I think it was Frank Whalley, an art critic with The EastAfrican, who wrote memorably that to be caught in Kampala traffic is to “lose the will to live.”

Being caught in a Nairobi traffic jam may not inspire such levels of despair, but one is tormented by something close; a horrible sense of stasis felt as a vague yet distressing nervous condition. So one tries anything to ease the agony: A radio station one would not ordinarily listen to, a newspaper page not ordinarily avidly read, etc.

And so it was that I found myself recently listening to a history and civics programme for Standard Eight pupils while waiting for time, held at bay by a Nairobi traffic jam, to restart. The lesson on radio was on the defunct East African Community.

After giving its history and purpose, the presenter explained that it eventually broke up because of personality differences between Idi Amin and Julius Nyerere.

The major reason for the collapse, said the presenter, was interference from Britain, which, still nostalgic about its past colonial hegemony, did not want to see a powerful and independent regional bloc.

To be sure, Nyerere, self-effacing and cerebral, was different from the gregarious and buffoonish Amin, but to say that this difference in personality accounted for the collapse of the EAC is akin to saying that Joseph Stalin had Trotsky killed because he did not like the latter’s dress style.

After all, the reserved Angela Merkel is different from the more extroverted David Cameron, but the forces that could eventually bring the EU down are rooted in fiscal policy, ideology, governance, culture and geopolitics.

Oh, dear, where to start with the colonial argument? The analytical framework through which Africa apprehends its condition is based on the idea — propagated by cultural nationalism — that the pre-colonial African society was democratic and egalitarian, and relations among Africa’s many ethnic groups were characterised by brotherly love.

Accordingly, every single malady that today visits violence on our nationhood and humanity — from tribalism to civil war to female genital mutilation — are attributable to an aspect of colonialism.

Thus Rwanda’s genocidal disintegration is viewed less as a confluence of historical ethnic antagonisms and a failed post-colonial state than as a legacy of the divide-and-rule tactics of colonialism.

The oppression and low status of women in Africa are not seen as a feature of traditional patriarchy, but is instead theorised in terms of colonial and capitalist inequity and discrimination.

Civil wars are less a product of dictatorship and institutional underdevelopment than as a product of geopolitical manipulation by world powers.

Economic failure and the resulting perennial famine and debilitating crime are not attributable to mismanagement and corruption but to colonial economic policies, a view given a veneer of scholarship by Walter Rodney in his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

This theoretical approach to analysing Africa’s condition would be fine if it were confined to schools of thought still mesmerised by illusions of past utopian grandeur. The problem is that this way of thinking has a bearing on our social and economic development.

An assessment that does not factor in internal causes of conflict or economic failure, for instance, can hardly prescribe workable solutions.

So our mechanisms to deal with high-level corruption or to prevent conflict will have conceptual and practical defects. A mental attitude that refuses to interrogate outmoded thinking means that harmful values and practices will continue to damage our humanity.

The radio presenter and the demagogues who wrote the syllabus were more concerned with ideological posturing, not pedagogy.

Real teaching dispenses with convenient “truths” in order to equip learners with a critical understanding of their situation, and a willingness to subject their most cherished beliefs to logical scrutiny.

The reasons for the collapse of the EAC should have looked at ideological differences stemming from the comical socialist experiment in Tanzania and the capture of the state in Kenya by a quasi-fascist clique, military dictatorship in Uganda, and divergent visions among Africa’s elite of the post-colonial state and pan-Africanism.

Clearly, it is time to ditch the popular but false general theory of colonialism.

Tee Ngugi is a social and political commentator based in Nairobi