By Dr. J. Kerkula Foeday
My Weekly Poetic Reflection, Issue 14, Friday, July 10, 2026
The most enduring colony is not the one imposed upon the land, but the one established within the mind
The colonizer has gone.
The flags have changed.
The impostors have departed.
The chains have fallen.
Yet, something remains.
A colony survives,
Not upon the land,
But within the mind.
Invisible.
Persistent.
Dangerous.
A colony where the conquered
Still doubt themselves.
A colony where black children
Learn to admire distant faces
Before learning to admire their own.
A colony where foreign
Is mistaken for superior,
And African for inferior.
A colony where a people
Slowly become strangers
to themselves.
And so I ask:
Why do you despise your own?
Why do you praise the stranger
While mocking your brother?
Why do you celebrate distant greatness
Yet overlook the genius that lives among you?
Why do you carry your heritage
Like a burden instead of a crown?
Why do you speak your mother’s tongue with embarrassment
Yet wear a foreign accent as a badge of honor?
Why do you run from your roots as though they are chains,
When they are the very source
of your strength?
In Liberia,
I have seen it.
Men and women
Who can recite the histories of Europe,
Yet know little of the stories
of their own people.
Children who know foreign songs
But cannot sing the songs of their ancestors.
Citizens who hide their tribal origins
As though identity were a crime.
Educated minds unable to speak the language of their grandparents.
People ashamed of the very soil that gave them life.
Tell me,
How can a tree despise its roots and still expect to stand?
How can a river reject its source and continue to flow?
How can a people reject themselves and still remain whole?
This sickness did not begin with us.
It was planted.
Watered.
Cultivated.
For colonialism sought
Not merely to occupy territories.
It sought to occupy consciousness.
It taught the conquered
To distrust themselves.
To question their worth.
To admire others excessively,
While diminishing their own reflection.
Frantz Fanon saw these wounds.
He understood that conquest does not end when soldiers depart.
Sometimes, it survives
In the imagination of the conquered.
Sometimes, the final battlefield
is the human mind.
Africa has never lacked greatness.
Never.
The lie is never that Africa l acks genius.
The lie is that Africa lacks value.
The world often speaks of Africa’s gold.
Its diamonds.
Its oil.
Its iron ore.
Its forests.
Its fertile lands.
But Africa’s greatest wealth
has never been buried beneath the ground.
It has always walked
upon it.
Africa is not only rich in resources.
Africa is rich in minds.
Rich in ideas.
Rich in imagination.
Rich in courage.
Rich in scholars,
Scientists,
Writers,
Artists,
Inventors,
Visionaries,
And transformative leaders.