The Indoctrination of Aspiration: Assimilation or Replacement?
A Civilisational Reckoning for Africa and the World
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
The most dangerous question in African history is not how colonialism happened, but why it succeeded. Why did entire civilisations—vast, complex, spiritually grounded—submit to foreign domination? Why did our ancestors, custodians of ancient systems of governance, economy, spirituality, and law, surrender their worlds to outsiders?
The answer is not simple cowardice, nor technological inferiority, nor even brute force alone. The answer lies in aspiration—specifically, in the indoctrination of aspiration.
1. Violence Came After Indoctrination Failed
History is clear: colonialism was never a choice. It was not a consensual transition into “modernity.” Where persuasion failed, violence followed.
From the severed hands and limbs of the Congo under Belgian rule, to the beheading and exile of ethno-governed leaders and tribal monarchs across Africa, colonialism announced itself through terror when indoctrination collapsed. Indigenous kings were dethroned. Sacred institutions were dismantled. Entire peoples were declared illegitimate within their own lands. This was slavery cloaked in administrative language.
Yet before the whip, before the gun, before the prison, came the idea—the promise. A promise that the world could be unified under one civilisation, one language, one economic system, one political form. A promise that indigenous systems were backward, inefficient, obsolete. A promise that salvation lay in abandonment. This was the first indoctrination of aspiration.
2. The Colonial Dream: Globalisation as Replacement
Africa was not alone in receiving this message. The world was told that progress required convergence—that all roads must lead to Europe. Languages must narrow into European tongues. Economies must become capitalist. Governance must become republican. Organisation must become bureaucratic. Spirituality must be replaced or subdued. Africans were taught to aspire not toward excellence as Africans, but toward resemblance to the West.
We abandoned our cooperative economies for capitalism. We replaced commicracy with bureaucracy. We dissolved ethnopublic governance into republican Statehood. We renamed our rulers “kings” and “queens” in the Western monarchical sense, stripping them of their communal logic. We learned to measure success by distance from home.
From childhood, the African dream was rewritten. Success meant departure. Pride meant passports and how fluent an African child can speak the foreign tongue. Every household learned to count its worth by how many children crossed the oceans. “Go abroad,” we were told. “Learn their systems. Return and build Africa.”
Governments institutionalised this belief, funding scholarships to Western universities, exporting their brightest minds to learn systems never designed for them. Africa was not alone in this—India, China, the Arab world, and many others, all participated. But the consequences, arguably, were not equal.
3. The Border Where the Dream Collapsed
When Africans arrived in Europe and America, they discovered a truth never taught in the classroom: globalisation had a colour boundary.
Merit dissolved at the border of skin. Equality evaporated in courtrooms, workplaces, and streets. The philosophy of shared humanity collapsed under institutional discrimination. Justice became unpredictable. Policing became existential. Jury bias destroyed lives. Accents became liabilities. Blackness became suspicion. The global dream failed at the border of racism.
This failure revealed a deeper truth: the globalisation sold to Africa was not globalisation at all. It was replacement masquerading as universality.
4. Kemet and the Forgotten Model of Globalisation
What makes this betrayal unforgivable is that Africa already invented globalisation.
Long before Europe imagined it, the world pilgrimaged to Kemet. Scholars, priests, builders, philosophers travelled from across the ancient world to learn. Yet Kemet never demanded replacement. It never erased languages. It never abolished indigenous systems. It never imposed uniformity. Kemet practised assimilation, not substitution.
What it offered was knowledge—not domination. Visitors took what resonated, adapted it to their own civilisations, and returned home transformed but intact. This is why African civilisations shared the same structural logic across thousands of territories—cooperative economies, communal governance, moral cosmology—but expressed them in diverse forms. This legacy survives today.
Africans did not abandon Christianity or Islam wholesale into foreign replicas. We Africanised them—through music, rhythm, spirituality, ritual, prophecy, and community. We did not erase indigenous languages; we hybridised them. We did not reject foreign dress; we fused it with ancestral aesthetics. This is the assimilation model—Africa’s civilisational signature.
5. Two Camps, Two Worldviews
The world today is divided not by ideology alone, but by aspirational logic.
One camp believes in total replacement: Europe, America, and historically Arab imperial systems—where conversion means erasure, and modernity means uniformity.
The other camp believes in assimilation: Africa, China, Russia—where foreign knowledge is absorbed selectively and reshaped within indigenous frameworks.
This distinction explains global tensions more than economics or politics ever could.
African’s attempt to hybridise capitalism into cooperative corporatism was rejected by western actors. This rejection fuelled the independence movements. Africans were not fighting modernity—they were resisting replacement.
6. The False Choice and the Third Path
The question before Africa today is often framed falsely: Do we globalise or do we remain traditional? This is a colonial trap.
The real question is this: Do we replace ourselves, or do we return to ourselves and engage the world from there?
The Manifesto of African Corporatist Society rejects both dominant camps. It rejects Western replacement. It rejects partial assimilation under foreign dominance. It calls for a wholesale return to indigenous systems without apology.
The solution is clear:
- Nationally, Africa must remain African—structurally, culturally, academically, economically, governmentally.
- Internationally, Africa must engage globally—cooperatively, sovereignly, without submission.
This is true globalisation. Globalisation must never demand internal replacement. It must never erase indigenous systems. It must never universalise one civilisation’s architecture. Globalisation asks only for mutual relation, not conformity.
Assimilation is a national right. Imposition is a civilisational crime.
Conclusion: The Call Home
The Manifesto of African Corporatist Society is a call—not to nostalgia, but to authorship. A call to Africans at home and in the diaspora to stop measuring success by resemblance to others. A call to live African again—not symbolically, but structurally.
Ethnosocialism, organised through commicracy, is not merely a govoxical proposal. It is a civilisational correction. It restores participation where bureaucracy ruled, unity where fragmentation reigned, and dignity where dependency was engineered.
Africa does not need permission to be itself. We must stop asking how well we fit into borrowed systems and begin asking how well we govern ourselves while standing in the world as equals.
The age of replacement is ending. The age of recall has begun. Africa is not returning to the past. Africa is returning to itself.
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