Muthoni Thangwa

Tag: africa

  • Beyond coloured paper: African Leaders are Breaking Old Chains

    A new chapter in post-colonial history – Africa is challenging colonial economies

    Africa continues to navigate a contradictory and often very conflicted post-colonial landscape. Decades after independence, the continent still finds itself entangled in structures and systems that echo colonial control.

    There is a need to decolonise most of our inherited systems, from our economies to heritage institutions, our belief systems to our ways of worship. Africa’s economies are shaped by external interests, our heritage institutions curated through borrowed lenses, and even our belief systems and ways of worship reconfigured to mirror worlds not our own.

    The result is a profound disorientation. So many distortions of history exist that many Africans can no longer tell what the true African story is. Our past has been fragmented, rewritten, and often silenced, leaving us with borrowed narratives that fail to capture who we are.

    I was first introduced to the uncomfortable but necessary idea that charities in Africa often perpetuate poverty rhetoric and reinforce dependency on the West through the powerful words of Mallence Bart-Williams. She reminded us that the story of Africa is not simply one of need and lack, but of abundance, resilience, and agency. Yet, for as long as we accept externally imposed definitions of who we are, we risk being trapped in cycles of dependency, distortion and extortion.

    The first time I listened to a TED Talk by Mallence Bart-Williams, I was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions—anger, frustration, even a trace of ridicule. It was difficult to tell which feeling outweighed the others.

    On that podcast, Mallence begins by proudly declaring that she comes from the most beautiful continent in the world, and on this point, I agree with her, fully and without hesitation. She is from Sierra Leone, a country endowed with fertile lands that produce coffee, cocoa, fruits, and vegetables, alongside exquisite timber such as mahogany and teak.

    Sierra Leone, like many other African countries, is also rich in natural resources: gold, diamonds, petroleum reserves, and over 20 other precious minerals. It holds the largest iron ore deposits in Africa, and the third-largest in the world. These resources are not just statistics; they are the very backbone of global industry and modern living. The West depends on Africa’s wealth to power aeroplanes, manufacture cell phones and computers, and adorn itself with the symbols of status and power – gold and diamonds.

    She asks the multi-million-dollar question: Why is it that African currencies are worth only a fraction of Western currencies, when it is Africa that holds the gold reserves?

    The dependency is not what we have been told. Africa does not depend on the West: the West depends on Africa. This imbalance is maintained by destabilizing Africa’s richest nations and masking the truth through massive PR campaigns. These campaigns, often fronted by so-called charitable organisations, push the narrative that Africans are starving and dying, at war with each other and helplessly in need of saving.

    Meanwhile, Africa continues to exchange her vast resources, gold, diamonds, and more, for coloured paper. But what if Africa sold her resources at true world market prices, in a market where the producer sets the rules, as is customary in world markets? What would happen to Western economies that have been built on a post-colonial system that is deeply anchored in ne0-colonialism?

    To reclaim Africa’s story, the continent must be intentional about unlearning what it has been fed and relearning our histories from within. This means amplifying African voices, interrogating the ways our institutions are structured, and critically re-examining the frameworks: economic, cultural, and spiritual, that govern our daily lives.

    A new brand of leadership in West African countries has started re-writing the African narrative. In 2023, Burkina Faso, under President Ibrahim Traoré, terminated its military agreement with France and demanded the withdrawal of French troops, asserting sovereignty in both defense and monetary affairs. Shortly after, Niger’s military government ordered French forces to leave, including those guarding strategic uranium mines that have long fueled France’s nuclear energy industry while contributing little to Niger’s own development. Chad, too, announced in 2024 that it would not renew defense accords that kept French troops stationed on its soil.

    Many other West African nations have begun taking strong stands against lingering colonial economic ties to France. Under the CFA Franc system, 14 countries have been required to deposit a large share of their foreign reserves into French-controlled accounts, in colonial debt repayment systems that defy all logic, effectively subsidising French economic stability.

