The Southern J of Philosophy - 2019 - Táíwò - Rethinking The Decolonization Trope in Philosophy

The Southern Journal of Philosophy
Volume 57, Spindel Supplement

2019
RETHINKING THE DECOLONIZATION TROPE IN

PHILOSOPHY
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Abstract: This piece takes a close look at the contributions of two very important
thinkers whose works have, on the whole, framed the deployment of what I call the
decolonizing trope in contemporary African philosophy: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and
Kwasi Wiredu. I argue that, in light of current discussions in African life and politics
and current trends in African philosophical discourse dominated by this trope, it
may be time to, at least, rethink, if not abandon, the trope. The viability of a con-
ceptual decolonization in philosophy may have been oversold; the trope may give a
false impression of the complexity of the situation it is designed to help attenuate;
and it may be having deleterious consequences on discourse and its progress even
if they are unintended.
I would like to begin with a personal story that, I suspect, illustrates what I
take to be the core of the problem that the idea of decolonizing philosophy
was meant to solve. This incident happened when I was in high school
in Ìbàdàn, Nigeria. A contingent of students from another high school in
Cotonou, Dahomey (now Bénin), had come to our city on an excursion.
They lodged with us in our dormitories at my boarding school. For the
week that we were all together, we spent our time trying to service our
French language skills while they did the same with their English skills. It
was not until the eve of their departure that we all discovered, doubtless
to our chagrin, that they and we were all, mostly, Yorùbá. That is, we
could have had more meaningful, even deeper conversations in our shared
original tongue and primary culture. It was not until 1985 at a conference
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests
and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African
and Africana Philosophy.
The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159.
ISSN 0038-4283, online ISSN 2041-6962. DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12344
135
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136 OLÚFẸ́MI TÁÍWÒ
in Toronto, Canada, that we held to mark the centenary of the infamous

Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85, that this experience came back
to me and I was able to dilate on it in a presentation that I entitled “On
the Political Implications of Geography.” It was almost an epiphany when
it hit me what might have been crucial in the making of the incident that
I just recounted. It was when it dawned on me that way before any one of
us was born, our future mindscapes had been delineated and mapped, and
our preferences, from victuals—bread/le pain, beer/le vin—to our favorite
colonial capitals to lust after—London/Paris—to our preferred philosoph-
ical orientations—empiricism/phenoménologie—had been rigged in ways
that we must, late into advanced adulthood, seek to undo.
So, when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues for the centrality of language to the
task of decolonizing the mind, I do not think that there is much to demur to
in that stipulation. And when Kwasi Wiredu insists that how we think phil-
osophically is inflected by the language in which we learn to do philosophy,
one may not disagree too strongly with that, either. Just as Ngũgĩ reports
how, in his own time going to school in Kenya, they were discouraged, on
pain of corporal punishment, from speaking their indigenous languages,
and Wiredu’s experience at an equivalent period was not much different
in Ghana, I can corroborate their experiences with my own in Nigeria at
a time much later than theirs. The schizophrenia-like condition induced
in all of us by our attending school in one language and leading our non-
school lives in a different language is a condition that we nurse until we go
to our graves. Although I do not do so in this essay, one can trace a direct
causal line from this contingency to some of the contemporary difficulties
that afflict much of the scholarly thinking in African knowledge production.
It is why we often assume that our original languages are only good for
“colloquial” discourses and are adjudged automatically to fall short of the
requirements of deep thinking about anything.
Even in such areas as religious practices, especially liturgies, the pro-
found domestication of Christianity has yielded in Pentecostal circles to
our colonial languages being the primary language of worship with gaudy
translations to our mother tongues almost for comic relief. The primary
assumption in all this is that recondite thinking, anything that requires deep
thought, is the province of our borrowed languages. Our original languages
are only good for the everyday, the province of habits, of things that we
just do, or for ritual purposes—the latter accessible only to a limited few
who are otherwise initiated into the relevant practices. However we con-
strue this, the consequence is that, in spite of all the anxiety about our
languages dying, it may be too late in the day to save them from deepening
RETHINKING THE DECOLONIZATION TROPE 137
fossilization even while they appear to be alive. I shall have more to say
about this anon. The insistence that future generations must be saved from
this contingency should be welcomed by everyone who is apprised of the
implications for a coherent, integrated intellectual identity and knowledge
production of the highest quality.
Given what I just said, why then do I think that the decolonization trope
in philosophy is due for a rethinking, maybe even abandonment? The
answer is very simple. The ubiquity of the idea of decolonization in all areas
of thought, from literature, linguistics, and philosophy to politics, econom-
ics, sociology, psychology, and, lately, medicine, indicates to me either that
the trope packs an explanatory and analytical punch like no other or it has
simply lost its way and become a catch-all idea that many deploy not so
much as a tool to aid understanding but a marker of being with it or a
paean to some shady authenticity.1 No, I am not going to be able to
develop this attack fully in this essay. My hope is that I make enough sense
to persuade others that maybe we need to take a closer look at the idea. I
limit myself to African philosophy, and I refrain completely from any dis-
cussion of decoloniality and associated discourse.
The original concern of decolonization came from the struggle for inde-
pendence from colonialism. The idea was that independence would mean
the departure from Africa’s shores of colonial rule and all that pertained to
it when it came to how life is led in the erstwhile colonies. The key phrase
here is “all that pertained to it.” What are the boundaries of this specifica-
tion? The two dominant aspects of colonialism that come to mind here are
politics and economics. In politics, colonialism was typified by denying the
colonized the modern philosophical ground of political legitimacy that
insists that no one ought to obey the rule of any government to which she
has not consented. Decolonization in politics would then mean that the
colonized would no longer chafe under the rule of governments, especially
by colonialists, to which they have not consented.2 In economics, control
over the levers of economic power that had been under the authority of the
colonizer is supposed to revert to Africans after colonialism. Other areas of
life—culture, writ large—are supposed to be marked by the deployment of
1
For a similar caution, see Ato Sekyi-Otu, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (New York:
Routledge, 2019).
2
I leave out here incidences of internal colonialism within former European-dominated
colonies. This is also without prejudice to the fact that post-independence, citizens of the
erstwhile colonies might find themselves chafing under the burden of rule by governments to
which they have not consented. The difference is that, in this case, the source of illegitimacy
is not extraneous to the polity concerned.
African agency in determining the issue of how life and thought are to be
organized. In short, self-determination is supposed to inflect life in ways that
are exactly contradictory to what colonization evinced. What matters here
is that people, as individuals and groups, get to author the respective scripts
of their individual and collective lives, a prerogative that was denied them
under colonial rule. A key problem suggests itself. We cannot always be
sure how this expression of agency might unfold. Self-determination, indi-
vidual and collective, cannot be decreed to unfold or be deployed in only
one predetermined way. The key difference between being under colonial-
ism and being from it is that the colonized will is coerced and bent in one,
and it is free and self-actuating in the other. So, when we see what appear
to be colonial survivals, we should ask whether they are still sustained by
the previous coercion or inertia or choice-making by the ex-colonized. We
shall presently explore the implications of this factor for the discourse of
decolonization.
What this means is that if we were to see structures and patterns of life
and thought that once characterized the colonial situation occurring in the
postliberation period, we need to investigate the causal antecedents before
we adjudge such occurrences to be instances of the failure of decoloniza-
tion. That is, there may be phenomena in the postindependence period that
mimic similar ones in the colonial period, we cannot automatically assume
that they have the same pedigree. If some turn out to have the same ped-
igree, we need further evidence to determine that the same causal agents
that were responsible for them in the colonial situation have remained
operative in the decolonized setting. Such would be instances of failure to
decolonize. And if these were indeed failures, we would need to determine
whether the will of the newly free is still being bent by the same forces that
ruled the roost while colonialism prevailed. We would also need to rule out
inertia, the exercise of the will in the service of choices that negate free-
dom or clear preferences for certain ideas and arrangements, even if they
had colonial origins, on the part of the ex-colonized. Unfortunately, we do
not often exercise these cautions in much of the discourse of decoloniza-
tion. Yet, exercise them we must if we are to come up with sophisticated
accounts of how life and thought have unfolded or ought to unfold once
formal colonialism was removed. Part of the case that I make in this essay
concerns the ease with which the decolonizing trope is deployed without
deep attention to the complexity of the issues involved.
The core of this decolonization project was the extirpation of colonial
rule symbolized by the placement of Africans at the helm of their states and
the restoration of African agency to the steering of African life on Africa’s
soil. Doubtless, in most parts of Africa, the project of decolonization, expan-
sively conceived, was never really consummated. As a former teacher of
mine in Nigeria put it in a famous essay, “independence was a programmed
transition to neocolonial dependency.”3 The structures of colonialism were
never really replaced, and what we had instead was what Kwame Nkrumah
christened “neocolonialism.”4 As African philosophy grew into a legible and
legitimate subdivision of the discipline, in reaction to the racist denial that
had consigned Africa to the zone of philosophical nonbeing, African think-
ers, too, began to grapple with freeing African philosophy from the vise grip
of colonialism and its ideological manifestations. That is, African thinkers
began to question the provenance of ideas and ideational structures that
dominate life and thought, tracing some to the colonial period. Such is the
genealogy of what is now the discourse of decolonizing philosophy where
its specific African inflection is concerned.
I need to be very specific in this context because, as I argue, much con-
fusion is occasioned by what I see as unfounded generalizations about the
nature of colonialism and an effacing of its specific configuration in even
different parts of Africa.5 It suffices to say here that even in a country like
Senegal where French colonialism unfolded in two distinct phases—assimi-
lation and association—one can see the differential fruits born of those
phases. The differences were deeper still in areas of settler colonialism. No,
I have not looked it up, but I would love to see what decolonizing philoso-
phy would look like if it resonates at all for Afrikaner philosophy in South
Africa. Similar questions can be raised for Zanzibari philosophy or Hausa
philosophy and its iterations in Islam-dominated countries in Africa. What
am I hinting at? This: it is all too easy for us to talk about decolonizing
philosophy when we take Africa to be our primary referent. But, once we
begin to dispel certain assumptions that inform our current discourses,
things begin to look rather complicated. Given that much of the focus has
turned on language and political philosophy, I elect to ask questions of these
two areas in the present discussion.
In sum, I shall be arguing that when viewed from the impact of what has
been called “the need for conceptual decolonization in African philosophy,”
it may have some very problematic, even if unintended, consequences.
3
Segun Osoba, “Decolonization in Nigeria as a Programmed Transition to Neocolonial
Dependency,” Seminar Paper, Department of History, University of Ife (now Obafemi
Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, Nigeria, March 9, 1977.
4
Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Panaf, 1965).
5
For elaboration, see Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), chap. 1.
These consequences are traceable to the very conception of the problem I

