Yet Again They Shout, “Afrika should get over Colonialism and Racial Capitalism Already!”: Reconciling a History of Injustice with Inherited Paths Towards Collective Healing

Introduction: The Violence of Forgetting

The demand to "get over" colonialism and racial capitalism is a profound failure to recognise that these systems were not mere historical events but are ongoing, lived realities that have shattered Afrikan material, spiritual, and psychological worlds. True "getting over" is impossible without first undertaking a deep process of collective healing, a journey for which Afrikan epistemologies and cosmologies centered on land restitution, epistemic justice, and ancestral relationality provide the essential, inherited paths forward. The central question in this paper is similar to those from the Afrikan Liberation Gathering (ALG) 2024: How does a continent "get over" a past that is not past, when its land, economies, knowledge systems, and very soul remain deeply wounded? Through an expanded thesis from the Gathering’s two panel discussions, we write this essay to unmask those unhealed wounds that are conceptually known but not understood or felt;  diagnose the shuttered worlds that were-and-are produced by the festering wounds; and lastly, keeping to the analogy of the practice of medicine, we illuminate methods of collective healing as passed down through ancestral wisdom.

The Wounds and Why We Can’t “Get Over” It

 It is a myth that colonialism and racial capitalism are over. The panelists' testimonies are evidence of the enduring, lived reality under these structures. Haunted geography challenges the myth and reveals land as a present site of injustice. 

The failure to address land issues means that three decades after democracy, the land reform project in South Africa has collapsed, continuing the condition of settler-native relations. Land dispossession is a current, pressing issue that is not merely academic or spiritual. The contemporality of perpetual land dispossession is evidenced in the lived and familial experiences of the ALG panelists in these ways: 

a) Yoliswa Msweli’s Family Displacement (Corporate Dispossession)

Yoliswa Msweli’s personal and family history provides a stark illustration of ongoing corporate dispossession.

• Msweli discovered five years ago that her family, the Mtiane family, had been dispossessed of their land in Zinkwazi.^[2]

• The displacement occurred when Hewlett was expanding its plantation.

• The land, now used for agriculture, nuts, sugarcane, and featuring gorgeous lagoons and oceans, remains unavailable to the Mtianes, who remain landless.

• This displacement makes Msweli feel "sugar free very quickly," highlighting the impact of corporations (which most people consume from) on land justice.

• Msweli notes that this ongoing dispossession leads to the pain deepening and people becoming radicalized, living in a "haunted space" until the work is resolved and true freedom is experienced.

b) Yvonne Phyllis’s "Geographies of Racial Capitalism^[3]"

Yvonne Phyllis, who is a child of fifth and second-generation farmworkers, frames the farm environment as a contemporary site of racial oppression.

• She refers to the farm as a "geography of racial capitalism".

• Phyllis grew up with a great sense of injustice and violence, having witnessed her grandfather, father, mother, and grandmother being humiliated.

• In this geography, Black farmworkers were, were, and still remain unfree on the land.

• The farms are characterized by being very paternalistic, and workers live a life of precarity.

• This unequal power relation between the owner (who has exclusive rights) and the inhabitants (who lack secure tenure) amplifies the humiliation.

• Phyllis emphasizes that for farmworkers, healing is linked to ending this precarity and having their belonging recognized legislatively or otherwise.

Spiritually: Yoliswa calls for a serious, integrated engagement with spirituality (in its diverse forms) as a foundation for healing, while cautioning against a rigid, rules-based approach.

c) Tshepo Madlingozi’s Data on Failed Land Reform

Tshepo Madlingozi provides concrete data demonstrating that the structure of settler-colonial ownership remains intact, rendering "decolonisation" incomplete.

• He states unequivocally that the process of land reform has failed in South Africa 30 years into democracy.

• He cites stark data: only 4 percent of the land has been redistributed (and only 2 percent restituted).

• This failure is partly attributed to the fact that there was never a serious, intentional project of land reform from 1994.

• Furthermore, the struggle for land return is often prosecuted from a capitalistic mentality of individual ownership or communal ownership, which "does violence to the land" because Mother Earth cannot be owned.

