Turns their impacts and alt solvency. Decolonial essentialism inevitably gets coopted for comparatively worse imperial violence.

Thus, the template for substituting a traditionalist narrative with predetermined conclusions for academic historical research has been set. Such histories are a common tool used by nationalist leaders to consolidate societies around their political agendas. But using them as a guide in domestic and foreign policy is bound to spell disaster.

Conclusion

This survey of Russian and African decolonial thought makes it clear that the emergence of decoloniality as a range of theories and as a trend in popular consciousness may not necessarily be connected with the real and understandable social grievances of the colonial era. It rather shows the similarity of intellectual responses to any rapid, revolutionary and necessarily disruptive societal change when intellectuals attempt to rationalise the change and protect the stability of what they see as the core of their societies. Decoloniality does not need to be anti-Western, but it must be directed against any dominant agent which causes the change. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this agent was certainly Westernism, be it in the form of colonialism, Marxism or liberal democracy. The present anti-Western political sentiment of the protagonists of decolonising the mind is a response to the long political, economic or ideological domination of the West, which particularly strengthened after the end of the cold war, and which is now palpably weakening.

Decolonial theories may be inconsistent and are often illogical or unclear, and they often contradict one another. But the decoloniality idea has been captured, unfortunately but perhaps unavoidably, by essentialist narratives which aim at liberating the minds of the global populace from any vestiges of Western influence and return them to an invented essential traditionalism. This, of course, is an unachievable goal as “traditional” societies never existed, and attempts to reach back to that traditionalism are bound to fail. Unfortunately, such decolonising efforts would necessarily kill the humanities as academic disciplines. History would likely be their first victim, as it is incompatible with the notions of immutable cultures and traditions and the rejection of cultural cross-pollination. These ideas are actually more dangerous for historical research than attempts at creating separate civilisational epistemologies. If such notions are supported by the policies of national governments who tell historians what to write, history as an academic discipline is doomed. If aggressive enough, such decoloniality can be extremely dangerous even politically, as the case of Russia’s treatment of Ukraine testifies.