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0. Memòria i identitat: Algunes perspectives teòriques comparades
If there can be any consensus on ‘decolonisation’, it has to be that the term is a floating signifier that has
proved to be remarkably resilient and flexible. Seemingly eclipsed, rendered irrelevant even, by the rise of
postcolonial studies in the 1980s and 1990s,84 the rallying call of decolonisation has returned with a vengeance within student movements in recent years.
Certainly, ‘decolonisation’ raises very different
concerns for the new generation of student activists in South Africa, UK and the USA than it did for colonial administrators and anti-colonial activists in anglophone and francophone Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. And even within these historical ‘camps’ a wide range of
understandings can be found.
1.2.1 Decolonisation and the transfer of power85
Hundreds of academic studies of decolonisation have been published, many on Africa. The majority are by historians whose primary focus has been on the processes leading to the political independence of formerly colonised
territories. Most of these publications have been
84 This is not to suggest that postcolonial theory began in the
1980s, rather that it became a recognised academic discourse at that time. As the editors of an influential volume put it, “post-colonial theory has existed for a long time before that particular name was used to describe it.” B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths and H. Tiffin (eds), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London & New York: Routledge, 1995, p.1.
85 Throughout this thesis I use the term ‘transfer of power’ in the limited sense in which it is customarily used, i.e. relating to the attainment of constitutional independence.
detailed studies aimed at explaining decolonisation in terms of challenges within the metropole.86 On the other hand, nationalist accounts have privileged local events, notably the anti-colonial struggles.87 While a third trend can be identified, that of situating decolonisation into international relations,88 Le Sueuer maintains that: “Many scholars … have long since argued that colonial history in general and studies in decolonization in particular have generally been separated into two camps: the
metropolitan transfer of power and the nationalist perspectives.”89
For scholars who understand decolonisation as a synonym for the transfer of power, the analysis of this
historical process is central. For such scholars,
decolonisation becomes a temporal phenomenon, i.e. one that can be dated. For Paul Tiyambe Zeleza,
“decolonization [of Africa] lasted seventy-two years”,
86 For an example of the metropolitan approach to studies of Portuguese decolonisation see N. MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan revolution and the dissolution of empire. London & New York: Longman, 1997.
87 For a critique of texts by John Saul and Joseph Hanlon, two international academics closely associated with nationalist
perspectives on Mozambique, see A. Bragança and J. Depelchin, “From the Idealization of Frelimo to the Understanding of the Recent
History of Mozambique”. Harare: African Journal of Political Economy, n.1, 1986, pp.162-180.
88 For the impact of the Cold war on decolonisation in Mozambique see W. Minter, Portuguese Africa and the West. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972; and J.S. Saul, “Inside from the Outside? Mozambique’s un/civil war”, in T.M. Ali and R.O. Matthews (eds), Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and Resolution. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999, pp.123-166.
89 J.D. Le Sueur, The Decolonization Reader. New York & London:
Routledge, 2003, p.3.
i.e. from 1922-1994.90 For philosopher Roy Fraser Holland, European decolonisation (of Asia and Africa) began in 1918, at the end of the Great War, and ended in 1981, the year after Zimbabwean independence.91 As we saw earlier, for Enwezor’s Short Century, the subtitle of the project locates decolonisation in Africa between 1945-1994.
These examples demonstrate that with colonialism commonly understood as a comparatively late historical
phenomenon,92 the beginnings of decolonisation tend to be attributed to fairly recent landmark events, either of international character (e.g. the World Wars that ended in 1918 and 1945) or associated with specific struggles for national liberation (e.g. political independence in Egypt, 1922; Zimbabwe, 1980; or the end of apartheid government in South Africa, 1994). While, of necessity, some analysis of the anti/colonial period forms part of this school of thought,93 the postcolonial period is
typically given short shrift. Le Seuer, for example, uses the term “historical postcolonialism” to define “the
period following independence”. Indeed, Le Seuer
90 P.T. Zeleza, “The Historic and Humanistic Agendas of African
Nationalism: A reassessment”, in T. Falola and S. Hassan (eds), Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa: Essays in honor of Don Ohadike.
Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2008, p.42.
91 R.F. Holland, European Decolonization, 1918-1981: An introductory survey. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.
