The alt lacks radical purchase at best and enables rampant violence under the decolonial banner at worst. The rights paradigm is imperfect but better than a total break from modernity.

The term has become a mantra, but “decoloniality” has almost no precise meaning and is used as an ideological trope. It points in a “progressive” sense towards a status quo ante, almost an arcadia descended from an anti-slavery Victorian regret that colonialism had robbed the “native” of his “innocence.” That there was something purer before colonialism and its particular manifestation of imperial globalism.

It is a term brandished often in African studies, but the imperial outreach impacted most of the world. And the status quo ante means many different things in e.g., China, where the world before European incursion was very different to that of the conglomerated and homogenised “Africa” of easy discourse, never mind its 2000 languages, ethnic groups, and senses of history.

In a very real sense, the decolonial impulse is a direct descendant of Postcolonial Studies (PoCo). PoCo had a very precise birthdate – August 29 1989, at the Silver Jubilee Triennial Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies held at the University of Kent. Edward Said was the keynote speaker – in fact, Said rehearsed many of his chapters for Culture & Imperialism in a lecture series at Kent –, and Said bluntly asked why a wealth of world literature was still associated with a grouping many people regarded as both British and an echo of Empire? At a stroke, Commonwealth Literature was replaced by Postcolonial Studies – although it still overwhelmingly meant literature written in English (Chan Citation2014, 123–131). There was no commitment to study literature in, e.g., the languages of Africa – even though in 1984, a full five years earlier, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o had rehearsed what became Decolonising the Mind (Wa Thiong’o Citation1986) in his Robb Lectures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Those lectures and the subsequent book were adamant that only by expressing oneself in one’s own language could what we would now call a “decolonial self” be uncovered or recovered and expressed. Ngũgĩ thenceforth wrote in Kikuyu, but Kikuyu is, as noted above, one of 2000 African languages, and in his own sense 2000 senses of authenticity and ways of thought expressed by way of language. A true decolonial project is thus one of immense complexity, navigation and unavoidably, finally, one of unwholesome hierarchies. Which of the 2000 might be the most important?

And can one speak to another without the lacunae of translation? Ngũgĩ’s audience relies on translation. He seems only recently to have been “discovered” in France and the French translations of his work have created a sensation (e.g., Boizette Citation2023). But, even without translation, Ngũgĩ’s use in, e.g., Petals of Blood of motifs and lines drawn directly from Yeats speaks to the need for an internationalism as a conjoined twin to local authenticity. In the meantime, his Kikuyu cannot speak to Wole Soyinka’s parental tongue of Yoruba, which cannot speak to the “unknown” Zambian writer Stephen Mpashe’s Bemba (unknown because almost no postcolonial or decolonial scholar reads Bemba) (Lutato and Primorac Citation2013, 30–31). But, if the world of forced colonialism created great dislocation and, above all, pain, what moral speech can be transacted across this world of pain if confined only to a huge number of separate languages?

The issue is further complicated by the artefacts of colonialism adopted as the “new authentic” to the point of becoming fully “traditional.” Zambia is constitutionally a Christian nation; its “traditional” female dress, the wrap chitenge, was introduced by missionaries anxious to promote female modesty. The “traditional” staple food, nshima, a maize-based dish, was introduced throughout Southern Africa by white employers seeking a cheap way of feeding the “natives” who worked for them. Maize was itself an import, largely replacing the indigenous millet. Attack any of these as “colonial” and it is an attack on an authenticity in a country which cannot be decolonised of such things. And culture does not contain many more basic elements than food, clothing and religion.

Zambia is in any case a composite country – composed in part because the minions of Cecil Rhodes declared it a unified territory. But Kenneth Kaunda, the founding president of the independent country, sought to unify the 72 ethnic groups of the country, plus the Indian and white population, with his own composite ideology – part “traditional,” though selectively so, part British social welfare state philosophy, and part Gandhian. The last as a means of passive but internationally-supported defence against the depredations of the aggressive white minority southlands of Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa. In declaring a national ideology, Kaunda also sought to speak an international language to gain allies as he suffered white attacks on his young country. He achieved a hybrid postcoloniality (Chan Citation1992).

Both Lily Ling’s “Worlding” and Edward Said’s hybrid intersections suggest that those once imperialised can turn the tables. Ling, who managed to have an entire International Studies Association annual conference devoted to Worlding simply proposed that the expression of multiple cultural foundations made the world more cosmopolitan and Western cultural foundations – including those that went into normative theory – less hegemonic (Agathangelou and Ling Citation2009). Said, even in resisting cultural imperialism, sought exactly the hybrid fightback on one’s own terms. The emphasis here is on “one’s own terms.” In one’s own adaptation and fusion, including of Western thinkers, canonical or not, the previously subordinated create difference in order to stipulate new terms to the previously “universal” (Howe Citation2006). Christian churches in Zambia, within an amazingly ecumenical national United Churches of Zambia umbrella – involving both established churches and entirely new charismatic ones – widen the scope of Christianity, lead the way in terms of gender equality by the creation of female Bishops and channel tongues and powers of healing that resemble both those of the apostles in the Biblical book of Acts and those of many cultural practices and rituals that existed before Christianity (Gifford Citation1998). In a sense, Christianity has rendered the “old” and the more fully traditional more acceptable in modern terms. And more able to assert their place in a nationalism. In other words, it does not decolonise; it reworks colonial influences into something that works against the central colonial ambition of subordination and, indeed, seeks to influence metropolitan concepts and practices of religion.

