Against Decolonization

Olufemi Taiwo, Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, Cornell University, in conversation with Chipo Dendere, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Wellesley College.

Decolonization has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency.

Taiwo fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonization’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonization industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonization’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonizers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilizing and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.

Taiwo challenges us to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesizers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant. (From Hurst Publishers).