By Melvin Kiyimba
They say history is written by the victors. But in Africa, it feels more accurate to say the victors wrote the software.
And that code, written in the quiet assumptions we carry about identity, education, faith, and power, is still running. Much of what feels normal in African life today is not organic. It is inherited. Often invisibly. Often by design.
Consider Uganda. It was never meant to be colonised in the traditional sense. Kenya was the prized asset, a settler colony with infrastructure built to serve foreign interests. Uganda was something else.
A strategic lever, valued because of its proximity to the Nile. Whoever controlled the Nile had influence over Egypt, and by extension, the Suez Canal.
So Uganda was labeled a protectorate, not a colony. It sounded softer, even benevolent. But beneath that label, the British imposed control over institutions, leadership, and land in ways that would shape the country’s future far beyond independence.
To govern Uganda without provoking widespread rebellion, the British turned to their favorite tool. Division. They studied the region and assigned ethnic roles based on stereotypes they invented.
Northerners like the Acholi and Langi were classified as martial races, supposedly strong, obedient, and brave. They were heavily recruited into the army and the police. Southerners, especially the Baganda, were placed in administrative roles.
This wasn’t because they were more qualified, but because they lived closer to the colonial seat of power and had earlier exposure to missionaries and Western education.
This approach was designed to prevent unity. Soldiers were deployed far from home to suppress communities they had no connection to.
The result was not just fragmented governance, but a fragmented sense of national identity. Long after independence, many Ugandans still believe that people from the north are naturally good at security or that Baganda are better suited to leadership and business.
These are not cultural truths. They are the residue of British policy, normalised through repetition until they became instinct.
This method of social engineering was not unique to Uganda. In Nigeria, British colonialists strengthened Islamic institutions in the north while introducing Western-style education in the south.
The result is still visible today. In 2016, Nigeria’s entire North-East region produced 96,220 candidates for university entrance exams.
Meanwhile, Imo State in the south produced 104,383 candidates on its own. These disparities are not simply regional. They are structural outcomes of who was meant to read and write, and who was meant to follow.
And while colonialism undermined the future, it also erased the past. Many African systems that were dismissed as primitive had clear functional value.
In Buganda, clans were not just social groupings. They were ecological roles. Each clan had a totem, usually an animal, that its members were forbidden to eat.
This was not superstition. It was conservation. If your clan’s totem was the crested crane or the lungfish, you were responsible for its survival.
This decentralised system protected biodiversity through cultural practice, centuries before modern conservation frameworks existed. But colonial rule classified such traditions as backward, replacing them with imported norms that saw nature as a resource to exploit.
The disruption went further. In the 1990s, African heads of state were summoned to a closed-door policy meeting in a Southern African country.
On the table was a controversial idea. That education levels in African countries should be intentionally limited. The argument was framed in economic terms.
Too many educated people would overwhelm the job market, challenge political systems, and destabilise fragile economies.
Around this time, structural adjustment programs from the World Bank and IMF began to bite. Countries like Zambia, once proud of their public education systems, saw budgets slashed, teacher training colleges closed, and school fees reintroduced.
A generation grew up in crumbling classrooms with shrinking opportunities. Whether through foreign pressure or elite complicity, the result was the same. A continent slowly conditioned not to ask too many questions.
Meanwhile, across the ocean, Haiti reminds us what freedom really cost. After defeating French colonisers in 1804 and becoming the first Black republic, Haiti was forced to pay reparations.
To France. For its freedom. The original amount was 150 million francs, later reduced to 90 million. Haiti spent more than a century repaying it.
Economists estimate this debt cost the country between 21 and 115 billion US dollars in lost growth. Haiti was technically free, but chained to poverty by design.
And some chains are spiritual. In Kampala today, congregants in some churches are being urged to contribute millions of shillings to fund cathedral construction.
Many of these same believers cannot afford three meals a day. They give in hope. Not just for heaven, but for relief. This kind of religious loyalty is not just cultural. It is historical.
Missionary Christianity taught Africans to see virtue in suffering, to value the next life more than this one, and to associate wealth with divine favor.
The prosperity gospel is the new version of this teaching. But the underlying logic remains. Endure now, give more, and wait for your breakthrough. Do not ask why you are struggling. Just keep believing.
All these stories connect. Uganda’s carefully curated protectorate status. Ethnic manipulation. Suppressed education systems. Haiti’s impossible debt.
The religious obedience that masks systemic injustice. Together they show that colonialism never really left. It simply changed tactics. It moved into policy, into memory, into theology, into the architecture of our self-perception.
We could call it Post-Colonial Stress Syndrome. A condition where societies internalise the logic of domination long after the dominator has gone.
It appears in the jobs people think they can or cannot do. In the faith that rewards suffering but discourages inquiry. In the assumption that African systems were primitive, and European ones are default. It is a ghost that whispers you are free while pulling the strings.
Independence was never just about removing a flag. It was about reclaiming the authorship of who we are and who we want to be.
That work is not finished. It lives in our schools, our pulpits, our hiring practices, our textbooks, and our traditions. We must learn to see the scripts we have been running and find the courage to write new ones.
Because the hardest chains to break are not on the hands or the feet. They are on the mind.