have just hinted at. First, it may strike some as odd to point out that when
it comes to its cultural iterations within which the discourse we examine
here falls, the very concept of decolonization is beset with significant mud-
dles. Even among its sophisticated proponents, one hardly is ever clear as
to what, ultimately, a fully decolonized—assuming that were possible—
philosophy would look like. Here, one finds as many iterations of decoloni-
zation as there are thinkers promoting it. Certainly, we cannot go fully into
this tendency to muddle in this discussion. My hope is that bringing this
to our attention might cool our ardor at throwing it out as a panacea for
what we feel ails our discourse in philosophy and culture at large. Second,
in the matter of language, as articulated by both Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and
Kwasi Wiredu, they may be raising or have raised unrealistic expectations
regarding what can and/or ought to be done. Third, a trope that emerged
to break down the walls that had been erected by Eurocentrism around the
very ideas of philosophy may have become a new wall that obscures much
more than it discloses. Fourth, the dominant conception of colonialism in
the discourse of decolonization is somewhat stilted and does not really take
seriously the complexity and historicity of the concept and, this is key, the
differential paths of modernity and colonialism in Africa. Finally, I would
like to argue that, in the discourse, we play fast and loose with—when we
are not pointedly ignoring—the intellectual contributions of thinkers in
ex-colonies and their reaction and relation to, and engagement with, the
legacy of colonialism and modernity.
I would like to frame my discussion by using as a foil the case for “decol-
onizing the mind” made by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and “the need for concep-
tualizing decolonization in African philosophy” by Kwasi Wiredu. I use
them as foils because they have loomed large in the debate on decolonizing
the humanities since both were published in the early eighties of the last
century. Both of them, especially Ngũgĩ, have had far-reaching conse-
quences for university organizations in Africa. Soon after Ngũgĩ and his
brave comrades in Nairobi forced the Department of English to be renamed
the Department of Literature in English, I am proud to say that my alma
mater, the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife,
Nigeria, was where the train next stopped, and it led to the emergence of
the dominance of Marxist-inflected sociology of literature and literary crit-
icism that generated such fierce debate that Wole Soyinka had to address
its impact in his inaugural lecture delivered there in the early eighties.6 And
6
Wole Soyinka, The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies, Inaugural
Lecture Series 49 (Ile-Ife, Nigeria: University of Ife Press, 1982).
Wiredu’s voice in the emergence of African philosophy as a subdiscipline is
a pivotal one. His Philosophy and an African Culture (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), was one of the earliest articulations of academic
African philosophy that did not allow itself to be deflected by the rac-
ism-tinged, sterile “question of African philosophy and the conditions of its
possibility.” So, in challenging their submissions, I am paying tribute to the
enduring significance of their contributions. But challenge I must to push
back the frontiers of a debate that, I believe, is fast ossifying.
For Ngũgĩ, the need for decolonizing the mind was a continuation of the
battle that Africans were waging against imperialism notwithstanding the
fact that most African countries had been nominally independent since the
early sixties. He identifies two “mutually opposed forces in Africa”: “the
imperialist tradition” exemplified culturally by the “African neocolonial
bourgeoisie” and “its culture of apemanship and parrotry enforced on a
restive population through police boots, barbed wire, a gowned clergy and
judiciary; their ideas are spread by a corpus of state intellectuals, the aca-
demic and journalistic laureates of the neo-colonial establishment.”7 For
him, there is continuity between the dominant ideas and ideational struc-
tures under colonialism and those that marked the postindependence period
that emerged from decolonization and purveyed by the local intelligentsia
in various African countries.8
To this he opposed “the resistance tradition [which] is being carried out
by the working people (the peasantry and the proletariat) aided by patriotic
students, intellectuals (academic and non-academic), soldiers and other pro-
gressive elements of the petty middle class.”9 In the present case, resisters
are able to push back against the imperialists. It is fair to assume that the
resistance is not influenced by ideas and ideational structures that mimic
those immersed in colonialism. We shall soon find that this counterposition
denominated by the presence or absence of certain ideas that are easily
ascribed to colonialism may not be a helpful way of understanding the tra-
jectory of ideas and ideational structures in Africa’s spaces.
“The biggest weapon,” according to Ngũgĩ, in imperialism’s armory is
“the cultural bomb.” What does the cultural bomb do when it is detonated?
It messes with a people’s furniture of the world, their cosmologies, their
7
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
(Nairobi, Kenya: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 2. Hereafter cited as Decolonising
the Mind.
8
He seems to think that the cause of this continuity must be traced to the power of im-
perialists to bend the will of ex-colonized intellectuals even after independence.
9
Decolonising the Mind, 2.
sense of their place in and relation to the world, their narratives, literary
and historical, and, most importantly, “their belief in their names [and]
their languages.”10 The cultural bomb makes people entertain significant
doubts about their sense of who they are and confidence in their being-in-
the-world. “It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achieve-
ment and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland.
It makes them want to distance themselves from that which is furthest
removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages rather
than their own.”11
There are assumptions here that I will not be able to hash out. We know
that imperialism is a global phenomenon. It is not the case that the outcome
described by Ngũgĩ is by any means the only or even the dominant one in
every instance. For instance, I think it would be a stretch to say that what
Ngũgĩ describes captures the experience of Indians with British colonial-
ism—a variant of which generated the outcome in Ngũgĩ’s account—nor
that of the Vietnamese with French colonialism. And British colonialism
did not extirpate Afrikaans or alienate its speakers in South Africa or make
Afrikaners unenthusiastic about their culture. We may require additional
reasons to explain this particular outcome in many parts of Africa beyond
the power of imperialism to assert its will. The discourse of decolonization
tends to obscure this interrogation.
When we shall have decolonized our literature and philosophy and other
areas of thought, what would things look like? Put differently, what goal do
we have in view, and how would the world look were we to attain a decol-
onized discourse in philosophy?12 Frantz Fanon was very clear about what
decolonization will look like in its aftermath. So was Cabral. I limit myself
to Fanon. According to him, colonization and decolonization do not form
a continuum such that we can affirm of them the kind of dialectical
10
Ibid., 3.
11
Ibid., 3.
12
Another way of phrasing the question is to ask what we are to understand by decolo-
nizing anything. This is the not the place to get into it. Maybe someone will one day put
together a taxonomy of conceptions of decolonization in the literature. Often, even in the
work of a single author, decolonization can come in three or more variations, and the con-
fusion is compounded when the idea is promiscuously deployed in all spheres as is often the
case now. It reminds me of a similar consequence of Thomas Kuhn’s introduction of the
word “paradigm” in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996) and how it became a catch-all term that everyone thought they under-
stood only because no one sat down to probe into its promiscuous deployment until someone
did present a taxonomy derived from the many usages the author gathered from diverse
writings. I am afraid that decolonization has become like that. I have refrained from popu-
lating this essay with instances of these muddles; they are readily available in the literature.
relations that subsist between moments of a whole. They are mutually
exclusive, and when we move from one to the other, there is an annihila-
tion of the previous state, not a sublation of it. In the specific colonial situ-
ation such as obtained between the colonized and colonizer in much of
Africa, the colonized were nonpersons; they were consigned to a “zone of
nonbeing.” To become decolonized means vacating this zone, not amend-
ing or ameliorating being in it; it must be ended, period. For this to happen,
the colonizer qua colonizer, too, simultaneously must become a nonbeing.
That is, if we apply this to discourse, living, and making sense of the world,
if any piece of colonization were to remain in the aftermath of decoloniza-
tion, that would be an indication that the latter had not occurred.
Put differently, if, say, philosophy was to be an integral part of coloniza-
tion, we cannot claim to decolonize while retaining philosophy. If we use
this as our metric, then any aspects of life that have anything to do with the
colonizer must be extirpated. This is why it is crucial that we not be careless
in attributing more to colonialism than can be supported by the historical
record. For illustration, if modernity were part and parcel of colonialism,
it is clear that a decolonized society would have no truck with it. Where
this is concerned, we either separate the two as I think we should, or they
both go down together and the ex-colonized’s relationship with it would be
forever conflicted, if not impossible. But we know that this is problematic
if not implausible. It would require that we take an extremely narrow and
monistic view of life under colonialism and attribute every artifact that we
can point to in the colonial situation to colonialism. Given this implausible
scenario, we need to be more modest and more specific in identifying the
inventory of colonization and its appurtenances. We may then need to take
a more expansive view of the plural forms of life under colonization.
We must separate changes under colonialism that were constitutive of
colonization and those that were incidental to it, those that unfolded under
the direction of colonizers and were designed to reinforce the nonbeing of
the colonized, and those that were driven by the autonomous—yes, auton-
omous—will of the colonized, however much the colonizer pretended that
the colonized were incapable of choice-making. We must strive to elicit the
clear provenance of certain ideas that may have been inducted into the
colonial situation but were not necessarily inherent to it. This is where I, for
instance, insist that we not conflate modernity and colonialism.
Next, we argue that the requirement that decolonization be demon-
strated by creating literature in African languages or thinking philosophical
concepts in “our own African languages” may be raising or have raised
unrealistic expectations regarding what can and/or ought to be done. The
imperialism-inflected cultural bomb compelled Ngũgĩ to adopt language as

