Decolonial epistemologies recreate colonial violence by essentializing “non-Western” cultures.

It seems that the first to use the term “decolonising the mind” was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan novelist (Citation1986), though only in connection with the language of African fiction. The “decolonial turn” in social sciences began in the early 2000s with the emergence of decolonisation theory or “decolonising” and “decoloniality” thinking in Latin America, in the power structure studies. Decolonial theory deals with the origins and nature of coloniality of power in the modern world, and, by definition, its scope is sociological and structural, rather than discursive. Yet, as with Afrocentrism and postcolonialism, it, too, rebels against Eurocentric modernity by uncovering the “dark side” of its history which, it is thought, will move this modernity away from the Eurocentric narrative, which, in the protagonists’ view, still dominates academic minds (Tlostanova Citation2009, Citation2019).

Whatever the main academic field of the proponents of these (and many other) decolonising theories or philosophies, one of their main preoccupations is often history. They believe that modernity was created exclusively by Europeans, that it is “white,” “Western,” and consequently “colonial.” Many are convinced that neither a particular vision of the world, nor the ways of understanding and rationalising it have been or can be – or even should be – shared across civilisations, races, nations, ethnicities and cultures. Apart from everything else, this means denying the universality of epistemology. According to the predominant tendency in decolonial thought, the existing epistemology has been imposed on the colonised world by colonisers through their education. In the process it has been killing off local, native epistemologies. “The colonial conquest of Africans – body, mind and soul – has led to real or attempted epistemicide – the decimation or near complete killing and replacement of endogenous epistemologies with the epistemological paradigm of the conqueror,” writes Nyamnjoh (Citation2012, 129).

“Radical” decolonialists believe that it is not enough to change, improve or supplement modernity and the present systems of knowledge. As it is impossible to rid them of Eurocentrism, the whole “project of modernity” based on European epistemology has to be erased or “overcome.” Then the history of mankind can start again from scratch, and the new, “endogenous,” epistemologies, not distorted by Eurocentrism, will emerge and flower.

“Popular epistemologies in Africa are different. Indeed, popular epistemologies everywhere are different,” writes Francis Nyamnjoh (Citation2012, 131–132).

Popular epistemologies create room for … “magical interpretations” where there are no obvious explanations for material predicaments. In them, reality is more than meets the eye. It is larger than logic … Popular epistemologies build bridges between the so-called natural and supernatural, physical and metaphysical, rational and irrational, objective and subjective, scientific and superstitious, nature and culture, visible and invisible, real and unreal, explainable and inexplicable … They constitute an epistemological order where the sense of sight and physical evidence has not assumed the same centrality, dominance and dictatorship evident in the colonial epistemology … The real is not only what is observable or what makes cognitive sense; it is also the invisible, the emotional, the sentimental, the intuitive and the inexplicable. Emphasis is on the whole, and truth is negotiated. (Nyamnjoh Citation2012, 131–132, emphasis in original)

This description of “popular epistemologies” perfectly fits any religious worldview, and, as such, it is shared by Europeans and Africans alike. What such epistemologies do not fit is historical research, history as an academic discipline – or, indeed, any other academic research based on the need to prove the veracity of its arguments and conclusions by methods appropriate to each discipline, but certainly not by “magical interpretations.” All sciences and humanities study much of what is “invisible,” “irrational,” “subjective” and “superstitious” – but as objects, not methods of research.

And so does history – as long as it is an academic discipline, and not a rendition of politically fashionable ideas. Historians’ research methods may be less “exact” than those of natural scientists, but they still have their methods of verifying the veracity of their sources and texts. New methods get reinvented and supplement the old ones, becoming more reliable all the time. Historians have long known that there are no such things as the truth and the fact. We may never know exactly what happened in the past but there are more and more ways to get closer to understanding how and why it did. Attempts to make history work according to “endogenous” epistemologies would kill it as an academic discipline. History and magical interpretations can co-exist as epistemologies, but only in two different compartments – one as an academic discipline, the other as religion. As research methodologies they are fatal to one another.

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, a key strategist of the struggle for “epistemological decolonisation” thinks that epistemic freedom, at least on university campuses, may already be near. He writes:

The definitive entry of descendants of the enslaved, displaced, colonised and racialised peoples into the existing academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter, and that they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems, enabled the resurgence of long-standing struggles for epistemic freedom. Epistemic freedom is fundamentally about the right to think, theorise, interpret the world, develop one’s own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism. (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Citation2018, 3)

The question of why they need to enter Eurocentric academies at all is easily answered. Ndlovu-Gatsheni views epistemological freedom as an outcome of “provincialising Europe, deprovincialising Africa and epistemological decolonisation.” This process can only be played out on the European academic turf: you cannot “provincialise” Europe anywhere else.

