Against “Decolonise X”: Recovering the Radical Meanings of Decolonisation

Decolonisation is a word that is often thrown about with the presumption (despite strong evidence to the contrary) that we all agree on its meaning. But where did the word come from? What was its first use? A dive into history demonstrates that contrary to common consensus, it was used in French and English in a much wider sense than only to describe the granting of independence to colonised peoples. With the inception of the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town, there has been another restrictive, definitive move to only use ‘decolonisation’ to describe what we do with educational curricula – often going no further than making curricula marginally more diverse. Both these definitions are too narrow and incomplete to encompass a wider temporal, spatial and contextual history, though not necessarily inaccurate. This post uses an analogy and a reading list to underline the broad scope of what the word has covered, is covering and could cover. I also invite a reflection on what decolonisation does not or should not mean.

Raymond Betts tells us that the word “decolonisation” was “seldom restricted in application to a particular political activity or a neatly defined era. [It] was interpreted to be both a calculated process of military engagement and diplomatic negotiation between the two contending parties – colonial and anticolonial.“ (2012: 25) This illustrates why I find it useful to understand decolonisation as not one thing but a set of context-dependent strategies adopted by activists resisting colonisation—strategies specifically relevant to the particular ways in which colonial ideologies manifest themselves in those particular places. What I mean is that decolonisation, in practice, has often involved Indigenous peoples, colonised peoples, and racialised peoples taking up the tools that they have to resist the specific forms of colonial oppression that they experience at the time in which they experience it. As the colonial machine changes, so does the response to it. It is useful to thus restrict our understanding of decolonisation to a response to a specific if complex system of oppression. Decolonisation responds specifically to the many manifestations of modern European colonial regimes.

So, what is decolonisation responding to?

What is the colonial project? What is its continuing nature? What are/were its tools? And what is its historic and current effect? In 1492, Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas. Please note, the Americas were not missing. The people living there had their own way of life, their own politics and commerce, and their own names for the lands they called home, the waters they washed in, and the skies they lived under. All these were violently changed with Columbus’ discovery. Similar confrontations between the old and the new world happened across the planet: for example, Jan van Riebeeck’s 1652 landing in what is now known as South Africa; Captain James Cook’s 1770 arrival in the now-named Australia; and the Portuguese invasion of Senegal, West Africa, in 1444. All these confrontations resulted in the subsumption of the discovered territories into Europe’s economy, social structures, legal frames, knowledge paradigms and its norms. Essentially, these confrontations herald a universal, Eurocentric globalisation of being, doing, thinking, and living in the world. Of course, the word “confrontation” masks the instant and continuing violence of these encounters. Race is introduced as a dehumanising and hierarchical categorisation of humanity; exploitation subsumes care for land and nature, but most viscerally, the foregoing is achieved through large-scale dispossession, kidnapping, and destruction of human lives and habitats. Understanding the large scaleness of this almost often requires us to take a massive step back and rethink how we view the present and the future in the context of that history and its significance. The following are some authors who explain the scale of this enterprise and its current impact:

• Chigudu, Simukai  “’Colonialism had never really ended’: My life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes”, The Guardian, 14 January 2021.
• Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019
• Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Verso Books, 2002
• Eltis, David. “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Reassessment.” The William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 17-46.
• Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. 1492: The year our world began. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013
• Hickel, Jason. The Divide: A brief guide to global inequality and its solutions. Random House, 2017. Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg.
  (2010). Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English
  Colonies. Oxford University Press.
• Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Trade, 2018.
• Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. UNC Press Books, 2014.
• Wynter, Sylvia. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Over-representation—An Argument’ (2003) 3 CR: The New Centennial Review 257.

Due to the vast nature of the colonial enterprise, as mentioned above, the way it was resisted, refused, and repudiated was often context-dependent. To illustrate where these actions converge and depart, I have often found it useful to offer an analogy of a table, thus:

Picture a large dining table. The table is laid with as much affluence as our imagination can manage. In this analogy, the table itself and the feast upon it represent the material and structural benefits of colonialism—including what has been stolen from racialised, colonised and indigenous peoples. Access to the table is the privilege that whiteness/white supremacy provides. Decolonisation is analogised according to how the table is responded to.

As with all analogies, this is not a perfect one. I don’t see these contexts as different, rather I suggest they should be read together to give us a better picture both of the colonial machine and ways in which people respond to it.