the best terrain to fight the struggle for genuine independence and resto-
ration of the dignity of African peoples. This is at the heart of his original
case for decolonizing the mind. “The choice of language and the use to
which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in
relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the
entire universe. Hence language has always been at the heart of the two
contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century.”13 Language
is both “a means of communication and a carrier of culture.”14
Ngũgĩ’s reflections intersect with those of Kwasi Wiredu. Wiredu, too,
locates the genesis of the need for decolonization in the continuing play
of colonialism in the African mindscape decades after independence was
supposed to have been attained.
By conceptual decolonization I mean two complementary things. On the negative
side, I mean avoiding or reversing through a critical conceptual self-awareness the
unexamined assimilation in our thought (that is, in the thought of contemporary
African philosophers) of the conceptual frameworks embedded in the foreign phil-
osophical traditions that have had an impact on African life and thought. And,
on the positive side, I mean exploiting as much as is judicious the resources of
our own indigenous conceptual schemes in our philosophical meditations on even
the most technical problems contemporary philosophy. The negative is, of course,
only the reverse of the positive. But I cite it first because the necessity for decol-
onization was brought upon us in the first place by the historical superimposition
of foreign categories of thought on African thought systems through colonialism.
This superimposition has come through three principal avenues. The first is the
avenue of language. It is encountered in the fact that our philosophical education
has generally been in the medium of foreign languages, usually of our erstwhile
colonizers. This is the most fundamental, subtle, pervasive and intractable circum-
stance of mental colonization. But the other two avenues, though grosser by
comparison, have been insidious enough. I refer here to the avenues of religion
and politics.15
There are significant differences between Ngũgĩ’s and Wiredu’s tones