Not only is land issue illustrated at personal and relational levels in the panel discussions, its implications on South Africa’s national integrity and constitutionality^[4] are offered. Specifically, 

Tshepo Madlingozi directly challenges the efficacy of post-apartheid governance by questioning "what is constitutionalism in the context of ongoing land disposition", arguing that without fundamental land redistribution and restitution, a democratic state remains incomplete, failing to achieve true decolonization. Madlingozi views the historical land seizures as a deliberate "project of constitutionalising settler colonialism", and asserts that because this land structure remains largely intact, the current democracy perpetuates the basic and unequal "relation of settler and natives". This persistence of dispossession prevents individuals from achieving full belonging, as the lack of lefatshe (land) deprives them of both lefa (inheritance) and fatshe (grounding) in Setswana/Sesotho, thus forcing them to "continue to be a nobody in the land of your ancestors".

The consequence of this sustained injustice is a deeply "Haunted Geography" marked by profound spiritual damage. Yoliswa Msweli notes that to be dispossessed is to be "stripped naked," leaving people marooned in a "haunted space". Madlingozi supports this view, stating that 300 to 350 years of land dislocation has resulted in "the whole land being haunted". At a deeper cosmological level, dispossession led to the declaration that "The land is dead"-ilizwe lifile, signifying the shattering of the material, social, and spiritual world of Afrikan Black people. Spiritually, this rupture destroyed the vital relationship linking the living, the yet to be born, and the living dead. Consequently, healing the land is essential; Madlingozi observes that communities who receive land back may still fall into conflict because they are "sitting on the land that has not been healed".

The Diseased Mind: The Epistemic and Psychological Inheritance

The persistent wounds inflicted by colonialism and its contemporary permutations extend far beyond the mere material theft of land and resources, deeply infiltrating the intellectual and psychological spheres of African existence. This non-material violence creates a fundamental state of disorientation and dependency, aptly summarised by Kekeletso Khena as the "infected lens". This condition arises because those seeking solutions for the continent are operating "from an infected mind" derived from the historical colonial encounter, which was characterised by "insatiable greed" and a destructive notion of scarcity. This structural dependency is cemented by African elites, or amaGqobhoka ^[5](the mission-educated individuals who adopted Western ways, dress, and ideas) who perpetuate dominant knowledge archives and "pragmatic" political frameworks, casting indigenous knowledge systems to the side. Consequently, decolonisation must begin with an urgent process of unlearning the mindsets, internalised "majority culture" of whiteness, and externally imposed definitions that continue to uphold oppressive structures. 

These are fleshed out as a conceptual framework that illustrates a colonial "infection", how it is perpetuated by elite structures, and how it manifests internally, requiring a deliberate process of unlearning for healing to begin. The framework rests on those concepts that the panelists presented at the Afrikan Liberation Gathering. 

1. The Pathogen: The Colonial "Infection" (Kekeletso Khena)

• Core Nature: The "infection" is not a mere idea but a foundational worldview based on Scarcity and Insatiable Greed.

   

• Origin: It arrived with colonisers who were themselves fleeing the consequences of this worldview in Europe. They injected it into Afrikan societies that operated on principles of Abundance and Relationality.

   

• Result: This creates the "Infected Lens" – a corrupted framework for perceiving reality, where land is for extraction, knowledge is for domination, and value is defined by accumulation.

2. The Vector: Epistemic Dependency & The AmaGqobhoka Elite (Kekeletso Khena & ThandOlwethu Dlanga)

• The Mechanism: The infected lens creates a state of Epistemic Dependency. Afrikans are forced to seek solutions from the very epistemological systems that caused the problem. Khena’s question, "Who informs the Ph.D.?" is crucial here, revealing that even higher education is a system for curating and disseminating this infected knowledge.

   

• The Agents: This dependency is institutionalised and perpetuated by the AmaGqobhoka – the "mission-educated" or "civilised" elite. They act as the carriers of the disease, having internalised the colonial worldview.

   

• The Political Manifestation: The AmaGqobhoka elite champion Pragmatic Pan-Afrikanism. This is a political project that rejects revolutionary, indigenous unification (Nkrumah) in favour of maintaining colonial borders and adopting Western political and economic models. It divorces Afrikanism from its spiritual and cultural roots, reducing it to a hollowed-out political idea.

3. The Symptomatology: The Internalised Condition & Psychological Infiltration (Thandi Dyani)

• The Internalisation: The external systems and structures (education, media, "majority culture") lead to Psychological Infiltration. The infected lens is no longer just an external pressure but becomes an internal compass.

