The Scots don’t want independence. They said this emphatically the other day in that referendum in which they were asked to decide whether they wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom or if they wanted out. They voted decisively to remain tethered to the Union.

Still, many an African will be justified in thinking that the Brits are a bunch of jokers. This referendum on whether Scotland should be independent or not is so incomprehensible to us that some of our people are wondering whether their former masters have lost it.

Just think about it. Where we are right now, all of us have been in some arrangement or other that we call “nation” that nobody’s ancestor voted for or even acquiesced in.

Some brigands came to our shores and said we were theirs, we belonged to them and we were too dumbfounded by their behaviour that we were lost for words to respond to this assertion. We were had.

Since then, we have been somebody or other’s property. Like fetch-dogs, we fetched when we were told to fetch. When the master said “drop your language and adopt mine,” we dropped and adopted. When he said “your gods are heathen and pagan, worthless and friends of the devil,” we acted like we always knew that to be true.

Even when we were told we were now independent, free, unfettered, let loose and allowed to behave accordingly, we still longed for the day when matters were clearer and we knew our station and what we had to do to earn our right to live.

We became “independent” at a time when we did not even understand what that word meant, but instinctively we felt, not thought, it was a good thing.

Today, we still do not know what that “independence” means, so much have our difficulties multiplied and our cluelessness become more entrenched.

So what are these mzungus arguing about? That after 300 years of two united crowns doing so well, apparently, these people are doubting the logic of continuing together? Have they forgotten that when they came to us and claimed us as theirs they were together?

No, don’t tell me there would have been a way that Dr David Livingstone, the Scotsman who represented in our minds the very finest of Britain, would have even contemplated the referendum, let alone “independence.”

Three hundred years during which the United Kingdom presented itself to the world as a mighty nation, one and united, cannot be taken in vain, unless we were conned, we Africans, just as so often before, and since, we have been had.

And too many dyed-in-the wool Scotsmen are not helping us get our heads round this strange episode. Sean Connery, the British spy who saved the world from so many nasties so many times over in his role as “007” James Bond is such a one. He had been on the forefront of the “Yes” campaign for Scottish independence.

Yet the superspy failed to turn up for the endgame of the “Yes” campaign, it being suggested that his tax-exile status — living in the Bahamas — did not allow him to be in Scotland at this time.

Why, you ask?

Let’s not speculate, but let’s settle for the theory that the man who spent his earlier life saving the Queen, and the free world in so many places around the world could not be seen physically, and so decisively around polling day, planting the Macbeth dagger in the back of Queen Elizabeth.

Nor did another prominent Scotsman, Andy Murray, help matters any. After keeping mum for so long he pops up and says, rather mysteriously, “Let’s do this one.” You ask, do which one? But then he goes on to say that voting any other way would bring “too much negativity.”

I don’t know what that means. Voting “No” to independence means a positive for union, where voting “Yes” means a negative for the same notion. It seems there were positives and negatives on both sides of the vote.

That is what we need to contemplate as we seek to understand our own “united” situations.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]