92 See, for instance, the charting of “phases of European Imperialism” in Rothermund op.cit. Pp.15-20.
93 For example, the timelines in The Short Century begin with the Berlin Conference in 1884. Elsewhere, Okeke-Agulu acknowledges Edward Blyden (1832-1912) as one of the pioneers of the “rhetoric and
ideologies of decolonization and nationalism”, thereby indicating that the discourse of decolonisation can be traced to the late 19th and/or early 20th centuries. Okeke-Agulu, 2015, op.cit. P.2.
exemplifies the school that applies decolonisation in a limited sense, evident in his definition of
decolonisation as “the historical phase that bridged the gap between colonial and postcolonial worlds.”94
Historians Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, on the other hand, maintain that it is productive to
distinguish decolonisation from the transfer of power.
Since their emphasis is on the latter, they do not do a thorough job of enunciating the meaning of decolonisation once stripped of this aspect. But they do assert that decolonisation has meanings beyond the narrow definition applied by many historians. Gifford and Louis posit that:
“The notion of decolonization … can also imply cultural and psychological freedom. It can include the liberation achieved by those who have found or rediscovered their true identity.”95 Their approach is significant, not only for enabling them to justify their focus on the aspects of decolonisation that preoccupy them, but also for their acknowledgment that restrictive uses of decolonisation do not do justice to its full discursive and existential potential.
1.2.2 Broadening the discursive base of ‘decolonisation’
While many historians use decolonisation as a synonym for the transfer of power, and situate it within a linear process between the colonial and postcolonial, some
writers adopt a more complex approach to decolonisation.
94 Le Sueur op.cit. P.2 (emphasis added).
95 P. Gifford and W.M.R. Louis, Decolonization and African
Independence: The Transfers of Power, 1960-1980. New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 1988, p.x (emphasis added).
These include scholars who recognise the historical character of decolonisation but also acknowledge its multi-faceted nature. In doing so, scholars such as
Prasenjit Duara, Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh not only broaden the uses of the term; they introduce porous borders that render their definitions more open than the ‘transfer of power’ school. For instance, Duara articulates three critical, inter-related dimensions of decolonisation:
“decolonization refers to the process whereby
colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states … decolonization represented not only the transference of legal sovereignty, but a movement for moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism. It thus refers both to the
anti-imperialist movement and to an emancipatory ideology which sought or claimed to liberate the nation and humanity itself.”96
Duara’s formulation captures key tensions in attempting to fix the meaning of decolonisation. On one hand it is revealing that he defines decolonisation in the past, evident in his use of the past tense (“represented … sought or claimed”). However, for anyone who remains committed to the values and ideals espoused in his
definition, his reference to an “emancipatory ideology”
implicitly raises the spectre of an unfinished project.
This tension is more explicitly articulated in his
96 P. Duara (ed), Decolonization: Perspectives from now and then.
London & New York: Routledge, 2004, p.2 (emphasis added).
statement that: “The era of decolonization may be over, but the pains of that transition have found their way into the new era of globalization.”97 What are these pains? Are they the residual trauma of a battle that has taken place (in the ‘past’), or are they symptomatic of deferred, unrequited promise (to be realised in the future)? Certainly, it is the unresolved outcomes or unfulfilled visions of decolonisation that lead some
commentators to challenge the conventional binary between colonialism and postcolonialism.98
Even if one accepts that Duara’s positioning of
decolonisation as having been superceded by the “new era of globalization” renders it a phenomenon of the past, his emphasis on decolonisation as a process, movement and ideology extends the horizons of a closed view of
decolonisation. Significantly, he is saying that the movement and ideology of decolonisation resonated beyond the direct interests of newly sovereign nation-states to the world at large (“humanity”). Decolonisation was (or still is) transnational, a “movement for moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism.” Equally importantly, by locating colonialism as part of a longer subjugating history of exploitation (“imperialism”), and asserting its identity as an “emancipatory ideology”,
97 Ibid. P.17.
98 As Falola puts it, “independence [is] not yet attained”. Falola and Hassan op.cit. In a similar vein the Comaroffs assert that
“Colonialism is still very much with us.” Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Volume Two. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1997, p.13. For Le Sueur the continuity is
explained as the “echo factor”. He maintains that, “the trauma and the burdens of colonial relations between the colonizer and the colonized as well as the after effects of anticolonial violence continue to echo…” Le Sueur op.cit. P.4.
Duara, in effect if not in intention, ruptures the tight temporal framings evident in closed definitions of
decolonisation.
