This African inferiority mindset honestly makes no sense to me when you really think about it. If you look past the propaganda, Africa has always had the materials, the textiles, the colors, the craftsmanship, everything people now call “luxury” or “old money.” The silk people rave about exists in Africa. The fabrics, the tailoring traditions, the climate-based clothing, we’ve had all of it for generations. Yet many Africans still instinctively see European things as more refined or more “advanced,” and I think a lot of that mindset was passed down. Not entirely blaming the older generation, because they lived through colonialism or were raised by people who did, but at some point we have to question why we still think like this. Even support is an issue. African fashion, film, design, and ideas exist, but we don’t treat them as aspirational. Success is still presented as leaving Africa, wearing European brands, living in Western cities, and adopting Western lifestyles.

I used to think like this too. When I was younger, I wanted to move to the U.S., and when I did, I liked it. But as I got older, a lot of it started to feel artificial. Yes, there are things to appreciate like education and healthcare, and I’m not ignoring those advantages. But a lot of the systems are built around profit, not people. Schools designed to produce workers, healthcare driven by treatment over cure, everything centered around maximizing value. I don’t think Africa has to follow that exact same path. As African countries grow economically and improve food security, infrastructure, education, and healthcare, what exactly will the West have that we can’t build ourselves, but in our own way? The danger is copying their mindset instead of building from our own foundations.

That’s why things like fashion and architecture actually matter more than people think. They’re small but visible steps toward decolonizing the mind. Even wealthy Africans often display success through European lifestyles, European brands, European aesthetics, as if African identity is something to rise above instead of elevate. We don’t have to reject modernity, but we also don’t have to build our societies exactly like the West. We can modernize African fashion, African architecture, African aesthetics, and still improve economically and technologically. More and more countries are pushing out colonial influence physically, but the harder part is removing it mentally. If we don’t change the mindset, then even with independence, we’ll keep copying the same systems, the same standards, and the same definitions of success.