What does it mean to Decolonise?

And why a return to 'tradition' is not decolonisation

I’m going to try something different with this article and will include a voice-over for those who would like to listen to it rather than read it, especially because this article might be a bit dense in some sections. You can listen with the Substack app, and it will play in the background so you can multitask.

In the name of Allah, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy

Decolonisation is not merely the ending of a colonial entity but the complete abolition and dismantling of the colonial remnants. This, from the very outset, must be made the clear objective of any decolonial movement; to obfuscate it, to ignore it, to delay it, or to insist on the interim maintenance of colonialism, reappropriated or repurposed, will end any revolutionary potential before the activist has even begun to decolonise.

But what is decolonisation? What does it entail? These are the questions that every single revolutionary must contend with. And, so long as you wish to do away with the current status quo in favour of something better, then you too are a revolutionary. A revolutionary has hope and acts out of love for both their fellow oppressed and their oppressors, because we recognise that the ending of these oppressive structures will liberate all of us, including those who have been increasingly warped and dehumanised by the mantle of oppression they have assumed. So let us question what decolonisation must be, as fellow revolutionaries.

This article will be the first of many parts because this is a question that must be answered on levels beyond the hypothetical; it must be connected to action (praxis). This series of articles aims to provide us all with the tools to be able to test, improve, and critique both our and others’ applications of decolonisation, and to be able to read and search for alternatives in books, media, and so forth. To familiarise ourselves with two terms, we have theory, and we have praxis. Theory is our assumptions, our hypotheticals, and the lenses through which we view the world. Praxis is our implementation and testing of these theories. There is a lot more nuance here, but I will flesh it out in this and future articles. All we need to know is that both are constantly evolving because they are always influencing each other.

So, we have our theories of decolonisation, and then we put them to the test with our praxis of decolonisation. What does not work, we change; what works, we analyse, and, in both cases, we question why that particular outcome was reached. Was it related to the theory or the praxis? Was there an alternative answer (outside influences)? Could we repeat the same process and expect a different outcome? Was our theory underdeveloped? In which case, what did we learn from our praxis? Because, after all, there is no better teacher than doing, and implementing faulty theory will very quickly teach (and humble) you.

For a very quick example of how we test praxis and theory and how we must investigate the interconnectedness of the two: we have theories on parenting, and we have the praxis of parenting; one is idealistic, one is realistic, and we must reconcile this rift in reality if we wish to address generational traumas. We can wish to be gentle parents and hold this as the theory we wish to put into practice, then, after a long work week, neglect the curiosity of our children in favour of peace of mind. Why? Perhaps the theory was true, but what we failed to do was work first on our patience. Or, we had not yet addressed an earlier problem; we had failed to set our priorities for our mental energies. These issues, much like decolonisation, will appear to be never-ending. But we must not be disheartened, because the responsibility of a revolutionary is to never become content with oppression; our resistance is our pride.

Now, what is decolonisation? Liberation from our oppressors. What is liberation? Our freedom to be fully human, rather than part human, part servant. Who are our oppressors? Those who wish to prevent us from being human because our servanthood profits them.

But how do we do this? To answer this question, let me show you how deep this process of colonisation has gone in a rudimentary list, and we will be able to see how far different forms of decolonisation theory and praxis have gone:

1. You have the clothing level, the physical self, and the material self. This is generally the very first thing to disappear under colonisation when the colonised first encounter the idea of “sophisticated.” Sophisticated, of course, is always something the colonised is not, because it is a racist dog whistle that contrasts the coolness of the oppressors, who appear so measured in how they pillage, loot, colonise, and steal, against the oppressed, who are so unmeasured in how they resist, defend, and ‘complain.’ One creates institutions solely dedicated to measuring your humanity and, therefore, the maximum amount of sustenance that they are legally obliged to give you so long as they need your labour, and the other aims to tear down these institutions by any means possible. In this way, the colonisers create an aura of sophistication, which the colonised (at the first stage) may mimic. You ditch your clothing for their suit and tie, you abandon your dense buildings around natural resources for their isolating urban sprawl, and you leave your crops to enter their bureaucracy.

2. You have the skin level, in which you suppress your cultural self and purge your skin of any evidence that you are any different from the oppressors. It is a job only half-completed when you don the suit and tie; now you must appear like you were made for the suit and tie. In this act of mimicking, you shy away from the colour and appearance because you have internalised the idea that it is ugly, that it is offensive, or that it is scary. You rush to cosmetic surgery to ‘fix’ the signs of your ancestry.