Like Duara, Pieterse and Parekh introduce a multi-layered perspective of decolonisation that bridges closed (past, political) definitions and an expansive, more open use of the term. They understand ‘decolonisation’ “both in a historical and in a wider metaphorical sense.”99 According to their formulation:
“In the historical sense, it refers to the momentum of political decolonization, a process that has largely been completed. In an economic sense it has been on the agenda for almost as long, under the blanket heading of ‘development’. A process of
intellectual decolonization has also been under way, in the sense that critical perspectives on
colonialism have become more and more common, also in the West.”100
The introduction of questions of the economy was a
critical element in the critiques of neo-colonialism that were closely imbricated in the decolonisation discourse of the 1960s. Influential texts from, notably, Kwame
Nkrumah101 and Walter Rodney,102 highlighted the imperative
99 J.N. Pieterse and B. Parekh, The Decolonization of Imagination:
Culture, knowledge and power. London: Zed Books, 1995, p.3 (emphasis added).
100 Ibid.
101 K. Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The last stage of Imperialism.
London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., 1965.
102 W. Rodney, How Europe Under-Developed Africa. London: Bogle l’Ouverture Publications & Dar es Salam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1972.
of economic liberation for meaningful ‘independence’.
Alongside these critiques of neo-colonialism and under-development went arguments for pan-African unity and self-reliance by leaders such as Nkrumah and Julius Kambarage Nyerere,103 as well as seminal texts on
psychological and mental emancipation penned by leading political and public figures like Fanon,104 Ngugi,105
Nkrumah,106 Amilcar Cabral107 and other leading African intellectuals.108 Accordingly, what Pieterse and Parekh are formulating in their broader, revisionist definition of decolonisation is arguably only a reflection of the spectrum of decolonial discourse that proliferated during what Le Seuer calls “historical postcolonialism”, and what Pieterse and Parekh term “internal
103 J.K. Nyerere, Education for Self-Reliance. Dar es Salaam:
Government Printer, 1967.
104 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963 [original French version published 1961]; and F. Fanon, Black Skin White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967 [original French version 1952].
105 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey and Nairobi: Heinemann Educational, 1985.
106 K. Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and ideology for de-colonization. London: Heinemann, 1964.
107 Amilcar Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory: Address delivered to the First Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America held in Havana in January 1966”, in A. Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral. Pretoria:
Unisa Press & Hollywood: Tsehai, 2008 [first published by Monthly Review Press, 1979].
108 See the emphasis on mental emancipation in the cultural policy for Guinea developed under Sekou Toure’s leadership. Guinea [The Ministry of Education and Culture under the auspices of the Guinean National Commission for Unesco], Cultural policy in the Revolutionary People's Republic of Guinea. Paris: Unesco, 1979.
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0003/000359/035975eo.pdf
decolonization”.109 Notably, unlike Duara, Pieterse and Parekh use an ambiguous tense, bordering on the present, when they refer to economic and intellectual
decolonisation. Indeed, the idea that decolonisation
extends to “critical perspectives on colonialism” written in the West is generally associated with postcolonial studies.110
“Internal decolonisation”, for Pieterse and Parekh,
accounts for the frequent post-independence contestations and conflicts. They explain this phase, which they
situate between (political) decolonisation and
postcoloniality, by noting that: “Social forces who
earlier followed the nationalist flag, or whose voice was not registered in the anti-colonialist confrontations, may challenge the nationalist project in the name of class, gender, ethnicity, region or religion.”111 This formulation is critical because it acknowledges that decolonisation can adopt a post-independence agenda that departs significantly from the “nationalist project” that most definitions assume to be the primary object of
decolonisation.
109 Pieterse and Parekh maintain that “in the engagement with colonial imaginaries we can identify several episodes and currents:
decolonization, internal decolonization and postcoloniality. In a schematic sense, these represent the mainstream pattern of
decolonization”. Pieterse and Parekh op.cit. P.6.
110 Gaurav Desai and Supriya Nair identify the re-reading of the
colonial canon as one of the main orientations of potcolonial studies (the other being an emphasis on the “cultural production of the
colonized subjects and their postcolonial inheritors.”). G. Desai and S. Nair (eds), Postcolonialisms: An anthology of cultural theory and criticism. Oxford: Berg, 2005, pp.3-4.
111 Pieterse and Parekh op.cit. P.7.
Duara’s reference to ideology, and Pieterse and Parekh’s Identification of “intellectual decolonization” brings one to the threshold of what traditional historians, political scientists and economists may regard as ‘soft’
forms of decolonisation, encapsulated within that other supremely floating signifier, ‘culture’.
1.2.3 Cultural decolonisation
According to Fanon: “A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in
existence.”112 This formulation explicitly links culture to intellectual output (“efforts … in the sphere of
thought”) of an imagined community (“a people”) in the struggle for self-determination.
