By Tony Edemenaha
When the missionary came with the Bible in one hand and a mirror in the other, we did not merely see our faces; we forgot our names. We looked into that glass and concluded that the reflection was ugly, that our tongue was incoherent babble, that our shrine was darkness and our cure was witchcraft. Thus began our long apprenticeship in self-abasement, a curriculum we have perfected with honours.
We are a people who pray fervently in a foreign accent, even when alone. In our churches and mosques, we have outsourced heaven. We describe God, whom we claim is omnipresent, as if He requires a visa to visit Africa, as if He understands only Hebrew, Latin or Arabic but is perpetually confused by Igbo, Yoruba or Urhobo.
We demonised Amadioha, Sango and Aziza as devils, yet we celebrate Thor with popcorn in cinemas. We call our ancestral masquerades demonic, but we pay for Halloween masks for our children. The contradiction would be comic if it were not tragic. We have become tenants in our own spirituality, squatters in our own cosmology.
The great irony is that we did not abandon religion; we merely swapped one set of mysteries for another. We left a religion that knew the names of our rivers for one that taught us to despise them.
Before the white man declared us fetish, we had a sophisticated moral ecosystem. The earth goddess, Ani, was not just a deity; she was our Supreme Court, our environmental protection agency, our code of conduct. The oath taken before her was more binding than any affidavit sworn before a commissioner for oaths today.
A man might escape the police, but he could not escape Ani. Now we have ten thousand churches per square mile and perjury has become our national anthem. We have more cathedrals than our forebears had shrines, but less conscience.
This self-repudiation extends beyond the altar into the workshop and the laboratory, where the damage is even more profound. We were told that we had no science, only superstition. And we believed it.
Yet the very blacksmith who forged our farming tools understood metallurgy well enough to differentiate between ores by colour, sound and weight, long before we could spell thermodynamics. The herbalist who treated malaria with dogonyaro and utazi leaves was practising pharmacology without a white coat. The village midwife who turned a breech baby with practiced hands was performing obstetrics without a degree.
But because they did not publish in journals, we dismissed them as quacks. We buried their libraries of oral knowledge without reading a page.
Today, we import toothpicks and pride ourselves on it. We export raw cocoa and import Swiss chocolate, then queue to take selfies with the wrapper. We produce crude oil and import petrol, a perfect metaphor for a nation that exports its brains and imports its opinions.
Our universities teach entrepreneurship by asking students to write business plans for importing what we already have. We celebrate a young man who assembles a drone from Chinese parts but mock the carpenter who builds a chair without nails that will outlive that drone. We have confused consumption with civilisation and packaging with production.
In the realm of technology, our inferiority complex wears a particularly expensive suit. We call our own inventions inferior by reflex.
A car assembled in Nnewi is “managed” until a car from Stuttgart, built by the grandchildren of those we taught to count, is declared superior without inspection. A textile woven in Aba is “local” — said with a sneer — while a fabric printed in Manchester from our stolen designs is “original.”
We have colonised our taste buds, so that we prefer imported frozen chicken pumped with chemicals to our own guinea fowl. Our tongue has become a customs officer that approves only foreign flavours.
Consider the parable of the two sons. One inherited his father’s compound, despised its mud walls because they were not made of imported bricks, demolished them, and now lives in a rented flat in his former backyard, paying rent to a stranger who built on his father’s land with the very mud he rejected.
That is our story.
We abandoned adobe architecture, which kept houses cool in our savage heat, for glass towers that turn us into prisoners of air conditioners, then we complain about the cost of electricity.
Our ancestors built pyramids in Nsukka and walls in Benin that were once described as the largest earthwork in the world, but we were told we built nothing. And we nodded.
To decolonise the mind is not to romanticise the past or to advocate a wholesale return to the age of flint and moonlight. Nostalgia is not a programme.
The past had its own pathologies — its own oppressive hierarchies, its own bloodletting, its own rigidities. The point is not to exhume every bone from the ancestral grave, but to sift the ashes for gold.
What we require is a critical Sankofa — the Ghanaian principle of going back to fetch what was useful — not a blind revivalism. We must interrogate what we threw away in our hurry to become European.
Why did we accept that our languages are unsuitable for science? The Japanese do quantum physics in Japanese. The Germans do engineering in German. Why must our child first become semi-literate in English before he can understand photosynthesis?
Why is our proverb, which compresses philosophy into a sentence, considered inferior to a Shakespearean sonnet that requires a footnote?
The answer is uncomfortable: we have been willing participants in our own erasure. Colonialism did not end; it merely moved from the government house into our minds, where it pays no rent but issues orders.
It is there when a mother beats her child for speaking Igbo in her own house in Onitsha. It is there when a professor insists that African medicine cannot be taught until it is validated in London. It is there when we fund pilgrimages with billions but cannot fund a laboratory to process our herbs.
The invitation, therefore, is to sober reflection. Let us dare to ask: what if we are not as empty as we have been told?
What if our heritage contains technologies of community, justice and ecological balance that the West is only now rediscovering under the fashionable labels of sustainability and mindfulness?
The village square that resolved conflicts without leaving perpetual scars was practising restorative justice before The Hague made it fashionable. The apprenticeship system, the Igbo Igba Boyi, was venture capitalism without the predatory interest rate.
Decolonising our minds does not mean rejecting what is foreign; it means refusing to accept that what is foreign is inherently superior. It means learning from all, but worshipping none.
We should take the best of the West — its methodical inquiry and productive efficiency — and graft it onto the best of our own: our communitarian ethic, our spiritual wholeness and our deep knowledge of our environment.
A tree that refuses its roots cannot welcome new birds.
The task before us is generational but must begin with a simple, almost heretical act: self-respect. To respect our names again. To call our gods by their names without flinching. To fund our own knowledge systems. To wear our heritage not as costume on cultural day, but as a compass every day.
Until we do, we shall remain what Soyinka warned us against: a pygmy nation standing on stilts borrowed from others, mistaking height for growth and noise for stature.
The mirror the missionary gave us is broken. It is time to look into the stream again, where our fathers saw their faces and were not ashamed.
*Tony Edemenaha, poet and social commentator, writes from Asaba.
