The festive season is still on, and I hope everyone is having a good time. When the season kicked in, of course we all expected African homes to light up with plastic pine trees and artificial snow; we expected children to rehearse songs about a white Christmas they will never see, and I am certain we saw most churches showcase a white Jesus as the centerpiece of our celebration. That has been the age-old tradition passed down generations, right? Which is all good. Or so it seems. Christmas, once a season of community, storytelling by firelight, sharing food, and remembering the vulnerable, has been reduced to spectacle and status. And that is exactly what it seemed like even this year. Seems the festive season celebration is no longer about togetherness; it is measured by how far one travels, how much one spends, and, in Africa, how closely one imitates a Western ideal. This obsession with external validation shapes more than our holidays. Families boast of children in Ivy League schools in the northeastern U.S. as if brilliance must be foreign. Leaders are judged by the prestige of their Western degrees rather than local wisdom. Weddings, once sacred unions, now collapse under the weight of extravagance white gowns, imported rituals, escalating bride prices, cars and houses exchanged like trophies, families sinking into debt to perform success rather than honour values. Again, as aforementioned, it is all good, depending on which side you fall in every aspect of life. It is just that, as 2025 comes to an end, can we not ask ourselves why we seem to still be performing a borrowed version of joy? Recently, I was watching a game of football of the African Cup of Nations (AFCON) tournament going on in Morocco with friends and we had a candid conversation as to why the tournament did not wait to feature in the months of January and February as they used to. I was told this tournament was changed from its usual schedule because the African organisers seemingly wanted not to conflict with Europe’s Champions League and Europa League fixtures which restart on January 20 and 22 respectively, so the Confederation of African Football (CAF) decided to bend the rules for their European counterparts. Not bad. Africa exports enough footballers to Europe and it can be seen why CAF would want to cooperate. The tournament in Morocco is already enthralling. But did we have to bend the rules for the ‘white man’? Why do we have to allow them to set the rules for us? Africa is a big continent and we are some of the biggest exports of talent in Europe. High time we are respected. Looking at all that during this festive time tells me how deeply our ideas of legitimacy, beauty, intelligence, faith, and success have been colonised. The white savior has become a standard, arriving silently as an expectation rather than a person. We decorate it, aspire to it, and pass it down unquestioned. How about this viewpoint? Maybe CAF should not have bent the rules to please their European friends. Maybe we have to now get a black Jesus. It is from this cultural mirror—not from politics, not from diplomacy, but from our daily lives that deeper conversation must begin. As everyone enjoys the festive season, we must still be reminded that the plastic pine tree and the blond-haired Christ are not accidental imports. They are the cultural endpoints of a centuries-old project designed for a single, devastating outcome: to make Africans reflexively revere anything foreign while uniformly denigrating anything African. This is the heart of colonial mentality – the internalised attitude of ethnic or cultural inferiority felt by people as a result of colonisation. By now we all know the colonial strategy was chillingly efficient when the Western powers decided 140 years ago at that infamous Berlin Conference of 1885 to sideline Africans and carved up ‘ownership’ of the continent among themselves. At the time, European nations were beginning to look at the African continent as a more permanent resource base for their newly growing industrial sectors. And they came here in droves. European powers knew that proud people with high self-esteem would not easily surrender their wealth and sovereignty. Their solution was a psychological conquest executed through spiritual disarmament and cultural erasure. The biblical figure of Jesus, for instance, was historically re-imagined by European artists into a white man, a process scholars like Edward Blum note was used to sanctify racial hierarchy and justify colonial subjugation. This ‘whitewashing’ provided a divine stamp on the myth of white superiority. This process created a “fracturing of the colonial psyche,” as analysed by Frantz Fanon. Everywhere, the colonised person is forced to view their own culture through the lens of colonial prejudice, internalising the idea that their own ways are backward, a form of internalised oppression with lasting effects. Africans that were colonized were robbed of their language, religion, wealth, dignity and cultures. That is why today, long after the coloniser left our lands, we still pray to a white God in churches named after European saints. We see this same imposed imagery in our halls of justice, where Africans put on white wigs on their heads, a sartorial relic symbolising authority whose ultimate reference point is elsewhere. Remember the heartbreaking “doll tests”? Our language codifies this bias even today: the misbehaving child is the black sheep; we fear dark days; we are blackmailed and blacklisted. The lexicon of our morality is colour-coded, and black is the shade of deficit. In Our Consumption and Aspirations, we had used mswakichewing sticks for millennia as our toothbrushes, yet now we happily order “natural toothbrushes” from Amazon. Our grandmothers pounded turmeric for health and they lived longer, so they say, but it took a “wellness” industry, packaged in the West, to sell it back to us as a superfood. We can’t deny our love as Africans for travelling to Europe, USA, and Canada for holiday instead of going for an African Safari. Did you people know that African Safaris in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa are, arguably, the best worldwide. But no, most Africans think the grass is greener in the West. We bleach our skin and our hair, chasing lightness, with women straightening hair with toxic chemicals and wearing silk hair wigs and blond wigs dumped into Africa instead of embracing their Afros. Using beauty products from the West we can eat our skin care from food we grow. We give business to black-owned companies only if they have a white face on the board for ‘credibility’. And yet, according to a recent report by Consumer Reports, all 10 brands of synthetic braiding hair tested contained cancer-causing substances. Three of them contained benzene, a chemical so toxic that it is heavily restricted in laboratory settings. Benzene exposure has long been associated with leukemia, particularly acute myeloid leukemia, a deadly blood cancer. As you enjoy your festivities going into the New Year, that decorated Christmas tree that sparkled in your living rooms should remind us that it is not just a holiday ornament. It is a stark invitation to introspection. It asks: how can we demand others to see our sovereignty when, in ways profound and subtle, we still question it ourselves? The path to true liberation begins not in conferences, but in our mirrors, our homes, and the deepest recesses of our self-worth.
