“Africa will be free not when her enemies disappear, but when her people begin to love her properly.”
— From the Gospel of Neo-Liberationism
I. The Counterfeit of Love: How the West Weaponized Affection
They told us love was docility.
They told us love was forgiveness without memory.
They told us love meant turning the other cheek while they looted the altar.
And we believed them—because they wore cassocks, spoke through scripture, and arrived with open arms and closed coffers.
The colonial conquest did not begin with swords.
It began with false intimacy—an invasion disguised as embrace.
They said “God loves you”, while digging the graves of our gods.
They said “we come in love”, while building prisons of culture, language, and thought.
This was not love.
It was strategic affection—affection as anesthesia.
They softened the blow of conquest with hymns.
They baptized our resistance into submission.
They turned the Christ into Caesar and called it salvation.
And now, in this age of neoliberal cloaks,
they still whisper love while stealing the marrow of our economies.
They give “aid” wrapped in conditionalities.
They fund NGOs that pity us while controlling the narrative.
They speak of “helping Africa” with the smugness of saviors,
never realizing true love empowers the beloved to stand alone.
Let it be known:
Love without sovereignty is exploitation in drag.
We have been colonized through the misuse of the very word meant to liberate.
II. The Revolutionary Definition of Love
What then is Love, truly?
Love is radical recognition.
It is the refusal to erase.
It is the honoring of a people not for their usefulness, but for their sacred being.
To love Africa is not to pity her.
To love Africa is not to romanticize her past, nor ignore her wounds.
To love Africa is to fight for her right to remember, to define herself, to heal on her own terms.
Love is loyalty to the dignity of the other.
It is political, cultural, spiritual.
It refuses assimilation. It rejects tokenism.
It refuses to see the African as a “cause” to support,
and begins to see her as a civilizational voice long silenced.
III. The Ancestral Art of Loving Africa
Africans once knew love not as sentiment, but as structure—
Ubuntu, not Cupid.
To be human was to belong, to care communally, to tether one’s identity to the well-being of the village.
Love was seen in the circle of elders, the rhythm of drums, the burial songs, the shared millet.
Colonialism severed this ontology.
It made us suspicious of each other.
It made us love the colonizer and fear ourselves.
It taught us to trust whiteness and question blackness.
But now, a resurrection is near.
To love Africa today is to reconstruct these ancestral ties—
to remake our affection into architecture:
Schools that decolonize.
Languages that revive.
Histories that heal.
We must replace romantic nationalism with restorative nationalism—
A nationalism rooted in love for truth, not hatred for others.
A nationalism that teaches our children to see beauty in blackness,
not as resistance, but as the natural state of being.
IV. The Work of Love Is Political
To love Africa is to:
Dismantle the IMF’s gospel of debt
Expose the corruption that cloaks itself in Pan-African slogans
Refuse French neocolonial currency systems masquerading as “franc zones”
Withdraw affection from leaders who betray the people for foreign applause
Create platforms (like PowerAfrika) that re-narrate the African story on African terms
This is no poetic exercise.
It is war.
Not with guns, but with the full arsenal of memory, creativity, and courage.
For too long, Africa has been told that love is peace.
But in the mouth of a colonized mind,
“peace” becomes passivity.
Let us now define love as righteous agitation.
Let our affection for Africa burn with clarity.
V. Final Benediction: Love as Liberation
This love is not soft.
It is not sweet.
It is not sentimental.
It is the kind of love that calls back the ancestors,
that speaks truth to pastors who preach submission,
that sees through the velvet gloves of international diplomacy,
and declares:
“If your love disempowers me, then your love is a lie.”
Let every African, every member of the Diaspora,
every stolen voice, every forgotten village hear this today:
We will love Africa not by licking her wounds but by healing them.
We will love her not by apologizing for her rage, but by sanctifying it.
We will love her not with tears, but with tools.
Not with nostalgia, but with Neo-Liberation.
This is not love as taught by empire.
This is love as rebellion.
This is love as restoration.
This is love as revolution.