Olúfémi Táíwò (Citation2022, xvi) considers the “anti-modernity” onslaught “a misconception” and calls it “incorrect” and “problematic as a matter of theory and history,” arguing “for oneness of humanity and against the racialisation of humanity.” He also recognises the fact that “the literature by both Africans and non-Africans that came out of these historical errors continues to be dominant in scholarship about the continent” but leaves the “subscribers of this all-encompassing ‘decolonisation’ … to their designs.” There is little else that a historian – and Táíwó is a historian – can say to those who propagate the creation of an alternative reality and its history. Those who are willing to try to implement this idea are welcome to do so, but it is difficult to see how the reality (modernity), or its history are going to be impacted by this exercise.

There is, however, a more serious threat to history as an academic discipline, coming from some less radical decolonialists who benignly agree that “overcoming history is hardly possible, for it has already happened and has become a very important part of our world’s structure and thought” (Vorobiova Citation2020, 69–70). So, to decolonise it they “expose its epistemic basis by deconstructing it, and thus making other ways of thinking about the past possible” (69–70). Proposals of purportedly novel ways of such deconstructions abound. They include, for example “multi-modernity,” i.e., the recognition of the possibility of multiple historical narratives, and the “concept” of “historical and cultural transfer,” which implies the possibility of the historical development of “cultures,” and even of cross-cultural exchanges. There is little new in these approaches: historians have been using them in their research for a very long time, albeit without the trappings of a terminology which is fashionable today.

Efforts to decolonise history exist in two dimensions: as an investigation of the impact of colonialism on colonised societies (and colonial societies, too), and as a theoretical reinterpretation of coloniality and postcoloniality. As the former, they perfectly fit the trajectory and landscape of the “traditional” historiography of twentieth- and twenty-first-century history. Understood as an investigation of the nature and depth of the impact of colonialism, decolonising approaches have enriched historiography with new themes, visions and perspectives. Among these are increased attention to the colonisation of value systems and spirituality, and its impact on literature, language, education, intellectual values and perceptions in both colonised and colonising societies. As the latter, understood as a complex of methodologies, theoretical reinterpretations of the impact of colonialism on the colonised world, decolonising theories have provided an insight into the depth of the emotional legacy of colonialism and its effects on many generations of the intellectual elite of both colonised and colonising societies. But there are pitfalls for history even in these, softer, approaches to decolonisation.

Whichever of the above dimensions they use, decolonialists see nations, ethnic or racial groups, or civilisations in essentialist terms. This means that for them, each of these entities, large or small, possesses a specific and immutable “culture” and a set of “traditions” and institutions which belong exclusively to it. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (Citation2013, 6), for example, writes of “indigenous” institutions, values, systems and histories which need to be “recovered” and then used to reconnect with the reconstituted postcolonial state. In his view, Mueni Wa Muiu and Guy Martin (Citation2009) do exactly that: they “recover” what they consider the authentic indigenous structures of power in Africa – as a whole.

First, they write,

there is a fundamental cultural unity of Africa that can be traced back to Egypt and Kush … Second, indigenous Africa was characterised by social stratification and economic inequalities. Third, indigenous African religions were informed by a variety of belief systems found in Kimit (Egypt) and Kush … Physical events were linked to the spiritual sphere, and communities’ leaders were involved in both. Fourth, power was not personalised, but was linked to the institution. The leader was the custodian of the peoples’ property and wealth – be it land or minerals – and held it in trust for the whole community. Fifth, political systems and institutions were based on kinship and ancestry (lineage) informed by a founding myth. They were also based on custom and tradition in which constitutions were not written … Sixth, the gender division of labour also exhibited some similarities … Seventh, organisations acted as support bases for the system by providing for the social welfare of the community. (Wa Muiu and Martin Citation2009, 3–4)

I am not sufficiently qualified to judge how close African social structures are to those of ancient Egypt or Kush, but I know enough of Africa’s history to see that such generalisations are far too broad to reflect the continent’s rich social diversity and the historicity of its social structures. It is also obvious that Wa Muiu’s and Martin’s “recovered” African societal features are devoid of historicity and that they are quite common in many societies outside Africa.

