Melanated People

11 Trong

Giống

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11 Trong

Giống

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11 Trong

I don’t focus on fixing “the system”; I focus on fixing my systems so these broken systems can’t break me.

Giống

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11 Trong

Speaking fluent English while your grandmother's tongue dies in your mouth is not progress. It is the most successful colonial experiment in human history.

They didn't just take your land. They took the language you used to name it. Every time a child grows up fluent in English but mute in their mother tongue, the colonial project wins—silently, generationally, completely. This is not about rejecting English. It is about understanding what was stolen before you decide what to keep.

There are over 2,000 languages and dialects spoken across Africa. Linguists predict that by 2100 more than half will be extinct—not because Africans forgot them, but because Africans were punished for speaking them.

This was not accidental. Lord Macaulay said it in 1835 in his infamous Minute on Indian Education, but the same blueprint was applied across Africa: create a class of people “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect.” Replace the mind. Control the continent forever.

Here is what they never taught you: African languages are not primitive. Yoruba has a tonal complexity that English cannot replicate. Xhosa uses click consonants that modern linguistics still struggles to fully map. These were not simple tongues. They were sophisticated systems of thought.

When you lose a language, you don't just lose words. You lose a way of seeing the world. Concepts, medicines, histories, philosophies—entire civilisations of thought—exist only in those languages. When the language dies, the knowledge dies with it. Permanently.

The most disturbing part: many Africans today voluntarily finish what colonisers started. Parents refuse to teach their children their native tongue. “It limits them,” they say. This is not practicality. It is a trauma response dressed as ambition.

Some will say English opened doors. And they are right. But ask yourself—who built those doors? Who decided which language unlocks opportunity and which one marks you as less than? Accepting that system without questioning it is not intelligence. It is submission.

You were not born ashamed of your language. That shame was installed through beatings, policy and generations of conditioning that told you the coloniser's tongue was civilisation and yours was noise. Thousands of Africans today cannot hold a full conversation in their ancestral language. That is not a coincidence. That is a designed outcome.

Ask yourself: if your language disappeared tomorrow, what exactly would be lost? And who benefits from you never asking that question?