When you meticulously trace the historical family tree of global mergers and corporate acquisitions, you will discover a terrifying reality. The massive multinational conglomerate behind your everyday household items like Dove, Knorr Maggi, Pepsodent, Sunlight, Close Up, and Vaseline is the direct corporate heir to the notorious Royal Niger Company. The Royal Niger Company is the exact private corporation that violently conquered, plundered, economically suffocated, and brutally subjugated the people of Nigeria using heavily armed gunboats, rapid-fire Maxim guns, mercenary militias, and scorched-earth tactics strictly for corporate profits. After bleeding the region dry, they casually sold the entire territory of Nigeria off like a cheap, used car to the British government for a paltry 865,000 pounds on January 1, 1900. The company surrendered its royal charter, and the British government officially took over the territory, creating the Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates, which were later amalgamated in 1914 by Lord Lugard. This is perhaps the most vivid and horrifying real-world example of how colonialism was never really about sovereign nations, planting flags, spreading civilization, or preaching religion. Colonialism itself was a ruthless corporate project that simply, seamlessly evolved into modern consumer capitalism. This is exactly why we cannot ever seriously talk about liberating Africa from the suffocating pangs of Western imperialism without first aggressively addressing the very economic foundation that sustains colonialism, which is global capitalism. In fact, I am more than convinced that the primary reason people usually do not see the similarity between capitalism and colonialism is because they make the naive mistake of thinking colonialism is merely about nations conquering nations to spread their culture, language, and religion. Simultaneously, they view capitalism through the highly sanitized, lobotomized lens of a harmless, voluntary, and mutually beneficial commerce between two corporate entities. This is actually a completely inaccurate analysis of the true nature of both colonialism and capitalism. Indeed, the colonial governors may have physically left Nigeria, and we definitely do have our own colorful national flags, written constitutions, bloated parliamentary systems, and independent military forces. Yet, the exact same extractive, parasitic economic system still exists. Today, even more raw resources, solid minerals, and financial wealth continue to flow completely uninterrupted to Western capitals than we ever witnessed in the past under direct colonial military occupation. The only structural difference with the extraction that exists today compared to the brutal form it took in the past is that it is no longer sustained by physical gunboats, brutal police crackdowns, forced manual labor, and the open repression of local communities. Today, this exact same extractive model manifests itself invisibly through corporate spreadsheets, extortionate debt servicing, IMF structural adjustment programs, currency devaluations, rigged trade tariffs, and predatory foreign direct investments. These deep historical and structural similarities between colonialism and capitalism are exactly why we must absolutely not fall into the intellectual trap of analyzing colonialism and neo-colonialism as if they are abstract concepts that exist in a vacuum. We cannot fight the symptoms while completely ignoring the very capitalist system that actively sustains, funds, and manages this brutal, ongoing subjugation and plunder of African wealth and resources.