The Children of the Master: A prose poem on inheritance, civilisation, complicity, and the great unlearning by David Yambio

You, children of the master, have a peculiar understanding of innocence.

You were not there, you say, when the first ships sailed. You did not hold the whip, you did not auction the human being, you did not set fire to the villages, you did not carve up continents, you did not stand over the dying child, you did not rape the enslaved woman, you did not torture by burning the enslaved man, you did not amputate those who resisted , you did not bury the indigenous beneath the foundations of your civilisation.

You were not there.

And because you were not there, you believe history has acquitted you.

Yet you were born into the house that the burning built.

You inherited the land, the institutions, the accumulated wealth, the passports, the machinery, the privileges, and the peculiar confidence of a civilisation that has never been required to account fully for the origins of its prosperity.

You call this inheritance  a civilisation.

You call its advantages  a merit.

You call its comforts a progress.

And you call yourselves privileged, with an audacity so extraordinary that one wonders whether you have ever understood the word.

Privileged by whom? At whose expense? By what historical arrangement? Upon whose stolen land, whose broken backs, whose extinguished civilisations, whose unpaid labour, whose buried children?

You ask none of these questions.

For you, children of the master, have learned to admire the house without ever examining its foundations.

And what foundations they are!

Conquest dressed as discovery. Theft dignified as trade. Enslavement organised into commerce. Rape concealed beneath the language of conquest. Genocide presented as settlement. Plunder celebrated as enterprise. The annihilation of indigenous worlds justified as the advancement of mankind.

And above it all, the invention of whiteness as an institution, a political entitlement, a manufactured hierarchy in which one portion of supposed humanity appointed itself the measure of all others.

The master called himself civilised because he possessed the weapon and tools of violence  to declare everyone else a savage.

He first invented the inferior human, then congratulated himself for bringing that human into civilisation.

And you, his children, centuries later, still speak of defending your civilisation.

Defending it from whom?

From those whose continents it plundered? From those whose ancestors it enslaved? From those whose languages it silenced, whose histories it erased, whose economies it dismantled, whose borders it drew, whose futures it continues to mortgage?

You cry that your culture is under attack.

What a remarkable accusation from a civilisation that made an industry of attacking cultures.

You cry that you are being invaded.

What an extraordinary fear from the inheritors of empires that crossed every ocean, occupied every continent, and planted their flags wherever their weapons and savagery wrath  could reach.

You, children of the master, have mastered the art of fearing in others what your own civilisation once glorified in itself.

You fear invasion but celebrate conquest upon whose foundation you sit today.

You fear disorder but defend domination upon which you are sustained.

You fear the foreigner but depend upon foreign labour.

You condemn the poor for being poor, yet your prosperity is built upon their exploitation.

You fear the collapse of civilisation while defending the very arrangements that are destroying the conditions for life on every corner of this Earth.

And when confronted with this contradiction, you invoke the most convenient defence ever devised by the descendants of power:

It was the government, not the people.

Ah, the government!

That magnificent invention through which you, children of the master, exercise political authority when it flatters you and surrender all responsibility when it condemns you.

When the master sends armies abroad, it is the government.

When he finances dictators, it is the government.

When he equips militias and terrorist groups, bombs villages, commits genocides, closes borders, deports families, imprisons children, protects corporations, and feeds weapons into wars whose consequences will be suffered by generations yet unborn, it is the government.

But when your roads are built, when your railways are constructed, when your planes fly high skies, when your rockets sail to alien planets, when your economies expand, when your GDP grows, when your passports open borders majestically, when your currency strengthens to dominate others, when your industries flourish, when your hospitals are staffed, when  your hotels and supermarkets are serviced and when your houses are kept warm by imported energy, suddenly it becomes “our achievement, our prosperity, our great civilisation”.

How curious!

The benefits belong to you, but the crimes belong to the government.

And you, his children, boast to the world:

Here, we have democracy!

Here, we vote!

Here, we elect our leaders!

Very well.

Then tell us, children of the master, what exactly does your participation mean if you claim no responsibility for what is done in your name?

What is the moral value of electing a government whose violence you insist has nothing to do with you?

And when those subjected to your civilisation’s violence demand justice, you offer them instructions.

“Why do you not protest?

Why do you not petition?

Why do you not campaign?

Why do you not vote?

Why do you not take your grievances to the courts?”

As though the colonised had never protested.

As though the enslaved had never revolted.

As though the oppressed had never petitioned, marched, organised, negotiated, voted, resisted, and died demanding the most elementary recognition of their humanity.

As though centuries of organised resistance were just the consequence of people not understanding the appropriate administrative procedures.

You, children of the master, are remarkably generous with methods of resistance that do not require you to surrender your power.

You teach us how to complain.

