Wasn't the colonial era over?

“Miss, tell me—when did the colonial era end?”

That’s the question my second-to-last university exam ends with. “I’d give you a 28 out of 30.” I think: am I satisfied? Not quite. I walk out of the room, shut everything down. And yet that moment keeps coming back to haunt me. The question stays with me for months. It starts here, I suppose—though we could also say it started earlier—the daily search for explanations, clarifications, interpretations, motives, connections. The same search I wrote from in the first place, because the colonial era never ended.

The kind of journalism that comes back most often—the kind that gets attention and sells—usually takes the form of newly “discovered” mass genocides, false statements, retractions, deceptions, indignation, private data stolen and sold without consent, hidden prisons, climate crises, and so on. It doesn’t matter whether it’s La Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, ANSA, Il Foglio, The New York Times, or Le Monde. Every day I sit at my desk hoping to be proven wrong, and instead the headlines waiting for me are always the same.

“It was a bad day,” I tell myself. “I’ll try again tomorrow.” But tomorrow is never the “right day.”

The headlines don’t change—if anything they get reworded, they get worse. For example: gang rapes of underage girls in African communities, human exploitation for copper extraction, lies about deforestation practices for oil production, sham economic alliances with presidents corrupted by their own private interests, peace agreements broken. It’s as if there is no such thing as a “right day.” This is the daily reality we’ve grown used to—so used to it that a positive headline, or a bare page without the usual contents, feels almost uncanny. But what kind of normality could this possibly be? I ask myself every morning, sitting at the same desk. I think back to my professor’s question, which—I'll admit—I struggled to answer. Dear Professor, maybe you’re right: colonial occupations ended a long time ago. Or maybe, as I much more naïvely believe, they never ended at all.

What is this widespread violence, this deep hatred, this systematic apathy coating the pages I turn? As things stand, I can’t bring myself to see hope in a man who is born violent and dies violent. So the real question isn’t When did the colonial era end? but rather: When did we stop teaching humanity? And, above all: When did we stop possessing it, and have to start teaching it instead?

Most esteemed Professor, I have deep respect for you, but these doubts torment me as much as the utopia of a newspaper with blank pages, a television with no channels, and a radio that plays only music. Normally the pages are full, the channels endless, the radios talking without pause. Will we ever realize that pages aren’t just pages, channels aren’t just channels, and radios aren’t just radios? I wonder when—consciences evidently lulled to sleep—people stopped questioning, and began memorizing colonial paradigms by heart.

I think of Elsa Morante. She writes that you cannot expect from a human spirit that has lived its whole life in captivity anything other than the reproduction of that same brutal idea of freedom. And so we have to teach. What’s missing is education, culture; what’s missing is participation, will, empathy. We are what’s missing in the machine. She would argue—and I agree—that a lullaby was sung to us, so pleasing that, instead of waking up, we chose to keep listening. Starting from that premise, I demand—and I dream of—different narratives. Narratives that begin with complex, thorough answers to equally complex, thorough questions. And with human actions, from human beings.

It feels as though a kind of symbiotic, “natural” relationship has formed between wars and peoples, as essential as water and oxygen are to survival. We have evolved—as populations—and we have grown up—as kids—convinced of the perfect “efficiency” of these toxic relationships, validated headline by headline, article by article, in the pages of our newspapers. But when will we get tired of settling? When will we learn to recognize our right to demand that these narratives change? When will we have the courage to choose the values with which to build our future—our right, and our duty?

If I’m to answer your question honestly, Professor, I can’t share your lesson. I can’t bring myself to believe the little story of decolonization, or the simplistic version according to which everything “ended” at some point—and when exactly would that point be? When a new justification became necessary? Or when it was simply more convenient to influence the masses than to risk losing power? Questions that hide ancient social hierarchies, economic developments, and political relations—now folded into what we call “neocolonization.”

With this new concept, old phrases have been replaced by new, misleading ones—“reconstitution of the homeland,” “annexation of a territory of belonging”—printed and sold off as if they were innocent, peaceful intentions. And so now Trump claims a right of superiority that allows him to expel anyone who doesn’t carry the American factory stamp of origins, or doesn’t have his face hanging in the bedroom in place of a crucifix; to raise barbed-wire walls (until he needs silent potato pickers); to station his aircraft carriers in the Caribbean; and to speak of “liberating” a country that once relied on the help of those who, with weapons and wars, built an empire.

Down south, in the poor hemisphere of the earth—graveyard of dirty consciences and archive of civilization’s skeletons in the closet—the Few-Rich grow bored and play Risk with the world map they want. Sometimes they even sign peace treaties that later turn out to be fake. So every morning one of them wakes up, rolls the dice, and pulverizes another house—like once it’s done, the game ends, and everyone goes back to their own.

Some questions arise on their own—questions born from the answers I failed to give, and in the name of the question I started from. What game are we playing? Is there a medal for whoever is most stubborn in pretending to tell the truth? Because to me these look like some of the oldest power games in the world—yet I don’t see these questions, or their answers, written in the newspapers I read every day. So I wonder: what would happen to someone who, by chance, were caught lying? And why is the normalization of the death of entire peoples—and of past impositions—so readily accepted?

