The Silent Majority
by Alonzo Kahalic
alkahalic6801@gmail.com
Dear Editor,
“When the missionaries came, they had the Bible, and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, they had the land, and we had the Bible.” – Often attributed to Jomo Kenyatta (1st President of Kenya).
This saying, heard across postcolonial lands from Kenya to Oceania, is not just a clever turn of phrase—it is a mirror held up to our histories. It captures the spiritual sleight-of-hand by which land, culture, and autonomy were exchanged for religion, obedience, and foreign governance. And now, decades or even centuries later, we are still waking up, eyes wide open, but hearts heavy. As our government treats its people like the colonizers of the past.
Today, in nations like Palau, the effect of this exchange continues, not just in land, but in identity. Too often, we find ourselves chasing dreams shaped by someone else’s god, someone else’s textbook, and someone else’s wallet. The phrase “In God We Trust” is printed on the U.S. dollar, but for many, God has been replaced by the dollar itself. We no longer seek meaning, we seek markets.
But let us not be confused. It is not money that is evil. Scripture itself tells us: “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). Love of money, obsession with wealth, with prestige, with ownership, has twisted our values. It has led churches to act like corporations, schools to train workers not thinkers and governments to adopt development plans that exclude the land and its people.
Our educational systems were designed by outsiders to serve outside interests. Even today, too many of our classrooms prepare our children to leave Palau, not to build it. They memorize foreign histories while forgetting their own bloodlines. We call it “education,” but much of it is indoctrination, training in dependency and not in dignity.
So, what is the solution?
We must begin again. Education must return to its roots: TO TEACH A PERSON TO THINK AND TO DO FOR SELF. To know their language, their land, and their lineage. To stand strong in a canoe, and in a classroom. To debate policy, and to recite chant. We must build churches that heal, not hoard. Schools that liberate and do not domesticate, with curricula that prepares our youth. To be Palauans in the 21st century and not replicas of American, Japanese, or missionary ideals.
The chains we wear today are not iron, but ideas. They are embedded in our prayers, our economics, our syllabi, and even our self-worth. And if we are to break them, we must first recognize that colonization did not end with flags, it continues in foundations, in education, and in the unspoken agreements we sign every day with our silence.
Our ancestors did not survive for us to live small. It’s time to open our eyes fully, not to complain about what we lost, but to reclaim what we still hold. Our land. Our children and Our future.
Your Humble Servant
Al Kahalic