COMMUNION: We are still in the grip of the colonial ghost

COMMUNION with Bishop Lazarus

As someone who grew up in the village, Bishop Lazi will bet that nothing can drive you bananas or insane as herding goats.

IT IS more than an extreme sport.

The Bishop had a fairly good and normal childhood by village standards until the year the Devil whispered into his grandfather’s ear and persuaded him to try his hand at goat farming.

Initially, it seemed to be a pretty cool idea, what with the rate at which these little creatures multiply. In addition to promising a deserved respite from the nearly daily dose of odd village veggies that accompanied every meal, it was a potential bonanza, promising to earn some much-needed pennies that could go a long way in making our lives a little bit comfortable.

The curse of being the youngest in the family meant Bishop Lazi was assigned this critical task.

So, what could do wrong? Well, everything!

For sure, the goat herd multiplied soon enough. But the more they multiplied, the more Bishop Lazi’s woes grew.

These little four-legged demons are simply uncontrollable, especially during the cropping season. On a typical day, you would find out that within seconds of release from the pen, some would sprint to the maize field or garden, while others found gratification in rearranging clay pots and pans in the village hut.

So, in essence, goat herding meant you would spend hours on end running — full-tilt, arms-flailing, dignity-obliterating sprinting — trying to gather them and prevent trouble.

After days of this nerve-fraying and emotionally taxing exercise, someone suggested the brilliant idea of tethering them.

The Bishop obliged.

He duly and dutifully scouted for a suitable grazing patch and tied each goat with 10 feet of rope. Freedom at last — or so the Bishop thought. No sooner had these animals been tethered than the screaming began.

Within minutes, every single goat had wrapped its tether around every possible object — stakes, bushes, other goats’ legs.

The noise was indescribable.

The whole herd, each convinced they were being slowly murdered by the rope, all screaming different keys of distress simultaneously.

It sounded like a demonic choir. And the attempt to untangle the goats seemed endless.

Each time you freed one goat, it would immediately run to its neighbour and begin methodically re-tangling itself.

Faced with this punishing task, you could hear your inside weeping softly.

Relief only came when these pests began attracting and being targeted by marauding hyenas, at which point the Bishop’s grandfather chose to abandon the project altogether.

An untethered people

You see, recently, Bishop Lazi, while walking in a supermarket in town, felt triggered after he saw something that made goat herding look and feel like a Sunday picnic.

A woman — with a perfectly pressed Gucci dress, designer handbag and Bluetooth earpiece — was pushing a trolley while her two children, a boy of about six and a girl of four, ran amok.

The boy had scaled a display of cooking oil and was using the bottles as stepping stones.

The girl had grabbed a bag of flour, bitten a hole in it and was now creating an artificial snowstorm in the cereal aisle.

“Jayden, stop that. Jayden. Jayden, please.”

The mother’s voice was a soft, ineffective whisper, weighed down by the accent she had clearly purchased from one of those elite schools in Harare.

Jayden responded by kicking over a pyramid of canned tomatoes.

The girl began to scream — not a cry, but a high, rhythmic bleat that sounded hauntingly familiar.

These were not children.

These were goats. Small, spoiled, untethered goats.

The mother turned to the Bishop, embarrassed, and offered a helpless little laugh.

This was a parent who had abandoned every ancestral tool in their parenting toolbox — the raised eyebrow, the dreaded “wait until your father gets home”, the wooden spoon that was more symbol than weapon.

Even the Bible counsels discipline.

Proverbs 13:24 advises: “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”

2 Samuel 7:14 adds: “I will be his father, and he will be my son. When he does wrong, I will punish him with a rod wielded by men, with floggings inflicted by human hands.”

Back in the village, elders would have looked at such a child with the quiet menace that forebode a thorough beating that would inexorably follow.

In the grip of a colonial ghost

As we celebrate Africa Day tomorrow — a day on which we commemorate the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) in 1963 — all this is symptomatic of where post-colonial Africa finds itself.

Beneath the pageantry, flags, anthems and speeches celebrating the hard-won prize of political independence on the continent lies a disquieting truth: the juridical sovereignty of the 54 African states masks a deeper, more insidious form of servitude.

While the colonial administrator’s whip is gone, the colonial frame of mind — manifest in language, economic structures, cultural taste and intellectual outlook — remains largely intact. We are still culturally and economically colonised. Far from being complete, the decolonisation mission must be carried out to its logical conclusion through a radical, systemic dismantling of all epistemic, linguistic and financial architectures that perpetuate the continent’s subordinate position in the global order.

The most visible form of post-colonial bondage is economic. While political independence promised to replace extraction with endogenous development, the structures of the colonial export economy were not only preserved but deepened under the guise of “modernisation” and “global integration”. At independence, African economies were designed by metropolitan powers to serve as peripheries: sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods.

This monocultural heritage — Ghana’s cocoa, Zambia’s copper, Nigeria’s oil and Zimbabwe’s platinum and lithium — remains the template. Today, over 80 percent of African exports are primary commodities, and the continent loses an estimated US$200 billion annually through illicit financial flows, a figure that embarrassingly dwarfs development aid.

