The Sunday News
THERE is a troubling wish amongst academics and political activists that by now we should be done talking about the colonial experience and colonialism itself. This is as if the colonial experience and its coloniality are done with us at all.
An Ethiopian colleague and friend of mine, lets call him TK for the sake of progress, is not talking to me lately.
Whenever issues of decolonisation were raised, either in serious intellectual engagement or frivolous pub talk, TK would take the opportunity to remind all and sundry that Ethiopia was the only African country that was never colonised or will it ever be colonised.
The occupation of Ethiopia by Italy from 1936 to 1941 is not considered colonisation, by some that include TK, as it did not lead to a durable colonial administration.
In the past few weeks, however, as the Tigray rebels are reported to be advancing towards Addis Ababa, TK has been asking all that have eyes to see what Western powers led by the United States of America are doing fomenting civil war in Ethiopia.
My sin was to remind TK that systematic and structural colonialism works exactly in that way; Ethiopia might not have had a colonial administration but it was not and it will not be insulated from coloniality.
Imperialism, which is the economic and political expansionism of the West into the rest of the world, gave birth to slavery and colonisation.
Not only had that but imperialism produced a world system that is economic, political and cultural in nature. This modern imperial, slavish and colonial world system is all enveloping and no single country is safe from it.
In every country of the Global South colonial conditions and experiences are going on long after colonial administrations were demolished.
That is what is called coloniality, the durability of the life and the after lives of colonialism, after the colonial settlers and their colonial institutions have departed.
It is no exaggeration therefore that the first step towards decoloniality and liberation is to read, understand, and know colonialism and the coloniality that it gave birth to.
Out of the Dark Night
Leading historian and political philosopher, Achille Mbembe, has written some punchy essays under the title; Out of the Dark Night: Essays in Decolonisation (2021).
In the metaphorisation of Mbeme, colonialism, colonial conditions and experiences, were a dark night from which the colonised were supposed to walk out.
Liberation from colonialism was supposed to be a long walk from darkness to some light. Mbembe deploys his usual exhilarating prose to show that decolonisation in Africa did not become that stroll from the dark to the light but came to be arrested by some deep politics, contradictions, discontinuities and continuities.
Mbembe is a true witness to it that there is no agreement even amongst the most perceptive and discerning Africans on what decolonisation was supposed to mean. What to decolonise means is itself a stubborn question whose answer is yet to be supplied.
The difficulty of what it means to decolonise, in my view, is based on the difficulty that we have had in understanding the nature of colonialism itself.
Colonialism was not just a group of strange foreigners that landed in another place and displaced and dispossessed the natives.
It was not a simple event of economic and geographic occupation with political and legal consequences. It was, over and above everything, the true arrival of a dark night from which the colonised may not just walk out into a new day whose light is not polluted by the darkness, no.
Colonialism was and still is that darkness of the night which follows its victims into their day to haunt them.
If colonialism was that simple event of occupation, settlement, political and economic domination, the departure of settlers at every country’s independence was going to deliver some bright days. But the dark night and the wound is with us and in us much like demon possession.
Colonialism is a System
At the beginning of the Algerian war of independence in 1956, the Marxist French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a forceful but much ignored essay: “Colonialism is a System.”
Sartre drew from Marxist analysis to illustrate that colonialism was a political strategy of the economic system of capitalism.
To exploit the labour of a people, displace them from their land and dispossess them of their property and resources is what colonisation did for capitalism. Capitalism used colonialism.
That is why Karl Marx noted it that colonisation was capitalism in its naked and much undignified form. Colonisation was more of a system also in how it absorbed both the colonisers and their colonised into one structure of power that had masters and servants, sovereigns and serviles that both knew their place and their part in the system.
A system by its nature is a machine that does not stop existing because some of its parts have been removed or disabled.
Perhaps much more vividly than Sartre, the Tunisian philosopher, Albert Memmi in 1965 published: The Coloniser and the Colonised, a book that described the systematic and structural nature of colonialism. Colonisers needed the colonised to exist as a political class and the colonised needed colonisers to exist as political identity; settlers and natives co-produced and co-preserved their positionalities and political identities.
One can totally remove one set of settlers and one set of natives from the scene but that does not stop the colonial system and machinery functioning.
In fact, one may totally remove the settlers and leave only natives in the scene.
If the colonial system is still alive, by tomorrow morning some natives would have become colonisers and others the colonised in the same scene. Colonialism is therefore a system of political and economic domination that lives before and after the end of colonial administrations.
That is what makes coloniality a problem of the present and not the past. Coloniality envelopes every part of the Global South, including Ethiopia that supposedly was never colonised, sorry TK.
If to decolonise is to undo colonialism and its afterlives it is important to start with understanding the nature of that which must be undone down to its recipe and its toxic ingredients.
After the Colonial Wound: Politics of Decolonisation
What Mbembe calls a dark night in reference to the colonial experience Chinua Achebe called the “colonial wound.” Decolonising therefore, refers to the political acts of undoing darkness and woundedness.
It is the unenviable task of taking on a system and a structure of power that is durable yet it operates, like witchcraft, in many invisible ways. Some among us naively believe that decolonisation, or decoloniality, refers to going back to a paradisal colonial past and innocence that was stolen from us by colonisers. Sadly and tragically there is no pristine
African past to go back to. Going back to the mysterious past and escaping modernity is mistaken for liberation.
Others believe that to decolonise is to take the position of the former coloniser and use our newly found power to dominate, displace and dispossess others.
Being a conqueror and an oppressor is for some the definition and the fruits of liberation from colonialism. Some of these are people that admired the power of settler colonialists and would use every opportunity to imitate that power and use it against others.
Because colonialism is a system some internalised it, and they then use it and it uses them the way demons are used by and use their victims.
Fanon said it that the permanent ambition of some colonised people is to be colonisers.
In that way some that see themselves as decolonisers use their positionalities and power in colonial ways and modes and do not see that for what it is.
Right inside the decoloniality movement, intellectual and political, one finds cadres that wish to reduce others to objects and other things, in true colonial ways.
As Mbembe notes, coming out of the dark night of colonialism and healing out of the colonial wound that Achebe describes has some deep politics, contradictions, paradoxes, ironies and some real tragedies.
I have a friend in the decolonial movement who thinks that we should get rid of foreigners to solve the problem of coloniality once and for all.
That foreigners and the borders to their countries and our country are all a product of colonialism is totally lost to my dear friend.
To attempt to decolonise using, and being used by, colonial logic is a pressing political temptation even for some of the most perceptive and discerning minds.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from KwaMabusbesala Village in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa.