3. You have your senses, and how you learn. This is when you learn to no longer trust your instincts, your intuition, and your wisdom. Suddenly, the ancestors who have guided your ancestors and your parents are all misguided. They just do not ‘get it’ anymore; at least that is what you have been led to believe. So, you must try to get it, but how do you aim to understand what, at its core, attempts to marginalise you? So, you rush to the oppressor’s knowledge, because surely they, as they have convinced you, know more than you? You ingest their labels, categories, and disciplines at the expense of your own.

4. Your mind, which has thus far acted as the root of your resistance, is the end goal of colonialism. It is not enough to act colonised, it is not enough to abandon your identity, and it is not enough that you speak their language; it is only enough once you abandon your intellectual agency and begin to think colonised. Thinking colonised is the fundamental shift in your being that allows you to exist in the status quo without ever questioning why it is so.

So, these are our four general layers on the body. There is the decolonisation of dress, the idea that if we appear ancestral, we have decolonised. But this is not even skin-deep; it only decolonises what we consume but not how or why we consume. We replace our thousand-dollar suits with cultural clothing; we replace our abstract paintings with art from home; and we throw out the mugs in favour of intricate coffee cups. But we have not decolonised; rather, we simply shifted consumption to a new market. This is the very beginning of decolonisation, but it is not an adequate level to stop.

Next, we have our skin, and this is where we reject the colonial beauty norms. What we once found beautiful, we now reject as revolting. This, again, goes hand in hand with our shift in consumption but represents a more holistic approach to decolonising our reflections. This stage is only complete when we can see our faces with our own eyes and not with the borrowed eyes of the harsh oppressors who saw in our skin colour fetishes and opportunities for conquest. We must see our beauty to decolonise our skin.

Then we have our senses and learning. It is the unlearning and relearning; it is the abandoning of the myths we have learnt in our colonial childhoods. Here, we finally ask why we internalised the idea that our skin was ugly or that we had to consume in a specific way. It is informed by the prior stages of decolonisation, and they all act in conjunction with each other. But we have not fully decolonised yet; we now have to prevent ourselves from relapsing into our colonial mindsets.

Finally, we have the mind. The mind is what has informed every other element on this list; it has created the patterns and systems of thought that have ingested some things and rejected others; it has drawn boundaries, then ignored some of them; it has conceptualised what it means to be different; it has analysed so carefully, even without you realising it, why you are the way you are; it has studied those who oppress you and attempted to understand why; it has created recipes and goals and ambitions for you; and it has imagined the self. You are the mind, and the mind is you, so to control you and transform you into subservient and obedient doers, the colonisers must colonise your mind. To decolonise the mind is to decolonise yourself, and from there you may decolonise elsewhere without fear of it returning.

So, we now have the rudimentary four levels of colonisation of the self, from the outside to the skin, to the senses, to the mind. All of these, of course, influence each other; to change one is to change all.

Now we look at various praxis/theories. One, which we have seen so frequently, is the invention of tradition. Here, in an attempt to reject the nauseating practises exported by the colonisers, we create antithetical practises that run in direct contrast to the colonisers. From these invented practises, which we ground in an imagined past, we draw strength. Of course, invented is not necessarily the right word, as every tradition was invented at some point, but English lacks the vernacular to express this. Nevertheless, we will analyse a few key examples in this series:

The homogenization of gender norms

This, in and of itself, is an entire article on its own, and I promise to return to it in the future. This analysis is largely historical-based, and the nuance can only be delivered in a multi-disciplinary analysis, which will be the theme of a future article.

The invention of gender roles is, generally, a flawed analysis of a ‘historical’ tradition, which is then homogenised to the entirety of a culture. It is the cherry-picking of a specific practise, assuming it did occur, while ignoring the context of said practise.

For example, the notion of women staying home, idle, and not contributing to the labour output of the household is the historical analysis of the bourgeoisie, a class of people at the very top of the exploitation hierarchy whose idleness was funded by the labour and toil of those below. Conversely, the double burden assigned to women was also not as rigid as it is in capitalist societies. It is, after all, a capitalist fabrication that history is a positive progress from oppression into liberation; rather, we have backslid at alarming rates. We were not once overworked to such an extreme that to now work only 40 hours is a miracle. Rather, we work more post-industrially than ever before.

Our ancestors did not toil 9–5, 5 days a week, with little to no leave. Each job had its seasons; some weeks one may work 2 or at most 3 days, from early morning to early afternoon (for the Muslims, from Fajr prayer until Asr prayer), unless there was an ecological disaster that necessitated work until sunset, then work would be finished. There would be weeks, sometimes months, where very little, if any paid work at all, was done. Instead, the main subject of work was the labour required to build one’s home, and with enough time to attend to the chores between the family members, including the men* (we’ll return to this later; it was not a utopia of any kind), the work was instead enriching the quality of one’s family, the richness in knowledge, and the acquisition of wisdom through conversation and communal activities of leisure. Separating labour from paid and unpaid labour as we do today would be nearly impossible, for both were understood to contribute to the wealth of one’s home. Now we so clearly understand that there is work for us and work for our bosses. You must remember, after all, that your average ancestor had far more time and was indeed far more involved in knowledge-gathering than you are currently permitted to have the time for. To be so time-rich is a privilege none of us own now under capitalism.

