Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò Livres

A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends

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.

Identitätspolitik polarisiert den Diskurs und wird oft missverstanden. Während das 'Combahee River Collective' Solidarität über Unterschiede hinweg anstrebte, wird Identitätspolitik heute oft zur Stärkung enger Gruppeninteressen genutzt. Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò kritisiert diese Entwicklung und plädiert für radikale Solidarität als Weg zu einer besseren Welt.