African Cultural Identity: Why Do We Let Them Take Things?Questioning why we fight for our cultural heritage after forgetting to value what was always ours.

12mins read. Cultural Reflection. June 24, 2026

Image credit: Barnabas Sani via Pexels

African cultural identity has always been a conversation of preservation, evolution, and belonging.

I don’t know if this fits perfectly into my cultural imperialism series or if it’s just a random observation, but this thought was inspired by something as simple as me drinking a ginger shot.

Recently, ginger shots, turmeric shots, and many other herbal drinks have become increasingly popular.

The fitness and wellness industry has fully embraced these herbal remedies, with more people talking about their benefits and how they support the body, skin, and overall wellbeing.

I have also started incorporating them into my daily routine to support my overall wellbeing. Do I realistically know if it works? Not really. But in my head, I use it as a way to create balance within my system.

A way to not beat myself up too much about enjoying sugary foods or the things society has labelled as “unhealthy.” I say that because sometimes I wonder, what life are we really trying to prolong by healthy eating choices? We exit dead anyway.

Maybe we should say to exit well.

So this afternoon, I took a can of ginger shot as usual and went about my other activities. While caught up in the middle of everything I was doing, the aftertaste of the ginger lingered in my mouth.

Then I had a thought.

This feels very similar to what we refer to as “agbo.”

Realistically what is difference?

At its core, agbo is herbs, vegetables, fruits, and different plants brought together. They are boiled, blended, crushed, sun-dried, or prepared in different ways depending on the purpose and the method being used.

Image credit: Barnabas Sani via Pexels

A concoction created from natural ingredients.

And in that moment, my first thought was: it is literally the same thing.

The idea did not feel too far away from the wellness shots we now see packaged in bottles. Ginger, lemon, turmeric, lime, apple, and many other ingredients combined together and marketed as something that supports health and overall wellbeing.

Maybe the difference is simply that “agbo” is more associated with Africa.

Unfortunately, many things associated with Africa have historically been viewed with less regard, even when those same ideas later prove to have value.

Everything associated with my race as a Black African is automatically excluded from the health and wellness circle, and that is our fault.

I sincerely want to know, before the colonial masters invaded our spaces, were we just dropping dead and not getting treated without the use of modern medicine like they make it seem now?

They painted the picture to us that if “modern medicine” isn’t used, our health will automatically deteriorate and we should completely ditch our own forms of medicine?

Were our ancestors not up and about researching herbs and roots that could cure us?

I remember, though I’m not sure whether I read it somewhere or it came up in a discussion, that there has been this ongoing conversation about how all the agbo we take damages our liver, causes more health problems, and that we should stop using it completely and ditch it for modern medicine. The pills, the liquid forms of medication, and everything else.

Which could actually be valid. There is really nothing with no side effect.

Because even with “modern medicine,” we have seen how over time, with research, they discover the extreme side effects of certain medications.

They flag that too much use of a certain medication, or a high dosage, could have side effects and should be reduced if possible. But they don’t completely condemn the medication entirely.

The testing is ongoing. They continue to research and find ways to make it better, not completely abandon it.

But we totally left ours.

I am not saying that our ways of medicine as Black Africans are entirely the best and that we are perfect in our ways. But my question is, why is this being ignored and shoved aside?

Historically, people of African ancestry have been underrepresented in clinical research and drug trials. That matters because clinical trials are where researchers test safety, effectiveness, dosage, side effects, etc. If certain populations are missing, the evidence base may not fully represent everyone.

I know some people will turn it into a racial card and talk about how racist it is, but we have been fitting into spaces that were clearly not created with us in mind.

Their way of medicine is not for us.

We should accept it.

Not push blame like we always do. Our focus should be research over time, to correct and try to make our own way of medicine better for us and better than it used to be.

That should be the aim.

And that is what is being done in modern medicine.

I wonder why when it involves anything African, the narrative always seems to be that we should completely ditch our origin and our existence in the mud, and blindly follow their own way of life.

Which we actually do, and we can see it come into play in religion, economy, and other aspects of our lifestyle.

But why do we let them keep taking from us, changing our narratives, and turning them into theirs?

Another part of this writing is inspired by a trending video I saw of a white lady. I am not so sure if it was her fashion brand or not, but in the video, she was advertising and showcasing a particular outfit.

It was a blouse and wrapper. Which from a cultural angle, as a Yoruba person, is “iro and buba” to me.

Image credit: 1. Koldshots , 2. Daniwura TCI 3. Abdullahi Santuraki via pexels

Even from the way she was describing how the wrapper should be tied, she was very detailed in her explanation and I remember my grandma teaching me in a similar way too.

That would of course spark so many reactions online. People having their opinions, calling her a culture vulture, this and that.

I sincerely have a lot of questions for them, but before that, let’s look at the evolution of fashion from the current trends in the Yoruba fashion space.

The current traditional Yoruba female attire is now dresses with embedded corsets.

Everyone has embedded corsets into their traditional styles. For a Yoruba traditional bridal outfit to be passed as a valid and acceptable bridal outfit in this modern day, it almost has to include a corset.

The waist has to be missing.

“Waist Where?”

