When Africans or peoples of African descent in the diaspora were enslaved or colonised, they must have dreamt one day of freedom, of seeing the fruits of their labour used for making their lives go forward, to provide a future for their children. The most advanced among the slaves preached that men and women had the right to be free, led them in sometimes futile uprisings which resulted in more tortures and massacres. Sometimes, as in Haiti, they prospered for a while.

The children of colonialism often read tales of slave revolts, strengthening their determination to lead their people to freedom. They went to schools operated by their colonial masters, where they learnt that people in the mother countries once led lives no better than slaves or the colonised. Enlightened men and women of those times preached that men and women were born free, endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This vision of men and women, as defined by freedom, was inculcated in the colonial peoples, empowering them to demand and win their liberation, sometimes with pain and immeasurable torrents of blood. The independence leaders were lionised, even by members of imperial society, who saw in them the spirit of their heroic ancestors who once fought for and won the rights to make their citizens proud, educated, materially successful and humane.

People who were once told their lot was to labour for masters of a different colour and nationality, without dignity, equality, freedom or citizenship, now almost deified the bringers of independence who built the schools, hospitals, roads, and houses denied them by men and women from a different continent. Children, once told they lacked the brains to absorb the knowledge to transform them from hewers of wood and drawers of water, now proved that doctorates in science and philosophy were not beyond them.

In newly built universities in ex-colonies, and old ones in the mother countries, men and women dazzled with their grasp of the most exotic branches of knowledge. Millions of citizens were dragged out of illiteracy, superstition and inhuman drudgery. Jobs once reserved for foreigners, which were defined as beyond the capacity of “natives”, were now occupied with distinction by men and women from towns and villages from where ordinary people came. A new dawn had arisen, and men and women were now full of hope.

For some, however, the dream faded and some experienced the beginning of unending nightmares.New men and women, who yesterday preached liberty and equality, began to interpret these words to mean they had the rights to occupy the jobs, houses and social positions of erstwhile masters. European Reservation Areas, created to segregate people with pale skins from those with dark pigment were redefined as Government Reservation Areas to separate people with money from people without.

Since equality now meant the right of leaders to act like Europeans, leadership now meant the right to rule forever without elections, and to use the resources of the country to create a new class of masters, with the same belief systems, if different skin colours, from the old class. Soldiers and policemen who once enforced inequality and inferiority on the people with whips, batons, machine guns, cannons and tanks, moved seamlessly into the new despotism of selective independence.

With the tendency of the oppressed to believe in illusions of hope, many rejoiced when young men in shining braid and khaki drove the discredited men from the parliaments and assemblies, sometimes exiling or executing them. People kept hoping for a short time till they saw that soldiers and policemen now shooting their children were those who had shot their parents or themselves on behalf of colonists or national leaders in the past. Except now they killed and tortured for their foreign accounts, not their old masters.

The rule of gunmen marked a new stage of regression as the public opinion which once constrained the colonists and civilian dictators had no impact on trained killers: constitutions are made of paper, bayonets are made of steel. Generals and field marshals awarded themselves ranks, honours, privileges, and wealth without measure, and murdered any who challenged their rights to do so. Like the colonialists who massacred victims in India, Jamaica, South Africa, Congo, Nigeria, Algeria, Namibia and elsewhere, the uniformed assassins “disappeared” those they did not like, and burned or buried their bodies in unmarked graves.

The impunity with which they massacred and plundered, reducing their countries to ramshackle slaughterhouses, made the people once more rejoice when they “elected” civilians to govern them. But their joy was short-lived as the new leaders had studied the manners in which poor soldiers had got rich by murdering their enemies. Elections became political coups, by which rulers gained power through new forms of warfare. Political assassinations became routine, often arranged by former generals who won the right to kill through the ballot box and egomania. For people without jobs, food, schools, hospitals, houses, hope, or dignity – slavery, colonialism, independence, military dictatorship and democracy were mere words without meaning, torturing the minds of those who suffered without hope of redress.

Patrick Wilmot, who is based in London, is a writer and commentator on African affairs for the BBC, Sky News, Al-Jazeera and CNN. He’s a visiting professor at Ahmadu Bello and Jos universities in Nigeria.