Even ‘Western culture’ is shaped by colonialism — Africa should stop moaning!

Making excuses for one’s shortcomings is always a sure sign of failure.

I recently came across yet another article urging Africans to “reclaim” their identity, lamenting the use of foreign languages, inherited borders, imported religions, and supposedly alien political ideologies.

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It is a familiar refrain—one that resurfaces with wearying regularity.

Africa, we are told, is uniquely wounded by colonialism, uniquely disfigured, uniquely robbed of its authentic self.

If only we could return to some pristine pre-colonial essence, all would be well.

This narrative is emotionally appealing, but it is intellectually lazy, historically selective, and ultimately self-defeating.

What is most striking about these arguments is the assumption that Africans are the only people on earth whose cultures, languages, religions, borders, and identities were shaped—or violently reshaped—by conquest and domination.

That assumption is simply false.

In fact, what we today loosely call “Western culture,” often treated as a monolithic and self-generated force imposed on others, is itself a direct product of centuries of conquest, colonisation, forced assimilation, and cultural erasure.

Take Britain, so often caricatured as the archetypal coloniser.

What exactly is “indigenous” British culture?

Before the Roman invasion, the British Isles were inhabited by Celtic tribes with no unified political identity, no written language, no road networks, and no urban centres in the modern sense.

Roman conquest fundamentally altered the landscape—introducing roads, towns, architecture, law, and systems of administration.

Latin words entered local languages, leaving a lasting imprint on vocabulary, law, and administration.

Terms like street (from strata), wall (from vallum), and even justice (from iustitia) trace their origins to Roman influence.

Christianity, too, arrived not as a gentle suggestion but as a state-backed religion, reshaping spiritual life, social norms, and even political allegiances.

Roman-built churches, organized dioceses, and canon law systematically transformed Celtic and Anglo-Saxon belief systems, leaving cultural and institutional legacies that endure in Britain to this day.

After the Romans withdrew, came waves of further colonisation: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, and then the Normans in 1066.

The Norman Conquest alone transformed England beyond recognition.

The ruling class spoke Norman French, while the majority of the population continued using Anglo-Saxon dialects.

English law, land ownership, and governance were radically restructured under Norman rule.

This duality is mirrored in the English language itself, which bears the marks of successive conquests: its core grammar and everyday vocabulary remain largely Germanic—words like house, bread, mother, and strong—while a rich layer of French vocabulary was added, especially in areas of governance, law, and culture, such as court, judge, government, justice, council, feast, and royal.

Latin, meanwhile, entered through the Church and education, contributing words like religion, scripture, and university.

Modern English is not an “indigenous” language in any pure sense—it is a historical compromise forged through conquest.

Yet where are the British clamouring for a return to pre-Roman Celtic religions, languages, or borders?

Where are the Germans demanding the abandonment of Christianity because it was imposed by the Roman Empire?

Where are the French insisting that Latin-derived French be discarded in favour of the disparate tribal tongues that existed before Rome conquered Gaul?

These societies acknowledge their histories, study them critically, but they are not held hostage by them.

They move forward, building on what history—however violent—has left behind.

Africa’s experience, painful as it was, is not unique.

What is unique is our persistent tendency to treat colonialism as a permanent excuse for contemporary failure, rather than as a historical reality to be understood, contextualised, and then transcended.

Even before European colonisation, Africa was never a continent of static, untouched cultures living in harmonious isolation.

Empires rose and fell through conquest, assimilation, and domination.

The Zulu kingdom under Shaka expanded through military conquest, absorbing and reshaping neighbouring communities.

The Munhumutapa Empire extended its authority over vast territories, incorporating different peoples into its political and cultural system.

These processes inevitably altered languages, belief systems, social structures, and identities.

Did these conquests not also “distort” the cultures, religions, borders, and languages of the conquered?

Why is European conquest treated as uniquely corrupting, while African conquest is romanticised or conveniently ignored?

Even in present-day Zimbabwe, the question of “authentic” identity quickly collapses under scrutiny.

Who can genuinely claim to be purely Ndebele?

The Ndebele state itself was formed through the incorporation of diverse groups, including Rozvi and other Shona-speaking peoples, who were assimilated into the kingdom and gradually adopted isiNdebele language and customs.

So when we speak of reclaiming “original” culture or language, which one exactly are we referring to?

And on what historical basis?

The same applies across the continent.

Borders were fluid long before Europeans arrived.

Languages evolved, merged, or disappeared.

Religions spread through trade, conquest, and migration.

There was no singular African culture frozen in time, waiting to be restored.

This is why constant lamentation about foreign languages rings hollow.

Language, everywhere in the world, is a tool shaped by power and history.

English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish are not foreign because they fell from the sky; they are foreign because history unfolded the way it did.

But they are now also African languages in practice—spoken, adapted, indigenised, and reshaped by Africans to express African realities.

To pretend otherwise is to deny lived experience.

The same applies to religion.

Christianity and Islam arrived through conquest and trade, yes—but so did Buddhism in East Asia, and Christianity itself in Europe.

No one suggests that Italians should abandon Christianity because it originated in the Middle East, or that Scandinavians should apologise for not worshipping Odin anymore.

The uncomfortable truth is that we often invoke “culture” selectively, as a refuge from accountability.

It is easier to blame colonial borders than to explain why corruption thrives decades after independence.

Easier to blame foreign languages than to confront the collapse of education systems.

Easier to romanticise ubuntu than to practise justice, integrity, and competence in governance.

This does not mean whitewashing colonial crimes or denying their enduring effects.

Colonialism was brutal, exploitative, and dehumanising.

Its economic and psychological scars remain real.

But history explains circumstances; it does not absolve responsibility.

The West, whose culture we so often decry, is itself the product of being colonised many times over.

What distinguishes it is not moral superiority, but its decision—conscious or otherwise—to stop defining itself primarily by grievance and instead to build institutions that function in the present.

Africa must do the same.

Instead of endlessly moaning about lost cultures, we should ask harder questions.

Which elements of our inherited systems—traditional and colonial alike—serve us today?

Which do not?

What kind of society are we trying to build now, not centuries ago?

And how do we get there using the tools, languages, borders, and realities we currently inhabit?

We cannot move forward while staring permanently into the rear-view mirror.

Colonialism shaped us—but it does not have to imprison us.