You teach us how to submit evidence.

You teach us how to obtain permission to demonstrate.

You teach us how to address the very institutions whose arrangements produce our dispossession.

And should our resistance genuinely threaten the foundations of the master’s power, we discover how quickly the language of democracy gives way to the language of public order, national security, extremism, criminality, and the preservation of civilisation.

The permitted protest must end before commerce is disturbed.

The petition must be polite.

The demand must be reasonable.

The resistance must never inconvenience the very order against which it rises.

Thus rebellion is processed into procedure, collective power into an appointment with an official who is authorised to listen but seldom authorised to change anything.

Yet you, children of the master, call this freedom.

Meanwhile, your houses remain warm.

Your petrol stations remain supplied.

Your machines continue to run.

Your plane still lingers in the high skies.

Your rockets continually attempts the rape of the other planets - discovery-human civilisation, your master proclaims.

Your wardrobes fill with cotton — exotic fabrics, your jewellery with gold and diamonds, your batteries with minerals extracted from distant lands, your supermarkets with produce cultivated by underpaid hands.

Your cities glow with the electricity of an unequal world.

Your comforts travel across oceans before arriving at your doorsteps, washed off the blood, exhaustion, dispossession, and ecological destruction that accompany their production.

You know the price of everything.

But you seldom ask the cost.

You ask how much the diamond is worth, not who was buried beneath the mine.

You ask whether the garment is affordable, not whether the hands that stitched it can afford bread.

You ask whether the fuel is cheap, not which communities have been poisoned, displaced, or sacrificed to extract it.

For in the master’s civilisation, successful acquisition has been elevated into virtue.

It matters less how wealth was accumulated than whether it was accumulated successfully.

In the master’s civilisation the conqueror is crowned as a founder.

The plunderer as an investor.

The exploiter as an employer.

The thief as a philanthropist.

The corporation as a person, while the person it exploits becomes a statistic.

And you, children of the master, learn to admire the successful man long before you are taught to examine the conditions of his success.

You are taught to compete before you are taught to cooperate.

To accumulate before you are taught to share.

To possess before you are taught to belong.

To defeat before you are taught to live alongside.

And so the empire reproduces itself, not only through its armies and institutions but through the desires of its children.

Yet behold!

Something extraordinary is happening.

The master, that insatiable beast, has begun to devour his own descendants.

For the master has never possessed loyalty, not even to those who resemble him.

He has loyalty only to power, acquisition, expansion, and the preservation of his dominion.

He cannot survive without extracting from life.

And when distant lands can no longer yield enough, when foreign labour has been squeezed and foreign resources contested, when the economic foundations of his supremacy begin to fracture, he turns his appetite towards his own household.

You, the children who once considered yourselves heirs, discover that you, too, are expendable and are bound to be enslaved.

Your wages stagnate.

Your rents rise.

Your homes become investments for strangers.

Your healthcare becomes a financial calculation.

Your education becomes a debt.

Your food becomes more expensive.

Your energy bills devour your salaries.

Your retirement recedes into uncertainty.

You work longer, compete harder, borrow more, and live increasingly anxious lives.

You are told that freedom means choice, yet every choice seems to arrive with a price.

You are told that success requires sacrifice, yet the sacrifices multiply while the rewards retreat.

You are told to become entrepreneurs of yourselves, to market your identities, transform your personalities into brands, convert your hobbies into income, and turn every remaining hour of life into an economic opportunity on devouring platforms.

For some, exposing themselves online is an exercise of choice; for others, economic desperation narrows the choices until selling access to one’s most intimate self appears to offer the only credible route towards financial independence.

And the master tells you  it is empowerment, because he has discovered that exploitation is easiest to defend when the exploited are persuaded to describe their survival as freedom.

He does not need to prohibit community.

He merely makes it difficult to sustain.

He stretches the working day, fragments the family, prices people out of their neighbourhoods, turns shared spaces into commercial property, and ensures that exhaustion arrives before companionship.

You see not how your  dinner table has become a luxury of time.

You see not how your food is purchased quickly, consumed quickly, and forgotten quickly – fast food he says.

You see not how your neighbour has become a stranger?

You see not how your elderly has become an administrative problem?

You see not how your child has become a scheduling problem?

You see not how your family has become an economic unit under pressure?

The individual so to speak has become a solitary competitor in a crowded marketplace.

And when anxiety, depression, loneliness, and despair spread through the master’s prosperous civilisation, you, his children, are encouraged to understand these conditions principally as private failures requiring private remedies.

You are offered another service.

A therapist.

A psychologist.

Another subscription.

Another product.

Another professional to help you endure what you have been taught not to question collectively.

The master thus profits even from the injuries his own civilisation produces.

And still you, his children, ask what happened to your society.

