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Walk up to an African Gen-Z and say, “I heard y’all eat grasshoppers in Africa,” and if this has never been part of their diet, they might hit you with a “Which part of Africa? Be specific because Africa is not a country.” [Btw, I love grasshoppers (kintia/libanki), high-quality protein, and taste SO GOOD]

And that is because one term cannot successfully convey the experiences and cultures of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse landmasses on earth. We’re talking 3,000+ groups –and potentially realities– that tend to be homogeneously crunched into one political term, in spaces of international discourses.

What we know TODAY as “Africa” is a colonial project. Borders drawn at the Berlin conference, with no regard for how local communities understood themselves or organized their worlds. The EXISTING geopolitical structures were deliberately erased, justified by the demonic(!!!) claim that Africans had no history and no civilization. All to serve one purpose, obviously: Europe’s economic gain and ego.

It’s with that in mind that V.Y. Mudimbe argues that Africa does not exist.

And if Africa does not exist, does African culture really exist? [Idk man…]

This came out of his attempt to write a survey of African philosophy, when he realized that African philosophy isn’t a “real thing.” By strict definition, it refers simply to Africans [colonial categorization] contributing and participating in the traditional field of philosophy, deeply informed and rooted in Western history and experiences. Extending that to African systems of thought is merely metaphorical, he argues.

In its place, he proposes African gnosis, a wider framework for thinking and writing about the Africa we live, and ACTUALLY experience today. It holds and acknowledges everything: the oral traditions, the indigenous cosmologies, the anthropological reports, the missionary records, the colonial classifications, and critically, the African intellectual responses and THE LIVED RESPONSES to all of it.

I see it like… not an over-romanticization of a past you never lived in, but a pragmatic and critical analysis (with an ounce of advocacy) of the holistic contingencies that inform our experience today.

So, what would African culture look like when defined through the African gnosis framework?

Nothing? I guess? And everything that informs our experience in Africa (the political entity that, sadly, has its foundations in colonial designs). I cannot define it because it’s not a static, timeless, or defined entity; Africa itself is not.

Because gnosis is never finished, African culture is not a thing that exists; it is something that is continuously being made. Every generation inherits the contingencies of the past and adds to them, with their social settings, needs, realities, and also their exposure.

African culture is not a noun. African culture is a verb.

Wax-print has a particular economic and cultural presence in West and Central Africa, where giants of the industry, such as Vlisco, have concentrated their commercialization efforts. But it made its way there through Europe’s bloody thirst for control. Wax-print was/is a tool of economic colonialism, first attempted in Indonesia, and later perfected in West and Central Africa.

Europe’s bloody thirst led to the industrial replication of the Javanese fabric Batik, as an attempt to dominate the textile industry in the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia.1 They failed. Not only was Local Batik superior and culturally entrenched, but the lack of cultural legitimacy also rendered the industrial imitation irrelevant to locals’ diverse use of the textile (in rituals, court culture, and social ranking systems, among others).2

They had to redirect the product elsewhere. The first African region to receive this weapon of local textile marginalization was the Gold Coast, modern-day Ghana, in the late nineteenth century (1880s-1890s). It was never imposed by force; European trade companies and private merchants introduced the product, which was met with high demand.3 Soon after that, the demand for Wax-print spread in other African colonies. It was an instant success. But the success that established the current status of wax was in the twentieth century, caused by Africa’s rapid urban growth and urbanization.4

By the second half of the twentieth century, Sub-Saharan Africa experienced one of the most dramatic urban growth in the world. By 2000, its urban population had increased from approximately 33 million in 1950 to 294 million.5 This rapid urban growth is both an intentional outcome of colonial design and a consequence of colonial action upon the colonized. It is a reflection of colonial violence.

The rural-to-urban migration, within a colonial nation-state that collapses diverse peoples into a single geopolitical unit, is a process that forcefully ushered people into a new paradigm. In urban settings where daily life mirrors European standards and is informed by Europe’s extractive vision for Africa, “African reality” is fundamentally reshaped.

Capital cities, as well as major urban centers across the continent, were designed according to European models, primarily for the benefit of European interests. Those are spaces in which African temporalities were reconfigured for global capitalism and extreme consumerism. In those spaces, ethnic/tribal and communal identities are transformed, accommodating the diversity that is created out of the violence. Similarly, conceptions of the household, marriage, and childhood are also affected. Even notions of aesthetics, comfort, and, obviously, textiles are altered. Recalibrated to fit the demands and rhythms of urban life.

Within this reconfigured urban reality, the Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C./the Congo) was never given the time, nor the opportunity, to decide which ethnic textile would come to represent urban life and identity. Raffia? Kuba cloth? Barkcloth? And let us not forget that textiles carry specific spiritual, ritual, and ceremonial significance among the country’s more than 250 ethnic groups. Beyond this, there was no space to adapt these textiles to the new paradigm imposed by Europe. Raffia, for instance, is highly impractical for everyday urban life; one cannot navigate traffic or comfortably drive a car while wearing it. Kuba cloth presents similar challenges. It becomes itchy and suffocating in the heat—the Congo is crossed by the equator, so it’s almost always hot. Barkcloth, too, raises questions of comfort, durability, flexibility, and artistic freedom.

