By ITTY OKIM

I didn’t understand how or know when tears rolled down from my short-sighted eyes, to rest comfortably on my cheeks for some seconds, right before they continue their journey all the way to the chin and away from my face.

I felt so much sadness, that I didn't even care to wipe them off. Truly, like my friends had previously brought to my notice, nothing else gets me as emotional as I get when it comes to issues relating to black exploitation by the whites.

The ambience was just perfect enough for me to get the message that Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu and Chris Martin were trying to pass to me in their art work, ‘Monsters You Made’ as that night while I listened to the track off Burna’s ‘Twice As Tall’ album, I had only my headset as my companion through the lonely night.

The soft piano progressions and protest-like percussions made through Diddy’s music production skill set me in the right atmosphere to entirely digest and comprehend all that Damini had to say.

All through the lyrics, I could feel the pain of the average African youth – the rage, the feeling of being cheated, the agony – and I could understand why the average one would think violence is the answer.

At the end of the track, the voice of an elderly woman lingered, asking a question that inspired another question which this entire work is about:

Since we met you people 500 years ago, look at us. We’ve given everything (and) you’re still taking. In exchange for that, we have got nothing – nothing! And you know it.

But don’t you think that this is over now?

Over where is it over?

This question – by whoever the woman featured in the track was – exposes how broken western colonisation has left the African society and it birthed the following questions in my heart that lonely night:

What is the measure of the success of the white man’s mission in Africa? At what point and what is to be achieved before the white man’s aim in the black continent would be said to have been met?

Chimamanda Adichie had made it clear in her ‘Half of A Yellow Sun’ how colonisation made Africans even aware of their tribes.

The very concept of being Pan-African itself was made known to Africans by the whites.

So if one says that before they became Nigerians, or Ghanaians, they were first Igbos or Ashantis, then they would be lying because they probably were not even aware of the existence of other people before the whites gave them an identity.

This awareness came with its own evils as segregation and tribalism set in.

The Igbo man would rather put his Igbo “brother” in a place of benefit than a Yoruba man. The Ibibio judge would rather sentence a Hausa than he would an Efik – his cousin tribe.

This very awareness led to the cause of the Nigerian civil war and is also behind that of almost every African nation.

In one way or another, every single war fought in African states can be linked to colonialism and white domination at some point in their history.

Even after independence, these states remain broken and even deteriorate further because of terrible legacies left behind by the whites.

However, these Caucasians always present it as their claim story that they penetrated Africa to help build the land, introduce civilisation and their one true God. How true is this?

The entire continent of Africa seems to have become a bag of rage, pain and suffering and this is as a result of the bad seeds sown by the westerners on the black soil.

We are monsters and they are our creators. The only way out of this very huge mess is every African making a solid decision to not do anything that’ll hurt his fellow African.

Africa is a country.

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