The double burden, therefore, was of a very different kind and had only been solidified when we were all forced into a system of exploitative work. Our ancestors were neither idle nor overworked in the same manner as we are. To claim either extreme as the ideal point to return to is to miss entirely the reality of our histories. We must always remember that the reality we live in is a very young one and that the history of capitalism is no longer than a fingernail in the history of humanity.

Yet, you will see conservative men in the decolonial movement who wish for us to return to these ahistorical extremes and impose standards that were never upheld by their own ancestors. They wish to keep women at home and maintain a barrier between them and ‘society’, but they cannot even sustain themselves, and if their car were to break down or if they missed a single pay check, they would very quickly unravel. Or they wish to maintain the same capitalist standards of work that have exploited us for centuries while also forcing women to maintain their duties at home, which they themselves shirk. Neither is decolonial; both are ahistorical. There has never been a barrier between home and community as there is now, and never previously have your ancestors been so gender reductionist. (**** EDIT Post Publish: To make this section clearer, I am criticising the notion that the domestic and other labour is not work, which is a myth. It is a capitalist myth that women somehow did not work until the white world permitted them to do so in the previous century. This myth is rooted in the idea that we were stupid and ignorant until the elites enlightened us. It is also rooted in a narrow redefinition of work. Our ancestors recognised the domestic as work, to build a home was to work, to toil the fields was to work, to learn and teach was to work. It is only the capitalists who narrow work down to what profits their pockets, and everything else we do is hobbies or chores. Work too needs to be decolonised. I won’t be doing the voice over again.)

Both of these extremes are only possible to imagine because of the current oppressive patriarchal realities. It is only in reaction to what we are subjected to that one fantasies about alternatives, but it is critical that we do not divorce theory from praxis. We cannot, in other words, put the cart before the horse. Recalling the hierarchy of colonisation from above, we cannot decolonise one part and forget the rest. Though we wish to return to the time-richness of our ancestors, we cannot do this without first abolishing the systems and institutions that have robbed us of that time. One cannot declare, “I now take leisure time at my will,” and assume that they will enjoy the same rights and communal activities as their ancestors, until everyone else around them can also take leisure time at their will.

In this way, one cannot enforce radical and ahistorical gender norms that are not decolonial without reinforcing colonialism. Gender is so interwoven with capitalism and colonialism that the oppressive reality of the various modern patriarchies cannot be isolated nor addressed in exclusion, but rather in relation to the other intersectional elements that form our privilege fingerprint (as defined in the previous article, The Precedented Racism).

So, correct those who fantasise in such harmful ways and remind them that we will not be decolonised by oppressive theories—the theories that are entirely removed from praxis and reality.

In the next part of this multi-article series (which will be collated into one longer article after completion), we will cover the homogenization of tradition.

To leave you with something, this series of verses has been on my mind this week:

فَأَمَّا ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ إِذَا مَا ٱبْتَلَىٰهُ رَبُّهُۥ فَأَكْرَمَهُۥ وَنَعَّمَهُۥ فَيَقُولُ رَبِّىٓ أَكْرَمَنِ

[The nature of] man is that, when his Lord tries him through honour and blessings, he says, ‘My Lord has honoured me,’

وَأَمَّآ إِذَا مَا ٱبْتَلَىٰهُ فَقَدَرَ عَلَيْهِ رِزْقَهُۥ فَيَقُولُ رَبِّىٓ أَهَـٰنَنِ

but when He tries him through the restriction of his provision, he says, ‘My Lord has humiliated me.’

كَلَّا ۖ بَل لَّا تُكْرِمُونَ ٱلْيَتِيمَ

No indeed! You [people] do not honour orphans,

وَلَا تَحَـٰٓضُّونَ عَلَىٰ طَعَامِ ٱلْمِسْكِينِ

you do not urge one another to feed the poor,

وَتَأْكُلُونَ ٱلتُّرَاثَ أَكْلًۭا لَّمًّۭا

you consume inheritance greedily,

وَتُحِبُّونَ ٱلْمَالَ حُبًّۭا جَمًّۭا

and you love wealth with a passion.

Surah 89, Al-Fajr, Verses 15-20

And Allah knows best.