SWORD
Japa: The British Colonization Reloaded
In the 19th century, they came for our land, our gold, and our people. Today, they come for our doctors, our engineers, and our tech talents. This is not history repeating itself; it is colonization rebranded. Welcome to the United Kingdom, the so-called “land of milk and honey,” where dreams are sold at the price of illusions. But is it truly paradise, or are we simply pawns in another version of the colonial playbook?
The New “Empire”
Once upon a time, the British Empire ruled over nations, extracting wealth and resources to fuel their industrial revolution. Now, the extraction is subtler but no less exploitative. This time, the resource is human capital. Countries like Nigeria, brimming with young, vibrant, and highly skilled professionals, are being systematically drained under the guise of opportunity.
The UK is no longer sending ships to Africa; instead, they’re rolling out “Global Talent Visas” and recruitment campaigns that target our best and brightest. The NHS, for example, is heavily reliant on foreign-trained medical professionals, many of whom come from nations like Nigeria, where healthcare systems are already overstretched. The irony? The UK’s colonial past directly contributed to the underdevelopment of these sectors in the first place.
The Illusion of Paradise
For many Nigerians, “Japa” has become the ultimate goal—an escape route from unreliable infrastructure, economic instability, and political chaos. The UK is marketed as a safe haven: a land of opportunity where dreams come true. But what they don’t tell you is that the streets are not paved with gold but with gray skies, exorbitant rent, and long hours of back-breaking labor.
The promise of a better life often masks the reality of systemic racism, wage disparities, and cultural alienation. You may arrive as a “skilled immigrant,” but you’re quickly reminded that you’re an outsider. The cost of living crisis will hit you harder than the cold weather, and suddenly, that “paradise” feels more like a well-packaged mirage.
Modern-Day Brain Drain
Back home, the effects of this new wave of migration are devastating. The brain drain weakens critical sectors, from healthcare to technology, leaving behind a gap that takes decades to fill. For every doctor that leaves Nigeria, thousands of patients are left underserved. For every tech genius that jets off to London, a start-up ecosystem in Lagos struggles to scale.
This isn’t just a loss for Nigeria; it’s a gain for the UK. They get to skip the cost of educating these professionals while reaping the benefits of their labor. It’s a win-win for them and a lose-lose for us.
The New Colonialism
At its core, “Japa” culture is the result of decades of systemic underdevelopment in countries like Nigeria. And let’s not forget who played a significant role in that underdevelopment. Colonial powers like the UK built their wealth by extracting resources from Africa, leaving behind economies designed to fail. The cycle continues: first, they underdeveloped us; now, they recruit our survivors.
The narrative is clear: leave your home, come to the UK, and be grateful for the crumbs they throw your way. It’s colonization reloaded, but this time, the colonized are volunteering—or so it seems.
What’s the Way Forward?
While “Japa” might seem like the only option, it’s time to rethink the narrative. Instead of building other nations, how about building our own? It’s not an easy road, but neither is living as a second-class citizen in someone else’s country. The solution lies in holding our leaders accountable, investing in local industries, and creating an environment where staying feels as promising as leaving.
Let’s stop selling our dreams to nations that don’t value us beyond our utility. The real paradise is not out there; it’s the one we build right here at home.
PRESS
We, the brave British, now building concentration camps’: How liberation movements in Africa were labelled ‘terrorist’
Western colonizers for years depicted themselves as saviors protecting locals from ‘satanic and barbaric terrorists’ who were actually fighting for their freedom
by Maxwell Boamah Amofa, research officer at the West Africa Transitional Justice Center (WATJ) and Coordinator for International Partnerships for African Development (IPAD)
‘We, the brave British, now building concentration camps’: How liberation movements in Africa were labelled ‘terrorist’
FILE PHOTO. British policemen hold men from the village of Kariobangi at gunpoint while their huts are searched for evidence that they participated in the Mau Mau Rebellion of 1952. © Getty Images/Bettmann
For centuries, African countries fought for freedom from the shackles of colonialism, from being forced on slave boats across the Atlantic to the West Indies to cultivate sugarcane and tobacco for the European economy, from being forcefully conscripted to fight for colonial powers in world wars or being put in cages in human zoos, whether in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in France, The Tervuren Park in Belgium, or far away in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in the United States.
