We are still colonised
Colonize:
to send settlers to a place to establish political and economic control over
it.
Colonize
synonyms: overrun, occupy, take over, seize, capture, annex, subjugate,
hegemonize.
Colonization
has taken place all over the world. It has taken place using various types of
pretenses and terms. When kings colonized a place in the name of their empires,
they called it annexation or a conquest. When a military force colonized a
place, they called it a siege or a coup. As a country or a state colonized a place
and its people, they called it a take-over or occupancy or even colonization
itself. No matter when it happened in time or how it was termed, it will always
have the same definition: to take control of a particular foreign place for the
sake of political, economic or social gain and dominance. It has happened
countless times between different societies and civilizations in history.
Ancient
and medieval colonialism was practiced by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the
crusaders, among others. However, colonialism in its modern sense was practiced
mainly by Europeans around the 14th century. Some historians identify three
waves of European colonialism. The three main countries in the first wave of
European colonialism were Portugal, Spain and the early Ottoman Empire. The
Ottomans conquered South Eastern Europe, the Middle East and much of Northern
and Eastern Africa between 1359 and 1653. The Portuguese started the long age
of European colonization with the conquest of Ceuta, Morocco in 1415, and the conquest
and discovery of other African territories and islands. These consecutive
conquests would start the movement known as the Age of Discoveries. This would
later be taken over by the Spanish exploration of the Americas, the coasts of
Africa, the Middle East, India, and East Asia.
The expansion achieved by Spain and Portugal caught the attention of
Britain, France, and the Netherlands. The entrance of these three powers into
the Caribbean and North America perpetuated European colonialism in these
regions.
The
second wave of European colonialism commenced with Britain's involvement in
Asia in support of the British East India Company. Other countries such as
France, Portugal, and the Netherlands also had involvement in European
expansion in Asia. And the third wave (“New Imperialism”) consisted of the
Scramble for Africa, regulated by the terms of the Berlin Conference of
1884–1885. The conference effectively divided Africa among the European powers.
Vast regions of Africa came under the sway of Britain, France, Germany,
Portugal, Belgium, Italy, and Spain.
Researcher
Mary Gilmartin argues that these three waves of colonialism were linked to
capitalism. The first wave of European expansion involved exploring the world
to find new revenue and perpetuating European feudalism. The second wave
focused on developing the mercantile capitalism system and the manufacturing
industry in Europe. The last wave of European colonialism solidified all
capitalistic endeavors by providing new markets and raw materials. However,
several years after the end of New Imperialism, these powers have changed their
face and have found a way to continue subjugating and profiting over “3rd
world” countries in this modern society. This leads us to the topic of
neocolonialism.
Neocolonialism:
the practice of using economic, political and cultural imperialism as well as
globalization and conditional aid to influence a developing country instead of
the previous methods of direct military control or indirect political control.
This is
an emerging power dynamic mainly being practiced by China, Britain, USA,
France, Belgium, UAE, Portugal, Russia and many more. Because neocolonialism
developed as a concept during the decolonization period of Africa, a great deal
of focus was put on the continuing affiliation between the colony and the
colonizer, which often left the colonized country open to economic
“partnership” and therefore, exploitation. However, the term is now used in a
much broader context as it is being practiced between countries which have no
historical colonial connection. After achieving their independence, most
African countries struggled to regain their economic and political stability,
while most developed countries saw an opportunity to continue the influence or
power they had had over us. They then seized this opportunity by giving
something in the name of conditional aid, and taking something else that is a
hundred times more valuable. Just as Mallence Bart-Williams once said, “while
one hand gives under the flashing light of cameras, the other takes in the
shadows… it's super sweet of you to come with your colored paper in exchange
for our gold and diamonds.”
Currently,
neocolonialism is not only being practiced, but also being vastly and quickly
expanded. They give us loans, in an effort to have an economic control over us
when we fail to repay it. Sometimes, they forgive those loans as a way to hold
a political upper hand. They loot our minerals while we’re too busy celebrating
the loans they forgave. They provide us with homogeneous and Eurocentric
education systems that will ultimately fail in our heterogeneous African
societies. These colonialist powers use their media to bombard the world with
dehumanizing images of us, so that the world keeps helping us, and we keep depending
on the world and consequently on them. It’s like the famous Chinese proverb:
“give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day, teach him how to fish, and he’ll
eat forever”. They give us fish in the form of loans, food, infrastructures and
other aid. They keep giving us fish instead of teaching us how to catch it
ourselves. And so, when the time comes and we’re hungry, we’ll keep looking at
them, instead of looking within ourselves. We become dependent on these
countries, and that dependency is exactly what they will use to exploit us, as
it will take away the self-sufficiency that we are capable of.
The most
prominent example of this exploitation can be the fact that they give us
finished products in the name of charity instead of teaching us how to make
them using our own resources. A real charity, would be them giving the initial
machines needed to convert our raw materials into finished products and then
buying those finished products. But instead, their “charity” consists of them
buying our raw materials for cheap prices and selling the end products back to
us at far more expensive rates. When we can't afford to buy these expensive end
products, they give it to us in the form of a loan. When we can't pay these
loans back, they then use that upper hand to gain a share of our land,
companies, and resources. These newly gained resources will then be used to
attain political and economic benefits that unbelievably outweigh the “charity”
that was initially given.
The sad
part is, most Africans know that charity is rarely ever free. And we know that
they're taking ten times as much as they're giving. But still, the need to
sustain ourselves for today, keeps making us blind to the fact that we're
giving away things that we can use to sustain ourselves forever. The need to
eat the fish today, makes us unable to ask how they caught it in the first
place and how to catch it ourselves. Therefore, even though we officially
achieved the complete decolonization of Africa in 1975, we, Africans in 2021,
are still colonized. And unless we instill a generational cultural reform and
stop the cycle of dependency on foreign countries, we will always continue to
be.
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