Jude Chidi Ogene🇳🇬🇺🇸

One of the most shameless lies still told about colonialism is that European powers gifted Africa its roads, its schools, its hospitals. Shut up! You gifted us nothing. We built it, we paid for it, we bled for it. Those roads were not built so African farmers could trade with each other or so African communities could grow. They were built to move our minerals and our crops from the interior to the ports and ship them to Europe. Every kilometre of colonial railway followed the same logic: not to serve us, but to drain us. The hospitals were built to keep labourers alive enough to keep working, not because colonial administrators believed African lives had value, but because a sick worker interrupts the extraction schedule. My grandmother was denied treatment for her twins dying of smallpox because my grandfather was in prison for resisting colonial rule. She lost one of them. And who built any of it? Our grandparents. Forced, beaten, worked into the ground under quotas, mutilated when they failed to meet them. When someone calls that a gift, what they are really asking is that we thank our oppressors for the infrastructure our own suffering produced. We also paid for it in cash. In 1932, French colonial commissioner Robert de Guise imposed new taxes on Togolese people whose incomes had already collapsed by nearly sixty percent during the Great Depression. When women dared to protest, France shipped 174 colonial soldiers from Côte d'Ivoire to crush them. Girls as young as thirteen were raped and 12 protesters were killed. That is how the roads, the schools, the administrative buildings, the hospitals were financed: with our blood. Not European generosity. And when independence finally came, the colonisers left with a bill. They calculated the cost of everything they had built through our coerced labour and our taxed income, called it colonial debt, and demanded repayment from the very nations they had spent a century looting. We paid for our own exploitation. Twice! In Europe, when a government builds a road, no citizen is asked to be grateful. It is called public service. But when colonisers built infrastructure on our land, with our bodies, with our money, after killing and raping us, we are expected to call it the "benefits of colonialism". The audacity!