Preamble
Thank you to the Wole Soyinka Centre for the tremendous privilege of this invite and for making it possible for me to be here to honour BJ: my teacher, friend, and always, a comrade. Particular thanks to Motunrayo Alaka, the Director of the centre and her very able assistants Hope Nwadiwe and Laura Ede, and others for their hospitality and kindness. Also want to thank Professor Akin Adesokan for his role in facilitating this, and I’m only sorry he can’t be here in person.
Ultimately, however, the work of decolonisation is the work of the imagination, posing the fundamental question humanity has to ask of itself on behalf of future generations, as Césaire puts it: ‘What sort of world are you preparing for us?’ Perhaps the answer to this sits in the realm of literature and culture. We must begin to answer it and expect the next panel to begin to do so.
TO pay tribute to one’s doctoral supervisor would be a simpler matter if his influence was restricted to the 2-3 years one spent writing a thesis. However, I’ve grappled with ideas raised in BJ’s seminars and our discussions for much longer than he might realise. Many of our conversations –many about democracy and authoritarianism in the ex-colonial world–are very fresh in my mind, and drive my thinking still.
The field known as ‘postcolonial studies’ was perhaps at the height of its putatively insurgent fame when, in 1994, I went to seek out the ‘Nigerian Marxist’ at Cornell as he had been described to me. I myself had recently graduated from India’s then fabled dissident institution, JNU, now fast degrading under deliberate targeting by the current Hindu ethnonationalist regime. At the same time, there had recently issued a challenge to postcolonial studies from the Indo-Pakistani scholar, Aijaz Ahmad. He had criticised the outsize presence in the field of privileged class scholars from Indian migrant communities, and what he saw as its undue emphasis on colonialism at the expense of the actual thematic concerns of literature from outside Europe. FIRST SLIDE Ahmad declared that the non-Anglophone Indian literature he was familiar with had mandated that ‘a critique of others (anti-colonialism) be conducted in the perspective of an even more comprehensive, multi-faceted critique of ourselves: our class structures, our familial ideologies, our management of bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences.’ It was a call to take the agency of non-western societies seriously, the kind of call to de-emphasize the colonial relationship and take seriously the agency of the ex-colonised that has been articulated more recently by another Nigerian professor at Cornell, Olufemi Taiwo.
In BJ’s classes—interrupted one year by serious illness which he fortunately prevailed over—we were introduced to Ahmed’s work, and variously to the works of African dramatists like Soyinka and Fugard, writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’O and Ken Sarowiwa as well as the classic liberationist thinkers including Ngugi himself, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon among others. I myself still teach many of these texts. I also remember reading JM Blaut’s collection1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History, a text to which I’ve returned recently. That date—1492– remains significant even more so after the events of this weekend.
In writing my own dissertation, however, after conversations with BJ about dissidence and opposition in our own postcolonial national contexts, Nigeria and India, I followed something of the track that Ahmad had mapped, examining a group of dissident Indian writers, the Progressive Writers Association, who were particularly interested in questions of radical transformation after the end of colonialism, including familial structures and gendered relationships. These writers, mostly Muslim, dissident from both the new nation of India and their own generally conservative communities were no friends of colonialism, but insistent that the moment of independence was also laden with possibilities for radical social and economic change within the new nation. For them, decolonisation was a historic opportunity for more wide-ranging change. Literature, and drama, they believed, could help transform national consciousness towards those goals. Flag independence was a new beginning rather than the end goal of decolonisation. When I arrived at Cambridge after a brief unhappy spell teaching at a small liberal arts college in the USA, I did not see myself as working on colonialism or indeed postcolonialism, a fact that I think appealed to my colleagues, defensive as they were about the British Empire’s legacies.
My trajectory shifted somewhat after 2009 by which time I had become, quite inadvertently, involved in controversial public discussions in Britain on the legacies of the British empire. Speaking against a strongly denialist and glorifying narrative of empire entrenched in the British mainstream by the BBC among others, I found myself returning to colonial discourse analysis and the liberationist tradition. Despite requests from publishers, I resisted a book strictly in the vein of a counter-history of empire. As an Indian in the 21st century, I had come to see the pitfalls of national consciousness writ large in the emergence of Hindu majoritarianism and I wanted to think about anticolonialism outside the frame of nationalism which was starting to look like a poisoned chalice. In the book that I ultimately wrote, Insurgent Empire, I continued to think about the dissent that was central to my earlier work, but this time, opposition to colonialism and empire from within the metropole itself, British critics of empire. I argued that their dissent and criticism was fomented by anticolonial resistance outside Britain—the colonies influencing Britain through ‘reverse tutelage.’