• The Diagnosis: The Diseased Mind. This is the state where an Afrikan individual or collective uses external, often white, frameworks to define their own intelligence, beauty, and worth.

• Suffers from a fractured identity and belonging (leading to phenomena like Afrophobia and xenophobia, as noted by Aribiah Attoe).

• Produces "curated" solutions like Agenda 2063 that, while well-intentioned, are often philosophically rooted in the very paradigms of extraction and development they seek to transcend.

The Core Conflict: The mind is trapped in a loop, trying to solve a problem of relationality and spirit using the tools of scarcity and greed.

4. The Treatment: Unlearning and Decolonising the Mind

    

• The Prescription: As Thandi Dyani argues, the cure must "start with ourselves." Decolonisation is first and foremost an internal, psychological process of Unlearning.

• The Process: This involves a conscious dismantling of the "infected lens", divesting from the internalised whiteness, its toxicities, and its definitions of power and success.

• The Goal: To clear the epistemic palate, allowing for the re-emergence and re-centring of indigenous knowledge systems based on Ubuntu^[6], Ma'at^[7], Abundance, and Relationality.

This framework posits that until this pathogenic structure within the mind is diagnosed and treated, all other efforts at land restitution, economic reform, and political liberation will remain vulnerable to re-infection by the very logics they seek to overcome. Therefore, the project of healing must begin with a deliberate epistemic and psychological detoxification, a ‘re-membering’ of fragmented worlds. This leads us to the inherited path towards treating these wounds, paths that are offered below, inspired not only by the two panel discussions and the panelists' offerings, but also from dances with the liminal ancestral realms.

The Diagnosis- Shattering of Worlds

The core injury is the violent severing of fundamental relationships. The severed umbilical cord manifests through alienation from Land and Ancestors.

The primary violence of dispossession lay in turning land from a living, spiritual relative into a disposable commodity. Yvonne Phyllis describes the powerful ontological bond that existed between African people and the earth through the concept of inkaba, ^[8]the umbilical cord. After a baby is born, the umbilical cord is treated as sacred, placed in the ground to mark the individual’s oneness with that place, establish a place of return, and mark their ties with a longer lineage. This indigenous relationship fundamentally contrasts with the logic of capitalism, which, according to Daliwonga Pantshwa, first seeks to "rob the land of its status as a living being and give it the status of property". This philosophical shift is what Pantshwa argues is a core reason why people should hate capitalism, as the violence it perpetrates on humans, it first inflicts upon the land and animals. Tshepo Madlingozi vividly diagnoses the profound consequence of this commodification and theft, noting that 300 to 350 years of dispossession has resulted in the land being "haunted". He explains that when people in the 19th century proclaimed ilizwe lifile ("The land is dead"), they meant that land dispossession caused the shattering of the social, cultural, material, and spiritual world of Black people. Specifically, this loss destroyed the crucial relationship that connected "the living, the yet to be born, and the living dead".

The Fractured Self: Alienation from Community and Identity

The severance of this spiritual and physical bond with the land leads directly to a profound crisis of personhood and belonging, which fuels internal divisions within the continent. Tshepo Madlingozi, whose mixed Hlubi and Tswana heritage means he is constantly asked, "Where do you belong?", links this identity crisis directly to the loss of land. In Setswana/Sesotho, lefatshe (land) also means both lefa (inheritance) and fatshe (grounding). Madlingozi argues that without this inheritance and grounding, ongoing dispossession means one "continue[s] to be a nobody in the land of your ancestors". Aribiah Attoe identifies the political symptoms of this internal fragmentation, challenging romanticized notions of Pan-Afrikanism by pointing to the reality of xenophobia and Afrophobia. He suggests that these conflicts demonstrate that a true sense of shared common culture or humanity has been lost. To address these divisions, Attoe advocates for reconnecting with indigenous philosophy, such as Ubuntu, which centers on relationality and might serve as the necessary foundation to unify disparate groups and safeguard their shared humanity.

The Inherited Paths - Blueprints for Collective Healing

This is the constructive core of the essay, directly addressing the "inherited paths" that are implied in the title of this essay. Three are presented, each with a special emphasis on which of the ‘symptoms’ a path is concerned with. The paths include: rematriating the land and remembering our belonging; re-membering knowledge and spirit; and rebuilding the "We"- ubuntu in practice.