and recommendations, respectively. For Wiredu, there are no ideological
issues involved. The simple fact is that African philosophers labor under
the weight of assumptions traceable to “foreign philosophical traditions.”
13
Decolonising the Mind, 4.
14
Ibid., 13.
15
Kwasi Wiredu, “The Need for Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy,” in
Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy: Four Essays, selected and introduced by Olusegun
Oladipo (Ibadan, Nigeria: Hope Publications, 1995), 22.
What is not clear is why this is a significant problem. For it to be so, it must
be the case that the operation of these superimposed “foreign categories
of thought on African thought systems” blocks us from certain significant
insights into the perennial problems of philosophy occurrent in African
thought systems or distorts them such that we are hampered in our search
for answers to those problems or, at the extreme, led to such outcomes that
are detrimental to our lives. Ngũgĩ was more forcible in this respect. I do
not see the same vehemence in Wiredu. Wiredu does not claim that these
foreign-derived frameworks alienate us from our names, our history, or our
language. But both share the belief that those frameworks do terrible things
to our language. For Wiredu, in thinking about our problems, we end up
deploying solutions that we have not critically examined. Finally, for both,
what makes these frameworks problematic is owed, in part, to their colonial
provenance.
With reference to the linguistic situation, Wiredu asserts that “By defini-
tion, the fundamental concepts of philosophy are the most fundamental
categories of human thought. But the particular modes of thought that yield
these concepts may reflect the specifics of the culture, environment and
even the accidental idiosyncrasies of the people concerned.”16 This leaves
us vulnerable to carrying other peoples’ baggage insofar as we are enslaved
to the concepts their linguistic and other cultural conventions foster. One
cannot overemphasize the importance of heeding Wiredu’s wisdom in this
respect. For example, many have argued that the reason for the repeated
failure of liberal representative democracy to take root in Africa is, in part,
the alienness of its package of ideas, institutions, practices, and processes.
We shall have more to say about this presently. Wiredu would later canvass
what he calls “no-party, consensus democracy” as an option that is more in
tune with African temperaments and memory.17 To avoid untoward out-
comes, “the simple recipe for decolonization for the African is: Try to think
them [concepts like reality, being, meaning, freedom, etc.] through in your
own African language and, on the basis of the results, review the intelligibility
16
Ibid., 23.
17
Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996), part IV; Harvey Sindima, “Liberalism and African Culture,” Journal
of Black Studies 21, no. 2 (December 1990), 190–209; Kenneth Kaunda, “The Future of
Nationalism,” in A Humanist in Africa (London: Longman, 1966), excerpted in Mutiso and
Rohio, eds., Readings in African Political Thought (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1975), 468;
Julius Nyerere, “Democracy and the Party System,” in Freedom and Unity—Uhuru na Umoja: A
Selection from Writings and Speeches (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), excerpted in Mutiso
and Rohio, eds., Readings in African Political Thought, 478.
of the associated problems or the plausibility of the apparent solutions that