In the Congo, as in many African nation-states, colonial violence physically reshaped our reality so deeply that even after independence from Belgium, the colonial nation-state and its rural–urban dynamics remained. The Belgian Congo was a 52-year period of colonial violence.

The reshaping did not begin with Belgian Congo, though. It was preceded by Leopold II’s regime, marked by mass local enslavement and the death of nearly half the Congolese population.6 23 years of colonial violence.

Leopold’s atrocities were preceded by Portuguese missionary incursions, which deployed religious violence to prepare the ground for European domination. These incursions involved killings, the reshaping of worldviews, and the demonization of local cultures, from language to textiles, allowing European textiles to circulate in the Congo long before wax prints arrived. Over 200 years of ‘colonial’ violence.

At this point, you may be wondering what the purpose of this essay is. I open by affirming the legitimacy I grant to wax, a non-African textile, as a representation of my African culture, only to spend the body of the essay tracing the colonial violence that enabled its success.

Well, I wanted to provide context before making a difficult argument: a complete erasure of how colonialism has geographically, demographically, and socially shaped our communities would require deploying the very violence that produced those changes in the first place.

There is a social wave that makes decolonization feel cool and fashionable. The wave places an emphasis on symbolism, neglecting the deeper thoughts on what decolonization really implies. The version of African decolonial discourse that emerges from the West, especially among African diasporas in Europe and North America, and which is increasingly gaining followers on the continent, is particularly unsettling to me.

That wave carries a loud undertone of romanticizing the violence that would accompany so-called “revolutionary” action. More so the violence than the revolution. Violence is framed as a necessity, one that may produce martyrs, but is presented as unavoidable. This logic frequently slides into calls for dictatorship, abrupt policies, and top-down decisions made by those who claim to “know better,” often on the basis of economic or geographic privilege.

African liberation will never come from violence. And you cannot lecture people about their own oppression, no matter how many books you’ve read on the matter; they experience it daily.

This surely is controversial, but the same logic of violence applies to European languages that function as lingua francas. Without colonial violence, people would never have been forced into what we now call urban settings, nor into managing the social and political complexities those spaces produce. In the Congo, for example, undoing this reality through language raises an impossible question. If French were to be replaced as a working language by an “ethnic” language, which one would it be?

Take Lingala. Treated as an authentic national lingua franca, especially in the capital and along the western coast, Lingala is in fact a pidginized form of Bobangi and related Congo River Bantu languages.7 It was pidginized, broken, Portuguese-ified, standardized, and institutionalized by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. In this sense, Lingala is also closely tied to European intervention. If neither French nor Lingala were to be used in urban spaces, which of the country’s more than 250 languages would take their place? And who would willingly accept the imposition of another group’s language, knowing the power language has to reshape knowledge, identity, and worldview? No one would. Imposing a single ethnic language across all groups would require the same level of violence that once imposed French and Lingala.

The only other option would be to send everyone back to their ethnic territories, segregating communities so that communication could occur without European languages. But how would that work for people like me, whose grandparents on both sides come from different tribes, who moved to urban centers in search of economic stability? Would my body be split in half, my mother taking one part of me to Tshela, Mayombe, and my father taking the other to Besingombe land?

I do acknowledge the importance of reclaiming our languages and textiles, and the significance of that work for decolonial movements. But we must be extremely careful with our rhetoric. Rhetoric reflects thought, and thought shapes policy. In trying to decolonize, we risk reproducing new forms of colonization.

“Culture is not only what is inherited; it is also what we create.”

For me, wax is both. Although Vlisco and other European companies remain major producers, African manufacturers have taken the lead in the market, and the designers across these companies, European or African, are overwhelmingly African. Wax has always been part of my life. I grew up going to the tailor and asking them to make me some baka munu mésure, using the leftover wax my mother utilized for her libaya. I grew up inspired by the repetitive patterns in wax design, which have informed my own creative journey—some of those designs align very well with Kongo cosmology. If I ever have a traditional wedding, my Mukongo self will be expected to buy high-quality Vlisco for my partner’s mother.

As the country continues to navigate life within this post-colonial paradigm, wax has also become a symbol of national identity. We wear wax at official events, at weddings, and on special occasions. We assess wealth and access through the quality of wax. Wax is, and will continue to be, an integral part of my culture. And if one day I get money, sheiii, there will be signs: The amount of Vlisco I will buy, and the crazy designs I will create, will speak for themselves.

Decolonization cannot be reduced to slogans, aesthetics, or purity tests. It requires patience, historical honesty, and a refusal of easy answers. We must reclaim our languages, textiles, and knowledges, but we must also acknowledge the material and social realities shaped by centuries of violence. The work, then, is not to violently erase what exists, nor to romanticize what was lost, but to move with care, responsibility, and imagination. Decolonization must be rooted in the places where people actually live, speak, love, and create today. Anything else risks repeating the very logic it claims to dismantle.