In 1977 the people of Kamĩrĩĩthũ village, peasants, factory workers, women who had never set foot in a university, built a theater. They built it from scrap materials and collective will and wrote their own play about their own exploitation and performed it in the Gĩkũyũ language before ten thousand of their neighbors. The Kenyan state did not write a review. It sent armed police and demolished the theater in thirty minutes.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who helped write that play, understood what the state was responding to. The villagers of Kamĩrĩĩthũ were not making art. They were making a simple claim that they were not an audience, not raw material and were the authors of their own lives. That claim is what had to be destroyed because it is the one thing colonial power cannot survive—a people who believe they own what they produce.

This is what I mean when I say independence. Not the word as it has been domesticated by the forces it was born to oppose—not a brand or revenue model—but the condition underneath. The insistence of a people who have been told for as long as anyone can remember that their labor belongs to somebody else, that their language is not a language, that the beauty of what they make is raw material to be shipped elsewhere, processed, and sold back to them at a price they cannot afford.

This is what colonialism has always been and is what it remains. The theater was demolished in 1982. The logic has not changed.

Achille Mbembe, in “Necropolitics”, called the occupation of Palestine “the most accomplished form of necropower”. Accomplished sits in your throat like glass because it means the machinery of colonial domination has been perfected there. The legal architecture that legitimizes dispossession through the language of procedure. The permit system, the checkpoint, the administrative detention… all of it dressed in the syntax of governance.

But the structure that extracts is singular. It does not have a military division and a cultural division. Instead it is one thing. The same logic that enabled the Berlin Conference of 1884 to carve Africa into possessions enabled the recording industry to carve Black music into property owned by people who never sang a note. Robin D.G. Kelley has mapped the circuit. Raw cultural product flows from periphery to metropole is processed, branded, and sold, profits returning to the imperial center. Greg Tate called his anthology “Everything But the Burden” because that is precisely what gets taken—everything except the weight of having made it. The contract, like the treaty, uses the word agreement to describe a relationship in which one party has no meaningful choice.

It is within this architecture—not beside it or above it—that independent music distribution becomes anti-colonial praxis. What UnitedMasters has the potential to represent, at its most serious, is not a business model but an argument. That the artist who owns their masters exercises a sovereignty analogous to the nation that controls its own resources. That transparent payment is a refusal of the opacity that has always been extraction’s first instrument. That removing the intermediary who claims your work as their asset is not innovation but restoration.

Placing the industry’s intellectual property back into the hands of its rightful owners is legal language but the resonance is older than any contract. It echoes Du Bois raising the sabotage of Black Swan Records at the Pan-African Congress—a label destroyed not by the market but by an industry that understood what Black ownership of Black music would mean. It echoes Curtis Mayfield building Curtom Records as infrastructure for self-determination, not just a catalog but a proposition about who gets to be the subject rather than the object of the sentence. It echoes Ngũgĩ’s insistence in “Decolonising the Mind” that the means of cultural production must be owned by the people who produce the culture and that anything less is what he called “the cultural bomb”, the annihilation of a people’s belief in their capacity to own what they create.

This is important at a time when the acquisition of independent businesses becomes the business model for the major labels.

And yet. UnitedMasters distributes through Spotify and Apple Music. It is funded by Alphabet and Andreessen Horowitz. The colonial middleman removed at one level persists at another. The artist owns the masters but rents the marketplace. The question this raises is not whether the project is compromised—all liberation movements operating within the world as it exists rather than as it should be are compromised—but whether the compromise is strategic or terminal. Whether the tools are being used or whether the tools are using you.

This is where I want to be precise about what independence means and what it must mean if it is to be more than marketing copy. Independence is orientation. The artists distributed through UnitedMasters are not liberated but they are oriented toward ownership and toward the proposition that the people who make the thing should control the thing. Orientation matters because it determines what you build next.

This is the connective tissue I have been tracing while on paternity leave. From a village theater in Kamĩrĩĩthũ to the rubble of Gaza to Atlanta music studios, the thread is the same. The colonial state has always known that claims of ownership, once believed, is the one thing it cannot survive. That is why it demolishes theaters and why it bombs hospitals and why it writes contracts designed to be unreadable. Every act of genuine independence, however partial, however embedded in the structures it seeks to transform, is an act of war against the world as it has been arranged. The kind that begins when a people decide that their language is a language, their music is music, and their lives belong to them.