have tempted you when you have pondered them in some metropolitan
language.”18
Wiredu’s simple injunction—think through in your own African lan-
guage—is teeming with assumptions that are not always, or for the most
part, plausible. Let us explore this passage. Wiredu assumes that his audi-
ence is bilingual, minimally speaking—possessed of an African language
and a colonially-imposed one, say, English. But given how the scenario
is designed, the colonial language is the primary language, the one that
triggers thought and in which thought is originally formulated. This is
where the problem begins. The thinker here is supposed to “think through
in her own language” the relevant concepts. Why wait to be prompted in
the colonial language? Why not proceed to think through the concepts in
your primary African language in exactly the way, I believe, that a Chinese
or Portuguese thinker will do in similar situations? The answer, of course,
pace Ngũgĩ and Wiredu, is that we have separated ourselves from “belief in
our languages” and embraced instead the colonial ones. If this is true, then
it is problematic to assume that those who have been thus separated from
their languages could summon, without more, the requisite facility and
grounding in those languages of the recondite thinking that we associate
with philosophy and other advanced modes of intellection. If what I say is
plausible, then Wiredu’s facile recommendation is neither easy to indulge
nor likely to be productive of exactly the kinds of insights that theoretical
explorations are designed to elicit.
This is where we must begin to acknowledge the sad fact that where
recondite intellectual activity is concerned, many African scholars are not
bilingual in the relevant sense. Our languages are already afflicted with a
severe case of fossilization that continues to elude our attention. Few of us
can think in “our own African languages” deep thought respecting many of
those concepts in Wiredu’s list. No whit of this affliction is removed by our
repeated declamations to decolonize our intellectual production. Yes, we
deploy our languages for colloquial, quotidian purposes. This deceptively
makes us think that our facility at this level and versatility in everyday
exchanges amount to an easy shifting of gears from here to theoretical
or philosophical discourse. It takes only a little bit of attention to realize
that this is a mistaken assumption. The upshot is that there is little, if any,
autochthonous recondite intellection in many of our original languages,
18
Wiredu, “The Need for Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy,” 23.
Emphasis added.
especially where research and knowledge production presented by our ter-
tiary institutions are concerned.
What we have mostly is equivalence-ism where many labor to find equiv-
alents in our original languages for the concepts that we encounter in the
metalanguages furnished by the colonial languages. To limit myself to the
Yorùbá that I know intimately, the original work being done at a higher
level takes place in Sociology, Art History, Language and Literature, and
Linguistics.19 It may not be what Wiredu intended but it is what dominates
much writing in academic and professional African philosophy. Words are
routinely yanked out of their semantic and hermeneutic contexts and made
to stand as equivalents for concepts derived from elsewhere. There hardly
is any effort at sustained analyses wholly or even mostly in our original
language. To the extent that this is the case, the promise of decolonization
in the sphere of language may have been oversold.
Ngũgĩ adopts an identitarian/pedigree approach: for literature to be
African, it must be written or presented in an African language. This decep-
tively simple answer may not be as helpful as many over the years have
assumed it is. What is an African language? Should we be concerned with
whether or not it is written or oral? It matters because there are few written
languages original to Africa. And the process of creating scripts for them cre-
ates a plethora of conundrums. Because of the impact of post-Reformation
Christianity under the inspiration of which the scripts were created, for the
most part, many of those Latin scripts vary the languages in ways that are not
always consonant with their oral metalanguages. Additionally, the scripts fell
victim to the usages of the European metalanguages of the script creators. For
example, there is Yorùbá written in Ajami script with Arabic inflection;
French inflections yield different alphabetical outcomes from those of Yorùbá
where English was the metalanguage of the script creators; the diasporic
19
Akínsọḷ á Akìwọwọ, Ajobi and Ajogbe: Variations on the Theme of Sociation (Ile-Ife, Nigeria:
University of Ife Press, 1983); “Àṣùwàdà Ènìyàn,” IFÈ: Annals of the Institute of Cultural Studies,
no. 1 (1986), 113–23; “Universalism and Indigenisation in Sociological Theory: Introduction,”
International Sociology 3, no. 2 (June 1988), 155–60; “Contributions to the Sociology of
Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry,” reprinted in Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King,
eds., Globalization, Knowledge and Society (London: SAGE Publications, 1990); “Indigenous
Sociologies: Extending the Scope of the Argument,” International Sociology 14, no. 2 (June
1999), 115–38; C. L. Adéoyè, Àṣà àti Ìṣe Yorùbá (Ibadan, Nigeria: University Press, 1979);
Ìgbàgbó àti Èsìn Yorùbá, (Ibadan, Nigeria: Evans, 1985); Timothy A. Awoniyi, “Ọmọlúwàbí:
The Fundamental Basis of Yorùbá Education,” in Oral Tradition, ed. Wande Abimbola (Ile-
Ife, Nigeria: Dept. of African Languages and Literatures, University of Ife, 1975); Rowland
Abíọ́dún, Yorùbá Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014); Afolábí Òjó, “Ìwà Ọmọlúàbí,” in Ìwé Àṣà Ìbílẹ̀ Yorùbá, ed. Olúdáre
Ọlájubù, 2nd ed. (Ikeja: Longman, 1982); Ayo Bamgbose, Fonoloji àti gírámà Yorùbá (Ibadan,
Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1990).
inflections supplied by Spanish and Portuguese come with their own chal-
lenges. We often do not invest in the philologies of our languages nor their
histories. I do not know of a single historian of the Yorùbá language, for
instance. What this means is that we make problematic, often undischarged
assumptions, about autochthony and borrowings in our languages. D.O.
Fágúnwà and C. L. Adéoyè both wrote in Yorùbá, but their writings are
underpinned by Christian metaphysics.20 Do we ignore these leakages, or do
we just say with Ngũgĩ that as long as they are written in Yorùbá and their
dominant themes and narrative structures are demonstrably—I don’t know
what that would mean—Yorùbá, then they are Yorùbá works? But this is a
pyrrhic victory.
It gets worse. For the most part, outside of the Ajami, in which indig-
enous languages are written in Arabic script, most languages have been
rendered in Latin script. As a native Yorùbá speaker, I know the con-
tinuing struggle to get the orthography right and make the written lan-
guage approximate more and better the way the language is spoken. More
important, expanding the lexicons of our languages to include borrowings
from as many influences as particular cultures that have interacted with us
over the course of centuries is hardly ever traced, much less researched,
by our scholars. For instance, many Yorùbá words are borrowings from
Arabic, Hausa, Nupe, Portuguese, and English. Because we do not do
profound thinking in the academy in our indigenous languages, we do not
track their evolution, mark the entries of new words and usages into them,
and, like other natural languages, engage their ambiguities and unavoid-
able polysemy.
It then becomes problematic to simply ask us to “think through” con-
cepts in our “African” languages when we are completely oblivious of the
not-so-obvious colorations imposed by benign but inescapable intercultural
penetrations. To continue with my example, Yorùbá, my “own African
language” is infused with Nupe, Portuguese, Arabic, Hausa, and—who
knows what other borrowings? If, as is usually the case, language is a
bearer of cultural values, it would be naïve to insist that the values encoded
in the borrowings were discarded when the words were incorporated into
Yorùbá. Hence, I cannot think through any concept in it outside of a pat-
tern of interconnected analyses and elucidations in this pidginized language.
There is no straightforward equivalence, and the effort to isolate particular
20
Wole Soyinka, The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, a translation of D.O. Fagunwa, Ògbójú
Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀ rev. ed. (Surrey, UK: Nelson, 1983); C.L. Adéoyè, Èdá Omo Oòd’uá, 2nd
ed. (Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press, 1971).
concepts for discussion in colonial languages, the dominant pattern at the
time of this writing, is to turn Yorùbá into a garnish in an otherwise non-
Yorùbá main meal.
Colonialism, the common anchor, for both Ngũgĩ’s and Wiredu’s respec-
tive cases for decolonization is problematic. There is a near absolutization
of the concept in the literature such that little, if any, care is taken to
accommodate the complexity and historicity of the concept or the differen-
tial paths that colonialism and modernity traversed in different parts of the
continent, not to talk of the other parts of the world, especially Latin
America, where decolonization talk has issued a whole new theory desig-
nated as “decolonial theory.”21 What is problematic about it is not easy to
see. Here it is. Decolonization, as Fanon points out, is a negation. The
affirmation is colonialism/colonization. The central significance that is
given to colonialism in our framing of discourse about Africa’s phenomena
from history to politics, from philosophy to religion, from literary theory to
education, is not justified by the historical evidence nor by the differential
experience of colonialism in different parts of the continent nor the different
forms of colonialism that abound in the continent.22
It was the late doyen of African historians, J. F. Ade Ajayi, who, in 1969,
inaugurated a debate among historians on this matter by arguing that colo-
nialism was a mere “episode” in African history and that the continuing talk
of it having enacted severe breaks—an epochal break, as it were—in African
history and experience is not justified by the evidence. He argued that
African history is to be noted more for its continuities and less for disconti-
nuities attributable to colonialism.23 For example, about the story I told at
the beginning of this discussion, in spite of the colonial borders foisted on
our minds and spaces, Yorùbá culture and its usages on either side of the
border have persisted, and the narratives that supply their agglutinating
21
Although I do not address it in this essay, the elevation of colonialism to a whole phil-
osophical framework in the discourse of decoloniality is the primary reason I find it unat-
tractive, even disturbing. But I always wonder whether I have a solid understanding of the
discourse. Hence, my decision to not engage it.
22
See, in general, Akinwumi Ogundiran, “The Formation of an Oyo Imperial Colony
during the Atlantic Age,” in Power and Landscape in Atlantic West Africa, eds. J. Cameron
Monroe and Akinwumi Ogundiran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 8;
Moses E. Ochonu, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in
Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Austin J. Shelton, The Igbo-Igala
Borderland: Religion and Social Control in Indigenous African Colonialism (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1971).
23
J. F. Ade Ajayi, “Colonialism: An Episode in African History,” in Tradition and Change
in Africa: The Essays of J.F. Ade Ajayi, ed. Toyin Falola (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000),
165–74.
element continue to mark life and thought, including but not limited to
indigenous modes of governance, rules of succession, grounds of legitimacy,
and so on, even though Yorùbá are now Nigerians and Béninois(e), respec-
tively. Furthermore, the connection between colonialism and continuity was
not a noble one. Ajayi made the historical case and I offered a philosophical
explication of the continuity that colonial authorities imposed on colonized
Africans against the normal evolution of social formations and the clamor
of the colonized to enact changes in their lives, institutions, and practices as
they saw fit. I styled it “sociocryonics.”24 If what I just said is true, then to
turn colonialism into the singular or even the most salient element in
explaining social phenomena in the African world cannot be plausible,
adequate, or correct.
Here, I hope, is an apt analogy. Moorish rule in the Iberian Peninsula
and much of present-day France lasted for over 700 years. Does anyone
periodize the history of Spain or Portugal according to that long history of
colonial rule? Or do we wish to deny that it was an instance of colonial-
ism? Meanwhile, nowhere in Africa, except South Africa, did European
colonialism last for up to 100 years. Yet, we periodize African history with
colonialism as its singular pole. That cannot be right. I do not need multiple
examples. But it is instructive that South Korea, instead of using Japanese
colonialism as a significant or defining element in its history, treats it as a
mere unfortunate interlude and maintains a periodization regime that is
indigenous to its dynastic history, religious, and intellectual movements.
Neither does India periodize its history by prioritizing British colonialism
even though it lasted longer there and had a much more lasting impact—
chieftaincy is no longer part of India’s governance, for instance—on Indian
life and thought.
I would like to suggest that our preoccupation with decolonizing is insep-
arable from our placing colonialism as the singular pole for plotting the
grids of understanding and narrating African life and thought. Our past—
designated “precolonial”—is understood in terms determined by it and our
future—postcolonial—is tied to our obsession with leaving it behind. How
we expect to do the latter while privileging it in periodizing our history and
characterizing our discourses beats me.
Now, our relationship with colonialism is necessarily and justifiably neg-
ative. That is as it should be. But European colonialism was not the sole
alien movement that played a significant role in Africa’s evolution. We also
have Christianity from its very origins, Islam soon after its founding, and
24
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, chap. 2.
motley other alien interactions shaping African phenomena. And while we
are fixated on modern European colonialism, we neglect that much of
North Africa was victim of Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman colonialisms
before the modern European; and Arab colonialism was present on the East
African littoral. If there never was a time when any parts of Africa were
hermetically sealed from the rest of the global circuit of traffic in human
discourses and ideas, then to suppose that much of what needs to be
changed or made sense of in our current experience is best traced to mod-
ern European colonialism is, minimally, implausible and possibly wrong.
Those who take this route owe us a case for privileging modern European
colonialism in our philosophy of history in Africa.25 They must make clear the
causal lines between the phenomena they wish to decolonize and this specific colonial-
ism. This does not seem to the be case, for the most part.
We must separate, and do so meticulously, what pertains to colonialism
from other influences that we all too often lump together with it. For, given
our justifiable hostility to colonialism, if we also see it as the herald of other
phenomena that we believe to be part of the constitution of our “colonial
mentality,” as Fela Anikulapo Kuti would put it, it stands to reason that
we would also be dubious of those bequeathals, too. This is why modernity
continues to evoke negative responses from African scholars. Yet, again, as
I have argued in How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, at least in West
Africa, contrary to accepted wisdom, modernity came there before colonial-
ism, and the imposition of formal colonialism was what preempted the tran-
sitions to modernity that were afoot in the region through the agency and
under the direction of African converts to post-Reformation Christianity at
the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because neither Ngũgĩ nor Wiredu
considered these possibilities, many scholars of decolonization influenced
by them are unable or unwilling to consider that a lot that they associate
with colonialism and, therefore, deserving of being shunned, can actually be
fruitfully considered, for good or ill, independently of colonialism. I come
back to this point presently.
25
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Methuen, 1975) issues a similar
caution in his now much analyzed “Author’s Note” in the frontispiece:
The bane of themes of this genre is that they are no sooner employed creatively than
they acquire the facile tag of “clash of cultures,” a prejudicial label, which, quite apart
from its frequent misapplication, presupposes a potential equality in every given situation
of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter. . . . I find it
necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar re-
ductionist tendency, and to direct his vision instead to the far more difficult and risky
task of eliciting the play’s threnodic essence. . . .The Colonial Factor is an incident,
a catalytic incident merely. . . . The confrontation in the play is largely metaphysical.
Both insist that we should deploy African languages in writing a truly