The appeal of “traditions” and “cultures” which are “authentic” or “indigenous,” not “spoilt” by foreign influences, to today’s intellectuals, who are engaged in a decolonising effort, is understandable. The problem of self-identification is most acute among the intelligentsia of the formerly colonised societies, often educated in the former imperial capitals and living and working there. The search for cultural roots and “authentic traditions” in this situation is only natural – never mind that such ahistorical authenticity never existed anywhere in the world.

The search for “traditional” or “indigenous” cultures leads decolonialists to think in dichotomies of insurmountable opposites, such as “indigenous” vs European, or Eurocentric; traditional vs modern; colonial vs post-colonial or pre-colonial. Táíwó shows that Africans actively participated in the creation and functioning of at least some colonial institutions, yet even he succumbs to thinking in dualities when he associates these institutions exclusively with coloniality (Citation2022, 65, 149).

But if, according to Nyamnjoh, “truth” is negotiable (it certainly is – historians know this very well), “tradition” should certainly be, too. And so should “coloniality,” and even colonial institutions of power. If they are de-historicised, notions of “traditions” and “cultures” (let alone “civilisations”) are returning us, in fact, to the 1930s, to the world of anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and their structural functionalism theory. These scholars were engaged in doing exactly that – looking for traditional, “authentic,” cultures, not influenced by the then modernity.

Essentialist ahistorical notions of “cultures” and “traditions” have since been debunked by decades of scholarship coming from field work in Africa and elsewhere. Even the much-maligned Eurocentric anthropologists who came from Malinowski’s school tried to find out “how things become,” thus contributing to disentangling their discipline from the tenets of ahistoricism. Suffice it to look at the work of Monica Wilson (Hunter Citation1936; Wilson and Wilson Citation1945).Footnote1 This work was continued in the 1950s and 1960s by the first generation of African professional historians together with their European colleagues belonging to the “new historiography” school. They worked at African universities studying social and political histories of their peoples and regions on the basis of the new “African approach” which implied using not only new archival sources, but also what were then new sources of historical research such as oral tradition and interviews.

One of the main goals of the “new historiography” was exactly to bury the Eurocentric myth of Africa’s ahistoricity. African historians of that generation turned the analysis and interpretation of local oral traditions into a generally accepted method of studying the pre-colonial and early colonial history of African societies. Using their local knowledge and connections, they could organise a mass collection of oral tradition and interpret it. The works of such historians as Saburi Biobaku, Samwiri Karugire, Bethwell Ogot and several others have since become classics (Biobaku Citation1957; Karugire Citation1971; Ogot Citation1967).

Another “new historiography” goal was proving that Africans were the subjects, not objects of history, as Eurocentrists would have their readers believe. This meant the search for “African initiative,” particularly in the colonial period. A striking example was the project carried out by Gilbert Gwassa in Tanzania. He commissioned his students to collect local memories of the Maji Maji rebellion during their holidays. These oral testimonies constituted a whole new archive of the rebellion, producing massive new research (Gwassa Citation1974; Gwassa and Iliffe Citation1967, Citation1969; Mabunda and Mpangara Citation1969)Footnote2

This early decolonising push by African and European scholars and their achievements are not only ignored but, in practice, negated by the present generation of decolonialists. Christopher Clapham (Citation2020) deplores the fact that so little original historical research comes from the present generation of African academics who engage with the decolonisation topic. He attributes this to the fact that they approach this subject mostly within the scope of interest of the prestigious Western universities, where they usually work, and calls on them to return to Africa and continue the field work of the older generations. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (Citation2003, 1), moreover, thought that the fact that “the posts [poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism] emerged … in the northern institutional locations” meant that their “promotion in the 1970s and 1980s as Northern intellectual fads gave them a distinctly Western accent.”

While accepting the Western location of much of the present decolonising effort as an explanation for the underperformance of historical research into African colonial societies, I think the main reason for it is different. It is the nature of the present decolonial theories and the pressure which the research paradigm they have created exerts on all disciplines that they touch. Their essentialist ahistoricity is a death-knell for any historical research, but particularly for such a complex subject as the history of colonialism. History studies interrelations, causalities, exchanges, mutualities, developments, continuities – a perpetual movement, not essential certainties, whether they refer to cultures, the character and dates of historical periods or borders between them. History’s cultures and traditions – as much as its borders – are permeable, interdependent and transient.