Merry Christmas. 🎅🏿
To the people celebrating.
To the people pretending not to scroll.
To the people having a completely normal day.
To everyone everywhere — greetings.👋🏿
Now, let me pause. Literally.
Because I saw a tweet that tried very hard to be profound… and failed spectacularly.
You know the kind.
The “this is going to heal generations” type of tweet.
Lots of likes. Lots of agreement. Very little thinking.
The tweet argued that Africans struggle academically because they are taught in foreign languages — and that this is all still the fault of “colonizers”.
At first glance, it sounds intelligent. Emotional. Even caring.
But once you actually sit with it, the tweet starts lying by omission.
And that’s where my problem begins.
The Tweet’s First Trick: Oversimplification
Yes, language matters.
Yes, learning in a non-native language can be difficult.
I don’t deny that — I’ve lived it. 😕
I moved from an English-dominant school to a fully Afrikaans one. My Afrikaans marks dropped. Not because I suddenly lost brain cells, but because the environment changed. Context matters.
But here’s what the tweet does: it takes a real challenge and turns it into a single explanation for everything.
That's dishonest.
If language alone explained academic failure, then Africans who succeed in these same languages simply wouldn’t exist. Yet they do. Millions of them. Daily.
The tweet ignores that reality because it ruins the narrative.
The Second Trick: Freezing Africans in the Past
This is where the tweet becomes insulting.
It speaks as if Africans today have no power. No governments. No ministries. No policy control. No agency.
As if we are permanently stuck in 1900.
But we’re not.
We have presidents. We have departments of education. We have the authority to add subjects, remove subjects, change curricula, and rewrite policy.
So when the tweet skips all of that and jumps straight to blaming people who have been gone for decades, it’s not truth — it’s convenience.
Blaming history is easier than interrogating the present.
The Hypocrisy the Tweet Hopes You Won’t Notice
Here’s the quiet part.
The same people pushing this argument:
• tweet in English
• build platforms in English
• earn degrees in English
• rely on English for global access
Yet suddenly, English (or Afrikaans, or French) is framed as an impossible burden that explains failure.
You can’t benefit from a system and then pretend it makes success impossible.
That’s not analysis. That’s selective outrage.
Who the Tweet Actually Protects
Ironically, this tweet doesn’t challenge power.
It protects it.
By endlessly blaming “colonizers,” it removes responsibility from:
• current leaders
• education ministers
• governments that have ruled for decades
If Afrikaans can be enforced in schools, it can be removed.
If policies exist, they can be changed.
So why aren’t they?
That’s the question the tweet carefully avoids — because it would require holding the right people accountable.
Why This Bothers Me
This isn’t about self-hate.
It’s about standards.
I’m tired of tweets that sound deep but lower expectations.
Tired of victimhood being confused with wisdom.
Tired of Africans being portrayed as permanently helpless/victims in order to protect leadership failures.
We can acknowledge history without being trapped by it.
We can talk about language without surrendering agency.
We deserve conversations that respect our intelligence — not emotional shortcuts dressed up as activism.
Anyways.
Merry Christmas. 🧑🏿🎄❤️
And here’s to thinking a little harder next time we hit “retweet”.
— The Dreamer’s Pause ⏯️
© 2025 The Dreamer’s Pause. All rights reserved.