African literature (Ngũgĩ), and we should think philosophical concepts
through our original languages (Wiredu). Leopold Sédar Senghor’s love of
the French language was at the base of Ngũgĩ’s brutal takedown of him as
a stooge of European cultural imperialism.26 He was no less scathing
towards Chinua Achebe’s pragmatic embrace of English as the language for
his writing. He insists that only those works written in African languages
can be properly designated “African novels.” He avers:
But some are coming round to the inescapable conclusion articulated by Obi Wali
with such polemical vigour twenty years ago: African literature can only be written
in African languages, that is, the languages of the African peasantry and working
class, the major alliance of classes in each of our nationalities and the agency for
the coming inevitable revolutionary break with neo-colonialism.27
A few consequences follow from not separating colonialism from other

causative agents in the evolution of African phenomena.28 In addition to
the problems that we earlier identified respecting language, there must be
something about the syntax of the colonial languages that makes them
impervious to domestication by African thinkers. As a result, no matter
what idioms Africans introduce to those languages, they would remain
unmistakably, irredeemably alien in the African context. Simultaneously,
there can never be a time that we can say that their African users have
sufficiently domesticated them such that we can talk of African versions of
the relevant languages. None of these outcomes is plausible. Hence, my
question: Have Africans the capacity to domesticate borrowings, from lan-
guage to cuisine, from religion to politics, from music to literature, suffi-
ciently to make them unrecognizable to those from whom they were
borrowed? Or, at least, to make the original owners see, possibly even
acknowledge, that African users have brought some creative genius to them
26
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 18–19.
27
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 27.
28
I have chosen to take a narrow view of Ngũgĩ’s characterization of “African language.”
This needs be pointed out because when he distinguished between the stooges of imperialism
in the “African neo-colonial bourgeoisie” and the infantry of the “resistance tradition,” I as-
sume that he was not suggesting that the “patriotic students, intellectuals (academic and
non-academic), soldiers and other progressive elements of the petty middle class” only write
in “African languages” or the fact that they are motivated by resistance, rather than collabo-
ration, is the Africanizing element of their language. If protest articulated in English automat-
ically becomes African, then the debate we are having will be completely otiose. By the same
token, it cannot be their linguistic choice, per se, that makes their position un-African but
their obsequious stance toward imperialism. This is not a plausible position to take. But that
is beyond the ken of this paper.
to make the end products distinctive? This will be a signal of agency and
creativity that will set such artifacts apart from being products of mere
mimicry.
Many protagonists of decolonization seem to assume that it is never pos-
sible to domesticate an alien language in any domestic space sufficiently to
make its users express fundamental and recondite thought in them. This
assumption is possibly false. Outside of an unhealthy preoccupation with
pedigree or a not so helpful attachment to authenticity, while we do not
make light of the ravages of colonialism in Africa, there is no reason to
excoriate Africans for attaining native fluency in a colonial language. What
is more, in much of West Africa, as a part of modernity, English came with
Christianity and its embrace by Africans was not a product of colonial
imposition.29 We may quarrel with the choices Africans back then made but
we should respect the historical evidence.
Those writers are all the more to be celebrated for writing a literature of
the universal from their particular necks of the human woods—an outcome
that is not contingent on the medium of expression. I do not see how any-
one who is adequately informed would think there is no difference between
the idiom in Senghor’s writings and that of Montagne, even though they
both work within the same syntax. Nor would anyone mistake Soyinka’s
drama for that of Harold Pinter, even though they both write in English.
Indeed, one of the signal failures of decolonization discourse is to ignore the
overwhelming evidence of the idiomatization of the respective colonial lan-
guages by colonized users, from the emergence of Indian English to a
Nigerian variant. The only difference is that Indians approach this issue
with more assertiveness while African scholars are being nudged to disown
any creativity and ownership of the same when it comes to their deploy-
ment of the colonial languages.30 No, Ngũgĩ is wrong. African literature
cannot be coeval with African-language-inflected literature. If what we said
earlier respecting the impact of the colonial languages on the script created
for African languages holds, we must question the wisdom of claiming that
“African” comes in only one flavor. So much did Yorùbá usages impact the
29
Africans are not alone in this. The Russian court adopted French as the language of
sophistication in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
30
There lies the reason why Indian scholars end up as leading lights of modernity, and
African scholars are distancing themselves from the creative legacy of domesticating and
dissipating their energies looking for alternatives in “their own African languages,” in which
most of them lack a basic proficiency, not to talk of fluency to undertake recondite thinking
in them. Worse still, they sometimes think they are decolonizing by putting Gianni Vattimo
in opposition to Georg Hegel and substituting Deleuze for Voltaire while execrating the
sterling contributions of a Senghor!
translation of the Bible into Yorùbá that latter-day culturally illiterate

