By Femi Akomolafe
There is something tragic in the ritualistic way African mis-rulers continue to shuffle, hat in hand, toward the gates of a dying empire, seeking affirmation from an institution whose moral and historical bankruptcy is as evident as its fading relevance.
It would be comic if it were not so grotesque to watch the abject self-abasement of African plantation supervisors in 2026.
One struggles to imagine what precisely Nigerians, or Africans more broadly, are expected to celebrate when a president from Africa is received by the brother of a man whose personal scandals have become global shorthand for elite degeneracy. King Charles’ brother, Andrew, stands accused of pedophilia and alleged cannibalism.
Predictably, the optics have been spun as triumph. Attention needs to be shifted from the scandal engulfing the Nazi-loving British Monarchy. Like clockwork, a faithful plantation manager was summoned to the big house, and, like an obedient child, Tinubu answered the summons.
Stripped of the charade of its ceremonial varnish, African leaders still behave as though their legitimacy requires the benediction of an archaic monarchy.
Why does a continent of 1.4 billion souls, rich in immense resources, culture, and enormous potential, still measure its worth by proximity to a crown forged in conquest and sustained by historic plunder?
This is not diplomacy; it is psychological, even a psychic, submission.
The so-called Commonwealth – what a deliciously deceptive term – invites us into a club where nothing is truly common, and the wealth is conspicuously absent for those who need it most.
The question that Tinubu and his fawning entourage failed to ask themselves is what exactly is “common” between the former colonizer and the colonized, beyond a shared history of massacres (*), oppression, and exploitation which continue till today.
Africans should ask, where, precisely, is the “wealth” that was supposedly the dividend of this imperial association?
Let us in Africa put a stop to the sickening pretense that the Commonwealth is anything more than a relic, an anachronism dressed in diplomatic niceties, designed to preserve the illusion of relevance for a declining power while maintaining the psychological dependency of its former colonies.
Any African who has been to the UK knows how virulently racist British society is, and how differently you are treated as a Black person, even as a citizen.
Commonwealth be damned.
And we, the hoi poloi, are supposed to clap like the mindless picaninies Boris Johnson called us. Here he is: “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.”
In his inimitable way, Frantz Fanon warned us about this pathology with prophetic clarity. In The Wretched of the Earth, he observed that “the colonized man is an envious man.” But Fanon did not mean envy in the trivial sense; he spoke of a deeper, more insidious longing – a desire to be recognized, validated, and ultimately accepted by the very structures that dehumanized him.
This is precisely what we are witnessing today.
The tragedy here is that African leaders do not merely engage with these archaic European institutions; they seek their approval. They crave the symbolic embrace of the former master, mistaking it for international legitimacy.
This is a tragic misreading of power. A betrayal of sovereign power.
As we have written on this blog several times, power does not beg for recognition. It compels it.
Silliness does not begin to describe you if you have to crawl to Buckingham or Windsor Palace to be validated by the shameless inheritor of a cruel British empire.
The Commonwealth’s visa regimes alone expose the farce of the organization. Citizens of so-called “white” Commonwealth countries move with relative ease into the “mother country,” while Africans, whose ancestors’ labor financed the imperial project, are subjected to humiliating scrutiny, bureaucratic obstruction, and outright discrimination.
If this is a “commonwealth,” then it is one structured along the same racial hierarchies that defined colonial rule.
Nothing has fundamentally changed. Only the language has softened.
Carter G. Woodson, in The Mis-Education of the Negro, diagnosed this condition with surgical precision: “When you control a man’s thinking, you do not have to worry about his actions.” That control is not merely educational; it is civilizational. It is embedded in the very frameworks through which African elites interpret the world. I
They have been conditioned to believe that validation flows from the West, that prestige is conferred by proximity to European institutions, and that their own indigenous frameworks are insufficient.
This diagnosis is too complex to penetrate the skulls of compromised leaders like Tinubu. So they perform deference to the same institution that brutalized their ancestors. Unashamed, they vibrate with gratitude for being granted audience with historical plunderers like Charles, the king of England.
And the tragedy is that they do so willingly.
Fanon again, as always, cuts to the bone: “The colonized intellectual has learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself.” But instead of asserting sovereignty, our elites assert their usefulness to the very systems that undermine their people. They become intermediaries, brokers of dependency, custodians of a status quo that benefits everyone except the African masses.
This is why the spectacle of African presidents seeking audiences with European monarchs is not merely embarrassing; it is revealing.
It reveals a class of leaders who have internalized their subordination and relish in their inferiority.
It reveals a continent still trapped in what Fanon described as “the zone of nonbeing”—a space where identity is defined externally, where worth is measured against foreign standards, and where autonomy and sovereignty are perpetually deferred.
And yet, the world has changed.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FemiAkomolafe