Around the time I was completing that book, events on South African university campuses around the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements had inspired a chain of protests in some European campuses with attendant calls to decolonise curricula which, for the most part, involved asking Western universities to acknowledge colonialism and to diversify their syllabi to include some non-Western materials—or at least, that is how most institutions interpreted it. In a sense this was inviting European universities to come very late to the debate that had already been had, decades ago, in Makerere, by Ngugi and others leading to their call to abolish the English department in African universities. Never slow to follow a trend, publishing houses were again eager for how-to books on nothing less than how to decolonise. In the realm of curriculum, a few useful works did emerge in the Anglosphere that more or less reworked the Makerere discussions for the present and for the European context but less radically. I resisted the immediate invitation to write on it but however, like others, been mulling over the concept of decolonisation. I’m sympathetic to the exasperation that drives Professor Taiwo’s recent book, Against Decolonisation. There is a clear danger of decolonisation turning into a facile catchall and an alibi for perpetual victimhood.
And yet, I am For Decolonisation. After five consequential world-altering centuries, it is not a project we can turn our back on, not yet. My current project, a book provisionally entitled Decolonisation: life and times of an idea argues that decolonisation in its most expansive sense remains an important and relevant concept for our burning planet and genocidal international political order, connected to many contemporary struggles around race, ecology, economics, land, governance, co-existence and self-determination. In this context, I’ve often found myself thinking about a 1990 essay by BJ entitled ‘The Nature of Things: Arrested Decolonization and Critical Theory.’ In it, BJ described then then historic context in terms of ‘arrested de-colonization world-wide and the fluid, uncertain conjuncture initiated by Gorbachev’s call for “de-ideologization” of international relations between states,’ that is, the end of the Cold War. Although we are well past the immediate glasnost/perestroika conjuncture of the late eighties, the world order today is shaped by the afterlife of that conjuncture. The situation of arrested decolonization, however, remains not only largely unchanged but is also the common condition across the Global South. For nowhere in the world has decolonisation come to fruition: instead, it is a process that was initiated but then diverted, hijacked, or twisted into something else entirely.
Across the fifties and sixties, decolonisation emerged on the world stage as a necessarily optimistic project with utopian horizons that was rooted in a diagnosis of inherited historical ills. These ills both directly descended from colonialism and through colonialism’s interaction with native tyrannies which more often than not involved leaving those tyrannies in place, what Cesaire called a ‘villainous complicity’ with colonialism. In the second half of the twentieth century, it did not take very long for arrest to set in. In India and Pakistan, of course, the dawn of independence was, in poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s famous words, already stained with blood and bitten by the darkness of the long night which preceded it. There were other letdowns including failures of redistribution and land reforms, progressive family and gender legislation put into abeyance and so on. Nonetheless, to speak of arrested decolonisation does presume that there was once a clear moral and political vision or at least, set of principles, and even processes which were abrogated. Is that true?
To answer that, one might return, at least briefly, to that mid-fifties moment of the two great conferences, the First African-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, and the ‘Second Bandung’ in Paris, the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1956 organised by the journal Présence Africaine. [Next Slide]. Bandung 1955 sought to bring together the national leaders of African and Asian territories that had just become independent of European colonial rule or were about to gain independence as in Ghana’s case. [Slide]. Like the conference in Bandung, which was in fact overwhelmingly Asian, the 1956 Congress of writers sought to address the question of colonialism’s legacies as the age of globe-straddling European empires finally drew to a close— but with a specific focus on Africa, blackness and culture in a global frame. Present at the gathering were literary and political figures—men, it should be specified for the absence of women was noted– who were either already stentorian voices criticising colonialism or would become known for it as the century progressed. They included Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, George Lamming, Jacques Alexis and Jacques Rabemananjara. James Baldwin and Richard Wright were famously present too.
The seeming cohesion of the Bandung story as the site for the emergence of the Third World and the Non-Aligned Movements obscures a more fragmented reality. In fact, those who attended the fabled event did not necessarily agree on what decolonisation would entail. There were significant differences of perspective on some key questions including capitalism versus socialism. What there was agreement on from start to finish was the centrality of the independent nation-state as the fundamental unit of decolonisation. One historian has noted that of the ten principles enumerated in the Final Communiqué, five were on state sovereignty and territorial integrity.[1] In many ways, this emphasis on state sovereignty remains the most widely understood version of decolonisation.
