A Message to African Americans Who Use Africa as a Punching Bag.
You read some of the comments from African Americans demonizing Africans on the continent, calling us weak, useless, incapable of governing ourselves after independence, still dependent on the West, still poor. And what is striking is that they are recycling the very same rhetoric that white supremacists use against them in America. The same tired argument that slavery ended centuries ago and yet they remain at the bottom of the economic ladder, the most incarcerated demographic, the most policed, the most structurally confined.
To borrow the language of Frantz Fanon, this is what internalized domination looks like when it turns outward. The oppressed, unable to strike the system that crushes them, search for another mirror to shatter.
What they erase in their arrogance is history. Our leaders were eliminated. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. Thomas Sankara was removed. Sylvanus Olympio was killed just to name these few. Those who resisted were overthrown through coups engineered from Europe and America.
Weapons flooded our lands. Our states were militarize; wars were financed, terror was sponsored decimating millions to this day. Our resources continue to extracted ar unfair prices and our currencies were chained to foreign treasuries. Structural adjustment programs hollowed out our hospitals, our schools, our public services. Illicit financial flows drained over a trillion within a few decades . And yes these happened thanks to our local Uncle Toms. We have been fighting to survive in a battlefield disguised as independence.
Let us be honest. The entire Black American population is about 48 million. Africa is 1.4 billion people. That means the whole of Black America fits into this continent nearly thirty times over. Demographically speaking, you are the size of one mid range African country.
So no, we Africans will not waste our energy arguing endlessly with what is statistically the equivalent of one large public market on this continent. We have imperial empires to confront and systems to dismantle.
From time to time, we will correct grave distortions and push back against your ignorance when it becomes too loud. We will do so as an act of solidarity toward your Blackness, to prevent the embarrassment of supremacist talking points coming from Black mouths. But we will not engage in fratricidal battles.
It is beneath our mission and our horizon.
We have larger adversaries to face, and we will not allow ourselves to be distracted by those who have internalized hate toward their own as a strategy of survival within a system that diminishes them.
We refuse to be the convenient target of misplaced rage, because our struggle is against systems that conquered, looted, and fractured us all, and we will not let borrowed contempt divide a people whose liberation is still unfinished.