The institutional capture of 'decolonisation'
In the last five years, I have seen a surge in interest in the topic of decolonisation. It has become a recurring theme in conferences, panels and webinars, so much that its presence can no longer be ignored. For decades, decolonisation has only been confined to radical movements, revolutionary texts and the margins of academic discourse in social science departments. Part of me is glad to see how it was able to break into mainstream politics. But that kind of visibility makes it the perfect candidate for performative politics, something that institutions can parade without having to change anything material.
A deeper look at how decolonisation is talked about, debated and argued today reveals how deeply it has been absorbed into liberal frameworks, falling into the familiar cleavages of empty inclusion and superficial diversity gestures that offer nothing but bland representation that only serves the status quo. The contemporary usage of the word has become far too removed from its historical meaning, that is, the struggle by the colonised people to achieve national liberation through protest and revolution. The departure from the original meaning emerged alongside the withdrawal of colonist’s army and the rise of post-colonial states, reinforced by the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to colonial countries and peoples. But the idea that colonialism has ended with formal independence completely disregards the main points Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1987) argues in his book. Thiong’o writes that the colonisation of the mind is the strongest weapon wielded by colonists against the colonised. Just because we no longer fly their flags does not mean we are free. The colonisation of the mind enables the illusion that colonialism is over.
These circumstances paved the way for the further cooptation of the vocabularies of resistance in the service of capital accumulation. This is where we see how the phrase ‘decolonise this and that’ turns into a slogan that carries no threat to private property, global value chains and imperial power. Just as how corporations such as Amazon gutted queer struggle by turning it into Glamazon aesthetics, or how police forces march in Pride whilst still brutalising queer and racialised communities, decolonisation has been pulled into the same cycle of performativity where it has become a placeholder adjective for institutions to sound more progressive.
We see this mutilation most clearly within the NGO sector, where terms such as ‘decolonialisation’ and ‘postcoloniality’ have become staple words in their dictionaries yet rarely disrupt the underlying colonial architecture. Amidst the glamourised linguistic shifts, projects labeled as ‘decolonial’ retain the same vertical bureaucracy wherein power remains concentrated in headquarters located in Washington, Geneva, Brussels and London. Budgets remain in the hands of the white expatriate (because you cannot be called a migrant unless you are black or brown) living on the 20th floor of an exclusive gated condominium in Manila, Nairobi or Bangkok, insulated from the socio-political realities on the ground that they are supposed to engage with.
The aid-industrial complex functions as the extension of the imperial capital. Simon Kapwepwe was right when he said that ‘if we don't handle our independence very well, the coloniser will come back in the form of investors.’ And return they did, but this time, they brought papers and contracts instead of guns and batallion of soldiers. Robbin (2023) contends how aid has been transformed into a money-making business for Western firms which operate as the functional arm of donor agencies. These firms arrive in Iraq, Cambodia, Haiti and Bolivia with their pre-written methodologies that focus on SMART metrics that they can publish in colourful bar charts and line graphs. And occassionally, they will bring ‘local experts’ as subcontractors for white consultants (Kami, 2018) as a symbolic rubber stamp labeled as participation. Further down the line, the ‘decolonisation’ aspect will now take the form of diversity workshops and listening sessions that reduce local experience and political contexts to footnotes in their annual reports. The British empire called it ‘civilising mission’ (Pekanan, 2016). The Belgian Congo labeled it as ‘mise en valeur’ (Lyons, 1992). And now, they take the form of capacity building, localisation and decolonisation workshops that barely scratch the surface.
But the machinery of the empire will not work had it been working alone. It requires people, bearing the same face and heritage of the colonised, to translate the language of the colonists into palatable pieces of jargons. The local elites become the ‘intermediary’, as Franz Fanon (2004, p. 100) had described them, between the international and the local. They help translate foreign interventions as local empowerment, often distant from the actual needs of community. We find these elites in higher positions in their organisations, occupying panels and roundtables where they preach virtues of diplomacy and reform, whilst replicating the language of the empire.
These elites do not sit too far from their fellow compradors who weaponise decolonisation to silence dissent. The ambiguity of the modern usage of the term has become a shield for those in power in postcolonial states, where decolonisation is repurposed as a rhetorical device that frames all critiques of state violence, dispossession and inequality as foreign sabotage. It is within this context where we encounter decolonisation as bourgeois nationalism cloaked as liberation whilst deliberately loyal to the capital and hostile to the struggles of the working class.
Sixty four years after his death, and the words of Franz Fanon (2004) remains more relevant today than ever: “Decolonisation never takes place unnoticed” (p. 2). Fanon reminds us that decolonisation is not the same as diversity and inclusion projects that seek reform as if it were a performance devoid of politics. It is not a metaphor, as Tuck and Yang (2012) rightfully asserted. Neither is it asking for a chair at the table where the oppressors once sat. It was never meant to be polite. What started as a struggle against the colonial system that was built on exploitation, extraction, racist ideologies and capitalist accumulation has been infantilised and assimilated into empty reactionary gestures. And this will continue until we reclaim the language back from the hands of power and return to the struggles that gave it life.
Decolonisation demands to be felt and to be seen not as mere acknowledgement for centuries of oppression. It calls for the return of land, the formation of treaties, the dismantling of exploitative systems, and the restoration of power to those from whom it was stolen. Decolonisation is inherently anti-capitalist. Anything less is betrayal.