Villagization, the innocuous name the colonial state gave to the forced internal displacement, was sprung on the Kenyan people in 1955, in the middle of my first term at Alliance, but living within the walls of the school, I had not heard about the agents of the state bulldozing people’s homes or torching them when the owners refused to participate in the demolition. Mau Mau suspects or not, everybody had to relocate to a common site. In some regions, the state forced people to dig a moat around the new collective settlement, leaving only one exit and entrance. The whole of central Kenya was displaced, and the old order of life destroyed, in the name of isolating and starving the anticolonial guerrillas in the mountains.

It is difficult to speak in simple terms about Nkrumah’s legacy. He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief. He decried tribalism and jailed those who disagreed with him. He hated colonialism and loved the Queen of England—a photograph of himself with the Queen at her estate in Balmoral was one of his prized possessions. Those same tensions that existed in Nkrumah still shape the lives of many Ghanaians. The old way and new ways coexist. People pour libation to their ancestors and proudly sing the national anthem. Members of my family were jailed for opposing Kwame Nkrumah, but both my grandfather and father saw Nkrumah as the father of modern Africa.

In West Africa they call him a griot. Swahili civilization is replete with poets, leaders of thought spanning centuries. A book edited by Abdilatif Abdalla and published by Mkuki na Nyota, Kale ya Washairi wa Pemba (The Past of Pemba Poets), lists quite a few, including Fumo Liyongo wa Baury in the twelfth century, and Suudbin Said Al-Maamiriy in the nineteenth century. These poet-intellectuals largely saw themselves as the voices of the people and seekers of justice.

The situation— and this was the case not just in Kenya but throughout postcolonial Africa— is that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, wherein the global vision that guided the anticolonial struggle gradually shrinks to the level of the continent, then the national territory, then down to the regional and ethnic level. The symbols of the nation left standing are the flag, the anthem, the nationalized colonial army and police force, and of course the Leader.

Whether they achieve that kind of empowerment or not will depend on the extent to which they can resist being pressured by the West to accept the Kenya solution. In 1962, Jomo Kenyatta was released from eight years in prison, and he proceeded to negotiate away everything that the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) had fought for. Colonial structures were left intact, and Kenya under Daniel arap Moi became one of the most repressive states in the world, a neocolony completely and pathetically dependent on the West. Kenyatta lost on the negotiating table what had already been won on the battlefield by the Kenyan people.

Black South Africa cannot accept, or indeed afford, to replace the 1910 neocolonial arrangement run by a white minority with a perpetual neocolonial arrangement run by a Black Minority. The history of the last four hundred years calls upon them to overthrow the triple burdens of colonialism, neocolonialism, and racial oppression and to start on a sentient march toward justice for all.