The third alibi: Colonialism

Nigeria is what it is because of what colonialism did to us. That is the third explanation. The deepest. The one the first two rest on.

It is partially true. That is not what makes it dangerous. The colonial encounter happened. Borders were drawn. States were imposed. Economies were restructured around extraction. Languages were carried in and others pushed to the margins. None of this is in dispute. What is in dispute is what the invocation of colonialism does today, sixty-five years after independence, in the mouths of the people who use it. The invocation is no longer functioning as historical analysis. It is functioning as the alibi that authorises every other alibi. Without it, the first two could not stand. With it, they become inevitable.

This is the alibi the African intellectual class has built its career on. It is the one they will defend hardest. Because the moment it falls, the work they have refused for sixty years becomes visible as a refusal.

What the colonisers were accused of

The colonial master was accused, and is still accused, of extractive economic practices. Value produced by African labour was taken without African consent and stored in metropolitan centres whose laws Africans had no part in writing. Wealth flowed outward. The colonised population paid in the form of stunted local accumulation, distorted economies, and infrastructure built to move resources to ports rather than to serve internal development. The vocabulary for this is well developed. Extraction. Dispossession. Plunder. Underdevelopment. A substantial intellectual tradition has been built on naming and analysing these mechanisms. The categories are taught. The indictment is settled.

Today, Nigerian public hospitals train doctors at public expense. The doctors leave. They land in London, Toronto, Dubai, and produce, for the receiving countries, the productive years their training was supposed to deliver to Nigerians. Nigerian politicians hold their wealth in the same metropolitan centres their colonial predecessors used. London property. Geneva accounts. Dubai real estate. The flow of value moves in the same direction it moved under empire. The accumulation occurs in the same cities.

Is the mechanism structurally identical? Not quite. Colonial extraction was backed by military force; today’s outflows are voluntary, often legal, sometimes illegal but unenforced. The difference, however, does not let us off the hook. If anything, it makes the indictment worse. The coloniser took it because he could. The Nigerian elite takes and then blames the coloniser for the poverty their own taking deepens. That is not structural identity. It is a moral inversion.

And the moral inversion has a grotesque theatre. Many of those who leave — the doctors, the academics, the wealthy — are the very people who most loudly demand that the white man pay reparations for colonialism. They live in London, teach at Columbia, send their children to Swiss schools, and from that comfort insist that the former coloniser compensate Africa. They are, in effect, asking their host parents for payment while refusing to return home and do the humble work of building. The coloniser is dead or retired. The emigrant intellectual has taken his place, but with a victim’s mask.

We have no word for this inversion. We call it japa, a word that does not even gesture at the structural transfer. We call the politicians corrupt, a category that conceals the pattern of their behaviour by reframing it as the moral failure of individuals. The vocabulary built to name the act when colonisers performed it, goes silent when we perform it. The act has changed in one crucial way: the agent now claims victimhood. And because we have no language for what we are doing, we cannot see it.

I can make sense of the coloniser doing what he did. He was a coloniser. Extraction was his project. This coming from the colonised, performed against the colonised, with the active assistance of the institutions the colonised built for themselves, is something else. It deserves a name. We have not produced one.

The carrying capacity

The argument is not that colonialism damaged Nigeria. The argument is that the colonial project, in its actual outcomes, delivered structures larger than the receiving societies had the carrying capacity to operate.

We inherited a state we could not staff. A legal system we could not maintain. An educational architecture we could not reproduce at scale. A federal structure imposed on social formations whose largest functioning units of cooperation were sub-regional. A military command apparatus designed for a different scale of administrative coherence than the society had developed. The colonial project, whatever else it did, over-delivered. The instruments it left behind exceeded our capacity to use them.

This gap — between inherited apparatus and the receiving society’s capacity to operate it — is the actual problem. Everything that fails in Nigeria fails inside this gap. The courts fail because the legal apparatus is larger than the social trust available to make it function. The universities fail because the institutional model is larger than the scholarly ecology required to sustain it. The bureaucracy fails because the administrative architecture is larger than the public ethics required to staff it. The army fails for similar reasons. Not because any of these institutions is inherently corrupt. Because each is operating at a scale the society has not yet built itself up to.

This is the diagnosis the colonial alibi prevents us from making. The alibi tells us we are recovering from damage. The truth is that we are operating below the scale of an inheritance we have not yet grown to match. Recovery and growth require different kinds of work. The first asks us to repair what was broken. The second asks us to build what was never there. We have been performing the first because the alibi authorises it. We have not begun the second because the alibi obscures it.

The colonial damage was, by comparison, modest. What we have done to ourselves with the inheritance is the larger fact.

The honest book

The most influential anti-colonial framework of the twentieth century described a condition of psychic alienation in the colonised subject. A splitting of the self under the white gaze. An inability to be at ease in one’s own body. A derangement produced by the colonial encounter. The framework was honest in one important respect. The writer who produced it was unwell, knew it, and had the integrity to write the condition down. The descriptions were precise. The case material was real. This is rare. Few African intellectuals since have matched the honesty of describing their own condition without projecting it elsewhere.

