What is Sustaining Colonial Mentality in 21st Century Africa?
It’s been about four months since Dorian (a young Chinese expatriate whom I worked under) returned to China. He ’ill probably never return to Nigeria, but the remembrance of some of the variants of colonial mentality I experienced while we worked together won’t stop returning to me. It’s such remembrance that inspired this article.
The organization I work for wanted to introduce a new generation of renewable energy devices into the Nigerian solar market, and they didn’t want to leave the B2B aspect of the project untapped. Dorian was brought in as the Chinese product manager. I had to work with him to scout for and close deals with EPCs (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) Companies) and other large corporations that need solar products.
Our official routine involved visiting and talking to high-ranking employees and CEOs of target organizations. The routine became repeated opportunities to experience multiple variants of colonial mentality.
In most of our visits and meetings, my Chinese counterpart’s color was the master key that opened all the relevant doors my silver-tongue, dapper appearance and lordly charisma failed to open. It was as though there’s usually an incontrollable submissiveness that his color fires in the brain of black interlocutors. They’d release confidential organizational information to him unguardedly, go the whole nine yards to not make him feel unwelcomed, and repeat genial gestures to him till he’s aware or acknowledges that he is getting a better reception than me.
There were a few incidents where his race and color were reasons they never granted him an audience. There were also incidents where no Nigerian was besotted by his color. But I could tell that those incidents weren’t impelled by immunity against the spell that his color usually cast. They were rather motivated by the narrow anti-China notion that some Chinese entrepreneurs in Africa are out to acquire the trade secrets of existing indigenous businesses, rehash the ideas to create cheaper offerings in the market, and thereby force the indigenous leaders of that market to quit; when they can no longer keep up with a fierce competition that’s based on disproportionate advantages.
Every time I remember those experiences, I’m forced to reflect on the chronic infection of colonial mentality in twenty-first-century Africa, and inquire: what is powering colonial mentality in twenty-first-century Africa Africa?
In colonial times, colonial mentality was created, animated and sustained by heavily institutionalized scientific racism, which was perpetrated through racial casteism and devious pedagogies that reinforce the idea of white supremacy. But during the era of decolonization, the necessary use and rich maintenance of that mechanism ended with all its attendant manipulations.
A few years after decolonization — and even several decades after — its vestiges on African psyche continued to be erased in several context. On the intellectual front, scientific racism was comprehensively debunked. Black scholarship also took an aggressive upward trajectory, with a laser focus on writing and rewriting about Africa and Africans.
On the social front, the Information Age propelled globalization into an overdrive; and the myths that were used to make white supremacy believable are being irreparably shattered, daily. We now see every day on social media that intelligence and lack of it or laziness and dullness are in no way functions of color or race — there are unbelievably stupid, lazy white people just as there are unbearably slow, undisciplined black people.
Also, we twenty-first-century Africans have more opportunities (than our twentieth-century forebears) to travel to the West for reasons like education, business, job and training. Those reasons necessitate extensive white-black social interactions that help us demystify the enigma of white superiority that was created during the colonial era. Another noteworthy fact related to the point on twenty-first-century African travel is: the twenty-first-century West mostly looks upon racism in disfavor; it’s nothing like the West that hosted our plebian and aristocratic forebears with equal racial grudge.
All these realities are enough logical reason for anyone to argue that even if the vestiges of colonial mentality can’t be completely erased in twenty-first-century Africa, it should be so dormant that it doesn’t find its way into quotidian experiences and become a subject of discussion as though we were in colonial Africa.
But since colonial mentality continues to manifest — in defiance of an unfavorable social evolution; and without the political support of the power that created and used it — one should ask: what is sustaining colonial mentality in twenty-first-century, post-colonial Africa?
I argue that it’s twenty-first-century Africa’s leading spot in major indications of underdevelopment and backwardness. For many Africans, a formidable sense of national pride is either completely absent or too small to make any impact. Consequently, the reasons to feel superior or equal to white people are not in a twenty-first-century Africa that’s ahead or at least on the same level with the West or some now successful former nonblack colonies. More often than not, the reasons are nostalgically rooted in the antique, faded, distant glory of a pre-colonial Africa that flourished in state development and economic progress.
It isn’t just that twenty-first-century Africa appears to be impotent in recreating and upgrading that glory. It also, as a remote effect of its failure, blights the individual, pervasive successes of all black people — successes that disprove the claims of white supremacy — in all markers of enviable positivity. While mischievous white people can easily prove white supremacy by pointing to the individual successes of white people in several fields of human endeavors and buttress the claim with the corresponding prosperity of predominantly white societies, black people around the world have no luxury of such double, coherent testament. This is one of the reasons modern Afro-pessimist intellectuals argue that Black America shouldn’t be equated to Africa. If the gloomy realities of twenty-first-century Africa cause Black America to fall out of love with Africa and some Caribbean blacks to neglect their connection to Africa, we should forgive Africans whom those same realities manipulated to accept the lie of colonial mentality that black is truly inferior.
After about sixty-four years of self-governance on the continent, most of the poorest countries in the world are in Africa; in global human development report, African countries are on the lowest part of the list; and African countries sit at the top of the list of countries with the lowest literacy rates in the world. We can dismiss these facts and figures as Western propaganda, but we can’t dismiss the sad realities of these facts. We see them in the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria; the number of people killed in terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso from 258 incidents; and the number of people in Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, etc., who have no clean water to drink. We can also pin the blame on colonialism, but former colonies like China, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) just to mention a few have all risen above the challenges of their colonial pasts to achieve economic prosperity, political stability, and global influence.
The solution is in fostering economic independence, reviving cultural pride, reforming education, asserting political sovereignty, and building confidence among citizens. African nations can collectively redefine their identities and narratives to ultimately erase the psychological and social vestiges of colonial mentality.
