Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o understood it with absolute clarity.
You do not need chains if you have classrooms.
You do not need to physically prevent a people from imagining their own freedom if you have already shaped the language in which they think.
If the colonized child learns to read in the colonizer’s language.
If the colonized child learns that the "great books" were written in the colonizer’s language.
If the colonized child learns that the history worth knowing begins with the colonizer’s arrival.
If the colonised child learns that success, sophistication, education itself, is measured by proximity to the coloniser’s standards:
That child does not need to be imprisoned.
That child will imprison themselves.
Will measure themselves against a standard designed to find them lacking.
Will work their entire life to approximate an ideal that was never constructed to include them.
Will call this effort "self-improvement."
The classroom was the most elegant instrument the colonial project ever designed.
More durable than any fort.
More effective than any army.
Because armies are visible. Forts can be stormed.
But a belief installed in childhood, in the voice of a teacher, in the language of learning itself, that is nearly invisible.
And what you cannot see, you cannot dismantle.
@GaryRoth79 I pray for all of them. Both sides. They are fighting for Rothchild childmolesting elites but are true wariors. Shitty food, cold and you need to be alert 24/7 or die. Peace be with them in the afterlife
@StanleyMachaari@seansmith142004 Brother Stanley, whites are so fragile😭🤣🤣 we speak in their language because we want them to hear snd read our insults. 🐷 cucks they are
Society’s obsession with forgiveness is one of the biggest contributors to abuse of all forms. Somehow the victim is gaslit into forgiving someone who wronged them but the same energy is never had for the actual abuser/perpetrator.
They taught African children, in colonial schools, that their continent had no history before Europe arrived.
Let that sit for a moment.
They took children whose grandparents had lived in functioning kingdoms, whose oral traditions carried the history of empires spanning centuries, whose communities had legal systems and agricultural science and trade relationships and philosophical frameworks for understanding the world.
And they sat those children in European-designed classrooms and taught them that their past was darkness.
That their ancestors had been waiting. Waiting without direction or achievement or meaningful civilization. Waiting to be found.
That the story of their people began when Europeans arrived to begin it.
This is not ancient history.
The generation of Africans who received this education are alive. Their children are alive.
The psychological work required to recover from being taught that your people had no history.
To excavate your own past not from lived memory but from archives that were often kept by the people who had the strongest interest in what was and wasn’t in them.
That work is ongoing.
And the people who created the need for that work are still explaining that colonialism, on balance, was not so bad.