African Scholar debunks #Woke ideas of #Decolonization
Peter Janssen
Experienced legal counsel for business people. Author and social commentator. The opinions expressed on Linkedin are my own and not that of the firms with which I am associated.
Lessons for Australia- Out of Africa- Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, Olúf??mi Táíwò
A summary of an article by Jim Butcher lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University.
"Racism exists, but has declined greatly, and does not define all aspects of life. Privilege, or its lack, is generally much more a product of class and wealth than race. Yet decolonial theorists in the universities persist in viewing the colonial past as key to contemporary struggles, reproducing exactly the same limiting assumptions within the UK (Australia or America) as Táíwò identifies in relation to Africa…"
“Ascribing ideas to identities – ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘African’, ‘western’, ‘southern’ – without recognising that all these ideas are the property of all of us – leads to a circumscribed dialogue. Calls to ‘Stay in your lane!’.. replace meaningful exchanges. Táíwò notes that decolonization can become ‘a catchall trope, often used to perform contemporary ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’’.
?
“today’s decolonisers do not promote social justice for Africans but actually reprise a theme familiar from rationalisations of colonialism itself: that Africans and their societies lack the agency to choose and make their own future. This is a hard-hitting claim which goes against the mainstream critical social justice advocacy often espoused in universities in Africa and beyond…. History is littered with campaigners, thinkers, political movements and constitutions of newly sovereign post-colonial states that take ‘western’ thought as their inspiration for liberation… Anti-colonial movements demanded precisely what the west had but denied to its colonial subjects: political and economic modernity…”
The #CRT #falsenarrative is that…
?“Modern ideas of progress and development, of rights and liberal democracy, are typically prefixed with ‘western’, ‘European’, or even ‘white’ by decolonial advocates today. In this way, modernity is placed at odds with African tradition and culture and presented as part of an alien colonial imposition from the west that lives on post-independence…. Much decolonial thought frames
reason,
rationality and
individualism
as features of ‘western’ modernity.
African societies, on the other hand” (say the #CRT Colonizers), “are defined by traditional knowledge, indigenous languages and quite different cultural assumptions. Following this line of argument, Africans – in order to be authentically African – should exclude themselves from modernity and the values accompanying it, and follow different, ‘African’, paths. This mode of thinking uses the radical language of anti-colonialism in order to circumscribe political and cultural choices for Africans.”
Táíwò states that this (#CRT False narrative of decolonialization): ‘reaffirms the racist ideology that Africans are permanent children…
‘To see today’s race poetics through the prism of decolonize involves viewing sovereign African states, and their populations, as incapable of choosing ‘western’ development standards, rights or liberal democracy. It posits those who do as somehow not truly authentic to their African identities, as complicit in an ongoing colonial mindset’
‘I want no part of it’….
Táíwò is not prepared to ditch universalism or modernity in politics just because colonial powers falsely laid claim to it as their own….
?Demands to widen access to the benefits of modern societies could, and should, be at the heart of any movement claiming the epithet ‘social justice’ or ‘equality’. These benefits would include the latest and best scientific breakthroughs, industrialisation on a grand scale to meet people’s needs and wants, and infrastructural development…”
??Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, Olúf??mi Táíwò
Summary by Jim Butcher is a lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University.