What the framework could not see was the cause. It attributed the condition to the colonial encounter. The actual cause was different. The writer who produced the framework was at three removes from any social formation that could have constituted him otherwise. He had been formed by metropolitan training. He worked in colonial institutions. His patients resembled him — metropolitan-educated, dislocated, caught between worlds. The condition he experienced was real. The framework he reached for to explain it was wrong. He blamed the coloniser for a condition produced by his own distance from foundations the coloniser had not in fact destroyed in the populations that retained them.

The Algerian war is the proof. Algeria was the most thoroughly colonised territory in francophone Africa. A century and a half of settler presence. Mass land expropriation. Deep cultural pressure. If the colonial encounter produced derangement at the level of the population, Algeria should have been the most deranged. Instead it produced the most coherent and sustained armed resistance of the entire decolonisation period. The fighters knew what they were fighting for. They were fighting from categories — land, faith, lineage, the specific Maghrebi forms of community and authority — that the coloniser had not produced and could not appropriate. They were not the deranged subjects the framework described. They were people fighting from foundations the framework could not see.

The framework was diagnosing one circle. The metropolitan-educated. The dislocated. The patients in colonial hospitals who resembled the writers describing them. That circle’s condition was universalised as the condition of the colonised. The framework was the elite’s self-description, generalised. It described the small stratum that had been displaced from its foundations. It could not describe the broader population that had not. The fighters were invisible to it. The villagers were invisible to it. The traders, the marabouts, the women who fed the resistance — all invisible. The framework had no analytical tools for them, because the framework was built from inside a condition they did not share.

This is not an indictment of the writer who produced the framework. He had no access to the populations that would have shown him the alternative. He was working with what he had — metropolitan psychiatry, his own experience, and patients who shared his structural location. The framework he produced was the best a writer in that position could produce.

The failure is in what came after.

What was done with the book

Generations of African intellectuals took the framework, generalised it further, and built a literature on it. They had access to evidence the original writer did not have. The actual life of African populations. The surviving foundations. The comparative cases. The failures of the framework when applied predictively. They saw the failures. They protected the framework anyway.

The reason is mundane. The framework was useful. It positioned the African intellectual at the most prestigious posture available. It allowed them to address Western audiences from the position of the wronged. It conferred moral standing while requiring no fieldwork, no engagement with the social formations of the continent, no humble study of what is actually there. It produced careers. It produced books that were read in Cambridge, Paris, New York. It produced keynote invitations and named chairs. The framework worked. It worked for the people producing the work. It did not work for the continent. But the people producing the work were not paid by the continent. They were paid by the metropolis. And the metropolis paid them to keep producing what they were producing.

Is it true that no other formerly colonised region organises its intellectual life around the colonial frame to the degree Africa does? The claim is not a census. It is an observation of proportion. India has its post-colonial theorists. The Caribbean has its own. But in those regions, the colonial frame shares space with other, more forward-facing intellectual traditions — industrial policy, technological development, geopolitical strategy, domestic institution-building. In African intellectual life, the colonial frame has become the default explanation for nearly everything. That disproportion is not because Africans suffered colonisation more deeply. It is because the African intellectual class produced by colonial education is structurally more invested in the colonial frame than the intellectual classes of other formerly colonised regions. They are demographically small. They are institutionally dominant. Their condition is real. Their alienation is real. But they have used their institutional dominance to project their condition outward as the African condition, and the rest of the continent has been reading itself through their projection ever since.

The work refused

The work the class refused is humble. It is not the work of arguing about whether African philosophy exists. It is the work of producing African philosophy — thinking from African positions, in African languages, about African problems, with African concepts, whose validity is not measured by metropolitan reception. The class has been arguing about the category for fifty years. The category was the wrong work. The work was always the practice that the category named.

The work is not the work of writing about African culture in English or French for journals published in London or Paris. It is the work of producing thought from inside African languages, addressed to audiences who live inside those languages, whose recognition is earned through the work rather than conferred by metropolitan validation. The discourse on African culture is not addressed to Africans. It is addressed to the metropolitan audience, in the metropolitan language, through metropolitan publishing structures. The Africans whose cultures are being interpreted often cannot read what is written about them. The interpreter has built a career on a position the ‘interpreted’ cannot access.

The work is not “decolonising education.” The verb itself borrows its conceptual structure from the system it claims to dismantle. The act of decolonising presupposes colonisation as the foundational reference point. It defines the work negatively, as the removal of something. It cannot produce a positive content, because its category is borrowed from the very apparatus it claims to be exiting. The decolonisers are still inside the frame they say they are leaving. Their language proves it. Independence would be the development of categories the coloniser did not provide. Decolonisation is the continued use of the coloniser’s categorical apparatus to perform a gesture of refusal. The refusal does not exit the apparatus. It works inside it.