Colonial ghosts: The hidden hands behind Africa’s shadow conflictsREAD MORE: Colonial ghosts: The hidden hands behind Africa’s shadow conflicts
To legitimize their stranglehold on African countries, the colonizers resorted to labelling African freedom fighters as terrorists under the concept of rule of law, which in practice was rule by oppressive colonial laws.
The imprisonment of Nelson Mandela serves as a stark reminder of this strategy.
Despite his efforts to liberate South Africa from the oppressive apartheid regime, which was deeply rooted in colonial policies of the Dutch and British, he was imprisoned for allegedly engaging in terrorist activities. He remained on the United States terrorist list until 2008, long after he had been honored with Nobel Peace prize in 1993 for his efforts in dismantling the apartheid system and ushering South Africa into a period of peace.
“Interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests”
This labelling strategy dates back to the dawn of European colonialism when they portrayed the doctrine of discovery as a universal legal principle to “civilize” what they described as dark and primitive continent by occupying African lands and imposing their values on the people under the veil of Christianity. In practice, Christianity was frequently used as a pretext to loot the resources of the people. As King Leopold in his letter to the missionaries in 1883 admitted:
“You will go certainly to evangelize, but your evangelization must inspire above all Belgium interests. Your principal objective in our mission in the Congo is never to teach the n****rs to know God, this they know already. They speak and submit to a Mungu, one Nzambi, one Nzakomba, and what else I don’t know. They know that to kill, to sleep with someone else’s wife, to lie and to insult is bad. Have courage to admit it; you are not going to teach them what they know already. Your essential role is to facilitate the task of administrators and industrials, which means you will go to interpret the gospel in the way it will be the best to protect your interests in that part of the world. For these things, you have to keep watch on disinteresting our savages from the richness that is plenty [in their underground]”.
RT
FILE PHOTO. King Leopold II of Belgium, late 19th-early 20th century. © Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images
Therefore, whether it was the ‘French mission civilisatrice’ (civilizing mission), ‘La missione civilizzatrice’ (civilizing mission) of the Italians, the ‘Portuguese Lusotropicalism’ or the ‘white man’s burden’, a term used to justify British and the United States imperial policies against the black race, the intention was the same: to create ‘a narrative of moral duty’ to protect the dignity of the people in the countries they wanted to colonize.
Reminiscing Nazi Germany strategy in Africa?
The first half of the 20th century saw colonial powers fortifying their grounds in African territories. However, one major problem they faced was fierce resistance from people whose economic and social settings were tied to their indigenous lands and were unwilling to let them go, such as the Kikuyu people of Kenya.
In the 1950s, the Kikuyu people and other Kenyans whose lands were occupied by the British colonial forces formed an armed resistance movement against the colonial power to protect their lands from occupation. In response, the British launched what was described as operation Anvil to protect their interest. As part of their operation, they instituted ‘concentration camps’ where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were forced into labor. Rape and sexual abuse of women, starvation, flogging, murder of inmates and death were commonplace in these camps.
RT
FILE PHOTO. Mau Mau suspects in a prison camp in Kenya in 1952. © Stroud/Express/Getty Images
British writer and broadcaster Nicholas Rankin, who experienced the situation, recalls:
“What I could not conceive, as I sat on the floor of my father’s study in my shorts and shirt and Bata sandals was that we, the brave British, were now building concentration camps”.
Torture practices in these camps were so cruel that the colony’s attorney General Eric Griffith-Jones described it as “distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany”.
During the Mau Mau struggle for freedom, it is estimated that over a million people were put in detention camps, with 13,000 Kenyans brutally massacred and about 1,000 people hanged by the British colonial force, while only 32 British had lost their lives in the struggle by 1954.
