Phantom Limb

I was thinking about colonialism and the ramifications it's had on the people of my continent. Some centuries ago a bunch of Europeans decided to leave their home nations to come and claim & discover a land that already had native inhabitants. So they claimed territories and drew up borders, it is now called 'The Scramble for Africa'.

This mineral-rich land that was occupied by what they regarded as "savages" was just sitting there ready for the taking. So they came under the guise of good intentions as advocates of a higher, more righteous power. Yes, I'm referring to the missionaries too. They came as emissaries and nested themselves comfortably among a completely unaware people. A people that were about to have their entire futures torn away from them.

This is not a history lesson and I could care less for the specifics but let's recap. The Europeans came and took as they pleased. They took lives, minerals, and resources alike. These resources were then shipped back overseas and used to develop their own native nations. 

To this day the British crown jewels are garnished with gems that were never paid for but taken (read Stolen). 

They came and did as they pleased with no regard for the lives of those they considered inferior or less than. Africans didn't just watch while these invaders ravaged our home, a lot of us died trying to fight it. They came and they called us savages. They told us we prayed to fake God's and that theirs was the one true God. They massacred a people out of greed and we had no choice but to watch.

Fast forward to the present day and the continent is different. Predominantly black but in shambles. The '60s came and many a nation decided "fuck the white man". We got our independence, great right? yeah sure. It should have been, yet we didn't know that we now had to single-handedly deal with a wound that had festered over decades, a wound we are not allowed to look at in the first place.

Here we are a people whose natural progression was taken from them. The wound we were left to deal with consumed the entire arm. The only remnants are a familiar sensation of what it used to be. A phantom limb. 

The damages done to my people are completely irreversible. The natural progression of cultures and practices was halted because we were too busy protecting it from complete eradication. We could not give it these cultures and practices room to grow because they were constantly under threat. 

Meanwhile, they used stolen resources to better and advance their own homelands and in the process creating an incredibly large technological gap between us and them. 

We are now in this modern world and my people are still playing catch up because we were never allowed to fully step out of the shadow of colonialism. My people have inherited an enormous inferiority complex as a result.