Decolonisation talk is everywhere. Scholars write books about decolonising elite universities. The government of India, a country that has been independent for 77 years, built a new parliament building in order to ‘remove all traces of the colonial era’. There are infographics on how to decolonise introductory psychology courses and guides on how businesses may decolonise their work places. Some Christians from regions that used to be colonies look to decolonise mission work through Biblical readings of Christ’s suffering. Why have expressions of decolonisation become so popular? And is there coherence to these many disparate uses of the term?
All these varied and even contradictory forms of decolonisation talk seek to draw upon the moral authority, impact and popular legitimacy of the 20th century’s great anticolonial liberation movements. And it is the gap between these movements’ promise of liberation and the actuality of continued power inequalities even after independence that has given the analytical and political space for such a wide, eclectic and contrasting array of individuals, groups and projects to wield the concept of ‘decolonisation’ to generate support for their endeavours. In the process, decolonisation talk has become more and more attenuated from the historical events of decolonisation.
The events of decolonisation involved colonised peoples, predominantly in Asia and Africa, rising up in the mid-20th century and overthrowing colonial systems of rule. National liberation movements that became postcolonial governments transformed the world order through the historical events of decolonisation. In 1945, for example, there were just 64 independent states, while today there are between 193 and 205, depending on who counts them. Before the Second World War, there were only three sovereign states with a Black head of state – Ethiopia, Haiti and Liberia.
Colonialism itself was uneven, complex and variegated. In practice, empires ruled by governing different communities differently, intensifying and maintaining often elaborate hierarchies of communities based on region, race, religion or ethnicity. For instance, colonial life looked very different in the French settler colonial cities of Algiers and Oran than it did in the Berber regions of Eastern Algeria. British colonial India was a patchwork of direct rule, princely states that were semi-autonomous regarding domestic policy, and excluded areas with a rather light imperial footprint, among other political configurations.