This does not represent a failure of African enterprise, but a logical outcome of a global trading system whose rules were written in London, Paris and Washington.

Bishop Lazi still keenly remembers the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme of the 1980s and 1990s, which the Bretton Woods institutions prescribed as a necessary medicine.

It turned out to be anything but.

It was actually a second colonial conquest: forcing the liquidation of State-owned industries, the privatisation of public services and the removal of trade barriers that might have protected our nascent industries.

African governments were told to specialise in what they had always specialised in under colonialism —extraction — while the value-added processing occurred elsewhere.

In some jurisdictions, particularly in West Africa, this neo-colonial economic architecture is reinforced by currency dependency.

Over a dozen African countries still use the CFA franc, a currency pegged to the euro and guaranteed by the French Treasury.

Under this arrangement, 50 percent of their foreign reserves must be deposited in French accounts, and their monetary policy is effectively dictated by Paris.

It is a phenomenon that was observed by Kwame Nkrumah in his 1965 treatise “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism”.

And it is this absurdity that has naturally engendered the revolt by military regimes in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, leading to the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States.

You see, the “scramble for Africa” has returned in the form of land grabs for biofuel production and strategic mineral acquisitions for electric vehicle batteries.

When an African country attempts to assert resource sovereignty — as Tanzania did under Julius Nyerere or as South Africa tentatively does with its mining charter — it faces punitive credit rating downgrades, investor strikes and diplomatic pressure.

The levers of economic life, in short, are still operated from afar.

Linguistic colonisation — The mind as territory

If economic colonisation controls the body, linguistic colonisation controls the soul.

Across Africa, the languages of the former colonial powers — English, French, Portuguese — remain the sole or dominant languages of power, prestige and knowledge production.

In the post-colonial state, we have watched in wonderment as the majority of our people who speak local languages are permanently relegated to the status of linguistic minors in their own countries.

Education systems amplify this distortion.

From primary school through university, the medium of instruction is the colonial language.

Children are punished for speaking their mother tongues. By the time they reach higher education, African students often struggle to articulate complex scientific or philosophical ideas in their native languages, not because those languages lack capacity (a racist fiction), but because generations of deliberate policy have starved them of institutional development.

The consequences are epistemic.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan novelist who famously abandoned English to write in Gĩkũyũ, argued in “Decolonising the Mind” that language is “the most important vehicle through which that power (colonialism) fascinated and held the soul prisoner”.

When a continent’s literature, law, medicine and science are conducted in a foreign tongue, the umbilical cord between the thinker and their reality is severed.

The African philosopher is trained in Aristotle and Kant but rarely in the epistemological traditions of natives. The economist learns Keynes and Friedman but never the indigenous banking systems or the communitarian land tenure of the Shona or Ndebele.

But the logical conclusion of decolonisation is not the abolition of English or French as useful global tools, but their demotion from their throne. It means creating functional, standardised and resourced African languages of instruction, governance and research.

It means, for example, translating the world’s knowledge into Zulu or Amharic and, more importantly, translating Zulu and Amharic knowledge into the world.

Without this, the African graduate remains a mental dependent.

Cultural and aesthetic colonisation

However, beyond economics and language lies the subtlest, most stubborn layer: the colonisation of taste, beauty and aspiration.

Like our Anglicised parent in the supermarket the Bishop referred to earlier, the African elite, across much of the continent, still measures civilisation by its proximity to European norms. This manifests in everyday aesthetics.

The architecture of power — parliaments, central banks, presidential palaces — overwhelmingly mimics neoclassical or modernist European styles. Thankfully, under the continuing decolonisation project being spearheaded by President ED, we will soon remodel our State House to reflect our values and culture.

The curriculum in elite secondary schools privileges Shakespeare and Molière over Chinua Achebe or Charles Mungoshi — though the latter are gradually being restored.

More damaging is the colonisation of aspiration.

To be “modern” in Africa has long meant to consume European or North American cultural products.

A young person in Lagos or Nairobi wearing a traditional agbada or kikoi is often seen as “traditional” or “village”, while a person in a European suit is “professional”.

Similarly, an African wearing dreadlocks is considered rebellious, backward and unprofessional.

The most prestigious awards, fellowships and validation still come from the metropole: a Booker Prize for a Nigerian novelist, a grant from a European foundation for a Ghanaian scientist.

This is not to deny the value of global recognition, but to highlight an imbalance: African cultural producers must still pass through foreign gatekeepers, speak in foreign idioms and cater to foreign tastes to be deemed legitimate.

The result is a persistent “double consciousness”, to use W.E.B. Du Bois’ phrase — a sense of seeing oneself through the eyes of a European or American audience.

Decolonising culture means, first, recovering the right to define beauty, excellence and modernity on the continent’s own terms.

It means investing in African fashion weeks that are not imitations of Paris or Milan, but sites of genuine innovation rooted in local textile traditions.