What the work actually is is older and slower and less rewarded. It is the work of going into the actual societies. Studying the marriage practices, the dispute resolution mechanisms, the savings circles, the apprenticeship structures, the religious institutions, the trade networks, the chieftaincy systems, the age-grade associations. Finding what is shared across them. Identifying what could be scaled. Asking how the existing fabric of African societies — which has been there all along, which has continued to function at the small scale across the entire colonial and post-colonial period — could be the foundation for institutions at the larger scale the inherited apparatus requires.

Consider two facts. More Africans today cannot speak their mother tongue than during the colonial period. The coloniser did not achieve that. We did — by making English and French the languages of prestige, by punishing children for speaking their native languages in school, by raising an elite that cannot greet its own grandparents without a translator. That is not colonial damage. That is a post-colonial choice.

Consider a second fact. There are more churches in Nigeria today than schools and hospitals combined. The colonial missionaries built churches and schools together. The Nigerian elite built more churches. That is a choice about priorities — about whether to invest in salvation or in sewage, in prophecy or in power plants. No white man made that choice. The churches were built with Nigerian offerings, Nigerian labour, Nigerian land. The hospitals were not. That is not colonialism. That is us.

These facts are not footnotes. They are the evidence the alibi hides. They are the measurements of the work refused.

This work — the study of what we actually do, what we actually build, what we actually lose — is endogenous. It does not produce metropolitan prestige. It does not generate keynote invitations at Western universities. It does not place its author in conversation with the canonical figures of the post-colonial tradition. It places the author back among the societies the author came from, in the difficult and unrewarded posture of trying to identify what those societies actually contain that could be built on. It is humble. It is less prestigious than blaming your host in Western universities.

The class has chosen the prestige.

What the choice has cost

Our past offers little to account for the present moment except the colonial event. Pre-colonial categories cannot place a society at the coordinates history has carried it to. The colonial event is the only feature in the recent past large enough to be invoked as an explanation, so it is invoked, repeatedly, as the only explanation available. Not because it is the right one. Because it is the one the class has produced for us.

What is missing is what should have replaced it. The development of tools — conceptual, intellectual, political, moral — capable of producing a shared vision of the future that would make present sacrifice tolerable. This is the work of constituting a society at the scale and complexity it now occupies. It is the work of giving people something worth bearing the present for. Without that vision, present sacrifice has no destination. Without that destination, the population disperses. The doctor leaves. The minister externalises his wealth. The citizen withholds participation. The boy crosses the Mediterranean. Each is responding to the absence of a future worth staying for. The absence is not produced by colonialism. It is produced by the failure to do the intellectual work that would have constituted such a future.

Sixty-five years have passed. The work has not been done. The literature that has been produced has been about colonialism. The work that should have been produced — the constituting work, the visioning work, the work of building the conceptual apparatus a society uses to project itself forward — has not. The class has been busy with the past while the present has been waiting for instruments only the class could produce.

The alibi

The colonial alibi is the structure by which this refusal has been performed. It is not just an evasion of responsibility for present conditions. It is the alibi for the non-performance of the most consequential intellectual work of African modernity. The class that should have done the work has been doing the alibi instead. The alibi has produced books, conferences, careers, named chairs, international prestige. The work has produced none of these. The class chose the alibi. They are still choosing it. They will continue to choose it as long as the choice continues to pay.

The cost is not borne by the class. The class lives well. The cost is borne by the populations who have no shared future to bear sacrifice for, and who therefore refuse the sacrifice, and so the present continues to deteriorate, and so the alibi becomes more necessary, and so the writing intensifies, and so the work remains undone.

Did colonialism damage Nigeria? It did. The damage was real. But sixty-five years after independence, the continued invocation of that damage as the primary explanation for Nigerian failure is no longer an analysis. It is a ritual. The ritual serves the elite — it excuses their inaction, their extraction, their flight. The doctor who leaves and then writes books blaming the coloniser. The politician who parks wealth in London and then demands reparations from London. The intellectual who has never spent a year living in a rural Nigerian community but lectures the world on African authenticity. These are not victims. These are people who have learned to wear victimhood like a bespoke suit.

The actual present condition of the country is produced by present African behaviours that the colonial alibi conceals. The doctor leaving. The minister externalising. The citizen withholding. The intellectual class refusing the work the continent needed and producing instead the literature that protects the refusal.

Colonisation is the alibi for refusing that work. The work is humble. The alibi is prestigious. The class has chosen the alibi for sixty-five years. The continent is still waiting for the work to begin.

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DAMILARE EBENIZA

Damilare Ebeniza studied Political Science and International Relations in Nigeria, Benin Republic, and France, with a research focus on Nigerian history, economy, and foreign politics. He has experience as a conference interpreter and external relations management across Chad, Niger, Mali, and Guinea Conakry, for governmental, regional and international organisations in West Africa. Proficient in French, English, and four additional non-Nigerian African languages, he embodies a commitment to cross-cultural understanding and effective communication. He can be reached via comment@businessamlive.com