I have been so quick to condemn the impacts of colonization of African countries. Always wondered how the lives of the people of the black nation would have been if we were not colonized, would we still have been living the lives we read African literature books? I mean , that would have been amazing but does it mean Africa would not have been civilized? does colonization equal civilization ? Well I guess that if you believe in parallel universes then the only way to know how a world with out colonization would be is if you move to a universe that it did not happen.
Even though it has been decades since most countries got their independence, I think that most African people leave like they are still under the rule of their colonizers, I do not even mean the relationship that African governments have with their colonizers, because that is a whole other story , rather I mean the daily lives of Africans and the African diaspora .
Recently I just watched a video of kids , black kids , being asked to pick their favorite doll, between a dark skinned doll and fair one and they all picked the fair one because they believed the fair doll is prettier , this just say a lot about our standards of beauty. I know that most people would attest to being raised believing that you could only be beautiful if your skin is fair and this has had great impact on how we see ourselves. The kids aside , this is the same reason we have grown adults trying to bleach their skin in order to fit the European standard of beauty. In many high schools in Kenya, including the one I went to , we were not allowed to keep our hair in its natural state in order to be seen as neat and well groomed . It always puzzled me how we considered our most natural state to be unkempt, but we could never question it if we wanted to stay in school.
Have you ever thought of how we treat foreigners when they visit our countries compared to how we got treated in other countries and how we treat each other as we travel across Africa. If today I choose to travel with a European friend to an African country , that is not my own country, believe me not the European will get first class treatment and I will get less, because a local African sees a European as a superior, that is why we still refer to them with names like "mzungu" which have been proven to be derived from "Mulungu " and "Mungu" which are African names for God in many Bantu languages
One of the biggest ways that we are colonized at heart is by the languages we speak, so many Africans take pride in speaking their colonizers language. We still consider the inability to speak colonial languages fluently as a sign of illiteracy. We even still divide our countries according to the languages we speak, like francophone, anglophone etc. I normally feel so embarrassed when I go back to the village and I need to speak to my grandparents and suddenly I stammer, putting in mind that they were alive and well during the last of colonial era, it is very a shaming for me. The good thing is that we are starting to acknowledge that this is a problem and we have seen the recent addition of Kiswahili as one of the official languages of the African union.
Sometimes I seat and wonder what would our ancestors do if they came back and they find us conforming to the ways of their colonizers and losing our culture . Should civilization be at the expense of our culture or are we just choosing to get westernized in the name of change?
