I will be honest because I am tired of being polite about this. I have been to 4 African countries these past six years. I have been called a foreigner in a continent my ancestors built. I have been overcharged, underpaid, and treated like a problem to be managed by people whose grandparents and my grandparents shared the same colonial humiliation.

And we want to talk about Gaddafi’s dream?

We are the only people who survived someone else’s boot on our neck and then looked for a neck of our own to stand on. The colonizer infected us. with inferiority complex. Sixty years later we are still teaching that lesson to ourselves.

I say this with exhaustion. The colonial project did not just take our land and our labor. It taught us to see each other as competition, as threat, as less than. And until we are honest about that, no amount of free trade agreements or Pan-African speeches will save us.

African unity is not a political failure. It is a psychological one.