And yet, Professor, you teach me that colonialism is over. I might have misunderstood—or I might have understood far too well. It seems to me—I'll say it quietly—that this phenomenon has simply taken other side streets, other tricks, other shortcuts, but in the end it doesn’t change. It has taken on elaborate forms that deceive, confuse, and feed us false hopes—having realized that all it takes is changing a few terms, and a disinterested, forgetful population, accustomed to the pleasure of living at the mercy of other people’s decisions, will not only believe it, but will come to think it has no real possibility of asserting itself—and that, in the end, that possibility doesn’t matter all that much anyway.

Overwhelmed by doubts, I type “colonialism” into the search bar and find the latest product of human intellect—capable of anything, except stopping wars. It tells me: “a policy of conquest, control, and exploitation of foreign territories by a State, carried out from the fifteenth century onward by European powers. This practice, which is now prohibited by international law, involved imposing political, economic, and cultural domination over colonized peoples, often justified by racist theories and civilizing missions, and continued until the mid-twentieth century, ending with the processes of decolonization.”

But then what are we to call the crushing of a people now reduced to a strip of land—their persecution, their being driven toward death? What are these “reconstruction plans,” with presidents of the most powerful nations in the world dressed for the beach, playing at building sandcastles on a “new Dubai”—plans devised by the very people who champion the technology that claims colonialism is over? Isn’t this conquest, control, imposition, exploitation? And if it isn’t, then what about the millions of Ukrainians who for years have been fighting for gas, water, basic goods—alongside their own lives? Or is that still not enough? What is missing, in these and in earlier violences, for them to qualify?

Those who object by saying colonialism no longer exists simply because it has been replaced by “neocolonialism” should take a cold shower of truth. The terms have changed, the methods, the faces—but the people, the houses, the lands have not. Death remains death. Nature, contrary to what we are told, remains nature. The roots of a certain way of doing and thinking grow out of the conviction that the planet is modifiable at our convenience—something over which we imagine ourselves to hold such superior power that we become our own poison. But this planet—the one we have failed to understand how to inhabit for centuries—doesn’t change on our whim. And so for centuries, in truth, we have been waging a struggle against ourselves.

The women raped every day in Darfur are daughters or granddaughters of the inhuman acts of what we still cannot bring ourselves to call by its name. The few shepherds left in Palestine—if it can still be named—are the same ones who were massacred, and then, if they were lucky, escaped from prisons, only to be condemned to the prison of their own existence. The people expelled daily from Trumpian borders because they are “different” die or flee from a country that leaves them no possible way to survive. Those who for decades have crossed the Mediterranean toward us and are left to die are the same people we once sailed toward—and whose differences, apparently, we used to appreciate.

Words change, but not the people who become their consequence and their effect. And here is the result: a recycling of terms used carelessly, under the protection of total ignorance, and with the conviction that if we no longer arrive on the other side of the world on great ships with flags and escort vessels—or armies armed with swords and pitchforks—then it cannot be called colonialism. But what, truly, is not colonial? You’re absolutely right: tanks are not colonialism. Neither are arrested children. Neither are drones, European funding, forced hunger, failures to rescue, or the weapons that silently set sail from the ports of La Spezia, Genoa, Livorno—and who knows from how many others.

“This practice, which is now prohibited by international law”: it has everything international about it, and nothing prohibited. Fine, then—let’s call it Neocolonialism, since it sounds more modern, more different. Since it doesn’t embarrass those Few-Rich—so feared, and so cowardly indulged. But instead of focusing on condemning my professor, we should ask ourselves whether we aren’t the problem. It is this general indifference in the face of a profoundly wrong system that becomes the nurse and indispensable accomplice of a colonialism—neocolonialism, whatever we choose to call it—that since the fifteenth century has sat in the front row of the world’s spectacle.

This is how, at my desk every morning, I recognize what isn’t explained in history books, nor even in university ones—least of all in the media: that this so-called colonialism has never ended, just as racism has not vanished, nor fear of the different, nor the sense of superiority, nor violence, nor the need for the strong to dominate, nor selfishness, nor the rule of the few and their spreading of ignorance. Otherwise the world we would live in now would be completely different.

And from this conclusion, I invite those who tomorrow—like me—will have to carry the consequences of this reality on their backs not to give up because of those who govern, intimidate, and deprive us of knowledge. I invite you to reflect on what has always been sold to us as “civilization”: on concepts rebranded, on changes in form without changes in substance, and on human beings who, despite everything, remain the same. We need to restore true values—perhaps new ones—wake minds up, and rebuild sincere relationships. But these do not begin in history books.

They begin from below.

From us.

Thank you, Professor.

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“A survivor, speaking of it afterwards, compared them to marked animals, who docilely entrust themselves to the enclosure of the slaughterhouse, warming themselves with one another’s breath. And this trust makes them seem unconscious; but isn’t the judgment of outsiders (the man noted) often absurd?”

Elsa Morante

Wasn't the colonial era over?