I was on TikTok last week when a video caught my attention, a man talking with the kind of confidence that comes from never having had to question what you were taught, explaining that Africans had no written language before Europeans arrived, that we were people without history, without systems, without anything worth knowing about until someone else showed up and handed us the tools to become human, and I watched it twice, not because I was angry exactly, though I understood why anger would have been a reasonable response, more because I was sitting with something harder to name, the specific sadness of watching a lie told so cleanly and so casually by someone who had no idea it was a lie.
I put my phone down and kept moving, of course it bothered me, but I couldn’t quite place why yet, and that night I went to sleep and I had a dream, and I want to tell you about it because I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.
In the dream the world looked like itself, which is the only way I can describe it, because it wasn’t a fantasy and it wasn’t me reimagining anything, it was simply a world that could have existed if nobody had ever decided that one part of humanity had the right to reorganise the rest of it. There were cities I recognised from history books that were never assigned to me in school. Trade routes were running across the continent and beyond, not carved out by force but built over generations by people who knew exactly what they were doing and why. The mathematics were African, written and calculated long before anyone came to teach it, the astronomy was African, mapped into the architecture of temples and the movement of entire civilisations, the medicine was African, grown from the ground and passed down through generations of people who understood the body long before it was studied in the languages we were told were the only ones that counted, and none of it was a surprise to anyone in the dream because none of it had ever been interrupted.
Of everything in the dream, the languages are what I couldn’t stop thinking about after I woke up, because in the dream nobody was apologising for how they spoke or raising their children in a tongue that was not their own because somewhere along the line the world had decided that their own was not enough, people were just speaking, Yoruba and Igbo and Urhobo and Hausa and Zulu and Wolof and Amharic and so many others, and it was just normal, nobody was making a big deal of it, nobody was trying to preserve it like something fragile, it was just life, and sitting with that feeling even inside the dream made me realise how much had been taken, because you don’t always know what was taken from you until you dream of a world where it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t just Africa, which is the thing about the dream that I keep coming back to, because every part of the world was just itself, the Americas still belonging to the people who had always lived in them and knew them, Asia trading on its own terms, and even Europe was there, just Europe, without the part where it decided that its way of doing things was the only way and that everyone else needed to be fixed, and what stayed with me was not that there was no conflict because I am not that naive, people have always disagreed and fought and failed each other, but the conflicts were their own, they stayed where they started, they were not exported or imposed or dressed up as civilisation while carrying a gun.
And then I woke up, and I just lay there for a moment before I reached for my phone, and when I did the news was still the news, somewhere a resource being fought over, somewhere a country being told what it was allowed to want, and I put the phone back down and stared at the ceiling for a while thinking about that man on TikTok who genuinely believed what he was saying, thinking about everything our forefathers knew and built and passed down that got buried under someone else’s version of the story, thinking about all the languages that are slowly going extinct, thinking about how much of what we were taught as history was really just the story that the people with the guns decided to write down.
I don’t know what to do with a dream like that except tell it, because the world I woke up to that morning is not the world I was inside that night, and I know it probably never will be, not in this lifetime, but the dream didn’t feel like an escape, it felt more like a reminder, like my mind going back to something that was real before it was taken and saying look, this existed, this was here, and the fact that it was interrupted doesn’t mean it was never true, and I think that is the thing that the man on TikTok and everyone who thinks like him will never fully understand, that you cannot erase what actually happened by telling a different story loudly enough for long enough, because the original story is still there, and it’s not just there, it’s in the languages that are still fighting to survive, and it’s not just that, it’s also in the knowledge our forefathers passed down that we are only now beginning to remember.
