The Educated Mind Can Still Be Colonised
The most dangerous form of colonisation is not always found in the uneducated mind. Sometimes, it lives comfortably inside the highly educated mind especially when inherited prejudice is mistaken for knowledge, scholarship, or intellectual superiority. This is the quiet, invisible colonisation. It doesn't arrive with soldiers, treaties, or flags planted in foreign soil. It arrives in classrooms, textbooks, sermons, and dinner-table conversations. It settles into the language we use to describe ourselves, long after the empires that authored that language have packed up and gone home. And because it wears the robes of education, it is rarely questioned. Few people interrogate an idea once it has been dressed in academic credentials. For generations, African traditions and spiritual practices have been labelled "primitive," "pagan," or "fetish." Yet when similar customs appear in other cultures, they are often described with more respectable words s...