You lament the disappearance of community.

You mourn the erosion of family life.

You complain of isolation.

You speak nostalgically of an age when neighbours knew one another, when children belonged to a wider circle of care, when meals were shared, when belonging was not purchased through membership loyalties.

But when we speak to you of rebuilding community sovereignty, of mutual aid, of shared resources, of people organising their collective lives without depending upon distant authorities for every elementary need, you stare at us as though we have proposed some impossible civilisation.

“It is too difficult.

People will not cooperate.

Who will organise it?

Where will the funding come from?

Which institution will manage it?”

And there, at last, the tragedy lay bare.

You, children of the master, have become so accustomed to institutional dependency that ordinary human cooperation appears to you as a radical undertaking.

What much of humanity has practised through generations—the sharing of food, the collective raising of children, the care of elders, the cultivation of land, the resolution of common problems, the understanding that one person’s suffering concerns the community—has been transformed in your imagination into a project requiring experts, consultants, funding applications, and administrative approval.

You no longer recognise cooperation as a normal condition of human life.

You imagine it must be invented.

You no longer trust the neighbour without first trusting your institution.

You no longer believe people can organise unless someone possesses authority over them.

The master has achieved something more enduring than obedience.

He has colonised your imagination.

He has persuaded you, his children, that life without his management is disorder, that security without his surveillance is impossible, that prosperity without competition is fantasy, and that a community without hierarchy is childish.

And so you become increasingly domesticated by the very power you believe you command.

Not citizens exercising sovereignty, but subjects trained to mistake consumption for liberty.

You are permitted to choose your products, your entertainment, your representatives, your insurance, your debts, and the particular arrangements through which your labour will be sold.

But the fundamental question—who owns the world in which these choices are made?—is kept safely beyond the boundaries of respectable conversation.

Your enclosure has no visible fence.

Your chains are called obligations.

Your obedience is called responsibility.

Your exhaustion is called ambition.

And your competition with one another is called opportunity.

This is not the slavery of the plantation and cotton picking, for the  ancestral crimes weigh heavily to be diminished to make our contemporary metaphor convenient.

But the master has learned that domination need not always announce itself through chains.

He  announced yours as a necessity. 

A necessity through a life in which the refusal to participate means the loss of shelter, dignity, security, or the possibility of belonging.

And you, children of the master, who have been taught that domination happens elsewhere, discover too late that the machinery has always been capable of turning towards you.

Still, many among you choose not to confront it.

Instead, you search for someone beneath you.

The migrant.

The refugee.

The foreign worker.

The Black neighbour.

The Muslim family.

The indigenous community that asks why they must disappear.

The poor person who has not yet learned to apologise for being poor.

And suddenly you, children whose material security is being dismantled by those above you, are persuaded that your greatest danger comes from those below.

Your neighbourhoods are emptied of people deemed undesirable.

Your borders become theatres of cruelty.

Your politicians promise to restore your civilisation by removing those it has historically exploited.

And you applaud.

You call it protecting your culture.

You call it preserving your identity.

You call it defending your way of life.

But what sort of civilisation requires the humiliation of another human being to reassure itself of its own worth?

What sort of identity becomes secure only when someone else is denied the right to exist alongside it?

What sort of culture, so certain of its superiority, trembles before the presence of a hungry stranger?

The master understands this weakness perfectly.

He knows that a frightened descendant is easier to govern than a descendant who understands the source of his fear.

He knows that the working poor can be turned against the displaced poor.

He knows that racial hierarchy offers even the impoverished a fictitious inheritance of superiority.

He knows that people who have lost economic power may cling more desperately to the illusion of racial power.

And so you, the master’s descendants, fight among yourselves for the crumbs of an empire whose wealth has been accumulating elsewhere.

You call each other invaders while the landlord raises the rent.

You quarrel over identity while the corporation acquires your water.

You demand stronger borders while your public institutions are dismantled.

You defend the flag while the ground beneath your feet is sold.

And somewhere, far above your quarrels, the master continues counting his benefits.

But the contradiction is becoming impossible to conceal.

Your master’s empire that claimed to bring civilisation has poisoned rivers, razed forests, exhausted soils, filled oceans with waste, exterminated species, and converted the conditions of life into commodities.

Your master's civilisation that promised freedom has constructed detention centres, surveillance systems, deportation machinery, and entire industries dedicated to the management of unwanted human beings.

Your master’s civilisation that worships peace remains among the greatest producers and merchants of war.

Your master’s civilisation that declared human rights are universal has devised borders, classifications, exceptions, and legal fictions through which universality can be suspended whenever the wrong human arrives.

Your master’s  civilisation that announces equality every morning continues to reproduce hierarchies of race, class, citizenship, property, and birth.

