Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s “Against Decolonisation”17/06/2022
Ralph Leonard, Areo Magazine
The idea of decolonisation has been a fad in western discourse for the past few years. Of course, when one thinks of decolonisation, the national liberation movements that engulfed Africa and Asia in the middle of the twentieth century, demanding political self-determination and independence from European colonial domination, instantly come to mind. But in the twenty-first century, decolonisation has increasingly come to denote a primarily academic and cultural movement, in part influenced by postcolonial theory, and in part by the decolonial turn promoted by Latin American thinkers like Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel, which takes aim at the supposed universality of “western knowledge” and its role as an instrument in the “colonial matrix of power,” which requires “epistemic de-linking,” in Mignolo’s phrase. In essence, the completion of the decolonisation struggle against western hegemony necessitates a rejection of the occidental Weltanschauung and its lingering influence among the colonised in favour of “indigenous knowledge systems.”Rhodes Must Fall, decolonise the curriculum, decolonise the museum, decolonise geography, decolonise anthropology, decolonise mathematics, decolonise the university, decolonise the garden—these are just some of the slogans that define the so-called decolonial turn.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is an academic originally from Ibadan in Nigeria, now teaching at Cornell University. According to his new book, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, these ubiquitous demands that we decolonise “indicate that either ‘decolonisation’ is truly an intellectual breakthrough that ‘packs an explanatory/analytical punch like no other,’ or it has become a catch-all trope, often used to perform contemporary ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity,’” a trope that has nothing serious to contribute to intellectual thought. One can critique Eurocentric narratives, broaden one’s intellectual and cultural palate beyond the Euro-American canon and believe that African societies and cultures deserve respect and should not be slandered—without the specialised and mostly incomprehensible terminology, shrill posturing and reactionary pseudo-radicalism that define decolonial politics. Indeed, as Táíwò stresses, many Africans have already been doing this, without feeling the need to declare that they are “decolonising.”
Táíwò takes an Afrocentric perspective, focusing more on the effects and implications the decolonising discourse has in Africa than in the west. He makes his stance clear: “we should rid ourselves of decolonisation” because “it is seriously harming scholarship in and on Africa.” Not only that, he also convincingly argues that the voguish decolonial discourse—promulgated mainly by intellectuals and academics—is positively harmful to Africa. For one, the so called decolonisers “fully embrace the racialisation of consciousness,” in, for example, coding modernity as white and therefore in some intrinsic way anti-black—a position that condemns Africans to being merely “resisters or victims of modernity,” rather than critical appropriators of it. The “absolutisation of European colonialism” turns Africans into “permanent subalterns in their own history.” No wonder the subtitle of the book is “Taking African Agency Seriously”: to portray Africans as merely objects of history inevitably—whatever the scholar’s intentions—denies them their capacity to be agents of history, capable of changing their condition.
One common battleground of decolonial arguments in Africa is language. Some people are worried that the indigenous tongues of Africa will risk going almost extinct under the hegemony of colonial European languages, such as French and English. One of Táíwò’s targets is Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose book, Decolonising the Mind, popularised the argument that African authors should stop writing in “colonial” European languages and instead write in their native tongues. As evidence that Africans need to “decolonise the mind,” Thiong’o asserts that, even after independence, the colonisers’ languages, concepts and culture were still hegemonic in the postcolonial societies and that therefore colonialism never really ended—the change was, at best, superficial. Decolonisation, for Thiong’o, needs to be both purer and more concrete and extend to the cultural and intellectual spheres.
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The fact that Africans write and speak English or French or take those as their national languages is often seen as proof of the unconscious mental and cultural servitude of Africans. But this, again, denigrates African agency. One of the ironies of European imperialism in Africa is that it leads to a deracination of language. English and French aren’t the exclusive property of England and France: they are world languages. Like India, Nigeria (where my own origins lie) has created its own branch of English literature, both in the homeland and the diaspora, which is read around the world, and has also created its own variant of English blended with native languages, which reflects the diversity of the nation. This is far from using the English language as a tool of white supremacist colonial hegemony. We Nigerians have claimed the English language for ourselves and refashioned it in our own way. Is this not true decolonisation?
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Against Decolonisation is a refreshing book. Táíwò is thoughtful, nuanced and yet firm in his rebuke of the common claim that past colonialism is the main reason why the African continent and its peoples continue to be held back. Much of the decolonial discourse rests on the assumption that there is “no qualitative difference between colonial and post-independence Africa” and that the problems plaguing African societies are therefore legacies of colonialism. This is a delusion. It turns colonisation into an eternal category—a form of ontology—instead of a historical one. It denies the reality, or indeed the possibility, of progress. This denigrates African political and moral agency and infantilises Africans. In this, it ironically echoes old racialist ideology. Colonialism is not the only source of underdevelopment in Africa, as the native postcolonial authoritarianisms that have plagued many African states demonstrate. “In reality,” Táíwò notes, “colonialism is neither as powerful nor as profound in its impact as our decolonisers proclaim.”
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Source:
https://areomagazine.com/2022/06/17/olufemi-taiwos-against-decolonisation/
