Decolonizing Decolonization – part 1
In 2022 I was invited to give an open lecture in Porto, and I suggested the theme “decolonizing decolonization.” The idea was to discuss and analyze the commonplaces of the “decolonizing” discourse in European academia and artistic circles.
Before I go any further, I should point out that this essay is about my relationship with the topics I’m going to cover here, so one shouldn’t expect a bibliographical cameo or a buffet of quotes (listing celebrities to make myself seem more well-read than I am), especially as it is far removed from the academic format. It’s also not an autoethnographic text, a term I don’t even understand, because auto is individual, and the individual doesn’t make the people (ethno). Maybe I’ll come back to this.
The verb decolonize has been used lightly for almost everything: Decolonize cities, decolonize museums, decolonize culture, decolonize art, decolonize academia, decolonize poetry, decolonize minds, decolonize the imaginary, decolonize bodies, decolonize language, decolonize the environment, decolonize tourism, decolonize spirituality, decolonize work teams, decolonize… I don’t know… ayahuasca. There’s so much to decolonize that I suggest, as a priority, decolonizing the word decolonization or, in short, decolonizing decolonization.
There’s no doubt that “decolonization” is necessary, but it must be done outside of assumptions, languages, approaches and relationships based on the still-intact colonial structures. Otherwise, it’s just a discourse that will soon become empty in practice. Sometimes it seems more like a desire to replace people in places of power and status than to destroy those power structures that hierarchize and reduce certain groups and people to nothing, or to very little. Decolonization is financed by the West, the great engine of global capitalism, to put it simply, which continues to exploit and maintain colonies, old and new, now with more sympathetic names and agents: if before they were missionaries, today they are expatriates, aid workers or volunteers; if before they were churches, today they are NGOs and global foundations, philanthropic and even cultural. The road to decolonization is paved with good intentions.
Hence the question: How does a colonizer decolonize?
In the last years of the liberation struggle in Guinea, now Guinea-Bissau, led by the PAIGC, or the colonial war in Guinea against the terrorists (depending on who you ask), in order to nullify the mobilizing and unifying advantages of Amílcar Cabral, General António Spínola instituted the Congresso do Povo da Guiné (Congress of the People of Guinea), in which régulos, djargas, tchernos, justices of the peace, chiefs and leaders were summoned to assemblies to speak on behalf of their peoples. As part of the Portuguese government, they saw themselves as decision-makers, with recognized power and status, and became enemies of the PAIGC, which only endangered these relations and their positions. Many of these leaders and régulos had been appointed by the colonialists themselves, especially the justices of the peace, as the previous ones didn’t want to cooperate. They became spokespeople for those they were sworn to protect, but they didn’t distribute the privileges and benefits that came with this representation. In fact, even excluding the colonial structure, these leaders already had real privileges within their context of power.
The question then is: was Spínola decolonizing by granting a sense of power to the people’s leaders?
“Decolonization” seems to be a Western program and agenda to me. We don’t see China or Russia operating within this framework or financing similar programs. In fact, if we’re so suspicious of these two powers and prefer the futseros (vampires) we already know, it’s due to the relationship we’ve already developed with the latter: the idea that decolonization is underway and that soon we’ll be part of the program.
“Decolonization” serves to dampen spirits, to control the thinkers, the dreamers and the restless, and to make them available to follow the playbook and bring about a revolution that follows the script, without dangerous ruptures. As long as we don’t scratch the superstructure, we can play at replacing pedestrians down below, swinging right or left, but always tied to agendas set by others.
In Portugal, on one hand, leftists can use decolonization as that apologetic pat on the back, in an orgiastic self-flagellation of White guilt, always reiterating how Whites are horrible and privileged bastards who only know how to hurt the rest of the world. Apparently, this absurd and self-centered mea culpa makes the world fairer and abracadabrally fades away all issues of oppression. On the other hand, even right-wingers can use it to further fuel their unfounded hatred and their glimpses of grandeur, based on a romanticized past of conquest and domination as a show of intellectual and racial superiority.
In the end, polarization continues and it’s useful to the powers that be.
As for the agents of decolonization, are they really interested in changing the dynamics of privilege and social order? Would they kill their own classes?
The third Congresso do Povo da Guiné
PLACE OF IGNORANCE
I’m not a “decolonization” theorist, or anything like that. Moreover I must also express my place of ignorance, because in this essay I dare to talk about “decolonization” without having read any of the great thinkers of the so-called “decoloniality,” or citing the usual great Afro-American-Latin names, or the most recent ones. I haven’t even read Franz Fanon in his entirety. The theories I know have more to do with anti-colonialism, and come from thinkers like Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara and some other African authors, so these are perspectives from specific times and contexts.
