In a time where many in African scholarship and society are focused on “de-colonizing”–– from de-colonizing theology, preaching, and hermeneutics, to de-colonizing education, research methodologies, politics, and sociology, even to using “decolonizing therapy” to deal with oppression and historical trauma––one would think we on the African continent would be hyper vigilant and aware of anyone who may try to colonize or oppress us once again. However, there is an invisible global oppressor, a “Trojan horse” that has crept into all our countries through the gift of technology and advanced science, internet, and social media. Unaware that these gifts have hidden militant forces within, these globalizing soldiers have surprisingly taken over by:

• Imposing its own belief systems of humanism, religious pluralism, secularism, consumerism and scientism.
• Obliging its own moral standards of tolerance, subjective truth, and choose-your-own biological identity, eroding cultural moral boundaries.
• Subjecting one to its required rules of always support the perceived victim, do not question the narrative, and take moral umbridge by the latest (fill in the blank) thing.
• Deceiving us with the propaganda of search engine-controlled truth, message bombarding bots, politically bias programmed AI, socially engineered social media, all warping our sense of reality and carefully crafting our view of the world.
• Forcing us to support global agendas and to get outraged over injustices we are told we should be outraged over or face being tarred and feathered online.
• Enslaving us to the worship of the god of self through incessant selfies, self-promulgation, self-obsession, self-seeking happiness along with occult-like worship of self-influencers and YouTube self-personality stars.

These global civilizing forces have colonized the Western world and threaten to completely colonize the non-Western world as well. Though this oppressor may not be colonizing us physically by limiting our comings and goings, exploiting our labor, demeaning us due to our ethnicity, or limiting our education quality as the old colonizers did, this new global colonizer’s strategy is to take control of the mind and make us its slave from within.
Peter cautions that “people are slaves to whatever has mastered them.” (2 Peter 2:19, NIV). So how do we ensure that we don’t become mastered again, this time by the globalizing forces that have already infiltrated our security-walled and burglar-barred homes? In order not to allow this new dominating conqueror to have mastery over us, Romans 12:1-2 gives us a protective solution: allow ourselves to be enslaved by a righteous master, willingly offering our lives in complete sacrifice to Jesus! As an animal sacrifice is offered in worship for complete consumption upon the altar, Paul urges a life of complete sacrificial worship in return for Jesus’s life of sacrificial mercy unto us. Interestingly, Paul tells us that for this sacrifice to be complete, it must involve something that animal sacrifices were never required nor could ever willingly do. This sacrifice is not only to offer the physical body, but to offer one’s mental capabilities as well––a mind in conformity, not to the ever-changing patterns and molded thinking of the world, but to the unchanging standard of God’s spoken truth (Romans 12:2). Enslavement is not just of the physical body, but it starts in the mind. Willingly allowing our entire selves––body and mind–– to be a sacrifice, a slave to Jesus, is the best protection from becoming a slave to any other cruel and oppressive master.

Ironically, while many in Africa are distracted with de-colonizing every aspect of society, a new global colonizer is already at work quietly creeping in and capturing a new generation worldwide. It’s battleplan is to primarily control the mind, for by controlling the mind, one controls the person. Let us be hyper vigilant and aware so that we do not become prey to this new era’s invisible colonizer, who would love to oppress and enslave us. Let us rather willingly enslave ourselves to a righteous master, Jesus, sacrificially offering up body and mind to him as our Ruler and Lord.

Works Cited:
Turaki, Yusufu. 2020. Engaging Religions and Worldview in Africa: A Christian Theological Method. Nigeria: Hippo Books.