Against Decolonisation

Selected as one of '100 Notable African Books of 2022' in Brittle Paper A leading African political philosophers searing intellectual and moral critique of todays decolonisation movement. Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the Wests 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. Olfmi Tw fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of decolonisation to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds decolonisation of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global societys foundations. Worst of all, todays movement attacks its own cause: decolonisers themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether todays decolonisation truly serves African empowerment. Tws is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.