First Path: Rematriating ^[9]the Land and Remembering Our Belonging

The colonial project commodified land as property and severed our belonging to and in it-a severed inkaba. Considering this, healing begins by restoring the relationship with land, not just as redistribution of property, but as a spiritual and ecological act. Therefore, recovering from the wounds of dispossession must begin by fundamentally restoring our relationship with the land, reconceiving it not as a commodity to be owned but as a living kin to which we belong. These shifts are powerfully advocated by Tshepo Madlingozi’s assertion that “Mother Earth cannot be owned.” The spiritual and ecological restoration, echoing Motsoko Pheko’s axiom that “Land is the economy^[10],” is embodied in Daliwonga Pantshwa’s call to “let the land heal us” through agroecological principles of “no waste” and interdependence, while Yvonne Phyllis insists that true healing for farmworkers necessitates ending their precarity and legally recognising their inherent belonging to the land. Thus, moving beyond mere property redistribution to affirm a sacred, reciprocal relationship with the earth is essential to dismantling the logic of racial capitalism and mending the fractured bonds between people and place.

Second Path: Re-membering Knowledge and Spirit

The second path is rooted in an understanding that healing demands a deliberate project of epistemic and spiritual reclamation. A "re-membering" ^[11]of worlds fragmented by colonialism, which Kekeletso Khena advances through her advocacy for the 42 Principles of Ma’at as an indigenous system of ethical self-correction. 

This reparative work is further embodied in Liepollo Pheko’s framing of the archive not as a static museum but as a living, embodied practice, and in Jermain Johnson’s use of call-and-response to transform space through ancestral affirmation, reminding us that “our names are not wounds, they are songs.” Together, these acts recenter indigenous knowledge as a dynamic, living force essential to collective recovery.

 Third Path: Rebuilding the "We": Ubuntu in Practice

The healing required is inherently collective and must be rooted in a rehumanising practice of relationality that actively rebuilds the bonds severed by coloniality. This is not an abstract ideal but is embodied in everyday acts of connection, as Thandi Dyani emphasises through her focus on stokvels, shared food, and music; practical sites where trust economies become modes of resistance and Pan-Afrikan joy. This relational worldview finds its philosophical anchor in what Aribiah Attoe identifies as the essential foundation for a meaningful Pan-Afrikanism: shared indigenous philosophies like Ubuntu, encapsulated in the principle, "I am because you are." 

This ethos is further echoed in Daliwonga Pantshwa's description of community gardeners in Soweto, who, through working the land together, relearn economic principles and ethics based on collaboration rather than competition. Thus, from the dancefloor to the garden, from the stokvel to the philosophical tenet, healing emerges from practices that systematically replace the logic of individualism with a restored sense of interconnected being.

 Conclusion: From Getting Over to Getting Whole

The dismissive shout for Afrika to “get over” colonialism and racial capitalism is not just ahistorical; it is a prescription for a perpetual state of spiritual and psychological fracture. As this essay has argued, one cannot “get over” a festering wound, rather, one must heal it. The haunting geographies of Emalahleni’s coalfields and the Zinkwazi plantations, the psychological infiltration of the “infected lens,” and the shattered relationality diagnosed by our thinkers are not relics of the past. They are the active, living consequences of systems designed to disinherit, disorient, and disconnect. To speak of “getting over” is to misunderstand the nature of the injury: it is not a single event to be forgotten, but an ongoing condition of alienation from our land, our ancestors, and each other.

True freedom, therefore, lies not in forgetting, but in the conscious, collective work of getting whole. The inherited paths are clear: to rematriate the land, recognising it as living kin rather than property; to re-member knowledge and spirit, cleansing the epistemic palate through the principles of Ma’at and the power of ancestral song; and to rebuild the “We, grounding our economies and politics in the ubuntu-informed practices of the stokvel and the community garden. This is the arduous journey from being haunted inhabitants of stolen lands to becoming grounded custodians of a remembered future. The call is not to get over history, but to finally, and fully, step into the wholeness that our ancestors fought to preserve for us. Our liberation depends not on forgetting the past, but on reclaiming it to heal the present.

Inolofatseng Lekaba is a researcher and writer whose work explores land, healing, and Afrikan epistemologies. LinkedIn: Inolofatseng Lekaba

Kekeletso Khena is an intersectional feminist and social activist driven by the philosophy of Ubuntu to advance Black Consciousness and the liberation of Azania. LinkedIn: Kekeletso Khena; X: @soulcandi78

Endnotes