What really brings together the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Paris Congress of 1956 is the fact that those assembled at each thought of themselves and those they sought to represent not as victims of colonialism but agents of decolonisation. They would now harness the power to shape history and remake the world. Whatever the realities at hand, hopes were certainly articulated at that world-changing scale. At Bandung, the denizens of ex-colonies were hailed by Sukarno as ‘peoples of a different stature and standing in the world.’ At the Paris Congress the following year, the venerable Alioune Diop opened the conference with the proclamation that ‘we of the non-European world must awaken new values in all men and explore together the universes born of the encounter of peoples.’[2]
Although at first the term itself referred simply to the withdrawal of a foreign military presence, ‘decolonisation’ has developed over time into a conceptual assemblage of arguments for transforming societies after the end of European imperial rule. Professor Taiwo urges us against such an expansive understanding: “I believe that once ‘flag independence’ was in place and the colonised had become captains of their own ships of state, any talk of colonisation persisting will not pass Fanonian, Cabralian or Nkrumahist muster,” he writes. That claim, I think is debatable, at least where Fanon is concerned. Many of the thinkers and campaigners who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, including Fanon and his fellow Martinican firebrand, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, both of whom were present at the Paris Congress, would open out ‘decolonisation’ to cover a number of related phenomena: resistance to colonialism; the danger of neo-colonialism, and the need for radical social and economic transformation after independence. A persistent concern in this regard, especially for Fanon, had to do with the role of native elites in the new nation, and the dangers of powers and privileges merely changing hands, what the British called a transfer of power. The contemporary relevance of decolonisation derives from precisely the reality of arrest.
While in Paris, as at Bandung, there were robust differences and arguments on cultures after colonialism, the most rapturously received and, frankly, most significant speeches, stressed the importance of decolonisation as a historic opportunity for deep transformation. Both Fanon and Césaire, at the Congress and in their other writings, would stress the capacities of cultures and civilisations to renew themselves, to engage with others, and change for the better. To them, colonialism had undermined the most fundamental characteristic of all living cultures: ‘the faculty of self-renewal.’ Neither saw decolonisation as a retreat into a silo or a rejection of the West in toto. Both saw the infliction of a slow death on colonised cultures as an intentional strategy on the part of colonisers in the service of an economic system, i.e. capitalism, dedicated to the enrichment of colonial elites. Anything that came in the way of a system founded on money was targeted for destruction. As peoples of African descent took their place on the world stage, the role of the Black intellectual and writer was to facilitate the retaking of historical initiative away from this sclerosis.
With such high hopes, and with so much insistence on taking initiative, how did the project of decolonisation go into arrest? Answers depend, of course, on context but in general attempts to ‘decolonise’ the economic landscape or ‘the inherited economic order’ varied greatly, ranging from mild reforms to more radical redistributive initiatives like land ceilings. The extraction of resources and labour, as also continued dispossession and ecological damage, toward the enrichment of a small number is the most salient feature of the colonial system and it has not, on the whole, changed across most ex-colonial contexts. Similarly, the apparatus—including police and military— and legal system of the colonial state was frequently left intact and used, again, for repressive and authoritarian purposes, now in the name of the nation-state rather than imperium. In some cases, decolonising contexts have turned into ‘recolonising’ ones, with postcolonial nations acting very much the same way as their former European colonial masters had, towards particular populations and communities. In historical terms, the imperative to revisit the meaning and scope of decolonisation towards giving it new life and visionary scope—including challenges to postcolonial states when they undertake their own forms colonialism— has never been stronger. As some scholars suggest, decolonisation ‘is unrealized, but not necessarily unrealizable’.
