Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously

by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

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 ‘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.

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, History, Theory, Post Colonial

368 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2022

About the author

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (b. 1956) is a philosopher and professor at Cornell University.

See also: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, philosopher at Georgetown University.