“The US is not qualified to lecture China or interfere in Chinese affairs, nor is it qualified to say it deals with China from "a position of strength." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian.
As we often do, let us begin with a Yoruba proverb: Iku ya ju esin. Death is preferable to humiliation.
This is a simple aphorism, yet one that carries the full weight of a dignified and cultured people - people who, unlike their former colonizers, would rather perish than bow to the insolent dictates of those who built their castles and their wealth on the backs of slaves and the colonization and humiliation of people of a different hue than them.
Ah, yes, we talk of Europe. That small, cold, fog-draped peninsula of Asia with no resources to sustain life yet somehow convinced itself it was the center of the universe. It even pretends to be a continent.
A continent that now staggers under the weight of its ignorant-engendered arrogant hubris yet still insists on standing atop podiums to lecture others about “values,” “democracy,” and “progress.”
Europe is beyond irony!
In this age, European leaders and scholars will not spare us their stupid sermons, even though the choir has long stopped listening. Like mindless little children, they continue to dance to their self-generated lullabies. Europe, which has killed human beings on a horrendous scale, gives lectures on the sanctity of human lives.
Contrary to the hagiography they concocted to celebrate themselves, which, unfortunately, many African intellectuals bought into, the story of Europe’s so-called greatness is not one of innovation or virtue. It is the tale of the cunning thief who discovered a loaded vault left open and decided to proclaim himself a financial genius.
Why do we often forget that the two most critical tools that powered Europe’s global hegemony—gunpowder and the compass—were not European? They were Chinese.
The Chinese invented gunpowder, the explosive powder that turned Europe’s tribal skirmishes into industrialized wars of global conquest for ceremonial purposes. Europeans turned it into a means of destroying human lives on an industrial scale.
Compass, the magnetic marvel that allowed Iberian caravels to stumble upon the shores of continents they neither discovered nor understood, was also a Chinese invention.
These tools, developed over centuries in the East and used for peaceful purposes, became Europe’s keys to empire-building and its unbridled violence against the world.
Europe did not share these gifts of human genius. They used it to pillage, rape, and commit unspeakable atrocities against much of the world. They enslaved. They killed Indigenous people on a truly industrial scale. And when their bellies were full and their coffers overflowing with looted wealth, they turned around and wrote history books extolling their “civilizing mission.”
The root of civilization is CIVIL; how could the scallywags from Europe who waged horrendous genocidal wars all over the world claim to be civilizers?
Contrary to their make-believe narratives, European dominance was not about merit but momentum. And that momentum was greased with African blood, Caribbean sweat, and Asian tears. As one of their scholars, Samuel Huntington, put it: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
When the Portuguese first landed on the coasts of West Africa in the 15th century, they did not come with gifts or items to engage in honorable commercial intercourse. They came with guns. With chains. With shackles. With branding irons. With priests. And they came with an ideology, Global White Supremacy - that blackness was a curse, that the rest of the world was a waiting room for Europe’s salvation.
That ideology, sanctioned by a Papal Bull - grew into plantations in the Americas, the Berlin Conference of 1884, and white Jesus icons plastered across Lagos and Kinshasa.
Europeans called their genocidal adventures the Age of Discovery. What a joke. It was as if the world wasn’t there before Vasco da Gama’s compass worked. And that the Benin bronzes weren’t gleaming in royal courts before the so-called civilzers looted them. It was as if the Swahili coast hadn’t traded with China a thousand years before Queen Victoria was born.
If only we in Africa will pay more attention to studying history.
What Europe “discovered” was not geography. It was power. And it wielded it cynically and without conscience. It drenched the world in blood.
As pointed out supra, the Catholic Pope sanctioned Europe’s criminal genocidal crime against the world: The Papal Bull "Inter Caetera," issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493, authorized Spain and Portugal to go on the rampage against the world.
Fast-forward to today. Europe and its albino cousin across the pond, America, are in decline - not because the world hates their freedoms as they like to tout, but because their freedoms were built on the unfreedom of others. The hubristic empire of lies is collapsing under the weight of truth. And rather than embrace humility, the West clutches its old script like a dying actor on a burnt-out stage - a lava effusing its last gas before the final collapse.
Take the latest champion of White Supremacy, Trump, the man with a vocabulary of about 600 words and a foreign policy that was made in a casino. Imagining that the 15th century is still on rotation, the narcissistic clown issues ultimatums to sovereign nations like Iran and China like a primary school bully.
Imagine the egotistical fool telling the Chinese - a civilization that survived Mongols, Manchus, etc - that they must obey a six times bankrupt real estate mogul because he waves the American flag like a drunk cowboy - or instructing Iran, the inheritor of Persian greatness, that their sovereignty is negotiable at the White House.
The sheer effrontery of Trump’s audacity galls greatly.
This is not 1492. This is not the Opium War era. Today, the colonized have come of age. They now have degrees, armies, satellites, and memory. Unlike the oppressor, the colonized remember. And they are not here to beg for inclusion - they are here to end the hubristic illusions of a dying colonialism, as Frantz Fanon aptly put it.
Even today, Western scholars still strut about like roosters on a dunghill, convinced that theirs is the only truth worth knowing. They parade their “universal values” without once interrogating whose universe they inhabit. They demand gender rights in Africa but never reparations. They scream about human rights in Asia but ignore drone strikes in Yemen and the genocide they finance in Palestine. They demand democracy in Venezuela while embracing monarchies they created in the Gulf. They talked about press freedom whilst they banned alternative media. The hypocrisy makes one sick.