The myth behind ‘protecting human dignity’
In Kenya, despite their atrocities, the colonizers insisted that the Mau Mau resistance force were the terrorists, murdering British nationals, and that the operation of the colonizer was a civilizing mission by agents of the civilized world.
Britain’s ‘common’ wealth: How London ensures that Africa never prospersREAD MORE: Britain’s ‘common’ wealth: How London ensures that Africa never prospers
As the New York Times put it in 1952,
“It is inevitable in our time that the white missionary should be tied to a hated imperialism. In turning on the missionary, the rebellion rejects the Christianity which the missionary brought. In Africa, this does not seem to mean falling back on atheism or agnosticism; it means a return to paganism, to the leopard man, to ritual murders, to primitive magic and terror, that is how Mau Mau works”.
This criticism could also be viewed as a direct response to the African people who had begun to grow increasingly skeptical about the role of colonial application of Christian principles in protecting what they described as ‘human dignity’. Africans began to see the hypocrisy of the colonial Christian administration because many of these missionaries were serving as home guards for the colonial government, fighting actively against the Kenyan people or using brutal methods to acquire information from the Mau Mau detainees while working in the detention camps.
RT
FILE PHOTO. Members of the Kikuyu tribe held in a prison camp in Kenya. The British authorities held a blanket suspicion that members of the tribe were part of the Mau Mau terrorist rebellion on 3rd December 1952. © Stroud/Express/Getty Images
“Fanatical, bestial, satanic, savage, barbaric, degraded and merciless”
In 1952, the media, particularly newspapers which had extensive reach, were used to spotlight the narrative of the colonial powers, and they did so by banning African media that did not align with the interest of the colonial government under the guise of a so-called state of emergency.
If framing involves accentuating certain aspects of perceived reality to garner support, the British press provided a perfect atmosphere for this, because their actions allowed the colonial government to control information dissemination based on two major narratives: the superiority of the European military machinery and the depiction of white supremacist colonizers as saviors of the African people from those fighting for freedom, but labelled as terrorists, such as the Mau Mau.
The British press wrote about “heroic whites being slaughtered by fanatical, bestial, satanic, savage, barbaric, degraded and merciless Mau Mau terrorists”.
RT
FILE PHOTO. Prisoners are building a dam as part of the government’s ‘rehabilitation’ programme for Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya. © Bristol Archives/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
This sense of nationalist rhetoric was necessary for the colonial administration as it sought to rally support back home and create divisions among colonies; between those who supported the liberation struggle and the people who believed the ‘colonial saviors’ as part of the British divide and conquer policy, a strategy that became popular among the colonial powers after the Berlin conference of 1884/1885.
Weaponizing the terrorist label in the 21st century
The terrorist label has been used against several African leaders that wanted to liberate themselves from the firm grip of colonialism, such as Muammar Gaddafi, who they referred to as the “Mad dog of the Middle East”. A title that was given to the Libyan leader whose effort, like Kwame Nkrumah’s, to unite the African countries under the Gold Dinar currency threatened the vested interests of those who wanted to exploit African resources and maintain their global hegemony. President Reagan of the United States was the first to use this title: “We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution, Muslim fundamentalist revolution, which is targeted on many of his own Arab compatriots”.
Brutally murdered 13 years ago, this leader is only growing more belovedREAD MORE: Brutally murdered 13 years ago, this leader is only growing more beloved
Gaddafi’s effort to unite the African countries was subsequently overshadowed by this narrative, depicting him as a terrorist against his own people.
Whether the Mad Dog of the Middle East, The Juntas of Sahel States or the Butcher of Syria, such labels have been an essential part of colonial policies for two major reasons. In Africa, it ensured that Africans would not unite against the main threat, which was the imperialist powers, but instead channel their energies to their fellow Africans fighting for freedom as threats and, secondly, it ensured that the colonizers gained support from the international community.
