Our understanding of decolonisation

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

Frantz Fanon, 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961)

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a historical process: that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content.

Frantz Fanon, 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961)

Culture has proved to be the very foundation of the liberation movement. Only societies which preserve their culture are able to mobilize and organize themselves and fight against foreign domination. Whatever ideological or idealistic forms it takes, culture is essential to the historical process.

Amilcar Cabral, 'The role of culture in the struggle for independence' (1972)

The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonized is to be removed from history, except in the most passive sense. [...] Colonialism determined that Africans were no longer makers of history than were beetles - objects to be looked at under a microscope and examined for unusual features.

Walter Rodney, 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' (1972)

More far-reaching than just trade is the actual ownership of the means of production in one country by the citizens of another. When citizens of Europe own the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. Under colonialism the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. Today, in many African countries the foreign ownership is still present, although the armies and flags of foreign powers have been removed. So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, etc. then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements.

Walter Rodney, 'How Europe Underdeveloped Africa' (1972)

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.

Edward Said, 'Orientalism' (1978)

What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that "true" knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not "true" knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective "political" is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity.

Edward Said, 'Orientalism' (1978)

Imperialism is total: it has economic, political, military, cultural and psychological consequences for the people of the world today. [...] The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 'Decolonising the Mind' (1986)

The call for the rediscovery and the resumption of our language is a call for a regenerative reconnection with the millions of revolutionary tongues in Africa and the world over demanding liberation. It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind: the language of struggle. It is the universal language underlying all speech and words of our history. Struggle. Struggle makes history. Struggle makes us. In struggle is our history, our language and our being.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, 'Decolonising the Mind' (1986)

Research for social justice expands and improves the conditions for justice; it is an intellectual, cognitive and moral project, often fraught, never complete, but worthwhile.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999)

Decolonisation must offer a language of possibility, a way out of colonialism.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999)

Decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression. Decolonization is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.

Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, 'Decolonization is not a metaphor' (2012)

The emerging consensus is that our institutions must undergo a process of decolonization both of knowledge and of the university as an institution. The task before us is to give content to this call - which requires that we be clear about what we are talking about.

Achille Mbembe (2016)

Taking colonialism as a global project as the starting point, it becomes difficult to turn away from the Western university as a key site through which colonialism – and colonial knowledge in particular – is produced, consecrated, institutionalised and naturalised. It was in the university that colonial intellectuals developed theories of racism, popularised discourses that bolstered support for colonial endeavours and provided ethical and intellectual grounds for the dispossession, oppression and domination of colonised subjects.

Gurminder Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 'Decolonising the University' (2018)

The foundation of European higher education institutions in colonised territories itself became an infrastructure of empire, an institution and actor through which the totalising logic of domination could be extended; European forms of knowledge were spread, local indigenous knowledge suppressed, and native informants trained. In both colony and metropole, universities were founded and financed through the spoils of colonial plunder, enslavement and dispossession.

Gurminder Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 'Decolonising the University' (2018)

Decolonisation, while not a metaphor, can certainly be a metonym, situated at the heart of and signifying a range of interlinked emancipatory projects that are, in fact, commensurable without flattening. Decolonisation is meaningless without a set of principles – anticolonialism – that enables it to emerge as a practice that is sensitive to the present and to context while yet steeped in historical awareness.

Priyamvada Gopal, 'Decolonisation and the University' (2021)

The university cannot be decolonised independently of society and economy, but it can be a site where these questions are frontally addressed towards wider change, not least in habits of mind. If we take the production of knowledge seriously as a vital contributor to systemic transformation, then it would be equally perverse, indeed, harmful to leave the university out of endeavours to 'decolonise'. It may well be possible to practice a contrapuntal engagement with 'decolonisation' somewhere between impossible dream and tick-box exercise.

Priyamvada Gopal, 'Decolonisation and the University' (2021)

Europe is indefensible. [...] And today the indictment is brought against it not by the European masses alone, but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.

Aimé Césaire, 'Discourse on Colonialism' (1950)