Paul T. Shipale (with inputs by Folito Nghitongovali Diawara Gaspar)
On this year’s day of the African Child, we want to reject the colonial narrative and arrogance that denies us our African humanity. In the same vein, we vehemently reject the passive victimhood mentality that denies us our African agency.
We reject the colonial stereotypes and their internalization as ultimate political truth in order to teach our future generations to remember our history and overcome it where it constrains the present.
For centuries, Africa has been described by others before Africans were allowed to describe themselves. Foreign explorers arrived on our shores and proclaimed they had “discovered” lands that had been inhabited, governed, cultivated, and civilized for thousands of years.
They drew maps, wrote books, and created narratives that portrayed Africa as a continent without history, without institutions, and without the capacity to govern itself.
The colonial project was not sustained by military power alone. It also depended on ideas that were carefully designed to justify domination.
Africans were told that they were incapable of building modern societies. They were told that Black people lacked the intelligence, discipline, and vision required for self-government.
The message was repeated in many forms: Pieter Willem Botha once said in 1988 that black people cannot rule themselves because they don’t have the brain and mental capacity to govern society.
“Give them guns, and they will kill one another.”
“Give them power, and they will steal public resources.”
“Give them independence and democracy, and they will divide themselves through tribalism, ethnicity, hatred, conflict, and war” Botha said.
These stereotypes were not merely insults. They became tools of political control. By portraying Africans as incapable of governing themselves, colonial powers sought to legitimize their occupation and exploitation of African lands and resources.
Nowhere was this logic more violently expressed than in the settler colonial laboratory of Namibia under the German rule. When German forces invaded and consolidated control over the territory, they did not merely administer they terrorized.
Violence, sexual abuse, forced displacement, and systemic humiliation were used as instruments of governance. Entire communities were broken through fear.
The colonial administration also engineered division. It institutionalized segregation among indigenous populations and deepened existing ethnic fractures, applying a deliberate “divide and rule” strategy that turned difference into hostility and solidarity into suspicion.
Control was maintained not only through force, but through fragmentation of the social fabric itself.
The culmination of this system was the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908. Tens of thousands were exterminated through massacres, forced marches into deserts, starvation, thirst, and confinement in concentration camps.
Many scholars regard this as one of the first genocides of the twentieth century and a blueprint of modern industrialized colonial violence. It revealed with brutal clarity what colonial “civilization” meant when stripped of its propaganda.
Yet the ideological justification for such systems did not end with colonial conquest. The same logic evolved into enduring stereotypes about African incapacity.
The descendants of those who once declared that Africans were incapable of governing themselves that they lacked the intellect and discipline to build and sustain civilized societies are the same voices, historically and structurally, who warned:
“Give Africans weapons and they will turn them against one another. Give them political power and they will plunder the public treasury. Give them independence and democracy and they will descend into tribalism, ethnic conflict, intolerance, bloodshed, and war” as it was said by Pieter Willem Botha in 1988.
Today, many of these prejudices persist in new forms. Africans are still too often told, explicitly or implicitly, that they cannot be trusted with power or democracy. Yet the contradiction is glaring.
In many cases, African societies welcomed foreigners, accommodated them with dignity, and integrated them into local political and economic life. In return, external actors often shaped institutions in ways that served extraction rather than development, and continue to influence national decision making through financial systems, conditional aid, and economic dependency structures.
This is not a story of cultural failure. It is a story of historical asymmetry.
Long before colonialism, Africa was home to sophisticated civilizations, kingdoms, and empires. The University of Timbuktu in Mali drew scholars from across the Sahara and beyond.
Great Zimbabwe’s stone architecture and the ancient Kingdom of Mapungubwe set hard against the northern border of South Africa, joining Zimbabwe and Botswana stand as testaments to advanced engineering and trade networks stretching to the Indian Ocean. The Kongo Kingdom developed diplomatic protocols that impressed European envoys.
Trade routes connected vast regions of the continent and linked Africa to the wider world. Systems of governance, justice, diplomacy, agriculture, science, and commerce flourished across diverse societies. Africa was not waiting to be discovered. Africa was already creating history.
However, rejecting colonial myths does not mean ignoring present challenges.
It would be dishonest to pretend that corruption, ethnic politics, poor governance, political violence, and economic dependency do not exist. They do. Millions of Africans live with their consequences daily.
Tribalism is practiced as if we haven’t learned our lessons of its devastating consequences. Public resources are often mismanaged. Elections can become arenas of fragmentation rather than unity. Leadership failures are real and must be confronted without romanticism.
But these failures are not evidence of African incapacity.
Corruption is not African. Tribalism is not African. Political greed is not African. These are human pathologies found across civilizations.
What makes them persistent in African contexts is not essence but structure as weak institutions, uneven state formation after colonial rule, and elites who often inherited and reproduced extractive governance models without fundamentally transforming them.
Europe experienced centuries of religious wars, dynastic conflicts, fascism, genocide, holocaust and colonial violence before consolidating modern state institutions. Asia has endured devastating wars and political upheavals. The Americas were shaped by slavery, conquest, and civil war.
No society emerged stable or democratic from the outset. Every political order is constructed through struggle, reform, and institutional learning.
Africa is no exception to this historical rule.
The greatest danger facing Africa today is not simply the persistence of colonial stereotypes. It is the internalization of those stereotypes as political truth.
When corruption is accepted as destiny, reform collapses.
When division is accepted as fate, unity becomes impossible.
When failure is accepted as identity, ambition is extinguished.
We must also recognize the African diaspora with the millions of African descendants across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe whose histories are inseparable from the continent’s own.
Their displacement was produced by the same global system that colonized Africa. Their cultural survival, resistance, and contemporary reclamation of identity form part of the broader African story of endurance and return.
We have heard of Toussaint L’Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda, who was a Haitian general and the most prominent leader of the Haitian Revolution and Antonio Maceo y Grajales (June 14, 1845 – December 7, 1896) who was a Cuban general and second-in-command of the Cuban Army of Independence. There are countless others in both North and South Americas as well as in the West Indies or the Caribbean Islands.
The twenty-first century presents Africa with an unprecedented opportunity. The continent possesses the world’s youngest population, vast natural resources, expanding markets, growing technological innovation, and increasing cultural influence.
Across cities and rural regions alike, African entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, artists, and thinkers are already reshaping what is possible.
Yet demographic potential is not destiny.
Africa’s future will depend on institutions stronger than personalities, education systems that reward merit and critical thinking, judiciaries that protect rights without fear or favor, and administrations capable of serving citizens rather than elites, tribes, patronage networks and other underground carefully concocted systems that eat at the very fabric of our society and go against our Nation Building project.
Political liberation without economic transformation remains incomplete. Economic growth without social justice remains fragile. National sovereignty without intellectual sovereignty remains vulnerable.
The task before African Child today is therefore not merely to remember history, but to overcome it where it constrains the present.
We must reject both colonial arrogance and passive victimhood. One denies African humanity; the other denies African agency.
Africa does not require permission to succeed. It does not require external validation. It does not require historical absolution.
What it requires is disciplined leadership, civic responsibility, institutional strength, and a shared commitment to turning potential into structure, and structure into power.
The question was never whether Africans could govern themselves.
The question is whether Africans will build and defend the systems that make self-government meaningful.
And that answer will not be written by history alone.
It will be written by Africans through the choices made in their institutions, their economies, and their political imagination.
That is the lesson we hope our African child will learn and that they will discover their mission as Frantz Fanon once said “ Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of our employers or this newspaper. They represent our personal views as citizens and Pan-Africanists.
