“The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission: that of the intermediary. As we can see, its vocation is not to transform the nation but, prosaically, to serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie. This lucrative role, this function as small-time racketeer, this narrow-mindedness and lack of ambition are symptomatic of the incapacity of the national bourgeoisie to fulfill its historical role as a bourgeoisie.” – Frantz Fanon
Let me tell a story of two visits.
The first was to a friend in Nottingham, a few damp winters ago. My friend drove me through the city’s arteries, and I saw a stunning sight: a quiet, relentless conquest, not by tanks, artillery, or decrees, but by sheer economic alchemy.
Almost all the shopfronts, the mini-cab offices, the engineering firms, including auto-repair workshops, the sprawling property portfolios, all sewn up, humming under the ownership of Indian and Pakistani Britons.
The Asians in Nottingham, children of the empire like us, studied their former master’s ledger, understood the columns for profit and loss, and proceeded to buy out whole pages of it. These immigrants navigated the system, but their genius was in never forgetting their roots: their communal capital, their kinship networks, their indefatigable hustle. They worked within Britain, but they refused to be mentally subjugated by it.
The second visit is perpetual, unfolding daily on the continent I call home. It is a tour of a grand, self-inflicted nullity, a safari through the museum of failed shameless imitations.
Back home in Africa, our own comprador elite, the plantation supervisors with PhDs and burgeoning Swiss bank accounts, preside over the most spectacular case of miseducation in human history. African elite did not just adopt a foreign system; they committed a psychic racial suicide, they scrubbed their brains clean of any ancestral software, and, in its place, they booted up a corrupted, pirated copy of a Western operating system that was designed, from its inception, to fail on African hardware.
Frantz Fanon warned that no one respects his imitators. We Africans did not listen. Instead, we miseducated ourselves into exquisite irrelevance. Marcus Garvey told us that if the Negro is not careful, he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it. Marcus Garvey was right.
Julius Nyerere, a man who at least thought, saw this coming. In his Essay on Ujamaa, he didn’t just prattle about “African socialism” as some romantic slogan. He performed a profound autopsy on the African traditional economy, a system built on obligation, communal wealth, and the understanding that an individual’s prosperity was inextricably linked to the vitality of the whole.
Nyerere contrasted African communalism with the cold, atomizing calculus of capitalism and the rigid dogma of communism. His plea was simple: Look inward. Build on what you know.
Nyerere wrote: “‘Ujamaa’, then, or ‘Familyhood’, describes our socialism. It is opposed to capitalism, which seeks to build a happy society based on the exploitation of man by man; and it is equally opposed to doctrinaire socialism, which seeks to build its happy society on a philosophy of inevitable conflict between man and man.”
But what did our revered “educated” elite do? They, with the eagerness of a court eunuch receiving his master’s discarded robes, grabbed the worst, most threadbare garments of both systems.
The African comprador elite took capitalism’s greed and stripped it of its discipline, its rule of law, and its supposed meritocracy. They took socialism’s state control and infused it with nepotism and obscene state-capture, stripping it of any ideological anchor.
The result? A monstrous hybrid: Klepto-patrimonialism. A system where the only “development” project is the development of corrupt officials’ offshore bank accounts; the only “trickle-down” is the trickle of tears from a populace brutalized by their own elite.
Consider the obscenity. China, Ghana, and Nigeria shook off the formal chains of colonialism at roughly the same time. Today, China dictates terms to the globe, a civilizational state that has digested Western technology while fiercely, ruthlessly retaining its own strategic and cultural core.
And Nigeria and Ghana? Our politicians, the proud graduates of Oxford and Harvard, gather in Abuja and in states like Ekiti, yes, Ekiti, the so-called “fountain of knowledge” where education has only perfected the art of the inflated contract and the ghost-worker payroll, they gather not to consider the state, but to consider their comforts. These reprobate elite debate the SUV brand in their convoys and the square footage of their Dubai apartments, while our universities crumble into forests of despair.
As we have repeatedly said in this blog, we don’t have leaders in Africa; we have concierges for foreign interests, facilitators of the final looting of the continent.
This is the great, tragic confusion: We in Africa mistook Western schooling for knowledge. We sent our brightest to memorize Milton and Keynes, and they returned thinking that Achebe and the indigenous Igbo esusu rotating credit system were “primitive.”
We abandoned our peerless apprenticeship models, the very systems that built the bronzes of Benin and the cotton pyramids of Kano, to chase paper degrees in “Business Administration” that teach nothing about administering a business in Lagos or Lilongwe.
We dismissed our traditional conflict resolution as “alternative” while blindly copying adversarial court systems that entrench discord. We traded our communal banks, where trust was the currency, for IMF structural adjustment programs, where debt became the shackle.
The geopolitical analyst, watching this, would note that Africa made itself the permanent periphery it is today. In a now multipolar world, the continent risks becoming merely the theatre for other people’s wars, the supplicant at every new power’s door, because it has no coherent, self-derived project of its own. It has no “African System.” It has only a cacophony of mimicry. Our elites are like parrots who’ve mastered the accent of their captors so perfectly they’ve forgotten how to build a nest in their own trees.
And here lies the most ferocious betrayal: the African scholar-intellectual class. As we have written several times, Africa’s intellectuals are the most stupid mimics of all. Trained in the citadels of the West, they return not as subversive decolonizers, but as the most pedantic priests of a dying faith.
The shameless parrots clothe their intellectual servitude in the jargon of “post-modernity” and “critical theory,” all while being critically unable to theorize a future born from an African past. They will deconstruct anything except the source of their own stipends, sinecures, and conference invitations. They are the palace guards of a mental prison, ensuring no one inside dares to remember what freedom, what a truly African epistemology, might look like.
The path out of irrelevance is not more of the same miseducation. It is a radical, furious re-education. It demands we rip the foreign textbooks from the curriculum and insert our own ledgers, our own histories of statecraft, our own proven economic models. It requires looking at the Asian shopkeeper in Nottingham not with envy, but with the recognition of his secret: he never believed the white man’s system was superior to his own family’s wisdom. He used the former to advance the latter.
Until we, the children of the soil, stop being stupid mimics and become proud, ruthless architects of our own systems, until we build on the foundation of Ujamaa, Ubuntu, and every other indigenous principle of collective survival and advancement, we will remain what we are: the world’s most resource-rich beggars, the permanently miseducated, talking in borrowed accents about a future that forever recedes from our grasp, sold for a handful of the master’s glittering beads.
PS: Unfortunately, the only industry I saw Africans excel in the UK was the Jesus Business, where charlatans, in priestly cassocks, belch nonsense and pretend to stand between the fear of Man and the wrath of the goblins of the sky.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.
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