Echoes of Our Stolen Dreams: A reflection on Africa’s Interrupted Trajectory Through Colonisation

I was in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city a few days ago when something struck me; I couldn’t help but notice how colonial the city’s infrastructure is. I have been there numerous times before, yet for some reason I had never really paid attention to it. However, this time around it hit me differently. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. It was a lightbulb moment that burst forth a flood of thoughts about colonisation and its continuing impact on the continent as a whole. I wondered to myself, if we had not been colonised, what would our cities look like? What environment would we have created for ourselves?

It is very unfair I believe, that people from another part of the world, came down to our lands and took possession of them, making us subservient to them and foisted their cultures and languages on us; cultures which they claimed were more “civilised” in comparison to our own.

They bastardised our cultures and customs, dismissing them as primitive while uplifting their own. By what measure was this so-called civilisation determined? Their own, of course. How ludicruous! They even used religion to push that agenda!

How audacious, that they even went as far as holding a conference halfway across the world. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, were they butchered us up like pieces of meat, showing no regard for our own customs, tribes or languages. To them, we were all the same: primitive and subhuman. They couldn’t even afford us the chance to be ourselves. Not a single African voice was consulted before the regrettable fragmentation of our land was done.

Strangers, with zero understanding of our ways, drew lines across our homelands as if we were invisible. We were treated as nonentities on our own soil.

We were robbed of the chance to map our own trajectory and define what “civilisation” meant to us without any outside influences. Now we will never know what we could have achieved on our own, what our cities and societies would have looked like if we had not been colonised.

Many years after colonisation, the effects remain deeply ingrained in our cities, our identities and our sense of belonging. The reminders are everywhere; physical remnants of our stolen dreams and a trajectory we were never allowed to choose.

Even though we will never know what we could have become without colonisation, we still have the power to rebuild and reshape our own narrative. Decolonisation is a journey, a long one and it starts in our minds. What we believe about ourselves will shape what we become.