Dear editor,
During the days of slavery, there were certain Blacks who preferred to remain slaves than seek their freedom. They were the favored slaves. These slaves often cooperated with the slave masters to report on other slaves who dreamt of freedom. They’d reveal the plans of any slave that tried to escape. For them, there was nothing wrong with being a slave so long as they had a place to sleep and food to eat. They’d rather “eat meat in slavery than eat mushrooms in freedom.”
During the days of colonialism, there were certain Blacks who also preferred to remain in colonialism than seek independence. They collaborated with the colonialists to oppress their fellow African and loved the ways of the colonialists to no limits. They considered themselves enlightened because they mastered the ways of the masters. These Blacks were often the preferred partners of the colonialists and they stood to gain loads of benefits as collaborators. They were highly educated in the colonial ways and highly ignorant of their own ways! They thumbed their noses at other Africans because in their minds, these other Africans are primitive and uneducated! For them, civilization started and ended in the West.
Fast forward today, you still have Africans who would rather remain moored to the colonial ropes around their necks than seek to free themselves. These Blacks see anyone that speaks against colonial relics as “hypocrites” because in their “educated” logic, despising colonial relics must mean despising everything about the West. Their simplistic logic revolves around “if you hate colonialism, then it means you hate the West.” And so you will hear them making dumb arguments like “if you hate colonialism, why do you write or speak in English?” My favorite is this: If you hate colonialism, why do you live in England? I mean how dumb can one be?
These Africans seldom take time to question anything they have been taught and prefer unthinkingly copying and pasting what they heard others say. They call that “education.” Africans that are seeking liberation bother them and so they will spend their days stalking and shadowing these Africans to counter them on everything. Just as the “master” has trained them to do. These Africans will lie, twist, undermine, pretend and be attack dogs for their masters while pretending to be patriots of their nations.
In The Gambia, we have a few of them marauding as enlightened citizens with pants sagging. They are often inconsistent and unprincipled. They can adopt one position today and completely abandon it the next day. There’s very little shame in their game and like leeches, they attach themselves to anyone of influence or situation they can get some attention from. They’d be the ones reporting other slaves to the slave master and they’d be the one that would rather be colonized than be independent, and today they are the ones insisting everything Western must be good for Africa. They hardly understand issues but love to run their mouth on everything because they mistake their chattiness for intelligence. Beware!
Alagie Saidy-Barrow
