The Blessing No One Intended: A Brutal Awakening For The Developing Black World
This is not a love letter. This is not a healing circle. This is not another polite Pan‑African essay that gets applauded, archived, and ignored. This is an indictment. And everyone is in the dock.
Let’s Kill the Lie First
The most dangerous lie Black and developing nations ever swallowed was not colonialism itself—but the belief that someone else was responsible for fixing the damage. Colonialism wounded us. Neo‑colonialism bled us. But self‑deception kept the wound open. For decades, we blamed the West loudly while copying it religiously. We cursed America while queueing for visas. We denounced Europe while shipping our children, our money, and our dignity straight back to it. And then along came Donald Trump. Crude. Unsubtle. Undiplomatic. And accidentally honest.
Let’s be precise. Trump did not create Western racism. He did not invent imperial arrogance. He did not design global inequality. He simply stopped lying about it. Empires usually rot behind polished language. Trump tore off the polish. He said the quiet parts out loud. He treated allies like assets, poor nations like inconveniences, and Black and brown countries like expendable shitholes. And suddenly—miraculously—people were shocked.
As if Kwame Nkrumah had not warned us that neo‑colonialism would be more dangerous than colonialism because it would feel friendly. As if Frantz Fanon had not explained that Europe’s humanism ended precisely where Black humanity began. As if Patrice Lumumba had not been murdered for refusing to pretend Belgium was his benefactor. Trump didn’t betray Western values. He revealed them.
Here is a truth that should sting. We did not just accept Western dominance—we sanctified it. We painted Jesus white, and made the West god. We taught our children that intelligence had an accent. We measured progress by distance from home. Success meant leaving. Staying meant failure. Building locally meant being “small‑minded.” Hospitals collapsed while presidents flew abroad for check‑ups. Schools were just rundown chicken shacks. Universities decayed while ministers bragged about foreign degrees. Roads disintegrated while Swiss accounts flourished. And the people? The people fought over tribe, surname, and skin shade—like loyal idiots guarding a house they didn’t own.
Let’s stop insulting history. The West did not loot Africa and the Black world alone without local help, It had partners. They wore suits. They quoted constitutions. They sang national anthems with their hands over hollow chests. They were our leaders. While Thomas Sankara told Burkina Faso that debt was a new form of slavery, other African leaders laughed—and then signed more loans. When Sankara was assassinated, the continent did not rise. It adjusted. While Marcus Garvey demanded Black economic power, we mocked him as unrealistic—then begged multinational corporations for crumbs. While Malcolm X warned that Western liberals were more dangerous than conservatives, we accused him of anger—then trusted smiles that hid knives that would eventually stab us in our backs. We didn’t lose unity. We traded it.
For decades, migration was the pressure valve, that saved us from revolt. Instead of fixing broken states, we exported the angry. Instead of reforming governments, we drained talent. Instead of confronting corruption, we escaped it. The West loved this arrangement. So did our elites. But Trump and the new Western mood have tightened the valve, Borders hardened. Visas shrank. Welcome mats disappeared, and the valve is closing. Now millions are stuck at home—awake, frustrated, and finally asking the right questions. That is dangerous.
Let’s say what we rarely admit. Pan‑Africanism failed because it was too polite, it asked thieves to behave morally and traitors to feel shame. Unity was treated like poetry instead of policy. Like a slogan instead of a strategy. But survival has a way of clarifying things. Now unity is no longer romantic. It is logistical. Currency. Trade. Defence. Education. Food. The things empires understand.
Trump’s greatest offence was not what he did to the world. It was what he did to our illusions, by forcing us to look in the mirror. He exposed how desperately we wanted Western approval. How fragile our self‑belief was. How shallow our independence had become. In months, he accomplished something terrifying: He made it impossible to pretend anymore.
Do not mistake awareness for progress. An awakened population without organisation is just noise. A united people without discipline is just a crowd. If this moment is wasted—if tribalism returns, if elites remain untouched, if dependency is merely redirected—then this awakening will become another footnote. History will not be kind. Empires fall when the oppressed stop believing in them. The West is losing belief. The only remaining question is whether the developing Black world will finally believe in itself—or crawl back to the altar of a dying empire. No saviours are coming. Grow up. Unite. Or be managed forever.
