CODESRIA

CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No. 14, October 2026

by Ibrahim Abdullah, Department of History and African Studies, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone

‘“When will this independence end?” a Congolese peasant asked, … amid the reign of Mobuto Sese Seko.’ (Mamdani 2022: 14–15)

Introduction: The Trouble with a Successful Word

Few words in the contemporary humanities and social sciences carry as much moral and intellectual charge as ‘decolonise’. Curricula are to be decolonised. Archives, museums, universities, disciplines, methods, languages, canons and minds are all summoned to the work of decolonisation. The proliferation testifies to a real dissatisfaction. It reflects enduring inequalities in the production and certification of knowledge, the continued authority of intellectual traditions formed within imperial worlds, and the inadequacy of merely adding African material to conceptual frameworks whose questions were generated elsewhere. There is therefore no serious argument for returning to the complacencies of colonial scholarship.

The difficulty lies elsewhere. A concept can become ubiquitous precisely when it begins to lose discrimination. The more activities ‘decolonisation’ is made to name, the less clearly it identifies a specific process. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang made one influential version of this objection from the context of settler colonialism, warning against turning decolonisation into a metaphor for any desirable reform (Tuck and Yang 2012). Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has mounted a different critique from African philosophy, arguing that the contemporary expansion of decolonisation into a catch-all intellectual programme can understate African agency and treat provenance as destiny (Táíwò 2022). These interventions matter, but the problem can be pushed further.

The deeper issue is not simply that ‘decolonial’ has become fashionable. Fashion passes. The more consequential question is what kind of historical intelligibility the fashion reproduces. If African thought is continually described as precolonial, colonial, postcolonial, anticolonial and decolonial, colonialism remains the grammatical centre of the sentence. It supplies the temporal coordinates and the epistemological antagonist. Even the language of escape can preserve the object from which one is trying to escape.

The argument advanced here is therefore not an argument against studying colonialism, nor against the serious traditions of scholarship grouped under the term decoloniality. It is an argument against granting colonialism an a priori right to organise African historical time and intellectual purpose. The task is to restrict its explanatory jurisdiction: to study colonial rule where it transformed social relations, and coloniality where the concept explains persistent structures, while refusing to make either the universal key to African experience.

The alternative proposed here is deliberately modest in name and demanding in practice: historical self-grounding. It does not describe a new fad, still less another ‘-ism’. It names a methodological disposition in which the historical movement of the societies under investigation generates the primary problems, temporal divisions and categories of explanation. External forces remain fully part of the story, but they enter as historical forces to be demonstrated rather than as automatic organisers of meaning. Such an approach, I suggest, is closer to the unfinished ambitions of an older African intellectual tradition than the current vocabulary sometimes acknowledges. Read More …