There is something tragically theatrical about the modern African comprador. He struts around in imported suits, speaks in the borrowed idioms of Washington and Brussels, lectures starving Africans about “global partnerships,” and mistakes applause from white diplomats for statesmanship. He is a man who has outsourced his soul. A colonial functionary with black skin. A plantation overseer pretending to be president. A Fanonian Black Skin, White Mask.
And nowhere in Africa today is this tragedy more grotesquely illustrated than in the person of William Ruto – the plantation supervisor masquerading as Kenya’s president.
Ruto behaves less like the president of a sovereign African nation and more like the regional branch manager of Western geopolitical interests in East Africa. His sheepish grin makes him look like the perfect Sambo.
If imperialism needed a smiling African mascot to reassure the world that neocolonialism is alive, healthy, and dancing the cha-cha in broad daylight, they could hardly have designed a better specimen. So grotesque is Ruto’s obsequiousness that he makes me physically ill whenever I watch him perform like a marionette. His slavish fawning in the presence of white people is an insult to Kenya.
The old colonialists at least had the decency to arrive with red coats and Maxim guns. Today’s imperialism arrives with development loans, climate summits, NGO jargon, IMF memoranda, and curated African presidents grinning like choristers at a missionary banquet.
Ruto’s wide grins in the presence of the Master make him look like a man who has lost his mind, or never had one. Sadly for Kenya, Ruto has embraced this role with almost evangelical enthusiasm.
This is the same man who rushed Kenya into the disastrous Western-engineered intervention in Haiti, turning Kenyan police officers into mercenaries for Washington’s collapsing global order.
Haiti! The first Black republic on earth. The nation whose revolutionary example terrified slave owners across Europe and America. Imagine the insult: descendants of Mau Mau fighters now being deployed to suppress another Black nation on behalf of the same civilization that once chained Africa like cattle and lynched us with impunity. Read my article on Haiti here: /p/crocodile-tears-for-haiti?r=3wwyw
History can sometimes be so cruel that it resembles satire.
But to understand Ruto, one must first understand Kenya itself — not the glossy tourist brochure called Kenya, but the deeper Kenya buried beneath the lies of official independence.
Kenya was one of the bloodiest laboratories of British colonial barbarism in Africa.
The Mau Mau rebellion was not a tea party. It was not the sanitized folklore taught in Western universities by people who sip cappuccino while discussing “postcolonial hybridity.”
It was a desperate land war, a savage confrontation between dispossessed Africans and an empire built on theft and atrocities.
The British stole Kikuyu lands, turned Africans into squatters on their own soil, built detention camps, castrated prisoners, tortured and raped women, hanged freedom fighters, and baptized mass murder as “civilization.”
And who stood against this imperial terror?
Not the polished comprador elite later celebrated by Western hagiographers masquerading as historians.
It was men like Dedan Kimathi.
Kimathi lived in forests while the future “founding fathers” maneuvered in political drawing rooms. Kimathi fought with bullets, while others fought with carefully rehearsed speeches acceptable to London. Kimathi became the face of uncompromising African resistance.
The British captured him wounded, tried him in colonial courts, and executed him in 1957. Then, in the sadistic manner peculiar to empires, they buried his remains in an unmarked grave so that even in death the man would be denied dignity.
That is how frightened the British were of his memory.
Yet today, Kenya celebrates thieving dynasties while the true liberators remain ghosts haunting the margins of history.
The Kenyatta political dynasty became the acceptable African face of “independence.” The West could work with them. They understood the rules and spoke the polished language of neocolonialism. The economy remained externally controlled. Western corporations remained secure. Financial dependency deepened. The colonial state merely changed complexion.
The Union Jack descended. The invisible empire remained.
Jaramogi Oginga Odinga saw this betrayal clearly. In his immortal book, Not Yet Uhuru, Odinga practically screamed warnings into African history.
“We are not yet free,” he warned in substance and spirit, arguing that political independence without economic sovereignty was a masquerade.
He described how conservative elites aligned themselves with foreign interests while revolutionary nationalists were sidelined. He lamented how the anti-colonial struggle was hijacked by men more interested in inheriting the colonial state than dismantling it.
One of the enduring themes of Not Yet Uhuru is that Kenya’s liberation was interrupted midway. The colonial governor departed, but the structures of domination survived intact. Foreign capital still dictated policy. Land remained concentrated in the hands of a few oligarchs. The security apparatus remained colonial in mentality, willing to suppress and brutalize citizens. The masses who fought in the bush were discarded after the victory.
In other words: the flag changed; the system did not.
Exactly as Kwame Nkrumah warned in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.
Nkrumah understood that the greatest danger to Africa would not come from direct colonialism, but from African intermediaries acting on behalf of foreign powers – men who looked African but governed in the interests of London, Paris, Washington, and Brussels.
Ruto fits this description with chilling precision. So do Tinibu of Nigeria and Mahama of Ghana.
Observe Ruto’s foreign policy posture. Kenya increasingly behaves like a forward operating base for Western strategic interests in Africa. Whether on Haiti, IMF austerity, climate diplomacy tailored for European applause, or military cooperation with NATO-aligned powers, Ruto appears permanently eager, like a beaver, to prove Kenya’s reliability as the empire’s favorite askari.
Even his rhetoric reeks of dependency psychology. He speaks the language of donor conferences, not liberation movements. He sounds less like a successor to Kimathi and more like an ambitious prefect hoping for the headmaster’s commendation.
Meanwhile, ordinary Kenyans sink deeper into debt, taxation, unemployment, and despair. The slum of Kibera keeps enlarging.
This is the great scandal of postcolonial Africa: the ruling classes have become more alienated from the masses than even the old colonial governors. Colonial officers at least knew they were foreigners. Africa’s comprador elite pretend to be patriots while auctioning away national dignity and patrimony piece by piece.
And the West rewards them lavishly.
A good African, in Western geopolitical vocabulary, is an obedient African.
A dangerous African speaks of sovereignty, multipolarity, resource nationalism, military independence, or African unity.
That is why the ghosts of Kimathi, Lumumba, Sankara, and Gaddafi continue to terrify imperial planners decades after their deaths. Dead revolutionaries still threaten the architecture of plunder more than living presidents who attend G7 summits carrying begging bowls disguised as policy papers.
But Africans themselves must also confront uncomfortable truths.
Too many African populations have normalized humiliation. Too many intellectuals have become grant-funded parrots of Western ideology. Too many churches preach obedience instead of resistance. Too many journalists function as stenographers for embassies and NGOs.
Cowards cannot liberate a continent.
The battle against Africa’s neocolonial ruling class must now be fiercer than the battle against the original colonizers. Because, as Nkrumah warned, neocolonialism is more dangerous precisely because it is less visible. The exploiter now operates through local agents. The whip has become invisible. The plantation manager now looks like us.
And that is why the words of Frantz Fanon remain prophetic thunder rolling across history:
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
Africa’s present generation faces exactly that choice.
To fulfill its mission means rejecting the comprador order that has turned Africa into a playground for foreign interests and local thieves. It means recovering the unfinished dreams of Kimathi, Nkrumah, Lumumba, Sankara, Cabral, and Odinga. It means dismantling the neocolonial machinery protected by smiling presidents in designer suits.
To betray that mission is to continue applauding men like Ruto while Africa sinks deeper into dependency, debt, humiliation, and managed underdevelopment.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.
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