The origins of the word are Eurocentric, its earliest usage was by administrators and politicians who witnessed the end of British colonial rule around the world. For them, decolonisation was the disappointment of the imperial illusion of permanence – the end of empire. As scholar Raymond Betts has also argued, decolonisation was seen by the West as a political change, rather than the violent transfer of power that it actually was.
This is something many in the Global North prefer not to acknowledge: the process of decolonisation of nations was a violent affair. Scholars from the Global South have made this point for decades. Algerian writer Frantz Fanon wrote, in the opening of his seminal 1961 book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, that “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon”.
The prominent Palestinian academic Edward Said used the term ‘exploitation’ in the same context, to point towards the negative connotations of underdevelopment as a result of the decolonisation process.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent – from which my own family fled as refugees – and the Algerian and Vietnam wars, to name a few, were not glorified edicts to independence. They were, in fact, a violent end to a violent occupation, which had to be fought for with equal violence by the occupied against the occupier. If left to the colonisers, they would have never acquiesced.
A misused term
The violence of colonisation and subsequent decolonisation is what led to the current wealth and social disparity between former colonisers and the colonised. But today, decolonisation is no longer understood in its historical context as a process of separation from one’s colonisers.
Proposals to “decolonise” aid are inaccurate and misleading: taken at face value, they leave open the implication that aid is a form of colonisation. But aid agencies see decolonisation not as a call to end the sector, but as a way of “course correcting” their own work and softening power imbalances. Decolonising the World Bank and IMF, as cv vbsome have suggested, would actually mean ending their existence altogether. How many of us see that as a possibility?
Although rich Northern nations may continue to have a powerful hold over global financial and political systems, Southern nations are no longer colonies. They have their own sovereign hierarchies of power and wealth, which may be influenced by their colonial past, but which do not dictate their political present or future. But the North continues to insist upon the former by using the term decolonisation in relation to its relationship with the Global South.
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Themrise Khan | Radio Free (2021-01-15T10:39:32+00:00) Decolonisation is a comfortable buzzword for the aid sector. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/15/decolonisation-is-a-comfortable-buzzword-for-the-aid-sector/
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