What Colonial Mentality Actually Looks Like On the Ground
Colonial mentality is one of those concepts that sounds abstract until you watch it play out in real time. It is not about overt racism or flag-waving supremacy. It is subtler. It shows up when a Nigerian doctor in Lagos dismisses a locally developed treatment protocol because it was not peer-reviewed in a European journal. It shows up when a Kenyan university professor requires all undergraduate thesis references to come from American or British publishers, not because the local scholarship is weak, but because the evaluation committee expects it. Nkuzi Michael Nnam has documented how this pattern repeats across African institutions, and the work is worth reading if you want to understand why cultural independence remains elusive even decades after formal decolonization. Nnam's analysis centers on the way colonial-era knowledge hierarchies were never actually dismantled after independence. Political structures changed, but epistemic authority did not. Western universities, journals, and institutions remained the arbiters of what counts as valid knowledge, credible research, and professional competence. African scholars and professionals internalized these standards to the point where they begin policing their own communities. This is the mechanism Nnam describes, and it explains a lot about why African intellectual production struggles for recognition even when the quality is competitive. I spent several years working on a research program meant to strengthen indigenous health systems across East and West Africa. One of the early problems we hit involved protocol validation. We had developed a community-based maternal health framework that used local traditional birth attendants alongside trained nurses. It was being piloted in three regions, and the outcomes were genuinely positive. When it came time to publish, our institutional partners insisted we redesign the study around conventional clinical trial parameters, which meant removing the traditional attendants entirely and starting fresh with a standardized hospital setting. The original data, which took eight months to collect, was essentially discarded because it did not fit the journal's preferred methodology.
The workaround I ended up using was to submit the full results as a qualitative implementation study to a regional African journal while preparing a separate quantitative paper from the hospital arm for an international outlet. It was not ideal, but it allowed the original work to exist in print and gave the team something tangible to show funders. The lesson was straightforward, and it came up repeatedly in later projects: you have to play by the validation rules that already exist, but you do not have to let them erase the work you are actually doing. The deeper issue Nnam raises is about institutional incentives. Academic promotion, funding allocation, and professional credibility in most African countries still depend heavily on publication in high-impact Western journals. That creates a feedback loop where local scholars optimize for those journals rather than for local relevance. The work becomes technically sound by international standards but disconnected from the actual problems on the ground. I have seen grant proposals rejected for exactly this reason, and I have also seen the reverse, where proposals that directly addressed village-level infrastructure problems were marked as insufficiently rigorous because they lacked randomized controls. Both responses are wrong, but the funding machinery rewards one and penalizes the other consistently. There is also a language dimension that gets overlooked. English, French, and Portuguese function as gatekeepers. Writing in a colonial language gives a researcher access to wider citation networks, conference circuits, and funding bodies. Writing in Igbo, Yoruba, Swahili, or Amharic limits reach almost entirely within regional academic circles. Nnam does not argue for abandoning the European languages, but he does note that the language hierarchy reinforces the broader mentality. Knowledge that circulates only in local languages is treated as less serious, regardless of its actual content.
One counter-intuitive point that many people miss is that colonial mentality is not always a problem to be eradicated, at least not without considering tradeoffs. Standardized methodologies from Western institutions can raise quality bars that local systems might otherwise ignore. Peer review, even when biased toward Western sources, has forced some African researchers to tighten their methods and report more transparently. The downside is obvious, but the upside is real enough that dismissing the entire system outright is strategically unwise. A more useful approach is selective adoption: use the methodological rigor where it adds value, while building parallel evaluation structures that reward locally relevant work without forcing it into foreign frameworks. Another nuance is that colonial mentality operates differently across sectors. In medicine, engineering, and economics, it tends to be institutionally enforced through credentialing and publishing requirements. In creative fields, it shows up more as aesthetic preference and market demand. Film festivals in Europe and North America tend to reward African stories that emphasize poverty, conflict, and tradition, while ignoring urban middle-class narratives that complicate those stereotypes. African filmmakers who produce those complex stories often find it harder to secure international distribution than those who lean into familiar tropes. This is a form of audience conditioning that colonial mentality produces without any explicit policy behind it. If you are looking to engage with Nnam's work directly, his publications on this topic have appeared in African studies journals and regional academic collections. You will typically find them through university library databases or platforms like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. Some of his materials may also be available through Nigerian university presses and Pan-African academic networks. I would recommend checking your institution's journal access first, since full-text availability varies by publisher and region.
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There is no clean fix for colonial mentality. It is structurally embedded in funding, education, and professional advancement systems. The closest thing to a practical response is awareness combined with strategic navigation. Recognize when external standards are being applied unnecessarily, push back where it matters, and build institutional alternatives that reduce dependence on colonial validation over time. Nnam's contribution is valuable because he documents the pattern clearly and makes it harder to ignore in policy discussions. The rest depends on people in positions to change hiring, funding, and publication criteria actually using that documentation.