Regarding decolonization, as I said, I’ve only occasionally read about one topic or another, one subject or another. As such, I can’t discuss the authors’ proposals properly (nor do I intend to), but that doesn’t mean that I can’t oppose or corroborate ideas from other perspectives and other knowledge, once they are known. In fact, I believe this is one of the strengths of decoloniality: the denial of universal knowledge.
I dare to talk about the subject because, after all, I must have read as much as most of the activists, artists and academics out there who want to decolonize anything and everything. Having said that, I’ll say that my observations have to do with the idea of decolonization, or pop and mainstream decolonization, they don’t go into the underground field of obscure thinkers who really want to bring about change.
Well, some of the subjects I see being developed on decolonization, in academic articles, performances, activism, films and other manifestations, usually have to do with identity, culture, art, knowledge, reparation and restitution. These themes intersect, they are or can be intersectional (like everything now), but they can also be analyzed independently and unfold into other sub-themes.
Having made the commitment to the place of ignorance, let’s establish points of agreement on colonialism and colonization.
COLONIALISM AND COLONIZATION
Colonialism is understood as the historical process that transformed the world into the mess we are in now, and which metamorphosed into another system of oppression and domination, represented today by capitalism. Colonialism was established through colonization, which is defined as the domination of a territory through military control, with the imposition of its own legal, political, economic, cultural, linguistic and religious structures, among others, while ignoring, erasing and replacing those of the colonized. This physical and psychological domination, control of the body and mind, which part of Europe exercised over the rest of the world, is still felt today in the regions affected by historical colonialism: Africa, Asia and the Americas. I said part of Europe here, because there was also internal colonization in Europe, but it seems that the term is only dedicated to so-called “non-White” countries, because colonizing Whites seems inconceivable. The very idea of colonialism thus ends up being grounded on a racist bias: when White colonizes White, it’s expansion and occupation, when White colonizes Black, it’s colonialism. When Black colonizes Black, it’s dictatorship, when Black colonizes White… it’s kizomba.
Colonialism is more than just a mere historical process, because it’s not a process that vanished after the so-called independence of the dominated regions. Colonialism continues to exercise its power, which is why the terms post-colonialism, post-colonial and the like make no sense, because it hasn’t disappeared. Colonization continues, domination and oppression continue, just in a more organized and globalized way, creating “colonialities.”
Colonialities here are satellite colonialisms, like what we have in Guinea-Bissau and other parts of Africa, where a state that emerged from European domination copies the norms of its former dominators, and continues to dominate the peoples and territories created at the Berlin Conference (1885) in the name of its masters, and so today we have Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone and Castilianphone (?) - Latin(?) countries.
Mon di Timba, 2019. For the democratization of art and the public space.
Contemporary Africa is a European creation: the borders, the built structures, the idea of nations are all Western creations. There are people who, before Berlin (b.B.), were brothers, like the Fulani, for example, but who today split up to defend nationalist flags, the Fulani of Guinea-Bissau despising the Fulani of Guinea Conakry, because they don’t know what Guinendade (being Guine-Bissauan) is. And even under the same banner, “tribalism” operates, for example, Balantas in conflict with the Fulani (during elections), because they are different peoples and cultures, and with different Guinendades (?). Until the liberation struggle, the term was Portugalidade (being Portuguese), the search was for a Portugalidade, that unifying and transforming feeling that would make all the peoples revere the same flag and embrace each other as bretherns.
After independence, Guinendade is sought, but no one considers it a process of domination and erasure of the other -dades that existed in the territory. However, on the positive side, the idea of Guinendade helps alleviate various conflicts that could exist in the territory due to the cultural multiplicity of the various peoples who live there, but it also erases and homogenizes politics and culture… the same thing that Portugalidade did. Today there are many children who can’t speak their ethnic language, because they only learn Kriol. This is because Guinendade, whose greatest exponent is Kriol, has replaced Portugalidade. The big difference, however, is that, despite this uniqueness that Guinendade aspires to and tries to impose, the coexistence of ethnic and cultural multiplicities in the territory is encouraged and viewed with optimism, with all its whys, what-ifs and then-whens, because an attempt is being made to form a new identity within an interesting paradox. If we had an explicit policy of miscegenation, it would be Guinendade: a kriolization or Guino-tropicalism which, although it tends towards an erasure and homogenization of the different identities that inhabit the territory, is nonetheless built on borrowing from these identities.
