that happened, countries like Nigeria and Ghana would not exist, conflicts like the Sierra Leonean Civil War and the Rwandan

Genocide would not have happened. This could very much be an alternate reality we are not privy to and hence, we can not explain, but the fact is, everything that happened, happened and now we are here, in this messed up world dealing with the consequences. I need to do more

research on this, but I am positive that regardless of Europe’s physical presence on the Continent, we would still be fucked over. I look at countries like Ethiopia and technically Liberia, that were never ‘colonized’. But even more aptly, I consider a country like China

(mainland, excluding Macau and Hong Kong) that was mostly spared from the same colonizing force that changed the way we lived life on the African continent. I look at these nation-states and I see the run-offs of colonization in their existences, especially in Ethiopia. This is

complicated to explain and I am restricted by character limits and short attention spans, but we all operate in an ecosystem designed for a select crop to succeed. We see this with the marketing of a product, ie Supreme or Gucci. It obtains it’s value from its rarity, its

supposed high level of quality and its limited quantity. We leave in a system that has elevated certain attributes as the ideal. The way we look, speak, eat, move, even exist. Isn’t it strange that hair straightening is seen as a requirement of professionalism on the continent,

or suits, or white wigs in the legal system? What about language? I got accepted to LSE and one of the entrance requirements was an English placement test. I was exempted because of my university schooling in the United States, but how is it that despite that fact that the

English colonizing mission in the Americas and Africa produced different English dialects (with the English on the continent closer in syntax, grammar and spelling to the English in England) that Americans and Canadians are not expected to test, whereas Nigerians and Ghanaians

are. What about Christianity? Some woke folk will say Christianity on the African continent is justified because Ethiopia had Christian communities well before a country like Ireland adopted the religion. But what they won’t mention is that the Christianity practiced in most of

Africa is not derived from the Ethiopian Orthodoxy. It was introduced primarily by Europeans and spread by Africans themselves under the guise of civilizing or adapting to the times. Isn’t it weird how important Christianity has become in African society, whereas in the West,

esp. Europe, it has declined. Declined to the point that Africans are evangelizing in countries like Hungary and Croatia. For one of my history seminars in college, I wrote about the ‘Africanization of Christianization’ and it was wild to see videos of young women from Nigeria

talking about going to Nepal and Myanmar to spread the ‘gospel’. Again, the issues we face are incredibly complex but one thing that is happening is that we are currently operating within a world that has placed a certain type of white existence above others. A white existence

that even Jews and Italians and Irish folks could not fulfill until black and brown folks ‘were given equal’ rights. This ideal whiteness that no one can really describe (Hilter tried) dictates the rules. If there was a god, a true overarching god, that would be it. It is this

ideal existence that tells us what is beautiful, hence the problem with colorism and 4c hair. This ideal existence tells us how we should speak (closer to the way folks speak in predominantly white populations in the world), how to dress (attires that have modern origins in

Europe), how to pray, how to govern (democracy), how to operate economies (capitalism) etc. Now, I’m not here to derail anyone’s bag or scream colonial mentality from the roof tops, it isn’t my place and I don’t have energy for it. This is tailored towards the folks that have

been held bound by a system that is designed against them and they don’t know they have the option to choose different. We can actively disentangle ourselves from the clutches of colonialism, one aspect of our existence at a time and remember, a lot of the things that were

advocated for by colonizing missions have been dropped in the west. It always baffled me when I started high school in the US that I didn’t have to wear a perfectly pressed uniform, or how many people only knew of Christianity as a cultural relic handed down by their grandparents

, or how many countries in Europe that are not capitalist, or the fact that they (Western nations) don’t seem to be as vocal about democracy in places like Saudi Arabia. In summary, they make the rules, then exempt themselves from it or downright break it. So we have no

obligations to uphold these systems in anyway and upholding them don’t actually increase our chances of advancing because nothing we do will change our heritage and skin color. I always find it so funny when people try to justify something to me and then they say something like,

‘this is how Americans do it’ or ‘na so oyinbo dey do am’. This is how to hold a fork, this is how to tie a lace, this is how to eat ass; but when you really look at it, white folks do what the fuck they want. So while Africans are striving towards and enforcing a whiteness they

will never attain, white folks are out here doing whatever makes them happy and being unapologetic by default. After too many tweets to count, I can simply say that we are not obligated to a system that does not affirm our existence as is. We are not. There are folks (the

tokens) that have gathered some acorns, but the fact that it is an infinitesimally small minority of the nonwhite world, proves that it is not sustainable and I cannot be attained by the majority of people seeking it.

I ran out of tweet thread space and now, this reads to me as more of a journal entry than a public PSA, but I think we should think critically about the fact that the majority of the world; in terms of culture, skin color, language groups, is non European and even less is white.

Yet, Indo-European languages are global lingua francas. Eurocentric history and cultural artifacts are considered global standards (the fact that World War 1, a war fought predominantly in Europe, is a world war; but the conflict in the Congo and adjacent countries is not).

The fact that a global body like the UN has a Security Council with no permanent African representation. Question: why is France still a permanent member, when there is Germany (to be more realistic) and Brazil (to be absolutely practical) and even South Africa (if we are serious

about permanent African representation that will be welcomed readily by the west). Let’s not even talk about the IMF and World Bank and the loans and austerity measures that keep African nations in perpetual debt. Gosh, I am out of virtual breath. I will close by saying,

We can pursue a better system, but it will not be easy.