Decolonisation I: Give us an equal seat at the table/We want our own
You made a table out of our lives

This perspective of decolonisation represents non-settler colonies. Here, decolonisation has often been defined as the granting of independence. But of course this is a problematic definition, as Nkrumah notes that after independence states were not free to determine their destinies—especially economically but also politically and sometimes even culturally. The terms of global trade and international relations have already been set. And justice in any language remains an unfulfilled wish. Reparations have never been made for the destruction of colonisation. For example, at least a 50 per cent population loss (the death of 10 million people) suffered by the Congolese under Belgian rule or Germany’s near-extermination of the Herero and Nama people in what is now called Namibia. How does having a flag, a national song, a president who looks like you and a written constitution repair that? In many cases, leaders of the newly independent states just stepped into the colonial shoes and kept on doing the same or worse than the colonial regime. In The Wretched, Fanon describes decolonisation as “the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another.“That indicates to me that independence or state creation is a means and not the goal. Many anticolonial actors keep on pushing the boundaries of what decolonisation can be seen to mean for peoples in the future. See below for more academic commentary on how this scope of decolonisation has been considered:

• Biko, Steve. “Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity.” Ufahamu 11, no. 1 (1981): 133-142.
• Cabral, Amilcar. Resistance and decolonization. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007
• Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand. The story of my experiments with truth: An autobiography. Om Books International, 2018
• Memmi, Albert. Decolonization and the Decolonized. U of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1966.
• Sankara, Thomas, “A United Front Against Debt (1987) – Viewpoint Magazine”. Viewpoint Magazine. February 2018. https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/united-front-debt-1987/.

Decolonisation II: Give us back our table/That is not even a table, genius!

In settler colonies, the settler never leaves. In this case, decolonisation cannot in good faith be presumed to mean the granting of independence, even if, as argued above, that is already a problematically limited reading of decolonisation. In settler colonies, the settler stays, not as an immigrant, but as the sole recognised authority in the territory they now understand as theirs. The territory gets new names, new modes of government and living. For indigenous peoples under settler rule, the state itself is the problem; it is the thing they want to undo. Yet, in non-settler colonies the state is supposedly the reward – a gift that cannot be returned, thrown away or maintained. So, when Tuck and Yang tell us that decolonisation is not a metaphor, they are pointing out the fact that for them, decolonisation must mean more than a shallow acknowledgement of the existence of the colony or the colonial dynamic. It means the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.” In the same vein, Coulthard critiques “the myriad ways in which… “attitudes” conducive to colonial rule are cultivated among the colonized through the unequal exchange of institutionalized and interpersonal patterns of recognition between the colonial society and the Indigenous population.” In essence, underlining the fact that often progressive moves like diversification, land acknowledgements and inclusive practices misrecognise the colonised and stop short of decolonisation.

• Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.
• Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd., 2013
• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012), 6.
• Veracini, Lorenzo. “Understanding Colonialism and Settler Colonialism As Distinct Formations.” Interventions 16, no. 5 (2014): 615-633.
• Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387-409

Decolonisation III: What if that was not a table?

I separate the Latin American context from the previous two for several reasons. Firstly, this context contains a mix of settler and non-settler colonisation. Secondly, the experience of colonisation and decolonisation is particular, with members of settler populations being involved with anticolonial movements. This has had a particular impact on academic articulation of decolonisation. Finally and somewhat consequently, the timeline of Latin American states as independent nations extends further back than states in Africa and Asia. Thus, states in Latin America have contemplated a post-development concept in relation to decolonisation, subsumed indigenous philosophies into their praxes and display a wide variety of decolonial activities. This, I suggest, underlines the cumulativeness of this analogy. In this context you find pervasive use of ‘coloniality’ and ‘decoloniality’ to describe the ongoing colonial condition and the means for transitioning to a world beyond it. This state of coloniality is aptly described by Maldonado-Torres. According to him, it survives the physical and administrative control of specified colonial territory, and it:

“refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations….It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday.“

Essentially, what scholars within this context are arguing is that a response to the persistence of colonial structures that does not question the order of the world (question capitalism, Westphalianism, individualism, etc.) will continue to produce the same order. What if that was not a table? What if there were other ways of being, doing and living in the world that do not produce racial injustice, extreme economic inequality and racial injustice?

• Coronil, Fernando. “Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization.” Postcolonial Studies: An anthology (2015): 175-192,
• Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. “Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (2012): 95-109.
• Maldonado-Torres, N 2007. On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the development of a Concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3): 243
• Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press, 2018
• Mignolo, Walter D. “Introduction: Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking.” Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 155-167
• Mignolo, Walter D., and Arturo Escobar, eds. Globalization and the decolonial option. Routledge, 2013
• Quijano, Aníbal. “Bien Vivir–Between Development and the De/Coloniality of Power.” Alternautas–Vol. 3–Issue 1–July 2016 (2016)
• Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533-580. 544-545

Decolonisation IV: What can be said from the table?

