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Debate

Decolonising Thought

Formal colonial rule has largely ended, but the borders, economies and institutions it shaped remain – that much is not in dispute. Does colonialism also live on in how knowledge is ordered – and does overcoming it mean opening the canon, or rejecting ideas that arrived with empire?

Most former colonies became independent in the twentieth century, yet disputes about looted artefacts, university curricula and global economic inequality show that the colonial past is far from settled. Since the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests in South Africa, calls to “decolonise” universities have spread worldwide. Thinkers from Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia argue that colonialism shaped not only borders and economies but also ideas of race, gender, reason and the human – and that philosophy is part of the problem as well as of the solution. They disagree among themselves about how radical the break must be, and critics such as the Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò question the decolonial frame itself (see the last position below).

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Positions

The coloniality of power

Quijano argues that colonialism produced a lasting “coloniality of power”: a global order in which the invented idea of race ranked peoples and organised labour, and which outlived colonial administration. Mignolo extends this to knowledge, calling for “epistemic disobedience” and “delinking” from the assumption that European thought is universal, in favour of a “pluriverse” of ways of knowing. Dussel’s philosophy of liberation had earlier insisted on thinking from the perspective of those excluded by modernity.

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Coloniality of being and gender

Wynter argues that the West made its own culturally specific idea of “Man” – first as rational political subject, then as biological and economic being – stand in for the human as such, “overrepresenting” itself and casting others as less than fully human. Lugones adds that colonialism imposed a binary, hierarchical gender system on colonised peoples, drawing on Oyěwùmí’s argument that Yoruba society was not originally organised by gender. Decolonisation, on this view, requires rethinking what it means to be human.

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Conceptual decolonisation

Wiredu calls for “conceptual decolonisation”: African philosophers should critically examine concepts absorbed through colonial languages and schooling – such as “mind” or “truth” – by testing them against their own languages, for instance Akan. This is not a rejection of universal reason: Wiredu defends cultural universals and also criticises uncritical traditionalism. Hountondji similarly rejects “ethnophilosophy”, the idea of a collective, timeless African worldview, in favour of philosophy as critical, individual argument.

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Provincialising Europe

Postcolonial theorists examine how colonial patterns of thought persist within Western scholarship itself. Spivak argues that even well-meaning intellectuals may speak over the “subaltern”, those excluded from representation. Chakrabarty argues that European thought is “both indispensable and inadequate” for understanding life in places like India: its concepts of modernity, history and politics cannot simply be discarded, but must be “provincialised” – recognised as one particular tradition rather than the universal measure.

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Critique of Black reason

Mbembe traces how modernity produced “Blackness” as a category of exploitation, and how colonial power claimed the right to decide who may live and who must die – what he calls “necropolitics”. Yet he also warns against nativism and the dream of a pure African identity: Africa has always been a crossroads of movement and exchange. Decolonisation, for Mbembe, should open up a shared world rather than retreat into origins.

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Against decolonisation

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously, 2022) argues that the decolonial frame has become too broad to explain anything: treating democracy, rights, science or Christianity as “Western” impositions denies Africans the agency with which they adopted, adapted and argued over these ideas, often against colonial rule. Many anticolonial thinkers, he points out, wanted modernity on their own terms rather than a return to origins. Decolonisation should mean ending colonial rule and its institutions, not rejecting everything that arrived with it.

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As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made

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