By Oswald Hanciles
They colonized the land. Now they’ve colonized the mind.
Africa is home to some of the most resource-rich soil on earth. Its rivers, minerals, and farmland could feed the entire continent twice over. And yet, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, over 600 million Africans go to bed hungry every single night.
But on a Friday evening, you will find packed bars from Lagos to Lusaka, from Nairobi to Accra, men cheering, crying, and arguing over whether Arsenal or Manchester United won a match played 5,000 miles away.
This is not coincidence. This is by design.
When physical colonization ended, something far more sophisticated replaced it. Cultural colonization does not need soldiers or borders. It needs television, brand loyalty, and emotional investment redirected away from home. It needs a man in Kampala to feel more devastated by a Chelsea loss than by the fact that his own country’s football infrastructure has been underfunded for decades.
The British Premier League generates over seven billion dollars annually. A significant portion of that wealth flows directly from African viewership, African subscriptions, African replica jerseys sold in African markets. The continent exports its passion and imports nothing back but distraction.
Meanwhile, the African Cup of Nations, one of the oldest continental football tournaments in the world, struggles to attract the same fever. African clubs hemorrhage their best talent to European leagues before those players have ever had the chance to build something at home. The system is not broken. The system is working exactly as intended.
This is what ideological capture looks like in the 21st century. You do not need to occupy a country if you can occupy its attention. You do not need to drain a treasury if you can drain a people’s emotional energy toward institutions that will never invest in them.
Frantz Fanon warned about this in the 1960s. He called it the internalization of the colonizer’s values. When the colonized begin to desire what the colonizer desires, celebrate what the colonizer celebrates, and measure themselves by the colonizer’s standards, the work of domination becomes self-sustaining.
The question is not whether Africans should watch football. The question is whether passion that powerful, loyalty that deep, emotion that real, could ever be turned inward toward building African leagues, African institutions, and African futures.
What would the continent look like if even a fraction of that energy was redirected home?
References:
– UN Food and Agriculture Organization, *The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World*, 2023
– Frantz Fanon, *The Wretched of the Earth*, 1961 (Grove Press)
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