One tortuous question that has occupied the minds of scholars in this area is whether decolonisation can be enacted from within structures of power that are doing the colonisation. This is of particular significance to decolonisation movements in what we call the Global North. It is a question that is also of relevance to what we would describe as ‘colonial institutions’, like universities, museums, companies, monarchies, etc. To paraphrase Tundama, can you decolonise empire? Or can you decolonise from within the heart of empire. There are two broad positions here. One is that you can work to ensure that colonial institutions cede their power and stop colonising activities. However, what if the character of the institution is so embedded in colonial logics that not colonising is effectively not existing? Which brings us to the second broad position as stated by Tundama in his statement: “You cannot decolonise colonialism”.

• Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums. Pluto Press, 2020
• Nemequene Tundama ‘You cannot decolonise colonialism’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXJS8d2T1IE

Decolonisation X/USA: We want to eat at the table/Let us abandon the table

In addition to all of the contexts above, there are many places where the evidence of colonial projects is quite strong, yet critics of the system do not always use those terms to describe their social and political conditions. This is especially the case in the USA, where both Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) respond to the afterlives of an entwining of dispossession of Indigenous peoples and racialised enslavement of Black people. CRT arose mainly as a trenchant critique of the pretensions of the legal system in the US to race-neutrality. The foundational tenets of CRT implicate law in the (re)production, entrenchment, and normalisation of socially constructed race. The theory plays close attention to how the meanings of identities are distorted by social forces and produce attendant material effects. Within that, Indigenous Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) builds upon Critical Race Theory (CRT) but focuses on the specific experiences and perspectives of Indigenous peoples, emphasising colonisation and the unique ways Indigenous people are racialised and politicised within dominant societies.

BRT does not differ greatly from CRT on certain principles such as socially constructed race. However, it is a reaction to or a split from a liberalist position within antiracist movements which adopt a “stance that sought access to the roles and rewards monopolized by whites.” As such, BRT articulates a meaning to Blackness that fundamentally departs from racialisation’s reproduction of being Black as essentially, irretrievably, and completely negative and inherently linked to racialised enslavement and the property-making that chattel slavery and its afterlives rely on. Its drawing together of radicality and this unsettling of the concept of “Black” has been described as encompassing “slave revolts, the creeds of the Black church, and anti-colonial rebellion” in its attempts to imagine a birth of a different concept of human existence. For example, Black Marxism, as theorised by Cedric Robinson, questions the atomisation and demarcation of class analyses from racial ones. Decolonisation X/USA, thus, covers wide and narrow ground simultaneously.

• Combahee River Collective “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” Home Girls: A Black feminist anthology (1983): 264-74
• Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” Stan. L. Rev. 43 (1990): 1241.
• Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical race theory: An introduction. Vol. 20. NYU Press, 2017.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Vol. 21. Univ. of California Press, 2007
• Narayan, John. “British Black Power: The anti-imperialism of political blackness and the problem of nativist socialism.” The Sociological Review 67, no. 5 (2019): 945-967.
• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000

What is There Left to Decolonise? The Pitfalls of Decolonise X

Despite the broad scope within which the concept of decolonisation operates, as noted above, the march to “Decolonise X” continues. What I mean by this is, in essence, attaching decolonisation to anything that moves without a shared understanding of the history and quality of the word. Personally, I have been reluctant to engage in or advocate for anything resembling “Decolonise X”, as I wrote about here. And I am far from the only one to decry this use of decolonisation. Scott Challener observes that the ‘X’ in “Decolonise X” can run

“the gamut from therapy, yoga, diversity, Thanksgiving, Columbus Day, and dieting to the museum, the university, the curriculum, the syllabus, the classroom, the humanities, the digital humanities, and individual disciplinary fields (critical theory, environmental studies, gender studies, literary studies, queer theory, sociology, trauma studies).”…

This use is a way of deracinating the word “decolonise” of all its radical and political meaning/power. So in the additional thematic reading that follows, I am not suggesting that these are texts that tell us how to Decolonise X. Rather, I am asking us to reflect on what future possibilities arise (or disappear) when we put decolonisation in conversation with these topics. What worlds can they help us build? What harms can they disappear? As I come to the end of the discursive part of this post, I want to leave you with the words inspired by Khadijah Diskin, “The demand that Rhodes must Fall should not be heard as a demand that Rhodes must read Fanon.” Colonialism was and is an ugly yet significant part of our past, present and future as a species on this planet. To ignore it does the pursuit of truth a disservice. Mes amis, until the next rebellion.

