FOR as long as I can remember, I have always been white. Like you. I just didn’t know it.
Born in the bipolar Nigerian city of soaring skyscrapers and sprawling slums, Lagos, where the sun sometimes forgot to dim its fierce heat, I grew up thinking I was black like everyone else. All the signs were there – including my black skin, my shy head-hugging hair, and my Yoruba name with its lyrical tonality and vaunted meanings.
There wasn’t much more to that identity, however. Nothing special. When I walked down Jemtok Street to buy my dad a small cold bottle of Guinness Extra Stout, it wasn’t “black” music that people were dancing to in street parties or “black” movie heroes that people were speaking animatedly about.
We were all bedazzled by Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo, by the manner of speaking of those of us who were fortunate enough to visit your countries, and by your technological wizardry – evidenced in every gadget we owned or wanted to.
At school, we watched recorded clips of BBC news videos to learn how to pronounce English words properly. “Don’t open your mouth so wide,” our teachers would warn – not quite living up to their own imposed standards.
Even though we preferred our own food, our own traditions, and our music, the soundtrack of our lives was the promise of travelling “abroad” and knowing the magic of meeting “oyinbo” people (a Nigerian pidgin term for a white person or someone not distinctly African) and living in “oyinbo” lands. And living “oyinbo” lives. The good life.
It was every thinking and non-thinking man’s dream. And for good reason: the West, your home, was heaven, and God lived there.
Needless to say, a steady undercurrent of self-loathing flowed through our lives – urging us to civilisational heights of whiteness. Urging us to wear three-piece suits under a quizzical sun. Urging us to demonise our own traditions so that we could catch up with you.
We didn’t say it this way, but it was nonetheless inescapably true to us: if it was white, it was right.
But one day, at least for me, it “suddenly” wasn’t.
I cannot recall when this shift happened – when I discovered to my dismay that underneath my cosmetic black skin was an inner whiteness, a Trojan guest behind enemy lines. Chinua Achebe’s story about Okonkwo and his tragic fight against the white invaders might have had something to do with this realisation. Reading Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, learning about Mandela’s struggle with apartheid, and my deepening fascination with difference and diversity certainly played no small role.
Soon, my entire energies were devoted to reclaiming my stolen blackness. My once secure tethering to the ground of Judeo-Christian truths came unfastened, and every church service seemed an ethical invitation into an ignominious exclusivism – the very sort that silenced Okonkwo. And my enslaved forebears. And those Aboriginal and Native American children that were spoon-fed healthy doses of good ol’ whiteness in neat boxes – by your people.
I had grown to become another elite spokesman for “white” knowledge systems, polishing the ossified walls of the ivory tower, walking past my own people with my laudatory gowns of academic achievement. An unusual, alien achievement. A House Negro.
I however wanted to know what it felt like to be grounded in my own culture – whatever was left of it. To feel comfortable in my own flesh. I wanted to feel an ancestral outrage; I wanted to be angry with you for what your fathers and mothers did to our fathers and mothers.
It was my silent protest against the predatory universality of the West. I would later travel the world, wear African colours, tell stories about tortoises and trickster spiders I had only learnt about in libraries.
Becoming indigenous. It’s all the rave now, isn’t it? In a stunning reversal of plot, you all came back to our lands. Well, many of you. This time, you didn’t bring the Bible or tell us that we need schools in order to learn properly (though, some of you still do this), you came with paint on your faces, and trinkets and elaborate jewellery and mysterious ancient masks our more industrious brothers sold to you to help you feel “indigenous”.
In fact, it seems you are everywhere now, scouring the globe once again for a sense of home. A feeling of embodiment.
In India, where I now live with my Afro-Indian wife and daughter, there are so many of you here. Many of you have learnt the painful lessons of colonial pasts and presents: you recognise that to displace another is to have displaced oneself. You understand – with silent whispers and hushed rumours that white privilege isn’t working for you or anyone else. You realise that white exceptionalism is like a parenthetical remark in the middle of a sentence, pretending to be the whole book.
With every new account of an oil spill, or of a dolphin struggling on the shore to deliver itself of plastic shrapnel gestating within her stomach, or of a suicide victim whose bank account was richer than “third world nations”, or of a politics that feels more beholden to the whims and fancy of giant corporations than to real public concerns, you feel there is something not quite right with this particular configuration of things. And so you my white friends are seeking – like I am – a way to reclaim your place on earth.
Decolonising myself is not about reclaiming a pre-existing given: Decolonisation might suggest returning to an original palette, an original practice, an ancient way – but the idea of originary paths and autonomous givens are themselves products of white frames of knowing.
Anti-colonial and Pan-African movements often try to enact justice by appealing to an elaborate ideal – a romanticised vision of Afrocentricity. In so doing, they uphold a politics of identity that is blind to changing contexts and the ineradicable markings of our colonial pasts. A different way to think about decolonisation is as intimacy with where we are.
I am black, but I am white also. For Yoruba people, the world isn’t populated by independent “things”, moving by their own internal logic or dynamism.
The world is a web and, as such, boundaries are porous and ever-changing. The soul of whiteness is the colours it excludes from mattering, the colours and voices that now haunt you from liminal places.
Saying sorry is not enough. Reconciliation today is often framed in terms of ornate performances of contriteness. Saying sorry is more likely to reinvest “white power” with the sort of moral nobility a philanthropist acquires for spreading his wealth.
A deeper sort of accountability is needed – one that brings us to the edges of ourselves. One that helps us notice that we are a palimpsest of colours, and that who or what we are is always in the making.
We need a new politics that does not cater to or reproduce the exclusionary whiteness you and I are prisoners of. This is a time for straying, for losing one’s way, for asking new questions.
● This is an edited version. Visit http://bayoakomolafe.net/project/dear-white-people/ for the complete text.
Akomolafe is globally recognised for his poetic, unconventional and counterintuitive take on global crisis, civic action and social change.