ÀWÉ ALÁGBO™

They called it the "Third World" to make you feel like you came third. But you were not late. You were taken from. Your labor built the factories that built the machines that built the industrial economies that then turned around and called you "undeveloped." Your land grew the cotton, the sugar, the rubber, the cocoa that fed the capital accumulation of the "First World" before the First World had decided to call itself that. Your knowledge, of crops, of navigation, of medicine, of metallurgy, was extracted, renamed, and claimed. Your people were moved across oceans as instruments of production and their descendants are still, in many cases, living with the specific material consequences of that movement. None of this is grievance for its own sake. Grievance without analysis is just pain. This is analysis. The analysis says: the distance between the wealthy world and the poor world is not natural, not cultural, not civilizational. It is the accumulated result of specific choices, made by specific people, over specific centuries, for specific reasons. Which means it is not permanent. What was made can be unmade. What was taken can be accounted for, even if it cannot be returned exactly. History doesn’t run backwards. Restructured. Refused. The majority of humanity did not consent to the terms currently governing the world. It is becoming aware, slowly and then quickly, that it never had to.