From Decolonisation to Decolonialisation

THE end of World War II and the tense global era of the Cold War gave the decolonisation of Africa and that of Latin America new impetus and importance.

For the peoples and liberation movements of Africa and Latin America decolonisation, from 1945 to as late as 1994 in the case of South Africa, became a language of life. Marxism as a theory and Communism as the praxis that developed from it achieved a historical vogue as tools of liberation from capitalist imperialism. As early as 1955, thinkers like Aime Cesaire who resigned from his position in the French Communist Party had realised that Marxism and Communism were not such a strong answer to the strong question of the “colonial problem” and the “problem of being black in a white ruled world.”

With the increasing destitution of Marxism and Communism as theory and practice of liberation the Dependency Theory of liberation gained worldwide purchase and achieved the status of a fetish in the Global South. GermanAmerican economic historian Andre Gunder Frank, Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin and Guyanese historian Walter Rodney became the go to theorists of the dependency school of decolonisation and the struggle against capitalist imperialism.

Dependency thinking was mainly a reaction to the Eurocentric school of modernisation which advanced the thinking that Third World countries were still trapped in traditional mode and urgently needed to modernise through defined stages of development, in short to civilise.

Tired and defeated Marxists found a new intellectual home and refuge in dependency theory and continued chopping at global capitalism and imperialism, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is the dependency theorists who observed that the capitalist world system had organised the globe into a powerful and prosperous western centre and an impoverished Third World periphery. Sadly, the dependency theorists as clear as they were about the nature of domination and exploitation of the Third World, in their theorisation they still hoped that the nation/state could be used as a springboard of the decolonisation and liberation of the Third World.

It was yet to dawn on the thinkers and leaders of the Third World that the nation/state was itself a creature of conquest and colonisation and was not structurally engineered for the liberation but exploitation and domination of the periphery even after colonial regimes and administrations had been dethroned. Like Marxism and Communism before it, dependency theory and its praxis of decolonisation through nationalism came to exhaustion and destitution. As a result, a quick survey of the founding fathers and mothers of decoloniality in the Global South shows that most of them are angry and disappointed former Marxists, retired communists and disillusioned nationalists. For these thinkers in decoloniality, coloniality is the stubborn corpse of colonialism that insists on resurrecting every time that it is buried.

Decoloniality arises from the political and philosophical dilemma in the Global South where historically decolonisation did not solve the problem of coloniality even as it dethroned administrative colonialism. Arising from this philosophical and political dilemma is therefore the truism that coloniality is different from colonialism, although it arises from it, and that decoloniality is also different from decolonisation. In a strong way, decoloniality now exists because decolonisation failed. Beyond decolonisation, decoloniality aspires for decolonialisation.

The Tragedy of Decolonisation There is no doubt that most of the intellectuals and political leaders of Africa and Latin America who championed decolonisation were intelligent, brave and above all well-meaning souls. Thinkers and leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah in Africa were formidable philosophers and soldiers that wanted imperialism, colonialism and their other accompaniments vanquished. Sadly and rather tragically, decolonisation thought and activism remained hostage to ideas of the nation/state that led to the maintenance of colonial maps, borders and other boundaries. While the problems of physical colonial maps, boundaries and borders can be obvious, little obvious or not totally hidden are the mental maps, psychological borders and intellectual boundaries that remain in the mindsets and heartsets of the peoples of the Global South, the invisible chains that still hold them. Decolonisation thinking and activism also did not go beyond the colonial political economy. Africa and Latin America, after decolonisation, remained colonies without colonialism. Some political and economic elites in the Global South became, in the main, the new colonialists who usurped the roles of the former colonisers to use the nation state that remained hostage to the modern colonial world system to accumulate power and wealth. Colonial regimes fell but colonial systems remained alive and well, if they did not become more virulent and punitive to their victims.

The Euro-American states, the owners of the nation state and the system of colonialism were the first to raise the alarm about the failed states in Africa and in Latin America. Before and during colonialism Africa and Latin America “needed civilisation and modernization”.

After colonialism, beyond the failed experiment of decolonisation, the message from Euro-America was that the Global South needed development, democracy, human rights, privatisation, political and economic deregulation; vocabularies that easily become the shorthand for civilisation and modernisation of the past. The colonial and imperial argument remains that the Global South is poor because it suffers lacks and deficits of its own and not that it has been dominated, exploited and underdeveloped. Even more tragic and dangerous is that, coming from the mouth of Donald Trump in his inaugural moment, a country as domineering in world affairs and as hegemonic and exploitative to the rest as the United States of America can afford to claim to be a victim in the world. disappointment with decolonisation that did not deliver liberation, thinkers of the Global South seek to belong to the larger world without losing their local identity; they seek “critical cosmopolitanism” that does not suffer the side effects of nationalism of the old that easily degenerates into racism, xenophobia, tribalism and nativism. The failure of decolonisation to usher in economic liberation, to deliver the “all other things” and “kingdoms” that Nkrumah promised after decolonisation has led decolonial thinkers to be suspicious of the traditional dichotomy between political economy and cultural studies. Economic reductionism or Economicism together with culturalism have only led to pride in cultures of the former colonised that is not backed up by lives that human beings can be proud of, movements like Negritude and the Rastafarian current exude black pride but have not explained how blacks can have a slice of the world’s fat, the resources and the economy.

Importantly, Decolonialisation, beyond decolonisation, thinks seriously about, as Ramon Grosfoguel puts it, “how can we overcome the Eurocentric modernity without throwing away the best of modernity as many Third World fundamentalists do?” Different from decolonisation thought, decoloniality as the thought of Decolonialisation takes seriously the knowledges, experiences and thoughts of the peoples of the Global South as producers of knowledge and not passive consumers of what the Euro-American world has produced and circulated as wisdom.

Many gifted thinkers and leaders of African and Latin American countries have severally tried and failed to navigate their countries out of the punitive modern colonial world system.

The reason for this political and historical dilemma is that lazily, thinkers and leaders of the Global South seek to use colonial thought and colonial logic to solve the problems caused by coloniality, which is as good as the naïve attempt to punish a duck by trying to drown it.

Decoloniality, having learnt enough lessons from the failures and limits of decolonisation has adopted “epistemic disobedience” and such other concepts as “shifting the geography of reason” and “artisanal practices” to ensure that intellectually and politically thinkers and leaders of the Global South do not reproduce the limits and failures of decolonisation.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@ gmail.com