However, there is the problem—incipiently visible at Bandung and warned against by the likes of George Lamming in Paris—of cultural or ethnic chauvinism occupying the space of decolonisation. The case of Hindutva or Hindu supremacism in India is only the most flagrant but also most telling example given the extent to which it is also bound up with neoliberalism, the relentless privatisation of public resources and spaces. Only in some ways a response to colonial racism, ethnic, religious, and national chauvinism tend to simply mimic and mirror the civilisational rhetoric of colonialism and racism. It is too easy to treat chauvinism or majoritarianism as simple aberrations or an unfortunate descent into extremes. While nationalism was clearly central to most anticolonial resistance movements, not least because of the wide legitimacy that had accrued to the idea of the nation-state, we might have to admit that it came with these dangers built in. As Nesiah et al point out, nationalism enabled decolonisation to be initiated but it also opened the way for ‘ethnic, racial and religious majorities [to be] treated as the prime beneficiaries of sovereignty’ even where minority groups were given juridical or constitutional equality and included in the vision of national community. In some cases, majoritarianism has resulted in civil wars while in others, religious and ethnic nationalism has been galloping steadily towards full-fledged authoritarian and exclusionary visions of nation.
Today the call to decolonise must be interpreted in the context of the reality of arrest in which independence came to stand in for decolonisation while cutting off its more radical possibilities. Given the scale and complexity of colonialism’s operations, including its routine collaboration with native elites, decolonisation could never really have been a simple matter of ending what Bandung’s Final Communiqué repeatedly called ‘alien subjugation, domination and exploitation’ and transferring power to a national government. Subjugation, domination, and exploitation both within and without nations must come under scrutiny. There was certainly an awareness at Bandung that national independence had to be given content and meaning but the question of what made had made colonialism ‘an evil which should be speedily brought to an end,’ and how those evils could be avoided in the future was not answered in any detail. It remains before us to continue to grapple with that question rather than assume colonialism is ended by the withdrawal of a foreign power. To the extent that many national discussions about decolonisation remain inflected by Bandung, decolonisation too often appears to devolve into the binary of native and alien, local and foreign. Though valuable in the context of resisting occupation and annexation, national independence does not in and of itself address the challenge of decolonisation as a full spectrum project of remaking the world itself. This last is a point of disagreement between me and Professor Taiwo who rejects ‘the demand that the world must be remade entirely.’ The world as it is currently constituted is inhospitable for the majority of its denizens, many of whom still remain without adequate nutrition, shelter, education and healthcare in ways that are absolutely connected to the dynamic of extraction and wealth concentration. The world under fossil capitalism is also about to annihilate itself.
My discussion so far has presumed a decolonising Global South, an arrested decolonisation, to be sure, but nonetheless one that had commenced. In concluding, I turn to the salient and painful question which stalked the edges of Bandung and unresolved, 70 years on, has returned the question of colonialism and liberation, specifically settler colonialism and decolonisation, to the table. As scholars have pointed out, while Israel was controversially but pointedly excluded from Bandung, despite lobbying to be included, the independent state-centric nature of that 1955 conference meant that there was also no representative from immediately post-Nakba Palestine to make the case against a catastrophic settler colonialism that took hold literally as formal political decolonisation commenced across Asia and Africa. Today, as we all know, that settler colonial project, although repeatedly unsettled by resistance, violent and non-violent, has reached a seriously genocidal conjuncture. By the most conservative estimates, tens of thousands of non-combatant Palestinians from Gaza have perished, while many hundreds of thousands more are unhoused. The urban area of the strip has been flattened into hundreds of tons of rubble. What does this mean for our contemporary engagements with decolonisation beyond demanding independent and sovereign status for the state of Palestine?
At Bandung, it had been left to the Syrian delegation to note that ‘Palestine does not figure in this Conference’ which ‘stands in testimony of the denial of the Arabs of Palestine of their rights of self-determination.’ It is an extraordinary indictment of the hopes of Bandung that those words have been repeated over the years in various international forums and that they are no less relevant today than they were then. To those of us who had, despite it all, moved into the space of the ‘post’-colonial, meaning the era after flag independence, embracing the status of our polities and of ourselves as historical agents etc have had the rudest and crudest of awakenings over the past two years. Always on guard for symptoms of the neocolonial, we have watched stunned, and largely in silence, as the spirit, not of Bandung, but of 1492 –when Europe set sail to bury its teeth in the throat of Indian civilisations in the Americas– has been distilled into the most concentrated, destructive and death-dealing acid in historical Palestine. The main difference is that this time this paleo-colonial decimation, dispossession, and slaughter has been livestreamed on our screens for 27 months now and counting.
