Author’s Note: Names and schools have been altered to protect anonymity.
We think we are free, and we want to be free, but we are not. This menacing truth is the situation that victims of colonial oppression must face in the post-colony.
In the spring of 2025, a twenty-five-year-old Badmus Arowolo left the brown-roofed city of Ibadan and moved to the hub of Texas, Lubbock, in pursuit of a master’s degree in art history. The infinite number of unfulfilled dreams in his home country assured him he would always be famished. Four years ago, his brother—a gifted singer—had won a monetary prize at a talent show, a prize he never received. That dazed him. And it is that strikingly off-putting and, somewhat, disorienting realization he needed to know the country he so desperately wanted to cling to couldn’t be home. Home, for him, cannot be utopia; but it must also not be the mouth of a shark.
Nigeria, his home country, could not accommodate the weight of his dreams—educational, artistic, or otherwise. Nigeria was, like him, a lost child; they had too much in common: wandering in the shadows of unfulfillment. He had wanted to go to university to study and become a lawyer, but instead, Arowolo found himself in the History Department at the University of Ibadan. But even the knowledge of history could not offer him hope; it couldn’t prove to him that Nigeria works for some dreams, too. So, menaced by the boundless units of unfulfilled aspirations, he applied to schools in the United States, accepted the first admission offer, and left Nigeria.
In America, Arowolo found a sweetness and an honesty that had long been absent from his world. In the eyes and speech of his acquaintances, he could feel their kindness. Unlike in his country — where everything, it seemed, was designed for him to fail — America and its people, for all their flaws, genuinely wanted him to succeed. This is what economic and ‘faux’ socio-political sufficiency afford people: It is the veneer of American exceptionalism that they can groove with the world in a way that creates a layer on one’s pupil, making what one encounters (or at least, what one thinks one encounters) appear as an inviting sweetness and kindness, milk and honey, that anyone needs to see and feel to convince themselves that a leap toward finding home in America isn’t such a bad idea after all.
But there is a price for everything. The price some people have to pay for their exceptionalism is some sort of insidious ignorance—an ignorance that blinds them to the rest of the human condition as it exists beyond their society.
This is why, after some months in the United States, a professor in Arowolo’s department felt compelled to send him an article in which a white male political theorist justifies colonialism. The theorist, with all the subtlety of a blunt instrument, argues that ceteris paribus, colonialism is good for Africans because it brought certain ‘civilized’ goods to the African continent. For example, colonialism brought ‘Western’ education, technology, and infrastructure to the African continent — as though such goods could ever outweigh the destruction that colonialism brought.
This is menacing. Everyone discovers, at the end of the day, that pathological tendencies in people aren’t endemic to one’s country of birth alone. They also exist in the place one runs to in search of home, in search of peace and love. But even if one cannot find peace and love in a place, one should at least be spared from prejudice. We can take for granted the question of the good colonialism brought to the continent. For instance, let’s concede, it gave the continent rapid technological development (relative to the West).
But a rational mind ought to wonder: this good that colonialism brought to the continent of Africa, how does it make a (moral—perhaps to put it aptly, sensible) case for colonialism if the same goods can be achieved through trade or international engagement? Arowolo’s professor and the theorist’s confession is a statement of a long-in-the-tooth belief in the West: Africans are incapable of self-governance, and they have no history of innovation. (I raise you the ancient Benin Kingdom!)
It is, indeed, disheartening. Why, then, should we make a case for the dehumanization that is colonialism, simply because it has, by some twisted imperialistic logic, produced a few ‘good’? If your child is killed by your neighbor, and this prompts you to have another child who ends up producing a cure for cancer, does that mean we can make a case for why your neighbor’s killing of your child is good? It is an insult to reason to think we can. It is nauseous. It is foul. Yet, alas, even a professor is not immune to the seduction of intellectual nausea.
On another day, while brewing coffee in the department’s lounge, Arowolo’s professor—in the casual manner of those who don’t think about their assumptions—asked him if he knew any scammers from Nigeria. Nigerians are among the most successful and educated immigrant groups in the United States. Importantly, also, Arowolo is a graduate student. But the only question his professor could think of asking was whether he knew scammers. Frightened by what the figure that stands in front of him represents: a malign agent, he smiled, answered no, and gently carried on with the conversation. He wanted to ask if he—the professor—knows any American mass shooters, but the worms crawling in his stomach stopped his ability to ask distortive questions.