Or to overcome and establish a latter-day hegemony over the metropolitan order with its imperialising and colonising history. But is President Xi Jinping’s new China, drawing from values of the past, an example of decolonisation at its most selective and opportunistic? Uighurs and others might say so as the past that is celebrated is rule over other people by the Han Chinese. Granted, China feels it has much from which to emerge – after its “century of humiliation” by imperial forces, a century of bitterness (Mitter Citation2004). But it officialises what is acceptably valuable from the past. The Falun Gong’s mixture of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism is not, for example, officially acceptable (Chan Citation2003, 192–196). And it overlooks pre-Communist efforts to blend an antiquity with new constructions and even new forms of Western thought. Even the Tai Ping, which almost overthrew the empire in the nineteenth century, advocating a self-invented Christian brotherhood and sisterhood which surmounted an array of local mysticisms, had its own modernisers (Platt Citation2012). In short, decolonisation required thought and not the permission, the imprimatur, only of a supreme leader. But, in terms of what Realist International Relations calls “high politics,” Xi’s is a “high decoloniality,” one linked with power and power plays that are transacted both nationally and internationally, but on the basis of huge modern technology and economic reserves.

And what about the Taleban in Afghanistan? They claim not only a decolonial mission but one of absolute and mandated authenticity. Beginning, in Rashid’s (Citation2001) account, as a rescue mission of kidnapped young women, they have become a constrainer of the rights, capacities and future development of women.

Similar questions can be asked of female genital mutilation as a pre- and perhaps decolonial traditional practice. At what stage, and with what methodology, should a metropolitan feminism intervene?

And, in the Russian war against Ukraine, that too is in the name of a Russian authenticity, a status quo ante in the face of a colonial creeping forward of NATO. Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric is a decolonial rhetoric (even if the Ukraine citizens themselves feel it is imperative to resist a new wave of Russian colonialism).

Returning to Africa, there is of course the somewhat wretched example of the late-nationalist and decolonial era of Robert Mugabe, with its nominal return of land to the people, rapidly corrupted by oligarchic ownership of the best land, and the lack of modern agri-industrial and agri-economic planning making the decolonial project a disaster for his people (Chan Citation2019) – a disaster perpetuated, only with less style, by his successor.

The case of Zimbabwe, of which I have written much earlier, sets a frame, however, for the work of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni – best known for his series of works on epistemology and how ownership of one’s thought is a prerequisite for freedom, i.e., not thought and styles of thinking imposed by an intellectually hegemonic metropole (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Citation2018). One would have assumed that he was by default a decolonialist. Instead, he warns of the trap of easy rhetoric. In his book, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa, he warns that there can be no “authenticity” in the modern world for any nation unless it knowingly, self-reflectively, immerses itself in the contradictions between self and other, modernity and tradition, accomplishment and stagnation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni Citation2022). If I may use the words of the US poet McClure (Citation1969, opening epigram), “the struggle to it is DARK BROWN the struggle itself is a solid moving in an inferno … ,” and if I may add my own gloss, being turned into liquid shit in the process. Thus adding a colloquiality that Ndlovu-Gatsheni would not have used, the work of authenticity is, in more pedestrian words, messy. And even more so in a world of power politics and a myriad exploitations and dependencies – each different, so that the condition of exploitation and dependency of the Solomon Islands, flung across the South Pacific, is different to that of the landlocked Central African Republic. But both the Solomon Islands and the Central African Republic would like to speak one day in a common language of accomplishment and the transcending of dependency – to speak, in short, a normative language.

But to speak norms in ways that were not first coined by Immanuel Kant. The “categorical imperative” of Recht, an overarching realm of cosmic natural justice, has parallels in every realm with a history of cosmic imagination. A human right can be drawn into being in a way unimagined by normative thinkers of the West. Freedom from an unjust emperor in China was every bit as courageous both in thought and deed as any uprising against a dictator in Europe. The ultimate decoloniality, if you like, is a horizontal global society with values that bind across the board but spoken and thought like the Tower of Babel. And, in dealing with contradictions, hybridity becomes the condition of a non-pastoral non-Arcadian decoloniality.

In short there is no “authenticity” in any case without re-creation in an unavoidable epoch of modernisation and modernism. Hybridity is built into existence. But the case for non-hegemony means also a world of nation-states and people in an acknowledged horizontal equality. In that equal space, differences and wonders can grow, but communication, transactions and commonality can as well. Commonality, but not universality.

That re-creation must work with peaceful modernity, not seek licence for death and slaughter as in the modern wars of Liberia, with the re-creation of poro as a ritual of invulnerability and its permission to kill others not invulnerable – all mixed with the modernity of assault rifles, artillery and motorised transport. This recipe for terror applied also to some female fighters as well as male ones (Ellis Citation1999).

So the task of the future is to seek the common language of values, of rights. But this language can itself be hybrid. My PhD student from Botswana, Alice Mogwe, won the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Prize for Human Rights in 2021 for her leadership of both international and Botswanan human rights (SOAS Citation2021). She is known for her work in gender equality and the rights of those with sexual preferences that are not part of a Tswana mainstream. But the language used in Botswana by Mogwe is not only drawn from the vocabulary of Western LGBT+ rights, but from Tswana traditional discourses on tolerance, plurality and acceptance (CitationMogwe ongoing). The vocabulary is as dense as anything in Western discourse on such issues – but is almost wholly unknown in the West; while Western non-governmental aid donors to civil society organisations in Botswana insist upon the use of Western vocabulary. The situation of a reverse insistence, that the donors must learn several thousand vocabularies from many countries in order to claim decoloniality in what necessarily remains a hierarchical relationship – someone has money to give and someone doesn’t – is addressed, if not fully satisfied, by an acceptance of hybridity in vocabulary and a commonality of values even if differently conceived and expressed.