Pentecostalists have resorted to revising the original translation that they
thought contained too many “fetish” [i.e., borrowings from Òrìsà, the
Yorùbá religion] references. Finally, on this point, if I were to choose
between the humanism and sophistication of Soyinka’s, Achebe’s, and
Senghor’s articulations and their Africanness, I am perfectly content to
yield the label and keep the works.31
Wiredu, too, argues that because African philosophers do not think their
concepts in their original languages, “we constantly stand the danger of
involuntary mental de-Africanization unless we consciously and deliberately
resort to our own languages (and culture).”32 This specific strand of Wiredu’s
argument raises different conundrums when it comes to political philoso-
phy. One area where this “involuntary mental de-Africanization” is evi-
denced, according to Wiredu, is in the sphere of politics. There, “many
contemporary African leaders of opinion” have suspended “belief in African
political traditions.” “Many African intellectuals and politicians” evince a
“visible enthusiasm” “for multiparty democracy. Indeed, to many, democ-
racy seems to be synonymous with the multiparty system.” What is wrong
with this enthusiasm is that it is driven by “foreign pressures” and there is
“little indication, in African intellectual circles, of a critical evaluation of the
particular doctrine of democracy involved in the multiparty approach to
government. Yet that political doctrine seems clearly antithetical to the
philosophy of government underlying traditional statecraft.”33
This is not the place for a deep critical engagement with the claims
involved in this passage. What is of moment is that, for Wiredu, “thinking
through the concept of democracy in our own African language” yields
an awareness that multiparty democracy “seems clearly antithetical to
the philosophy of government underlying traditional statecraft.” Here are
some questions for Wiredu and other decolonizers. What informed the
conclusion that “there is little indication, in African intellectual circles, of
31
This last idea came out of a conversation I once had with a colleague who was always
hung up on demarcating between philosophy and pseudophilosophy. One day, I asked him
if he would consider Max Weber a philosopher. After some hemming and hawing, he con-
ceded that Weber is. Then I quickly mentioned another German thinker in the Weberian
mold, Niklas Luhmann. Without skipping a beat, my colleague retorted: “That one is not a
philosopher.” Then I made him the offer that I just stated: “You take the label and I’ll take
the ideas.”
32
Wiredu, “The Need for Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy,” 24.
33
Wiredu, 30. As we pointed out above, Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere pioneered
this line of argumentation against multiparty democracy inspired by liberalism in African
political thought.
a critical evaluation” of the sort that he does? It definitely did not come
from any awareness of, much less engagement with, the robust debates
that are available in African political thought going back, to limit our-
selves to the modern period, to the mid-nineteenth century in West Africa
before formal colonialism was imposed and continuing into the period in
which Wiredu wrote. From the Fanti Confederates to the Egba United
Board of Management, to individual intellectuals like John Mensah Sarbah
and Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford to Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere,
Sekou Toure, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and Obafemi Awolowo, closer to Wiredu’s
own time, a critical evaluation of the doctrine of democracy condemned
by Wiredu did not lead them to embrace “traditional African statecraft.”
Each one of these individuals and movements, at certain periods in their
respective evolution, embraced variants of liberalism, a fact that is often
unacknowledged in African discourse. Ironically, Wiredu’s evidence for his
preference derived not from some of those I just mentioned but from the
same foreign pressures he admonishes us to critically evaluate: colonial-
ism-inflected anthropology from Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard
and, in later works, Kofi Busia.
My interest here is not in a full-fledged critical exploration of Wiredu’s
preferences in political philosophy. But in appearing to assert that there
is an essential conflict between African ideas and practices and those of
foreign provenance, especially if they are from our erstwhile colonizers, on
account of primarily their alienness, Wiredu and other proponents of decol-
onization do not aid illumination. I would not like to be misunderstood. I
argue that the alienness of an idea or practice, by itself, cannot be a disqual-
ifying attribute. When we point out its inappropriateness for any location,
there must be more to it. Put differently, unless we assume that any African
society, much less Africa, is monolithic or characterized by some measure
of unanimism in its institutions, practices, and ideas, we must show in our
exploration of life in that community there are no local nodes of what we
consider to be alien practices; and there is no plurality of social and political
forms such that our singling out what looks like “no-party consensus democ-
racy” is the sole mode of governance in it. Neither Wiredu nor any of the
other defenders of African modes of governance that they oppose with their
favorite whipping horse, liberalism, has ever made this case.
When I said above that they assume that no amount of fluency in the
acquired tongues would suffice to domesticate them, it is one manifestation
of the attitude that affirms an essential lack of fit between, in the present
case, multiparty democracy and so-called traditional African statecraft. I
would like to suggest that contentions like Wiredu’s yield the persistent
but wrong-headed search by African scholars for African equivalents of

