Dwayne Omowale

What you are describing is the unequal burden of belonging. In political environments where national identity is closely associated with whiteness, Christianity and pride in imperial history, a politician from the majority population can more easily question the national past without having their attachment to the nation questioned. Their belonging is presumed, so they have greater freedom to criticise. A politician whose name, ancestry or religion marks them as an outsider face different calculation. Any form of criticism risks being interpreted as evidence that they were never truly loyal in the first place. This pressure is especially pronounced within conservative parties whose politics draw heavily on hostility to immigration and the celebration of national “greatness”. A White Christian politician in Britain or the United States is generally less likely to have their ancestry or faith treated as evidence of allegiance to a foreign nation. The politician that emanate from immigrants families however are aware that their belonging is conditional and must be renewed through repeated declarations of devotion. So they are forced to sound more patriotic than those whose patriotism is never questioned and more hostile to immigration than those whose families are never described as immigrants.

They’re about to blame each other…

People do not realize that the struggle for freedom in Africa cannot be reduced to a confrontation between Africans and Europeans/westerns. We are also fighting a class battle. Here in Africa, we have aristocratic, despotic families that have held power for decades, controlled businesses, maintained monopolies and treated entire countries as their private inheritance. Some draw their wealth and influence from lineages that collaborated with enslavers and colonizers and operated slave plantations within Africa itself. In some of our cities, vast portions of the land remain in the hands of these families, allowing them to extract wealth from generations of people whose ancestors they once enslaved or dispossessed. Even the authority of some so-called traditional rulers cannot be separated from colonial violence: colonial powers executed, deposed or exiled legitimate leaders, sometimes through beheading, and installed collaborators whose families have maintained those positions ever since. What is presented to us as ancestral legitimacy can therefore be the inheritance of a colonial appointment, secured through the destruction of those who resisted. Sections of these ruling classes later opposed independence or helped undermine and overthrow leaders who threatened their interests. That faction did not disappear when our countries raised their flags. It occupied the institutions of the new states and preserved its alliances with foreign powers. People speak of imperialism as though it operates entirely from outside Africa, when it also has domestic allies and bemeficiaries who share our skin colour, speak our languages while helping to keep us dispossessed. The foreign interests that profited from our subjugation have always needed local partners, and their allies are still governing, monopolizing and plundering Africa today.

You have managed the remarkable feat of being condescending about a distinction you are too ignorant to understand. Nobody said Africa lacked sovereign kingdoms before colonialism. The point, since it has apparently escaped your sanity is that those kingdoms were not identical to the countries on today’s map. Thanks to the wickedness of European colonizers, who, after centuries of conquest and plunder in the Americas, met in Berlin to establish the rules for carving up Africa, existing kingdoms and communities were subsequently sliced across colonial borders, while previously separate societies were bundled into the same territories. Communities whose villages were raided and whose people had been captured and sold into slavery find themselves enclosed within the same colonial borders as the powers that had preyed upon them. Take my country Togo for example. The country known as the Republic of Togo today has over 40 ethnic communities. One of the kingdoms that conducted the raids was split between Nigeria, Benin and Togo and its population does not even make up 5% of Togo’s population today. But many of the ethnic communities that were raided are also in modern Togo. As a result, both victims and perpetrators were forced to live in the same country because of colonialism and this has been the root of political crisis to this very day.