Colonialism Wrapped Up In Classism

Sometimes I look around and I genuinely ask myself did colonialism ever really leave?Cause it feels like we’ve just inherited the chains and called them gold. We bleach our skins like our melanin is a mistake.We name our kids Chloe and Ethan and laugh at people named Chinedu or oluwanifemiWe’ll rock jeans in 40°C heat, but call Ankara “too traditional” for dinner.And don’t even get me started on hair. Our hair our crown. We hide it, fry it, cover it, shame it. A girl wears her afro to an interview and suddenly she’s “not professional.” But Becky from abroad wears the same hair in a messy bun and somehow it’s “effortlessly chic.”It's wild. We treat our own culture like a second-class citizen, but praise anything Western like it’s gospel. A white person opens their mouth to speak Igbo or Hausa, and we go, “OMG so smart!” But your own cousin can’t even speak their native language without being mocked like it's a bad accent. How did we get here?I’ll tell you how: classism wrapped in colonialism's leftovers.It’s not just that we were colonized. It’s that we were taught to believe everything African was less. Less valuable. Less civilized. Less pretty. Less… correct.And what makes it worse? We still carry that mindset today but now it’s coded as “aspiration.” We want accents, not authenticity. We want passports, not purpose. We want proximity to whiteness so badly, we forget we were once royalty in our own land.We think imported is always better. Even our churches sound British. Our weddings try to look European. Our schools punish African languages like it’s a sin.But God forbid you wear full agbada to a restaurant suddenly it’s “too much.”Yet we dance to Afrobeats. We eat jollof. We rock gele when Beyoncé does it. We’re proud when the West borrows our culture, but we’re shy to own it ourselves unless it’s trending.It’s a strange, painful love story between admiration and self-erasure.I’m not saying we can’t enjoy foreign things. But let’s be honest it’s not just enjoyment. It’s worship. And until we admit that, we’ll keep calling ourselves modern when what we really are… is colonized with Wi-Fi.So yeah, maybe colonialism left.But it left its number and we’ve been calling it back ever since.

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