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And now colonial powers are terrified. Empires startled. They fumble to make sense of what they see — the fall of their illusion of control. They sit in glass boardrooms reminiscing about the “good ol’ days,” as they put it — when there was order, when “law was law.” The irony. Their idea of order was submission. Their law was written in blood, built on bones. Now, the same ones who stole land, languages, lives, dare say the ANC is the problem. That the ANC had 30 years and failed. But what is 30 years compared to 400? What is 30 years of a party that never even truly ruled to begin with? That never had control of land, wealth, banks, airwaves, or truth. Just the illusion of power, the shell of office, a seat in a burning house they didn’t build and were never allowed to renovate.

Every so-called African president elected on the continent never truly answers to the people — we know this. Their first order of business is to kneel before colonial thrones. They fly to America, to France, to England, to swear loyalty. Not to the soil that birthed them, not to the people in the shacks and the fields, but to the ones who drew the borders with blood and called it peace. And when you bring this up — when you speak of puppets and power, of oaths made in foreign tongues — they call you a conspiracy theorist. Or worse: divisive. “The government is trying to divide us,” they say. “We must stay united.” But what is unity without equality? What is unity without compensation? Without repercussions? What kind of unity demands silence from the wounded and amnesty for the abusers?

It’s the same kind of twisted logic that blames feminism for what patriarchy destroyed. That blames women’s freedom for men’s fear. Just like that, they blame black governance for what colonialism left broken. They blame the ANC, they blame BEE. In other countries they might call it something different — a different acronym, a different black scapegoat. But it always means the same thing: black people. They won’t say it out loud, but we know what they mean. When they speak of “foreigners,” of “immigrants,” of “crime,” it’s always the same coded language — they mean black people.

And the audacity of it all. White settlers, who refused to leave after liberation, who raised children on stolen land, now turn and say that Africans are foreigners. Imagine that. A Zimbabwean in South Africa, a Nigerian, a Congolese — labeled an outsider on African soil. Simply because a goat is born in a cow pen, doesn’t mean it is a cow. Yet they believe geography trumps ancestry, that paper makes heritage. Their children — born here, yes — but born of conquerors, and taught to inherit arrogance, not belonging.

What’s even more absurd is the contradiction they live with so comfortably. They'll say, “I’m proudly South African,” or “proudly Namibian,” or “proudly Kenyan,” yet refuse to identify as African. They'll never say “I’m black” — they’ll say “white,” “Caucasian,” as though they are above the land they live on. As if Africa is beneath them, yet they won’t leave. They’ll stay, benefit, rule, extract — and still never belong. That, to me, is proof enough. Because you cannot be proudly African in name, and anti-African in spirit. You cannot call yourself of the land, yet hate its people. The Caucasus Mountains, after all, are not in Africa.

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