It’s funny. We have more access to information than any generation before us. I can sit here in Marondera or Harare or even Bulawayo and read what someone in Tokyo or São Paulo is thinking in real time…..

I can stream lectures, download books, enter rabbit holes of knowledge so deep I forget what time it is. And yet—and yet—so many of us are still trapped in the same colonial cages our ancestors bled to break open.

We may have WiFi, but our minds are still tethered to the West. We speak in accents we learned from Netflix and measure our beauty against algorithms trained on Eurocentric data. We quote Baldwin and Adichie but still hesitate to publish our own thoughts because they don’t sound “refined.” Refined by whose standards? Whiteness? Harvard? The same systems that erased our libraries, burned our languages, and renamed our gods?

We scroll through Twitter (still not calling it X) arguing about    the price of eggs in the US but couldn’t name three liberation icons from the continent if our lives depended on it. We meme colonizers into jokes and let them live rent-free in our culture. And the worst part? We think we’re woke because we know the lingo. “Decolonize this. Unlearn that.” But we’re parroting without practicing. Reading without reckoning.

It’s not enough to know. You have to undo. You have to unspool the threads of colonial thought stitched into your subconscious. And that takes more than hashtags. It takes introspection. Unlearning the shame tied to your mother tongue. Reclaiming your spiritual practices without feeling like you’re sinning. Writing stories that don’t ask for global validation to matter.

This isn’t just about history. It’s about identity. Because a colonized mind will build an independent nation and still ask for permission to breathe. Will create art and call it “third world.” Will pray in English and dream in American dollar signs.

So I don’t care if you’ve read Fanon. I want to know if you felt Fanon. If you’ve sat with the discomfort of realizing that your ideas of progress are hand-me-downs from the same empire that called you savage.

Yes, the internet is free. But freedom isn’t data. It’s consciousness. And until we start thinking like us instead of them, we’ll just be well-informed captives scrolling through the ruins of our own liberation.