In Africa, and Nigeria especially, everywhere you go, there is a 'king'. There seems to be a new "kingdom" every 20,000 people and just 10 kilometers apart. 😂 If you don't believe me, just look at Ekiti or Ondo states. How happy do you think this made European slave traders? How much easier and more efficient do you think it made their business? "Divide and conquer"? There was no need to divide. The African package came almost completely pre-divided — ready to be conquered. Our divided kingdoms and kings were simply no match for European destructive cunning. It was the exact same global playbook of erasure that devoured the Aztecs, destroyed the Native Americans, and dismantled the Aborigines of Australia. While we were fiercely guarding our micro-borders of 20,000 people, we were completely blind to the fact that the Europeans didn't see individual kingdoms. They saw fragmented pieces of a global puzzle they already knew exactly how to solve. Do you think today's Europe did not have tribes and ethnic groups? Europe was a blood-soaked battleground between different groups for centuries. Tribes like the Iceni, Arverni, Salian Franks, Lusitanians, Arevaci, Vascones, and Caledonians were perennially at each other's throats. But their wars had a different, brutal flavour. Europeans possess a ruthless culture of expansion and total subsumption. They violently erased their own micro-identities to consolidate thousands of small, warring clans into a few massive, powerful nations. And when the need to conquer and colonize Africa arose, they took it a step further: they collapsed those powerful nations — fierce internal rivalries and all— into a unified cartel. Against such a purposeful, single-minded evolution of macro-identity and goal, Africa’s hyper-dividedness was a catastrophic weakness. We used them to defeat our neighbours, never realizing we were handing an unforgiving master the keys to our collective cage. Centuries later, we are still plagued by the exact same weakness. By continuing to obsess over our tribal identities, we inevitably exaggerate our differences to our collective detriment. If Europeans can bond to survive — tying their destinies inextricably together to fail or succeed together, to live or die together — how tragic is it that Africa still refuses to unite? Isn't it time to finally put down the micro-lens of the 'tribe' and pick up the macro-shield of continental unity? Don't we know that we have far more in common than otherwise? We must find what unites us, forge it into our core identity, and make it the ultimate springboard to rise, sovereign and unbreakable, on the global stage.