Against Decolonisation

Selected as one of '100 Notable African Books of the Year' in Brittle Paper‘A powerful case for how Africans can get out of their malaise’ — Tomiwa Owolade, Financial Times ’An electrifying book.’ — The Wall Street JournalA leading African political philosopher’s searing intellectual and moral critique of today’s decolonisation movement. Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.Has sparked debate worldwide as it challenges the notion that decolonisation equals empowerment Questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Professor Táíwò’s previous book, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa, won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015.