“democracy,” “rule of law,” “modernity,” “knowledge,” and so on. It is as
if these concepts are so foreign that it does not matter what level of fluency
we attain in the foreign languages, we can never domesticate them absent
our thinking them in our own languages.
These are problematic claims. This is where, I am afraid, proponents of
decolonization have substituted a new wall for the ones that decoloniza-
tion was crafted to tear down. This wall discourages interest in, much less
engagement with, African discourses respecting many of the foreign ideas
that have made their appearance in and impacted African life and thought
over time. Because of the insistence on decolonization, Africa’s long history
with the core tenets of modernity dating back to Napoleon Bonaparte’s
arrival in Egypt in December 1798 commands no attention from our con-
temporary philosophers. The many African contributions to the discourse
of civilization going back to our participation in the Mediterranean civiliza-
tions of antiquity are increasingly lost in the vapid references to “precolo-
nial Africa.” Many now think there is nothing to be found there, and what
they must do is to look for “African stuff” which is understood as not having
anything to do with whatever smacks of the colonial legacy. This needs to
be reversed both for theoretical and practical purposes.
Political philosophical discussion in contemporary Africa is not just lack-
ing critical engagement with political philosophy of foreign provenance;
there is evidence that there is simply no engagement beyond the ritual
denunciation of the colonial provenance of liberal representative democracy
and its pertinent ideas and the need to find practices of African provenance
or be more attuned to African history and culture. This is happening at
precisely the time that Africa needs some serious education about the philo-
sophical foundations of the entire system of governance—some form of lib-
eral representative democracy and associated ideas like the rule of law and
the dominance of rights discourse—that characterize much of the African
continent outside of Eswatini, which has the last absolute monarchy in the
world. Whether it is in Morocco or Egypt, Guinea Bissau or South Africa,
the cry is the same: the discourse of rights, freedom, governance by consent,
and inviolate human dignity. It is very difficult if not impossible to operate
successfully systems wherein the underlying philosophical foundations are
not part of our intellectual orientation. Abiola Irele puts it well:
Our present experience of alienation stems directly from our historical encounter
with Europe, and from our continuing relationship with a civilization that, in its
present form, was forged in that continent, and which therefore, holds out a
special interest for us. We cannot ignore the fact that the transforming values of
contact with this civilization have produced the present context of our collective
life, if we are to get a mental handle upon the process of transition in which we
are involved. The very tensions and conditions of stress of this process would have
been beneficial if they helped to concentrate our minds both wonderfully and in-
tensely upon the nature of our alienation.34
Decolonizing theorists make it easy for scholars to not engage this liter-
ature at all and, in so doing, elide the contributions of African thinkers to
the domestication of these ideas going back to the nineteenth century, espe-
cially in West and North Africa. The efforts of African thinkers to domesti-
cate foreign ideas suffer from disinterest from the proponents of
decolonization. Many African thinkers have critically engaged both foreign
and indigenous ideas in trying to think through the best form of govern-
ment for human efflorescence in the African context. Unfortunately, so
thick is the wall that, to continue with the example of politics, many of our
decolonization theorists would be hard put to name any serious political
philosophers outside of Nkrumah, Fanon, Cabral, and Nyerere at any time
beyond the present. And they hardly ever engage even those in their com-
plexity. And these are the darlings that are often trotted out as theorists of
decolonization. Of course, no one thinks of engaging the robust defense of
liberal democracy by Obafemi Awolowo or Abiola Irele’s “In Praise of
Alienation” or Paulin Hountondji on liberal individualism in our time.35
Most frightening of all, because Africans can only be resisters or victims
of modernity—the dominant motif in the decolonization domain—we are
unable to come to terms with the philosophical genius of African thinkers
who disdain the cant of decolonizing and find it worth their while, after
critical evaluation to be sure, to appropriate the core tenets of modernity as
fundaments of their own thinking both in politics and in moral philosophy.
This is as it should be because, again, in Irele’s words:
We must not forget, too, that African labor and resources went into the building
of the material prosperity of the West. In many ways, therefore, we have a claim
upon Western civilization, as well as a considerable stake in it, as the instrument
for the necessary transformation of our world. It is in our interest to make good
34
Abiola Irele, “In Praise of Alienation,” in The Surreptitious Speech, ed. V.Y. Mudimbe,
201–24 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
35
Obafemi Awolowo, The People’s Republic (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1968); AWO:
An Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); Abiola Irele, “In Praise of
Alienation”; Paulin Hountondji, The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and
Democracy in Africa, trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Athens: Ohio University Center for
International Studies, 2002).
that claim, to adopt strategies that will make our stake in that civilization pay
handsome dividends. We cannot do this if we continue to be burdened by the
complexes implanted in us under colonialism, and which are only intensified by
cultural nationalism. If the Japanese had been deterred by the insults constantly
hurled at them by the Europeans during the last century, they would not have
been where they are today: as we all know, the yellow peril has become with time
the yellow paradigm.36
But because of a penchant for nativism buoyed by a crude conflation of

colonialism with modernity, we ignore Irele’s wisdom. We are not able to
engage the eminently modern appropriations of a Fanon, a Cabral, or a
Fatima Mernissi, a Saad Eddin Ibrahim, or Abdulai An-Naim.37 When
Nelson Mandela put his triers on their back heels at his treason trial, he was
not channeling some “traditional” legal philosophy nor did Martin Luther
King Jr., in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Insofar as we do not
see beyond a superficial understanding of the many possible responses
Africans have had to colonization across time and space, we are not able to
have a robust representation of ethical debates in the African world, for
example, between Senghor and Soyinka on the ethics of reconciliation.38
Much of the debate about politics and its exigencies in contemporary Africa
unfolds almost innocently of theory and of the philosophical foundations of
the institutions of representative government, impartial judiciary, rule of
law and separation of powers that we seek to install in our various coun-
tries. Thus, it often seems as if our political operatives are building without
proficiency in the discourses that structure our institutions. Scholars and
practitioners alike are literally operating with significant knowledge deficits.
Africa cannot afford to continue to proceed the way it has done so far in
building modern institutions without deeper knowledge of the philosophical
templates from which those institutions and practices were forged. We
should stop shooting darts in the dark when it comes to redeeming the
promise of modernity for our citizens.
36
Irele, “In Praise of Alienation,” 222.
37
Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy: The Fear of the Modern West, trans. Mary Jo
Lakeland (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular
State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Toward
an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights and International Law (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1990); Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “An Open Door,” The Wilson Quarterly 28, no.
2 (Spring 2004): 36–46.
38
Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Prayer for Peace” in The Collected Poetry, trans. Melville Dixon
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the
Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
At a time when Africans are prosecuting their second struggle for free-
dom, it is a disservice to them to keep reinforcing this wall obscuring the
full spectrum of African engagements with colonialism and its aftermath. A
genuine commitment to human liberation cannot afford anything less.39
39
I would like to thank Michael Monahan for inviting me to be a part of the Spindel
Conference 2018 at which this presentation was made. I thank, as well, the members of the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Memphis for their generosity. This paper has
benefited from the reactions of those who attended the session where it was presented and
others, especially fellow participants, who shared with me their responses to its thesis.
Professors Ebenezer Obadare and Siba Grovogui have been critical interlocutors in the de-
velopment of the core ideas and arguments of the essay. I thank them warmly. I fully own its
shortcomings, of course.

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The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 57, Spindel Supplement

RETHINKING THE DECOLONIZATION TROPE IN

in Toronto, Canada, that we held to mark the centenary of the infamous

These consequences are traceable to the very conception of the problem I

imperialism-inflected cultural bomb compelled Ngũgĩ to adopt language as

There are significant differences between Ngũgĩ’s and Wiredu’s tones

of the associated problems or the plausibility of the apparent solutions that

Both insist that we should deploy African languages in writing a truly

A few consequences follow from not separating colonialism from other

translation of the Bible into Yorùbá that latter-day culturally illiterate

but wrong-headed search by African scholars for African equivalents of

But because of a penchant for nativism buoyed by a crude conflation of

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