In the face of this we must ask: whatever happened to the Global South, that political entity which emerged first out of Bandung and then out of the Tricontinental conference in Havana in 1966, then dubbed the Third World? Historical agents to what end? The transnational anticolonial links, invoked here and in multiple other congresses, manifest in a series of feeble if symbolically valuable UN resolutions condemning the genocide and the ongoing illegal appropriation of lands. They manifest in South Africa’s honourable case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. But that’s about the sum of it. What else can be done, we may ask? There are two obvious choices, of course in facing the Goliath of Israel backed by the near entirety of the West, the United States’ fiscal and military might in particular. There might be collective military intervention, a mighty Afro-Asian peacekeeping force enforcing no-fly zones and ground protection. There are obvious limitations and dangers to that. Let us turn then to the other weapons of the weak: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. These weapons ultimately prevailed in some form against Apartheid South Africa. Why have these not been deployed on a transnational scale across the Global South which boasts in its midst the formation BRICS, to which have been recently added Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, the UAE, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia? A new category of ‘partner countries’ includes Nigeria. Why has this massive bloc with some truly gigantic constituent economies failed to sanction, divest, and cut trade ties with Israel?
One of the points made by Professor Taiwo in his critique of decolonisation is that ‘the choice of a capitalist path to development’ should not be seen as ‘a sign of lingering colonialism.’ As the planet burns—more swiftly than we like to think— as dispossession proceeds largely unchallenged in historical Palestine, and while the privatisation of goods and resources proceeds to historic highs, can we really write an alternative to capitalism out of our understanding of decolonisation? Colonialism is nothing if not the dynamic of appropriation, dispossession, extraction and wealth concentration. This process is less racialised than it used to be, certainly, though still far from transcending race. Rather than turn us away from seeing anticapitalism as fundamental to decolonisation, this invites us to think about which colonial strategies and philosophies persist, not (only) as neocolonialism, but as renewed colonial projects within and by nation-states. This is a form of recolonisation familiar both in Nigeria and India, where deeply destructive and extractive corporate projects harm and dispossess local communities and ecosystems. The axis of capitalist power is moving slowly but certainly southwards but this does not promise decolonisation except in the most spare and tendentious sense of non-Europeans taking the reins of economic and political power.
This shifting axis has so far done very little for either Palestine generally or Gaza specifically. While the genocide that is underway has been rightly described as ‘a transnational effort coordinated and organised by the advanced capitalist countries of the West together with Israel,’ it is also the case that the advancing capitalist countries of the non-West, including the Arab world, have done very little with their material power to intervene non-militarily. Egypt just signed a gigantic gas deal with Israel claiming it was purely commercial not political. China and India both have strong trade relations with the occupying power. Brazil is another significant partner. So, we must ask: is there something within the global and transnational workings of capitalism that actually militates against resistance to colonialism?
In 1959, at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held this time in Rome, Césaire would address ‘the success of that neologism which is beginning to play such an important part in the current vocabulary, the word decolonizationitself.’:
Decolonization is not automatic; that means to say that decolonization is never the result of a mere << fiat>> arising out of the conscience of the colonizer. It is always the result of a struggle, the result of strenuous efforts. Even the most peaceful form of decolonization is always the result of a rupture.[3]
While stressing that even the worst decolonisation is better than the best colonisation, Césaire makes an important observation, one often forgotten today: ‘The difference between decolonization and colonization is not one of degree but of kind.’[4] Decolonisation has to be qualitatively different from colonialism, not just a change of guard. It simply cannot mean embracing the core dynamic of colonialism—dispossession, extraction and exploitation—itself.
Ultimately, however, the work of decolonisation is the work of the imagination, posing the fundamental question humanity has to ask of itself on behalf of future generations, as Césaire puts it: ‘What sort of world are you preparing for us?’ Perhaps the answer to this sits in the realm of literature and culture. We must begin to answer it and expect the next panel to begin to do so.
[1] Patrick Quinton-Brown. ‘Bandung, 1955: Asian-African Conference and Human Rights’, in Online Atlas on the History of Humanitarianism and Human Rights, edited by Fabian Klose, Marc Palen, Johannes Paulmann, and Andrew Thompson, 2017 [2] Diop 15. [3] 126 [4] 128- Currently Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow, Churchill College, Priya was born in New Delhi, India, She was educated in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Thimpu, Bhutan; Delhi, India; Vienna, Austria, with subsequent education at Delhi University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Purdue University (USA) and Cornell University (USA, PhD 2000). She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2023-24, and elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
Photos: Emmanuel Osodi, PM News