And your civilisation that considers itself the pinnacle of human achievement has not guaranteed dignity even to growing numbers of its own children.

How is this a moral contradiction alone and not a material crisis?

The master can no longer so easily conceal the fractures beneath the marble.

His dominance is contested.

His extraction meets resistance.

The resources he treated as inexhaustible are finite.

The populations he treated as obedient are remembering.

The communities he sought to erase continue to survive.

The economic order that promised endless expansion collides with the limits of the living planet.

And you, the very descendants who were taught that history had ended with your civilisation’s triumph, are beginning to discover that history never sought your permission to continue.

But beware.

A declining empire is not necessarily a kinder empire — ask the Romans.

A wounded master may become more vicious than a triumphant one.

He may tighten his borders, enlarge his prisons, criminalise solidarity, militarise his institutions, cultivate fascism, and demand new sacrifices from those who once believed themselves protected by his favour.

He may turn the anxieties of his children into weapons against those who have suffered beneath his authority for centuries.

And unless you, his descendants, begin to understand the machinery, you may defend it more fiercely precisely when it begins to destroy you.

So hear this, children of the master.

We do not ask you to feel guilty for having been born.

Birth is not a crime as ours have been. 

Nor do we hold that cruelty flows through your blood, that violence belongs to your skin, or that the atrocities of your ancestors render you incapable of humanity.

That would only reproduce the monstrous logic by which your master’s civilisation divided humanity into superior and inferior beings.

You did not invent every institution you inherited.

But you live within them.

You may not have committed the original theft.

You may not have committed the annihilation of a people.

You may not have committed genocide.

But you cannot knowingly defend its continuation and still claim innocence.

You may not have drawn the borders.

But you can question why some human beings inherit the right to cross them while others inherit the risk of death at them.

You may not have established the plantations.

But you can refuse an economy that continues to treat human disposability as an acceptable cost of prosperity.

You may not have designed the empire.

But you can stop calling its preservation a moral duty.

And do not tell us that we envy your privileges.

Envy is far too innocent a word for what we are confronting.

We are not asking to exchange places with you inside the machinery of domination.

We are asking why that machinery should exist.

We do not aspire to become new masters.

We aspire to a world in which mastery over other human beings ceases to be regarded as an achievement.

Nor should you tell us that you feel guilty.

What is guilt worth when it changes nothing?

What is an apology worth if the inheritance remains sacred?

What is remorse worth if it ends at the ceremony?

What is solidarity worth when it disappears the moment justice requires the surrender of an advantage?

You cannot undo the centuries.

You cannot return every stolen life.

You cannot resurrect the civilisations that conquest destroyed.

You cannot restore every forest, un-spill every drop of blood, or recover every name erased from the historical record.

But you can stop demanding that those who survived remain silent for your comfort.

You can confront the institutions that continue the violence.

You can refuse to defend racial supremacy under the respectable language of cultural preservation.

You can challenge the accumulation of wealth through exploitation.

You can rebuild relationships that are not governed by acquisition.

You can recognise the humanity of those whom the master has taught you to fear.

You can begin to understand that freedom cannot be sustained through the organised unfreedom of others.

And above all, you can unlearn.

For what has been taught can be questioned.

What has been normalised can be rejected.

What has been inherited need not be defended.

We cannot unsee what has been witnessed.

We cannot unknow what has been revealed.

But we can unlearn.

And unlearn you must.

Not because history demands the endless punishment of descendants, but because the future demands an end to the reproduction of the master.

You, children of the master, stand before a terrible choice.

You may spend your remaining strength defending a civilisation that devours the world and is now beginning to devour you.

Or you may finally recognise that the house you inherited was never the whole world, that humanity existed before its foundations were laid, that community does not require a master, and that civilisation cannot be measured by the power to conquer but by the capacity to live without conquest.

For the master has always feared one creature above all:

The witness.

But perhaps there is something he has not yet fully imagined.

That one day, you, his own children, might begin to listen.

That you might look upon your inheritance without worshipping it.

That you might discover the difference between possessing the world and belonging to it.

That you might refuse to become the instruments through which his dominion is reproduced.

For the master can survive the condemnation of his enemies.

He has survived it for centuries.

He knows how to imprison the dissident, deport the foreigner, silence the witness, and turn rebellion into an administrative matter.

But what becomes of the master when you, his children, no longer desire to inherit his throne?

When you cease to mistake his power for your freedom?

When you finally understand that the world was never his to give you?

Perhaps then, for the first time, you, his descendants, will be capable of something greater than inheritance.

You will be capable of refusal.

And the master’s greatest fear will no longer be the return of the truth.

It will be the day you recognise it—

and refuse to become him.

End

Originally written on the 18th June 2026

-  David Yambio