Dear Black African Child- AKA Letter to My Younger Self

 

I travelled to Cape Town this week. As you already know, I started a new job — something slightly different from what I was doing, but a fresh, beautiful, enthusing challenge nonetheless. I am excited about what the future holds.

We flew on a Proflight plane into Johannesburg before connecting to Cape Town on South African Airways. As we lifted off from Johannesburg, I looked down at the gleaming buildings, the undulating roads snaking their way across the land. A lump rose in my throat — not from fear, but from recognition. Recognition of a truth I have carried for years, a truth I can no longer ignore.

Black African Child, I want to tell you today that I think you have a problem.

A problem that has followed you like a shadow. One that covers your existence like a rash you pretend not to see. It announces you, it controls you. Some days I think it’s a lack of imagination; other days I diagnose it as a permanent warped logic trap — a maze that provides both the questions and the answers, yet keeps you lost in the same place.

A problem that has shaped your posture, your voice, your dreams.

You prostrate yourself before whiteness.
You grovel on all fours before whiteness.
You define your very existence in whiteness.

It sickens me.

It bothers me.

It infuriates me.

Your template for thinking — your aspirations, your sense of worth — seems inextricably tied to whiteness. And that limits you. It shrinks your imagination. It cages your expression. It convinces you that you must always be less, even when you are more.

Let me tell you about Muzi Sikhakhane, a South African lawyer who has stood toe‑to‑toe with whiteness. I want you to learn the difference between white people and whiteness.

White people are human, just like you.

Whiteness is not a person — it is a lens.

A behemoth.

A bulwark.

A worldview that demands your obedience and rewards your self‑erasure. It calls you to belong, or else your worth will be questioned. It becomes the source and objective of legitimacy itself.

Whiteness is what makes you fake an accent. Makes you sound like a DJ. Whiteness makes you mistake eloquence in the English language for intelligence. It makes you wear the Western‑styled corporate suit and elevate it above any other apparel.

It is what makes you tuck your tail between your legs when you meet foreign‑trained contemporaries.

It is what makes you elevate Western education, Western validation, Western lifestyles above everything that shaped you.

I see it in your dreams — or the absence of them.

I see it in your aspirations, your values, your quiet belief that excellence must be imported.

But Black African Child, long before you and I were born, others saw this wound in you. They studied it, named it, dissected it, and warned that if you did not confront it, it would swallow you whole.

Frantz Fanon wrote about the “epidermalization of inferiority” — how you begin to wear the lie of your own inadequacy on your skin. He saw how colonialism did not just take land; it took the mind. It rearranged your sense of self until you believed that beauty, intelligence, and excellence must always come from elsewhere.

Steve Biko, in his quiet thunder, reminded you that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” He understood that whiteness is not a person but a psychological architecture — a system that convinces you to shrink yourself before anyone even asks you to.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o warned you about the danger of linguistic colonisation. He saw how you abandoned your mother tongue in pursuit of validation, how you began to believe that your ideas only mattered when expressed in the language of the coloniser. He knew that language is not just communication; it is memory, identity, and the soil in which your imagination grows.

These thinkers were not writing about strangers.

They were writing about you.

They were writing about the child who lowers their voice when speaking to a white colleague. The shopkeeper who smiles profusely whenever visited by a white person. The pride you wear on your sleeve just because you went to school in England. Yes — they were talking about you.

The child who believes a foreign degree is inherently superior.

The child who thinks success must be stamped with Western approval.

The child who dreams in borrowed colours.

Black African Child, whiteness is not a ghost — it is a curriculum.

It is a worldview.

It is a psychological inheritance passed down through generations of conquest and humiliation.

But here is the truth those thinkers also insisted on:

You can unlearn it.

You can reclaim your imagination.

You can stand upright again.

You can choose to see yourself through your own eyes, not through the lens of a world that once declared you subhuman.

You must learn to trust the intelligence that was born in you, not the one you think you must borrow. You must honour your own languages, your own histories, your own ways of knowing. You must refuse to be a spectator in your own continent.

Black African Child, you must stop outsourcing your confidence.

You must stop believing that excellence is foreign.

You must stop treating your own people as a footnote.

You must stop waiting for permission to be extraordinary.

The work ahead of you is not easy. It requires unlearning, confrontation, and courage. It requires you to disappoint the systems that benefit from your silence. It requires you to disappoint the version of yourself that whiteness sculpted.

But you must do it.

Because the world you want — the world where you walk tall, where you create without apology, where you lead without imitation — will not be handed to you. You must build it. You must insist on it. You must become it.

Of course the titles will be given to you. You will be called President, you will name the country the way you want to. You will name your children those beautiful flowing local names — Luyando, Maluba, Tafadzwa… However, as long as you cannot change your imagination, as long as you remain caged to whiteness, all of that will be surface dressing. A whitewashed tomb, as Jesus said.

But then you must realise something — something that Biko, Ngũgĩ, Soyinka, and Fanon knew already: the greatest revolution is not political; it is psychological.

It is the moment you decide that you are enough — without translation, without dilution, without permission.

Back in Zambia, I took a drive to my alma mater, the University of Zambia. I walked to the Goma Lakes. The students seem too young these days, I thought. I tried casting my memory’s eye to the days I walked these same grounds as a student. What did I think I would become? Have I become it? Or am I just flailing wildly in this pool of whiteness?

Perhaps am getting old and my frustration is brimming. My organs are drenched in bile. I don't know.

Sincerely

Keith