The Sunday News
Much like colonialism itself coloniality is alive. It is so alive as a system and a structure of power that it does not only get converts among us, but it also gets spokespersons that verbalise it.
Coloniality is at its most powerful and successful when it gets converts and spokespersons among the colonised. This is as true as it is that anti-colonialism itself as a philosophy achieved its Zenith when white-skinned European philosophers took the front seat in debunking colonialism and the racism that came with it. Ahead of Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire, for instance, it is French philosopher, Jean Paul-Sartre, who projected robust anti-colonial existentialism that vibrated throughout the world.
Many African anti-colonial philosophers, from Amilcar Cabral to Steve Biko fed richly from the anti-colonial ventilations of Jean Paul-Sartre. It was no accident, therefore, that Fanon’s punchy anti-colonial book of 1961; The Wretched of the Earth, was prefaced by Sartre.
Presently such philosophers as Walter Mignolo, Boaventura de Soussa Santos and Enrique Dussel are white-skinned thinkers that are lifting and flying the flag of decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation.
Decoloniality is validated when white thinkers rise to challenge coloniality and push back against racism and white supremacy. Humanism itself is validated when those that would be beneficiaries of oppression rise up to speak for the liberation of the oppressed. Tragedy is real when victims of coloniality elect to be its spokespersons and constables.
“Against Decolonisation.”
The book of 2022; Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, by Professor Olufemi Taiwo is such a painful account to read. So painful it is that one needs to take some painkillers before reading it. The principal argument of the book is that we should not at this stage of African history be talking about decolonisation because decolonisation was achieved when African countries became politically independent, and settler colonial administrations were collapsed.
The economic, political and cultural challenges that burden Africa today, Taiwo argues, totally have nothing to do with colonialism. Much creatively, Taiwo deliberately misreads Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral to support the argument that the two African philosophers also suggested that after political independence Africans need not talk of decolonisation because colonialism would have died and been buried.
In the Preface of the book, Taiwo discloses that he is “one of the few scholars from the continent who still argues in favour of the relevance of the so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’ to the advancement of Africa and the progress of its peoples.” This is as the majority of European philosophers are ashamed to even mention the Enlightenment that darkened the Global South with colonialism and enslavement of black peoples.
In other words, Taiwo proclaims that he still believes in the European civilising mission in Africa that was used as a cover for colonialism and slavery. Of decoloniality, Taiwo makes the false claim by agreeing with Appadurai that “it seeks to return us to an earlier period of pre-colonial splendour.” This falsehood is made after almost all published decolonial thinkers have emphatically stated that decoloniality does not, and must not, mean a primitivist return to Precoloniality.
This untruth is manufactured by Taiwo, perhaps, just to give decoloniality and the growing decolonisation movement a bad name. Why an African would want to give decoloniality and the growing decolonisation movement a bad name boggles the mind.
Why an African philosopher would be invested in giving decoloniality and decolonisation a bad name must be cause for curiosity and concern because it exemplifies a victim of colonialism and coloniality that paradoxically becomes angry at decoloniality on behalf of colonialists.
Colonial sophistry
By sophistry is meant “the use of clever but false arguments, especially with the intention to deceive.” Cleverly but unfairly Taiwo constructs his own definition of decolonisation as “forcing an ex-colony to foreswear, on pain of being forever under the yoke of colonisation, any and every cultural, political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past.” In doing this Taiwo does not refer to any decolonial philosopher that has ever suggested that to decolonise should be to purify things of any and all traces of the colonial past and western modernity.
Taiwo spends his whole book using clever but false arguments to box the “decolonisation” that he has concocted while strictly avoiding decoloniality and decolonisation as they have been enunciated by decolonists.
Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 book on neocolonialism as the continuation of colonialism by other means after an African country has been politically freed from colonialism is twisted and turned by Taiwo to mean the opposite of what Nkrumah meant.
Many words and phrases are dragged kicking and screaming and deployed to fortify the false argument that colonialism ended at the independence of African countries. In many words Taiwo does not only apologise for colonialism but defends it by reducing it to an event when it was a durable process whose effects are still being endured in the Global South today.
African agency
To Taiwo the observation by decolonial scholars that colonialism continues by other means in Africa means that Africans are being robbed of their agency and turned into children that have no initiative to solve their problems.
For African problems that burden the continent after the independence of African countries from colonialism we are taught that we should blame African leaders for not using their agency to solve those problems.
That colonialism, as Sartre argued, is a system that can remain in place in the absence of colonialists is totally ignored by Taiwo who is determined to insulate Europe and America from all blame for African problems.
That the world economic and political system is controlled from centres of the Euro-American Empire is erased to make the convenient argument that Africans, in order to prove that they have agency, should stop even observing that the effects of slavery, colonisation, and imperialism still burden them today. To have agency in Africa, therefore, is to totally erase the history and the memory of conquest and Empire in the continent.
In the book under discussion, Olufemi Taiwo, the brilliant philosopher who wrote the prize-winning book, How Colonialism Preemptied Modernity in Africa, becomes not only a colonial sophist but also a colonial constable. The titan of Africana Studies at Cornell University becomes another broken thing.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in South Africa. Contact: [email protected].