    There are those who will argue that these events: the withdrawal of French troops, the rejection of colonial debt arrangements, and the pushback against the CFA franc, are not directly related to France’s current economic woes. But the fact remains: time is re-writing the African narrative. A new generation of leaders is emerging, unafraid to confront the old order and determined to reclaim sovereignty over their nations’ resources, economies, and identities. Their interventions mark not just a political shift, but a historical turning point for Africa. This is starting to look like decolonization.

  • She Spoke German without History

    She thought there are Africans who look upon colonisation with nostalgia!

    I thought I had heard it all—until, in 2024! We were in Germany as part of the MuseumLab programme, a curated platform that brings together African and European heritage practitioners for dialogue, collaboration, and critique on museums and the heritage sector in both continents. 

    During one session, a young African woman spoke proudly of her German heritage. That made me physically wince. However, what followed cut even deeper: she stated that some people in Cameroon recall the German colonial period with nostalgia. The room stiffened with various reactions. Some looked at the floor; others started searching in their bags, as if for lost treasure, while a number stood and headed for the coffee table. The discomfort was palpable. Her words bruised my spirit, as if I had lived through that colonial experience myself. I looked at her for the first time – looked at her.

    Many wild thoughts were running through my mind, scrambling around like restless feet on a tin roof. But one kept rising above the noise: I wanted to lock this African somewhere, to isolate her, but to give her light, sunshine, until she could think again. It wasn’t disdain. It was heartbreak. Because what she had just said was not an opinion, it was evidence of brainwashing. Evidence of historical amnesia, of how colonisation not only stole land and bodies but rewrote memory itself.

    It was a painful reminder of how deeply manufactured memoryhas burrowed into our consciousness, convincing some among us that the oppressor brought order, when in fact he brought rupture. Romanticizing colonization is not just a travesty, a betrayal of historyandancestors, it is also forgetting oneself, in the quest to be like ‘those others’. It speaks to the danger of a people who no longer recognise the chains that still shackle Africa culturally, economically and socially. Such people have trained their minds to call the chains bracelets.

    The speaker came to Germany as a child. It was clear that the country doesn’t teach any African history. Fair enough – until recently, the history that was taught in Kenyan schools was often stripped of its messiness and violence. Children were told of explorers who ‘discovered’ mountains and rivers that Kenyan communities had interacted with for millennia.  But here, the silence felt heavier.

    I wondered what takes root in a historical vacuum? How do people, like that speaker, Africans raised in Europe, without the tools to interrogate or process historical facts presented through the lens of someone else?. People who speak with certainty, but from a place of omission. Her nostalgia for German colonization didn’t seem rooted in malice. It sounded almost pitiful, like it came from an emptiness, an absence where something vital should have been.

    As she spoke, I watched the room. No one said a word. Not the Germans, not the Africans. There was no applause, no challenge, only a silence so heavy it felt complicit. This was the saddest part. Because silence, in moments like this, is not neutrality – it is endorsement. The presenter, who had spoken of cassettes as if they were some prehistoric discovery, may have walked away thinking she had delivered a successful talk. She may have believed she had represented the African voice with clarity. But the truth was quieter, and more haunting: the Africans in the room decided not to engage. She had gone too far, too far from truth, too far from self, for any meaningful recourse. And we, out of weariness or protection, chose not to waste precious hours trying to bring her back.

    We were visiting African heritage practitioners; she was going to remain in Germany. We could not save her, and we knew it. Her mind had already been claimed by another story, one we could not rewrite in a single afternoon. So we chose to save ourselves. The irony is that even the Germans remained silent. The organisers had probably anticipated a spirited resistance, at least some reaction. As for the Germans, I’m still not sure what was expected of them. And I’ve always wondered what, if anything, was said among them once the event ended. If silence held any discomfort. Or if it, too, was just routine.

    Colonialism does not simply vanish over time – it mutates, hides in school curricula, reappears in street names, and sometimes, finds voice in those it once oppressed. What happened in that room was not a debate about historical nuance; it was the echo of a violent erasure. And when we fail to teach African children their own histories, whether in Europe or in Africa, we raise generations fluent in the language of their colonisers, but illiterate in the truths of their nations and people.