It means building museums and archives that interpret African art through African aesthetic philosophies, not Western ethnographic categories.

Why the decolonisation mission must continue

Continuing the decolonisation mission is, therefore, as urgent as it is imperative.

Some, particularly in the West and among African elites who benefit from the status quo, argue that decolonisation is a backward-looking grievance — that globalisation has rendered the concept obsolete, or that Africans should simply “move on”. This is a position of profound ahistorical privilege.

Decolonisation is a matter of material justice.

Economic neo-colonialism directly causes poverty, inequality and vulnerability.

The CFA franc system, for example, has been shown to maintain artificially high prices for basic goods, keeping West African populations in subsistence while French treasury officials manage their currency.

The debt crises that periodically sweep the continent are not natural disasters; they are engineered outcomes of lending structures designed during the Cold War to punish African countries that sought independent paths.

To stop the decolonisation mission now is to accept that an African miner in the Democratic Republic of Congo will forever earn a fraction of what a European miner earns for the same cobalt, and that an African farmer will remain a price taker for their own produce.

Furthermore, decolonisation is an epistemic necessity. The global crises of the 21st century — climate change, biodiversity collapse, pandemics — require every knowledge system at humanity’s disposal.

Western science, for all its power, has blind spots. It struggles with complex, non-linear systems like dryland ecology or multi-cropping.

Indigenous African knowledge systems contain insights that have been systematically suppressed or dismissed as “superstition”.

A decolonised Africa would not abandon modern science; it would integrate it with local knowledge on equal terms, producing more resilient solutions for all of humanity.

The colonial wound — the persistent sense of inferiority, the shame associated with indigenous languages and practices — continues to corrode African self-esteem.

Young Africans internalise the message that success means leaving (physically or mentally) for London, Paris or New York.

The “brain drain” is not merely an economic loss; it is a symptom of a colonised psyche that cannot imagine a fully realised life at home.

Decolonisation, as the Senegalese scholar Souleymane Bachir Diagne has argued, is about restoring dignity.

It is about enabling an African child to dream of becoming a Nobel Prize-winning physicist without ever speaking a word of French or English.

The preferred African end state

All told, economic decolonisation requires the establishment of a Pan-African financial architecture.

The African Monetary Fund, the African Investment Bank and the proposed single African currency (the Afro) must be fully capitalised and operationalised.

African countries must systematically renegotiate or exit neo-colonial currency arrangements like the CFA franc. Resource sovereignty must be enforced through a continent-wide regulatory framework for extractive industries, mandating local processing and beneficiation.

In this regard, Zimbabwe is leading from the front, and, as pronouncements by Mines and Mining Development Minister Polite Kambamura on Friday show, is determined to value-add and beneficiate its minerals.

This is the new frontier of our struggle.

And the African Continental Free Trade Area must prioritise intra-African value chains over exports of raw materials to former colonial powers.

Also, linguistic decolonisation demands a continental language policy that elevates major African languages to working languages of the African Union, alongside English, French, Portuguese and Arabic.

Member states must also implement bilingual education policies that use an African language as the medium of instruction for the first six to nine years of schooling, with colonial languages taught as subjects.

Universities must create departments of African linguistics and translation studies, producing dictionaries, textbooks and scholarly journals in African languages.

Again, as Harare has shown, epistemic decolonisation requires a radical overhaul of curricula from primary to tertiary levels.

The history taught in African schools must centre African agency, not colonial “discovery” or “civilisation”.  Philosophy departments must include African philosophical traditions as core, not electives. Law faculties must study indigenous jurisprudence.

And research funding must be redirected to African-led knowledge production, with peer review and publication systems that value work published in African languages and journals.

And, as China has done, cultural decolonisation demands that African governments invest in cultural infrastructure that is not derivative.

National theatres, galleries and museums should be mandated to feature contemporary African work that draws on indigenous aesthetic principles. Fashion, music and film industries should receive State support to challenge the dominance of Western content. And Pan-African cultural exchange should be as routine as the current flows to Europe.

The long walk

So, for Bishop Lazarus, Africa Day is not a celebration of completion.

It is a commemoration of a promise — the promise that the defeat of formal colonialism would be followed by the construction of genuine freedom.That promise remains largely unfulfilled.The chains of economic extraction, linguistic subordination, cultural alienation and epistemic dependency have merely been gilded.

To pretend otherwise is to insult the memory of the liberation fighters who understood that political flags without economic and mental emancipation are just coloured cloth.

The decolonisation mission is not a nostalgic return to a pre-colonial past, nor a rejection of all foreign influence.

It is a forward-looking project of recentering.

It insists that an African life, an African language, an African idea and an African resource are not merely raw material for European or American civilisation.

They are ends in themselves.

To carry this mission to its logical conclusion is not an act of separatism but of maturity — the maturation of a continent that has spent six decades waiting for the promised independence to arrive in full.On Africa Day, let the ceremony be brief and the resolve be long.

The unbroken chain of coloniality must, finally, be shattered.

A luta continua!

Bishop out!