The Coloniser's Retina

There is a phenomenon I have come to call semblance: the surface similarity between culturally distinct social problems that makes them vulnerable to misinterpretation and appropriation by dominant interpretive frameworks. It is not sameness. It is the appearance of sameness — and one of the most consequential epistemic errors of our time.

When social phenomena share a surface resemblance across cultures, Western interpretive frameworks, particularly liberal democracy and human rights discourse, exploit that semblance to universalise their own specific cultural anxieties. Gender disparity as a Western epistemic preoccupation gets exported as a universal social problem because it looks like something that exists everywhere. And it does exist everywhere, but it does not mean the same thing, carry the same weight, or require the same solution. The hermeneutical shortfall is this: when we interpret social phenomena through a borrowed lens, we do not simply misread the problem. We reshape the reality. The act of naming changes what exists.

I want to speak to a particular kind of reader. The global maniac, the one addicted to generalised, normative interpretations, who mistakes semblance for sameness and exports solutions to problems they have first had to invent. This is not an insult. It is a diagnosis. And it is offered in the spirit of the essay that follows.

Gender binaries have existed across many societies, though accompanied by occasional tensions that intensify as societies become increasingly egalitarian. In certain interpretive framings, the issues infiltrating our universities have taken root, dismantling the fragile balance that once supported social cohesion.

Our social relations are now evolving into a pronounced gender disparity, one that some observers describe as an emerging cultural conflict. It is reasonable to ask how we arrived at this point. Have men become increasingly insensitive toward women? Are everyday provocations now met with hostility and intolerance? Or are we collectively becoming more apathetic and impatient in our interactions with one another?

Perhaps the answer is yes to all of these questions, and perhaps the reality is even more layered than we assume. Today we inhabit a vast marketplace of unsolicited advice, competing opinions, and imported worldviews, many shaped by a hegemonic, Western-dominated epistemic orientation that never anticipated its own global influence. These forces create a multifaceted landscape in which one problem stacks upon another, often presented as a single, linear path of modernisation. What travels across borders is not understanding. It is semblance. And semblance, mistaken for sameness, distorts the resonant life-world of every society it enters. Africa is a case study.

When semblance becomes the dominant mode of vision, something quieter happens beneath the surface. The lived depth of a place, its memory, its rhythm, its contradictions, begins to be replaced by a language that can circulate, be compared, and be governed. What was once felt as presence begins to arrive as classification. Experience stops being encountered and starts being administered. What remains is not false, but reduced. A version of reality shaped by what a system is able to articulate, rather than what a people actually live.

We do not all come from the same village, global maniac. Neither do we wear the same lens, despite the coloniser's attempt to replace our retina. He feared what we might see with our God-given perspective and offered democracy as a gift, knowing he possessed the tools to magnify and distort it as he pleased.

So before you drown us in your holographic, normative social concepts, learn who we are. Learn the societal architectures the coloniser once studied, extracted, and repackaged back to us. Know the worldview he took from us before you impose the worldview he crafted for you.

Let us begin here. We can globalise when you are ready to accept us as ourselves, not as projections of you. Resist your proclivities for a moment and open your eyes to the problems embedded in what has been handed to you, problems that now shape both your world and ours. Our villages existed long before your concepts. We had harmony, and we had our mothers in positions of authority long before you imagined "women's empowerment." For us, inception was not the ontological foundation of knowledge. It was a mechanism for record-keeping. You have misread us from the moment you encountered us. Your nature could not comprehend the generosity of the land or its people, so you taught us your nature as the God-given, normative, innate nature of the one God you misrepresent.

Each one for himself. That is your creed. But Ubuntu lives: I am because we are. And yet you sit as the moral authority atop the Trojan horse of democracy, propagating ideas your own individualistic tendencies cannot embody.

So before you masquerade through town marching for one of your causes, know that you do not yet know what you are doing. And know that it is not for the good of humanity, but for yourself. A power-drunk illusion that has shielded you from your own self-destruction.

A morning in the village taught me more about harmony than democracy ever could. I remember a system of elders, men and women together, holding authority with dignity, with the Obaapanin, the eldest woman entrusted with the voice of justice, presiding over social disputes. Yet your system travels the world campaigning for female inclusion, the very inclusion your sweet concepts once stripped from us. Governance and accountability were symbiotic, perfectly aligned, until you met us and took everything.

And now, the voice of Ama Ata Aidoo crescendos in the background, reminding us of what was lost, and what still refuses to die.