Decolonization requires annihilation of any colonial remnant. The broader we define colonialism to include (modernity, human rights, ai etc) the harder and more counterproductive it becomes

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

There are assumptions here that I will not be able to hash out. We know that imperialism is a global phenomenon. It is not the case that the outcome described by Ngũgĩ is by any means the only or even the dominant one in every instance. For instance, I think it would be a stretch to say that what Ngũgĩ describes captures the experience of Indians with British colonialism—a variant of which generated the outcome in Ngũgĩ’s account—nor that of the Vietnamese with French colonialism. And British colonialism did not extirpate Afrikaans or alienate its speakers in South Africa or make Afrikaners unenthusiastic about their culture. We may require additional reasons to explain this particular outcome in many parts of Africa beyond the power of imperialism to assert its will. The discourse of decolonization tends to obscure this interrogation. When we shall have decolonized our literature and philosophy and other areas of thought, what would things look like? Put differently, what goal do we have in view, and how would the world look were we to attain a decolonized discourse in philosophy?12 Frantz Fanon was very clear about what decolonization will look like in its aftermath. So was Cabral. I limit myself to Fanon. According to him, colonization and decolonization do not form a continuum such that we can affirm of them the kind of dialectical relations that subsist between moments of a whole. They are mutually exclusive, and when we move from one to the other, there is an annihilation of the previous state, not a sublation of it. In the specific colonial situation such as obtained between the colonized and colonizer in much of Africa, the colonized were nonpersons; they were consigned to a “zone of nonbeing.” To become decolonized means vacating this zone, not amending or ameliorating being in it; it must be ended, period. For this to happen, the colonizer qua colonizer, too, simultaneously must become a nonbeing. That is, if we apply this to discourse, living, and making sense of the world, if any piece of colonization were to remain in the aftermath of decolonization, that would be an indication that the latter had not occurred. Put differently, if, say, philosophy was to be an integral part of colonization, we cannot claim to decolonize while retaining philosophy. If we use this as our metric, then any aspects of life that have anything to do with the colonizer must be extirpated. This is why it is crucial that we not be careless in attributing more to colonialism than can be supported by the historical record. For illustration, if modernity were part and parcel of colonialism, it is clear that a decolonized society would have no truck with it. Where this is concerned, we either separate the two as I think we should, or they both go down together and the ex-colonized’s relationship with it would be forever conflicted, if not impossible. But we know that this is problematic if not implausible. It would require that we take an extremely narrow and monistic view of life under colonialism and attribute every artifact that we can point to in the colonial situation to colonialism. Given this implausible scenario, we need to be more modest and more specific in identifying the inventory of colonization and its appurtenances. We may then need to take a more expansive view of the plural forms of life under colonization. We must separate changes under colonialism that were constitutive of colonization and those that were incidental to it, those that unfolded under the direction of colonizers and were designed to reinforce the nonbeing of the colonized, and those that were driven by the autonomous—yes, autonomous—will of the colonized, however much the colonizer pretended that the colonized were incapable of choice-making. We must strive to elicit the clear provenance of certain ideas that may have been inducted into the colonial situation but were not necessarily inherent to it. This is where I, for instance, insist that we not conflate modernity and colonialism.

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Another way of phrasing the question is to ask what we are to understand by decolonizing anything. This is the not the place to get into it. Maybe someone will one day put together a taxonomy of conceptions of decolonization in the literature. Often, even in the work of a single author, decolonization can come in three or more variations, and the confusion is compounded when the idea is promiscuously deployed in all spheres as is often the case now. It reminds me of a similar consequence of Thomas Kuhn’s introduction of the word “paradigm” in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and how it became a catch-all term that everyone thought they understood only because no one sat down to probe into its promiscuous deployment until someone did present a taxonomy derived from the many usages the author gathered from diverse writings. I am afraid that decolonization has become like that. I have refrained from populating this essay with instances of these muddles; they are readily available in the literature