The University and Knowledge Production

• Bhambra, Gurminder K., Kerem Nisancioglu, and Dalia Gebrial. “Decolonising the University.” (2018).
• Chantiluke, Roseanne, Brian Kwoba and Athinagamso Nkopo, Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, editors. Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire. Zed Books, 2018
• Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The structure of knowledge in westernized universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century.” Human Architecture: Journal of the sociology of self-knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 8.
• Maldonado‐Torres, Nelson. “The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge: Modernity, empire, coloniality.” City8, no. 1 (2004): 29-56.
• Mama, Amina. “Is it ethical to study Africa? Preliminary thoughts on scholarship and freedom.” African Studies Review 50, no. 1 (2007): 1-26.
• Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms.” Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 211-223.
• Mbembé, Achille. “Decolonizing the university: New directions.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 29-45.
• Olivia U. Rutazibwa ‘On Babies and Bathwater: Decolonising International Development Studies’
• Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. East African Publishers, 1992
• Escobar, Arturo. “Worlds and knowledges otherwise: The Latin American modernity/coloniality research program.” Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 179-210.
• Mbembé, Achille. “Decolonizing the university: New directions.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15, no. 1 (2016): 29-45.
• Mbembé, Achille. Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive. Africa is a Country, 2015. Web. 23 Aug. 2018.
• Mpofu, William Jethro. “Coloniality in the scramble for African knowledge: A decolonial political perspective.” Africanus 43, no. 2 (2013): 105-117.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the subaltern speak?” Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea (1988): 21-78.
• Walsh, Catherine. “Shifting the geopolitics of critical knowledge: Decolonial thought and cultural studies ‘others’ in the Andes.” Cultural studies 21, no. 2-3 (2007): 224-239.
• Another University is Possible by Akwugo Emejulu Verso Books Blog, 12 January 2017   
• The University is not Innocent by Akwugo Emejulu Verso Books Blog, 29^th March 2017  

Our Being in the World

• Weheliye, Alexander G. Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and Black feminist theories of the human. Duke University Press, 2014.
• Lugones, Maria. “The coloniality of gender.” In The Palgrave handbook of gender and development, pp. 13-33. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The new centennial review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257-337.
• Mills, Charles W. The racial contract. Cornell University Press, 2014.

And Property-Making

• Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as property.” Harvard law review (1993): 1707-1791.
• Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial lives of property: Law, land, and racial regimes of ownership. Duke University Press, 2018.

The Epistemics of Making the “Global South”

• George Ayittey, Africa Betrayed (St Martin’s Press 1992) <http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0601/92016026-d.html>
• Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Coloniality of power in postcolonial Africa. African Books Collective, 2013.
• Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. Empire, global coloniality and African subjectivity. Berghahn Books, 2013.
• Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “The entrapment of Africa within the global colonial matrices of power: Eurocentrism, coloniality, and deimperialization in the twenty-first century.” Journal of Developing Societies 29, no. 4 (2013): 331-353.
• Modiri, Joel. “In the fall: Decolonisation and the rejuvenation of the academic project in South Africa.” The Daily Maverick 16 (2016).
• Odinga, Oginga. Not yet, Uhuru. Vol. 38. East African Publishers, 1995.
• Mudimbe, V. Y. The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. Lulu Press, Inc, 2020.
• Mudimbe, Valentin Yves, and Vumbi Yoka Mudimbé. The idea of Africa. Indiana University Press, 1994.
• Connell, Raewyn. Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Allen & Unwin, 2007.
• Shilliam, Robbie, ed. International relations and non-Western thought: Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity. Routledge, 2010.
• Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999.
• Sen, Amartya. Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation. Oxford University Press, 1982.
• Gilroy, Paul. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993.
• Wallerstein, Immanuel. The modern world-system I: Capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. Vol. 1. Univ of California Press, 2011.

• Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. NYU Press, 1989. 

  Said, Edward W. Culture and imperialism. Vintage, 2012. 

  Said, Edward W. “Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 1978.” Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin (1995). 

As Liberatory Politics

• Fanon, Frantz. A dying colonialism. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1994.
• Nkrumah, Kwame. “Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism, Panaf.” (1965).
• Fanon, Frantz. “Towards the African Revolution: Political Essays [1964].” Trans. Haakon Chevalier. London: Pelican (1970).
• Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press, 2018.
• Fanon, Frantz. The wretched of the earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007.
• Memmi, Albert. The colonizer and the colonized. Routledge, 2013.
• Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on colonialism. NYU Press, 2001.