Reject vague tropes of decolonization-their virtue signaling

(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)

Given what I just said, why then do I think that the decolonization trope in philosophy is due for a rethinking, maybe even abandonment? The answer is very simple. The ubiquity of the idea of decolonization in all areas of thought, from literature, linguistics, and philosophy to politics, economics, sociology, psychology, and, lately, medicine, indicates to me either that the trope packs an explanatory and analytical punch like no other or it has simply lost its way and become a catch-all idea that many deploy not so much as a tool to aid understanding but a marker of being with it or a paean to some shady authenticity.1 No, I am not going to be able to develop this attack fully in this essay. My hope is that I make enough sense to persuade others that maybe we need to take a closer look at the idea. I limit myself to African philosophy, and I refrain completely from any discussion of decoloniality and associated discourse. The original concern of decolonization came from the struggle for independence from colonialism. The idea was that independence would mean the departure from Africa’s shores of colonial rule and all that pertained to it when it came to how life is led in the erstwhile colonies. The key phrase here is “all that pertained to it.” What are the boundaries of this specification? The two dominant aspects of colonialism that come to mind here are politics and economics. In politics, colonialism was typified by denying the colonized the modern philosophical ground of political legitimacy that insists that no one ought to obey the rule of any government to which she has not consented. Decolonization in politics would then mean that the colonized would no longer chafe under the rule of governments, especially by colonialists, to which they have not consented.2 In economics, control over the levers of economic power that had been under the authority of the colonizer is supposed to revert to Africans after colonialism. Other areas of life—culture, writ large—are supposed to be marked by the deployment of African agency in determining the issue of how life and thought are to be organized. In short, self-determination is supposed to inflect life in ways that are exactly contradictory to what colonization evinced. What matters here is that people, as individuals and groups, get to author the respective scripts of their individual and collective lives, a prerogative that was denied them under colonial rule. A key problem suggests itself. We cannot always be sure how this expression of agency might unfold. Self-determination, individual and collective, cannot be decreed to unfold or be deployed in only one predetermined way. The key difference between being under colonialism and being from it is that the colonized will is coerced and bent in one, and it is free and self-actuating in the other. So, when we see what appear to be colonial survivals, we should ask whether they are still sustained by the previous coercion or inertia or choice-making by the ex-colonized. We shall presently explore the implications of this factor for the discourse of decolonization. What this means is that if we were to see structures and patterns of life and thought that once characterized the colonial situation occurring in the postliberation period, we need to investigate the causal antecedents before we adjudge such occurrences to be instances of the failure of decolonization. That is, there may be phenomena in the postindependence period that mimic similar ones in the colonial period, we cannot automatically assume that they have the same pedigree. If some turn out to have the same pedigree, we need further evidence to determine that the same causal agents that were responsible for them in the colonial situation have remained operative in the decolonized setting. Such would be instances of failure to decolonize. And if these were indeed failures, we would need to determine whether the will of the newly free is still being bent by the same forces that ruled the roost while colonialism prevailed. We would also need to rule out inertia, the exercise of the will in the service of choices that negate freedom or clear preferences for certain ideas and arrangements, even if they had colonial origins, on the part of the ex-colonized. Unfortunately, we do not often exercise these cautions in much of the discourse of decolonization. Yet, exercise them we must if we are to come up with sophisticated accounts of how life and thought have unfolded or ought to unfold once formal colonialism was removed. Part of the case that I make in this essay concerns the ease with which the decolonizing trope is deployed without deep attention to the complexity of the issues involved. (137-8)