Africa Must Decolonize Its Mind

Fellow Africans, as it’s our wont on this blog, let us ask another uncomfortable question: did we actually become free?

More than sixty years after the flags came down and new ones went up, after governors became presidents and colonial secretaries became ministers, after we joined the United Nations and solemnly declared ourselves sovereign - the honest answer is that we changed the management, but we did not change the mind.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o saw this before most of us did, and he espoused it in his book, Decolonizing the Mind. Colonialism's deepest conquest was never the land. It was the imagination.

The colonizer did not simply rule Africa - he trained Africa to see itself through his eyes, to measure its own worth by his yardstick, to regard its own languages, names, and memory as things a serious and “civilized” person outgrows.

And we Africans have been extraordinarily obedient students.

Victoria Falls. Victoria Island. Livingstone this. Rhodes that. King's Street. Queen's Avenue.

Nobody is arguing about whether Queen Victoria personally stood at every waterfall that now bears her name. The question is why a continent that claims to have liberated itself still finds it natural to advertise its former owners on its own soil.

Imagine the French or the Dutch, freed from German occupation, deciding to leave German names on their national monuments as a permanent courtesy to the men who occupied them.

The idea is absurd on its face. Yet Africa is asked to treat the same arrangement as unremarkable - even respectable.

The waterfall was there before Victoria. The mountain was there before Victoria. Africa was there before Europe found the nerve to rename it.

An African place-name is not a gap waiting for a European word to fill it. It is the history of that place, spoken in the mouth of the people who first stood there.

Along the West African coast stand the buildings where our people were imprisoned, shackled and shipped away like cargo.

Strangely, we call them castles. Elmina Castle.

Castles. As though the word itself hasn't been asked to do something indecent - to dress a dungeon in the vocabulary of grandeur, so that a schoolchild reading "Cape Coast Castle" pictures towers and nobility rather than chains, whips, branding, and the auction block.

Why can we not call the place what happened inside it? A prison. A holding pen for human beings.

Instead of Elmina Castle, the proper name should be Elmina Slave Dungeon.

We cannot decolonize African memory while still describing African suffering in the language of the men who profited from it.

My Yoruba people have a saying: Ọ̀rọ̀ tí a kò bá sọ dáadáa, kì í yé ni dáadáa - a matter not spoken plainly is never understood plainly.

Sanitized language is not neutral. It is the colonizer still choosing our words for us, decades after he left.

As we have written several times on this blog, every living culture borrows. The shame is in what we've allowed borrowing to become - erasure dressed as sophistication.

Why does a Yoruba name get shortened, translated, or quietly retired, while a missionary's name is treated as the mark of an educated and civilized household?

When did we agree that our own names belong to the village and someone else's belong to civilization?

That is not modernity. That is colonial psychology wearing a jacket and tie.

It follows us into the sanctuary, too. Millions of us praise God in languages our grandmothers never spoke, and quietly conclude that our mother tongues are too small to carry something as large as the sacred.

When did God become an Englishman?
A language is a vessel for human thought - nothing more, nothing less.

If Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, Wolof or Kiswahili cannot yet be heard discussing theology, science or law in our public life, the failure is not in the language. It is in what the civilization has allowed itself to believe about that language.

It follows us to the altar as well - the African wedding is treated as unfinished without the white gown, the veil, the imported liturgy of a nineteenth-century European parlor, as if the rich negotiations, music and symbolism of our own marriage traditions were a rehearsal for the "real" ceremony to come.

None of this argues for retreating into an imagined, frozen past.

Nobody serious is asking Africa to reject medicine, science, or constitutional government. Decolonization is not rejecting the foreign. It is the rejection of foreignness as the measure of worth.

The Japanese borrowed massively from China and later the West without ceasing to be Japanese. India absorbed English education while reviving its own languages and its own historical memory intact.

When would we in Africa understand that confidence borrows. Only insecurity imitates.

And here is the real tragic cost of our perpetual imitation: we have produced generations of Africans who can name every European football club but not the great kingdoms that stood on their own soil; who know the British monarchs but not the philosophers and technologists of their own ancestors. That is not education; it’s brainwashing.

That is not an educational gap. It is a civilizational rupture - and it will not be repaired by renaming a street.

Call Victoria Avenue Kwame Nkrumah Avenue and keep teaching African history as a footnote to European history, and you have changed nothing but the signage. Take down the statue and keep believing that European approval is the final word on African achievement.

The colonizer has never actually left - he has moved from the plinth into the mind, where he governs more effectively than he ever did from Government House.

Decolonization has to reach the classroom, the pulpit, the newsroom, the wedding, the naming ceremony - our very conception of beauty, intelligence, history and self.

A people cannot be sovereign while requiring the former master to certify who they are.

This is not a call to hate Europe or Arab or anyone. Hatred would only leave foreigners sitting at the center of our imagination, in reverse.

That is bad psychology.
What we need in Africa is harder than hatred: we need to stop treating Europe as the tribunal before which we must continually present our credentials, and start treating it as one civilization among many - to learn from where useful, disagree with where necessary, and answer to no one.

To be whole again, Africa must recover the languages, recover the names, recover the histories, the philosophies, the architecture, the confidence - and then, having recovered them, subject them to the same honest scrutiny we apply to everything else.

It’s not every tradition that deserves preservation. But the judgment must be ours to make. That is what sovereignty actually means.

You cannot build a civilization while living intellectually from the pantry of the people who colonized you.

You cannot stand upright while still waiting for your former enslaver to tell you that you are now respectable enough to do so.

The first liberation was political. The next must be psychological. Only then can an African look at a waterfall and ask not what the colonizer called it, but what his ancestors called it - and know that the second question is the only one that matters.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com