Paper/Proposal Title
Unraveling the Complexities of the Coloniality Thought in Africa’s Post-Colonial Identity
Location
M2225
Start Date
November 2023
End Date
November 2023
Keywords
Coloniality, Colonial thought, Post-colonial identity, Decolonial epistemic perspective, Africa
Abstract
In African history, modernity has endowed whiteness with ontological density far above blackness as identities. Since modern Western thinking is controversial, colonialty operates through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of "this side of the line" and the realm of "the other side of the line.” For some, there are doubts about African’s ignorance, knowledge, and power. At the outset, the so-called age of reason, or enlightenment, as commonly referred in the West, coincided with slavery, slave trade, and colonisation.
The starting hypothesis for the inquiry is that decoloniality seeks to unmask, unveil, and reveal coloniality as an underside of modernity that co-existed with the rhetoric of progress, development, equality, fraternity, and liberty. People’s epistemic struggles are a salient feature of African studies. The core questions arising therefrom are how does Africa’s post-colonial identity stand within the realm of the oppressed in reference to real-world interventions or in any resistance to them? In the search for alternatives to domination and oppression, how could the continent develop strategies to roll back oppression and domination, defend its cultural identity, economic self-sufficiency, and political sovereignty?
This paper analyses postcolonial identity from the prism of coloniality, the status of the colonised, and decolonial epistemic perspective. It contributes to renewed efforts at clarifying African history from the margins and efforts to account for the long duration of the global South agency. I argue that the Northern epistemology, a methodology for dividing the world between regions of order and chaos, sustains the ingredients of the postcolony. In other words, the Euro-North episteme has distorted, bastardised, and ignored Africa’s post-colonial identity. Decoloniality is both an epistemic and political artifact seeking the liberation of Africans who experienced colonialism and who are today subsisting and living under the boulder of global coloniality.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Christophe Dongmo is senior Research Associate (non-resident), Leiden University African Studies Centre; and Fellow of the Law and Development Research Network. Previously, he served as Senior Regional Executive Officer for Central Africa at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); Country Representative (Cameroon), Denis & Lenora Foretia Foundation; and Senior Research Fellow, Hague Academy of International Law, The Netherlands. His areas of expertise are Political Economy of the Developing World, International Human Rights, and Gender History. Advanced degrees in International Law of Human Rights, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), African-American History (Vanderbilt University, USA) and Political Science (Johns Hopkins University, USA). He has widely published in these fields
Unraveling the Complexities of the Coloniality Thought in Africa’s Post-Colonial Identity
M2225
In African history, modernity has endowed whiteness with ontological density far above blackness as identities. Since modern Western thinking is controversial, colonialty operates through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of "this side of the line" and the realm of "the other side of the line.” For some, there are doubts about African’s ignorance, knowledge, and power. At the outset, the so-called age of reason, or enlightenment, as commonly referred in the West, coincided with slavery, slave trade, and colonisation.
The starting hypothesis for the inquiry is that decoloniality seeks to unmask, unveil, and reveal coloniality as an underside of modernity that co-existed with the rhetoric of progress, development, equality, fraternity, and liberty. People’s epistemic struggles are a salient feature of African studies. The core questions arising therefrom are how does Africa’s post-colonial identity stand within the realm of the oppressed in reference to real-world interventions or in any resistance to them? In the search for alternatives to domination and oppression, how could the continent develop strategies to roll back oppression and domination, defend its cultural identity, economic self-sufficiency, and political sovereignty?
This paper analyses postcolonial identity from the prism of coloniality, the status of the colonised, and decolonial epistemic perspective. It contributes to renewed efforts at clarifying African history from the margins and efforts to account for the long duration of the global South agency. I argue that the Northern epistemology, a methodology for dividing the world between regions of order and chaos, sustains the ingredients of the postcolony. In other words, the Euro-North episteme has distorted, bastardised, and ignored Africa’s post-colonial identity. Decoloniality is both an epistemic and political artifact seeking the liberation of Africans who experienced colonialism and who are today subsisting and living under the boulder of global coloniality.