When he narrated the experience to his roommate, astonished, his roommate asked why he didn’t tell the professor off and expressed his anger at being asked such a condescending and obscene question. Arowolo not expressing his anger, his roommate noted, was just a way of telling the professor it was okay to keep saying that to Nigerians and, thus, a failure to educate the professor.
Arowolo’s roommate’s assumption—that it would have been good and served as a preventive measure if Arowolo had expressed how he truly felt—is illusory. It fails to recognize the oppressive double bind present in Arowolo’s encounter. Philosopher Sukaina Hirji uses the term ‘oppressive double bind’ to describe the traps set by systems of oppression, where no matter what the victim chooses, they are damned: The victim faces a choice situation in which, no matter what they do, they end up being mechanisms of their own oppression. In such a bind, one must sacrifice either what is prudentially good or what is morally good. For him, to speak out would have meant surrendering the peace he had learned to navigate in a world that already gave him less of it—thus, neglecting reasons of prudence to act. And to remain silent, as he did, is to let a system that dehumanizes people like him flourish—thus, he neglected his moral reasons to act.
If Arowolo had expressed his anger, he could have prevented the professor from treating other Nigerians condescendingly. He would have done what is morally good: curtail just a tiny bit of oppression in this world. But if he did this, he would have reinforced the stereotype that so-called black-skinned people are susceptible to irrational anger and too sensitive to flimsy issues, thus sacrificing his prudential good. However, if he does the prudentially good thing, he will have to sacrifice what is morally good. Arowolo was trapped in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ choice situation, bound by an oppressive logic that had no place for him to be free.
Arowolo wasn’t free; his roommate only illusorily thought so, thus failing to see the reality of Arowolo’s confinement.
This oppressive double bind also ensnares victims of colonially transformed societies, not just Arowolo. Victims of colonialism are condemned to encounter choice situations in which what is good for them is bound up with another good. Consider how, if one does not uphold the norms of valuing Western epistemologies in, say, Nigeria—such as speaking the English language—one risks the possibility of unemployment, since the ability to speak English, and how well one speaks it, serves as a paradigm for intelligence and competence in the colonially transformed society.
Upholding norms of Western epistemologies reinforces the status quo that views traditional forms-of-life as savagery, thus helping to perpetuate the inegalitarian effects of colonial oppression. Not perpetuating these effects is a morally good thing. The problem here is that the victim of colonial oppression who perpetuates their own oppression faces a choice situation in which what is prudentially good for them is bound up with what is morally best. It is prudentially good for them to get a job. But to do this, they must sacrifice what is morally good. Even when they make this sacrifice, the problem remains.
If they don’t perpetuate the effects of oppression, they will have to give up what is prudentially good, thus hurting themselves in turn—through unemployment, starvation, and being mistreated because of their social status. So, in any case, the morally best thing to do comes with a moral cost, insofar as it is morally good to take care of oneself.
If they perpetuate the effects of the oppressive system, they choose to act based on their reasons of prudence, but in doing so, they sacrifice what is morally best, only to reinforce the very structure that keeps them oppressed. In the end, the ‘good’ they cling to carries its own cost, a cost that is measured by the invisible chains that bind them and refuse to let them be free. They are damned—for the victim’s pursuit of both prudential and moral good is always threatened as long as the oppressive system remains.
Many want victims to resist and not perpetuate their own oppression. If they respect themselves, some contend, victims must not merely resist the system that binds them but their own acquiescence to it. Because if one has self-respect, one cannot contribute to harmful practices that are set up to harm them. Even if one has no self-respect, one should at least be moved, we might think, by the damage being done to their kinsmen and refrain from contributing to such harm. One must be self-respecting and/or other-respecting; these arguments often go.
What, then, can we do? Oppressive double binds exist, and the illusion of freedom is why we think we are boundless; it is why we think we are water that no chain can bind, and no hand can break. But we’re bound already, and we have been broken. We are damned!
Idowu Odeyemi
Idowu Odeyemi is an essayist, critic, and philosopher; right now, he is a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Fellow at the Center for African and African American Studies. His essay “On Accent and Confidence” (published by Isele Magazine) was recognized as one of the 50 notable essays from Africa in 2024, and his essay “Living in America, Leaving Nigeria” (published by The Republic)was recognized as one of the 18 notable essays from Nigeria in 2023.
Twitter: OdeyemiIdowu2
Photo by Kirill Kruglikov on Unsplash