The West’s cultural ignorance masquerades as moral authority. It is hubristic arrogance polished into doctrine. And it is precisely why the West is no longer respected - only tolerated, like a visitor who had overstayed his welcome.
Who will respect self-worshipping idiots?
When we look at the West today, what do we see if not a beautifully embroidered, maggot-infested cap parading a corpse? With access to modern means of communication, everyone can now observe the West, but only a few admire what they see.
The European empire is collapsing - not from external attack, but from the implosion of its delusions. And yet, the elites in Brussels, London, and Washington continue to strut around with arrogance and mouth nauseating imperial nonsense as if the world still runs on British tea and American hamburgers.
Contrary to the narratives of its image makers, European “civilization” was never about progress. It was about power - hegemonic power to promote the doctrine of White Supremacy. Gunpowder allowed them to conquer, the compass allowed them to chart their spoils, the printing press allowed them to whitewash history, and Christianity gave them a divine excuse.
Bob Marley wailed: “Nothing change and nothing strange, nothing strange and nothing changed. Today, the West is still at its old tricks. Only the new missionaries now wear suits, and the sermons come from IMF loans and NATO bombs. You will hear them talk about the “international rules-based order.” Whose rules, exactly? Made by whom, and for whose benefit? They will never tell us who appointed them as the Guardian of the World. They will not even show you the rules they apply arbitrarily - as it suits their interests.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq on a lie of seeking non-existing WMD, was that part of the rules? When France bombs Mali and calls it “stabilization,” are those the rules? When revanchist Germany sells weapons to Israel but lectures Russians about peace, is that rules-based behavior? When elections were canceled in Romania on flimsy grounds, was that democracy in action? When citizens cannot watch foreign media with VPNs, as in the EU, is that press freedom?
Let us not forget: the same Europe that weeps over Ukraine’s suffering yawned through decades of the Rwandan genocide, the Congolese plunder, the disintegration of Libya, and the ongoing real-time genocide against the Palestinian people - much of which they caused. African and Arab lives don’t command the same media ratings.
What we are witnessing is not just hypocrisy. It is weaponized and televised cultural ignorance. European leaders, scholars, and journalists cannot imagine a world where they are not at the center. It is beyond them to imagine they can no longer issue imperial orders that the world must unquestioningly obey.
But China has had enough, and it is not listening anymore. It is fighting back robustly and strategically.
A country humiliated by European gunboats in the 19th century now launches satellites into orbit and runs digital economies that leave Europe looking like a peasant retirement village. Do Westerners think the Chinese have forgotten the Opium Wars or the unequal treaties foisted on them? Of course not. Unlike Europeans, the Chinese do not suffer from historical amnesia.
Likewise, Iran is no Western vassal. Persia existed long before England was a thought. Why do Westerners refuse to learn that you cannot sanction a civilization into submission and you cannot intimidate a people whose poets outwrote Shakespeare centuries before he was born?
So when a Western leader appears on television, issuing threats to Iran or North Korea or Venezuela, what the rest of the world sees is not strength - but desperation - a fading empire trying to scream over the sound of its decline.
Is that what psychologists call coping? Or is that the number 2 on the Kubler-Ross 5 Stages of Grief?
We do not write to excuse authoritarianism, bad governance, or whatever. It is about finally rejecting the Western conceit that they alone possess the moral compass to steer humanity, even if they forget that the compass, like gunpowder, wasn’t their invention.
The post-colonial world is no longer tolerating Western tantrums. Africans are rewriting curriculums. Asians are building infrastructure. Latin Americans are rediscovering sovereignty. And we should let it be known that we do not require permission from Europeans, whatever they call themselves, on the land they stole.
Let the West clutch its pearls. Let them host security summits and publish white papers. Let them panic about declining birthrates and immigration waves - the consequences of centuries of greed and plunder and constant warfaring against the rest of the world.
Westerners are being haunted by the children of the world they broke. And no border fence will stop history from returning home. Malcolm X told us that Chickens would come home to roost.
Jean-Paul Sartre warned that Europe should not expect adulation from those whose heads it had forcibly bowed: "What did you expect when you unbound the gag that muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?"
The same perceptive Satre told Europeans that the era of the boomerang had arrived. The colonized would no longer kneel; they would stand tall with memory, dignity, and power.
The West must discover humility - not the theatrical kind performed at Davos panels and UN conferences, but real humility, which begins by listening, learning, and, above all, shutting up for once.
The rest of the world is not waiting for Europe’s apology. We are writing our future - with or without them. This is no longer 1884 when Europeans made all the rules.
As I concluded in my article, “Who is Afraid of the Recolonizers,” As the global power paradigm shifts inexorably away from Europe, the central question thus becomes: Who needs Europe with all her reckless bigotry, violence, virulent racism, cynicism, unbridled greediness, selfishness, rampant arrogance, hubris, immodesty, and wanton decadence?
When the baton is finally and irrevocably passed from Europe, perhaps the rest of us can finally leave Europe, with all her negative baggage, behind and march to build a new relationship of humanity based on mutual love, respect, peace, fraternity, and solidarity.” - https://femiakogun.substack.com/p/who-is-afraid-of-recolonisers?r=3wwyw
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, and Social Commentator.)
If you like what I write, I would appreciate it if you kindly support me with your subscription to my Substack: HTTPS://femiakogun.Substack.com
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