THERE is a wound that still festers beneath the skin of this continent. A wound of words. A wound of definitions. A wound whose origin lies not in a bullet or a whip, but in something more enduring — language. Many, rightfully so, opine that a fierce debate should sweep across Africa and that African scholarship, youth, and leaders must grapple with the urgent task of redefining who we are.

The continent should no longer be content with borrowed identities and imposed definitions, Africans must rise to reclaim their story, their dignity and their rightful place in the world. It is time we do away with the language and words that rewrote us, erased our names, poured shame on our skins and put us in cages of perception not of our making. When Arnold Toynbee, in all the ‘might’ of his Eurocentric scholarship, speaks of us, Africans, as beings without tenure, without soul, without humanity, he is not simply making an academic observation. He is shaping a world. He is fashioning a worldview, a global gaze, a prism through which Africa is seen, weighed and dismissed.

We must recall, as if it were etched in our collective marrow, what the late ZANU Chairman Herbert Wiltshire Pfumaindini Chitepo once echoed with an uncompromising tongue. In a moment of searing clarity, he reached into the belly of the imperial archive and pulled out Toynbee’s grotesque formulation that most chilling declaration masquerading as a question: “Shall we treat them as vermin to be exterminated, or shall we treat them as hewers of wood and drawers of water?” The Chairman, not in admiration but in fierce condemnation, held that quote up like a mirror. And in it, we did not see ourselves, but the grotesque hallucination of ourselves projected by the imperial eye. Cde Chitepo was not quoting Toynbee to teach us who we were. He was showing us what we were never meant to forget, how empire saw us, how empire sees us still. Cde Chitepo did not just cite Toynbee.

He pinpointed the problem. He made it plain: that the world’s refusal to see the African as human is not a matter of outdated text or academic oversight, it is the architecture of the global order we are struggling to dismantle. And if we do not redefine ourselves, on our terms, within our cosmologies, languages, philosophies, and visions, we shall always be living within Toynbee’s grim dichoto.

The problem with Arnold J. Toynbee (pictured above) and his ilk is not that they saw us as animals, it is that their words were taken as truth. my, either as vermin to be exterminated or as tools to be used. For sustainable development, we should begin by knowing the truth. Truth about who we are, who we have been, and who we refuse to be ever again. Chairman Chitepo’s invocation of Toynbee was not an intellectual gesture. It was a spiritual alarm.

A call to war, not of bullets but of being. It was a command to become, and to do so loudly and unapologetically African. That world, the imperial one, is cracking, falling apart. It must crack. We cannot, and must not achieve our agendas while still walking in the shadows of others’ definitions. We must define ourselves, not as reaction to Europe, but as an affirmation of who we are and who we have always been. This is not merely political. It is spiritual. It is ontological. It is revolutionary. I write not as a scholar seated in the ‘hallowed’ halls of this or that institution, but as a son of the soil, mud on my shoes, sun in my skin, ancestors in my veins. I write with the conviction of Mbuya Nehanda’s final breath, of Mushawatu’s belief, of Lobengula’s defiance.

I write because to be African is not to be waiting to be discovered. We have always been here. The problem with Toynbee and his ilk is not that they saw us as animals, it is that their words were taken as truth. Institutionalised. Canonised. Used to draw borders, to dictate curricula. Their lies became policies. Their imagination became our shackles. And we? We began to doubt our own reflection. There is no vision of a brighter future, if we do not first break the mirror they gave us. Let me tell you something about mirrors. They do not lie by themselves. A mirror reflects what is placed before it.

But when a colonial mirror is crafted, it is not silver-backed glass, it is tinted glass, distorted glass, glass made to warp your features until you no longer recognise yourself. Until you believe you were meant to serve, to obey, to be grateful for the hand that beats you so long as it feeds you after. We are a nation, a continent still trying to explain its right to exist, using foreign languages. We have minerals that sparkle like constellations buried in the earth. We have rivers that never run dry. We have children whose minds are sharper than the blades that once cut us into colonies. But what use are these riches if the soul of the continent is still wrapped in foreign cloth? If we still kneel before donors who measure our worth by GDP and not by the depth of our dreams? To redefine ourselves is not simply to tear down Toynbee.

It is to resurrect what Toynbee tried to bury. Our philosophies. Our cosmologies. Our moral frameworks. Our ways of being that are older than the Enlightenment, richer than classical liberalism, and more humane than any empire’s doctrine of civility. We must return to the fire. I speak here not of some sentimental longing for a precolonial utopia. No. We are not naïve. We know the world has changed. But to navigate this world, we must walk with our own compass. We must build schools that teach our heroes as vigorously as they teach theirs. We must raise children who know that Mbuya Nehanda, Mtshane Khumalo, Josiah Tongogara, and Kwame Nkrumah were not rebels, they were prophets of freedom.

We must build technology that does not erase us. Grow economies that do not sacrifice our environment to chase illusions of Western-style industrialisation. Speak English only when it serves us, not when it silences our tongues. Our definition must be complex, multidimensional and rooted. Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030, Agenda 2063, The Africa We Want, are all noble aspirations. But these mean nothing if the citizen who lives in that economy still believes he/she is less. Still believes he/she is borrowing civilisation. Still believes his culture is backward and her language inferior. Our visions and agendas must be more than numbers but philosophies of self. It must be ubuntu.

Not in the corporate branding way. But in its deepest sense: I am because we are. And we are because we remember. And in remembering, we rise. Toynbee would have us choose between extermination and servitude. As if our existence is a burden to their conscience. As if their wealth was not built on our blood. But Africa does not exist in relation to Europe. Let them call us what they will. We will not answer. We will answer to our own names. The ones carved in stone at Great Zimbabwe.

The ones sung in praise poetry. The ones whispered by grandmothers as they tuck dreams into sleeping children’s minds. If our visions are to mean anything, they must begin with a funeral. A burial of Toynbee’s dictionary. A final service for colonial anthropology. A cremation of imported inferiority. And then a birth. Of new language. Of new purpose.

Of new definitions. What are we, if we are not our own? The white man once stood with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. Now he comes with loans and NGOs. But the aim is the same: to keep us defined by dependency. To give us names that do not fit. To write reports on us like we are subjects of an experiment. Enough. We are not an experiment. We are the experiment that survived. We are the fire that refused to go out. We are not Toynbee’s natives. We are the future. And it is ours to define.