Which is very okay to me.

Fashion evolves.

That is the new trend of fashion, and to be trendy you have to follow. With my little knowledge of Yoruba culture and my continuous research, I don’t think any part of our original fashion includes the embedding of corsets into our outfits.

I had to pause mid-writing and ask Google if Yoruba women at some point wore corsets or if corsets had African origins.

The answer that came up was:

“Historically, the Western structural corset has no direct historical or ancestral link to traditional African clothing.”

“The origin of the corset (the specific garment with stiff structure, boning, and lacing) is European.”

Image Credit: Anastasiya Lobanovskaya Via pexels

If corset is European and it is now being embedded into our traditional attire, why do we make a fuss about it when a white woman is making something similar to iro and buba?

If we knew we were truly upholders of our cultural heritage, why did we ditch the normal iro and buba and explore our style with European influences, but get mad when someone different from us is copying our traditional style of dressing?

If we were so concerned about our cultural heritage and we are the custodians of our culture, why are we still walking around in our own countries wearing suits and ties?

We have even placed Westernised clothing on a pedestal, to the point where we set rules that certain people wearing traditional outfits can’t come into particular events.

We can’t wear our hair as our ancestors wore them without being targeted, even by people who we share similar identities with.

Image Credit: 1. Adefemi Adedoyin 2. Peculiar Perfection 3. Kold Shotz

I have heard of situations where people who didn’t dress corporate, which I refer to as the “institutionalised upholding of colonialism,” were turned back at interviews, not allowed to be in certain spaces, and not allowed to enter restaurants because the men were not buttoned up in suits and ties and the women weren’t dressed as colonialism deemed fit.

If the restaurant was themed around European culture and aimed to create an ambience and feeling of Europe away from Europe and the Western world, it would be understandable.

But not as a requirement to decide whether you can enter or not.

Because it is still this same African food we are going to eat. Expecting an individual to eat amala or fufu in a suit and tie is a very wicked thing to do.

From the books and stories I have read about how men ate in old times, they ate their amala and whatever food they were having shirtless. Enjoying the breeze from the trees and sipping palm wine.

I also remember when I was very little that our cultural outfits were used to differentiate people of lesser financial status.

Oh, I almost missed out our food being given modern names and changed to suit white people’s cultural identity.

During school parties, everyone had to show up wearing “English dress” lol, and those whose parents dressed them in traditional attire would automatically be tagged as being from a lesser financial status.

It was something other kids would joke about to make the person dressed in traditional attire feel bad.

Parents even knew not to dress their children that way if they could afford not to, because they knew what was to come after that.

We could judge the kids for being kids, but surprisingly, the adults are much worse in colonial thinking than one would imagine.

When an African accent is copied by people of other races, we flip and there is an uproar about it on social media about how our accent is not represented properly and how they are copying it to mock us.

But we are still the same people that would pay much more attention or have a greater form of respect for someone who sounds British instead of someone with our original Nigerian accent.

The British-sounding person is automatically placed into a financial bracket of a higher standard, while the person who sounds original to their identity is considered less.

Then we suddenly have an opinion and are quick to attack Nigerian social media influencers who try their best to just be accepted in society when they “form” a British or American accent and don’t get it right.

Its also funny to me.

But it’s not their fault. We are the real fault.

They just want to fit into the narrative of those we assume to be better polished than us because they are able to emulate well the effects of colonialism.

I sincerely feel we are loud in the wrong places.

I know quite a few white people might have lent their voices when they noticed that their culture was being copied in some sort of way, or maybe they don’t. Maybe, maybe not.

It doesn’t get to me, which makes me assume they don’t. And even if they do, not much of it becomes deliberated upon because realistically, it doesn’t matter.

Which speaks to me that they set their priorities right, unlike us, where we do not uphold our culture nor set our priorities right.

We wait around for people of other races to see the gems and value of our culture. And when they see it and try to make meaning of what we already have existing, something we pay no regard to, we get angry, worked up, and so many other feelings arise.

But if it truly matters to us, we would not wait for them to remind us, and we would not flare up when it is being appreciated.

They place priorities on things that matter to them. You can tell from the way they speak up about immigrants and immigration.

We sincerely need to question our views and set our priorities right. Decide whether we want to acknowledge our culture or if we still want to pick up on the remnants of colonialism.

And that means everything and anything that encompasses our heritage.

I am sincerely tired of my algorithm showing people of my race making false complaints about things they never uphold.

I genuinely think this has to be some form of unacknowledged PTSD from colonialism in our race, passed down from generation to generation.

We genuinely might no longer identify with certain things that mattered to our ancestors. Not because we don’t hold them in high regard, but because our attachment to them comes from a deeper place.

Maybe some of it comes from the emotional attachment to our cultural heritage and everything our ancestors went through during colonialism and the slave trade era.

It might not be an identified trauma, and maybe there is no existing research to back this exact thought, but I do think a part of it could be linked to the effects of what was passed down from generation to generation.

Maybe our anger is not only about our culture being copied, maybe it is connected to history, loss, and the emotional weight attached to what survived.

Originally published at https://notesfromoutside.com on June 25, 2026.