Similarly, for Cabral, culture was linked directly to popular struggle. He asserted that “culture has a mass character”,113 that “society is the bearer and the creator of culture”,114 and that culture is the “fruit of history [that] reflects at all times the material and spiritual reality of the society, of the-individual and man-the-social-being”.115
112 Fanon, 1963, op.cit. P.233.
113 Cabral, 1979, op.cit. P.144.
114 Ibid. P.143.
115 Ibid. P.149. In contrast to Cabral’s measured attempt to find balance between the needs of the individual and society at large, consider the extreme formulation in Guinea’s cultural policy: “[The cultural revolution] seeks the total eradication of the
individualistic approach in all spheres and the absolute triumph of the ‘mass’ approach on all fronts.” Guinea op.cit. P.33.
These formulations should be understood not as ‘soft’
contributions to struggles for liberation but rather as fundamentally decolonial responses to histories of
western imperialism and colonialism. These ideas
circulated widely in revolutionary environments, and were influential in shaping ideological alternatives to the model of High Culture that had been introduced by
occupying powers in the name of Civilisation. Culture, in the European discourse of Civilisation, was both racist (Europeans had it, Africans, Asians and others didn’t) and elitist (the domain of ruling classes).116 Thus, the project of affirming African civilisation and culture (exemplified by the work of Cheikh Anta Diop117) was inherently political, as was the act of stressing the mass, democratic character of culture, evident in the quotes from Fanon and Cabral.
Pieterse and Parekh remind us that many anti-colonial movements had cultural roots: “Often the first nuclei of what were to become movements for national independence were movements we would now term cultural”.118 They cite
116 Postcolonial Guinea’s policy for a “socialist cultural revolution”
explicitly stated that: “It is a ‘mass’ revolution. It involves the mobilization of the entire people. It uses a ‘mass’ approach
diametrically opposed to the ‘élite’ approach.” Ibid. P.31. Within the Western world, sociologists such as Raymond Williams
distinguished between ruling class and working class culture, evidencing an ideological struggle for ‘culture’. See “Culture is Ordinary [1958]”, in R. Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, democracy, socialism. London: Verso, 1989, pp.3-14.
117 C.A. Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or reality.
New York & Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1974 [originally published in French by Presence Africaine, 1955].
118 See also the bold assertion that “Resistance and offensive are organized first and foremost in the field of culture.” Guinea op.cit.
P.72.
the examples of religion, “a major ground for popular mobilization” and that of Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, stating that, “the ‘Pan-‘ movements of the turn of the century … were avowedly ‘cultural’, sometimes with religious, at other times with biological-racist, overtones”.119
From this formulation by Pieterse and Parekh we can deduce that religion and race (or their associates, ethnicity and tribalism) play an important role in the cultural politics of decolonisation. According to
Pieterse and Parekh: “The common denominator is the
mobilization of the cultural resources of civilizational areas, supplementing, amplifying and superseding
nationalism”.120 They distinguish two contrary approaches.
One being the “logic of nativism” whereby a sharp distinction is drawn between coloniser and colonised, indigene and settler. For evidence of this trend they cite the examples of “discourses of authenticity, Africanite and Afrocentrism”. Contrary to this trend, they note “counter discourses for syncretism”, which they define, narrowly, as “some form of synthesis between
Western and local culture.”121
Examples such as Amin’s Uganda, where Asians were
expelled, and Mobutu’s Africanisation of cultural symbols
119 Pieterse and Parekh op.cit. Pp.6-7.
120 Ibid. P.7.
121 Ibid. Pp.8-9. In contrast, consider the model of syncretism promulgated by Blyden, Nkrumah and Mazrui, where Islamic culture is an important element. See Alamin Mazrui “Ali Mazrui and the Triple Heritage: A contextual essay”, in A.M. Mazrui and W. Mutunga (eds), Debating the African Condition: Race, gender and culture conflict.
Ali Mazrui and his critics (Vol. 1). Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2003, pp.21-26.
in the Belgian Congo/Zaire,122 illustrate what Pieterse and Parekh term “nativist logic”. However, the
relationship between nativism and syncretism is not always clear-cut. Formulations of cultural policy and their implementation are often complex and contradictory, revealing internal tensions as well as pragmatic and
opportunistic political responses to cultural capital.
For instance, under Sekou Toure’s leadership, a nationalist, self-proclaimed “socialist cultural revolution” propagated the development of an
“authentically African, progressive, people’s culture … in which people regard themselves first and foremost as Guinean citizens, for whom considerations of tribe or race are of little importance.”123 This policy, officially identified as authenticite, led to the systematic
destruction of ethnically located masks and objects
destruction of ethnically located masks and objects