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Newton, brilliant as he was, is wrong here for several reasons. The main one is that no decolonization movement was ever premised on being able to roll back history and act as though colonization never happened. It was always about the nation reclaiming its sovereignty... https://twitter.com/arborerich/status/1355651196501913601
...Most decolonization movements, for better or for worse, accept the social changes wrought by colonialism, even as they seek to reclaim the primacy of their own culture. The nation is not an atavistic concept, it need not be unchanging to be real...
...The Black American context is informative here, no matter how far into the future our national history runs, no matter how far we get from the tyranny of White supremacy, it will never be as though the trans-Atlantic slave trade never existed. The mark is indelible...
...But, in this new world created by the colonizers, it is possible to create new ways of being, as Fanon alluded to in the end of “The Wretched of the Earth. The nation is both ancient and new, rooted in tradition yet relentlessly innovative...
...This idea of nations and cultures as unchanging and having their “authenticity,” only through stasis is an artifact of European/Eurocentric anthropology. The pith helmeted anthropologist stumbles out of the jungle; beholds the “native,” and supposes him to be timeless...
...the “native,” of the anthropologist is a being without history, whether he is found in the Americas, in Africa, in Australia, in Polynesia etc. history being only the province of White men. But in truth, all humans have history, even if they don’t have archives...
...There is no eternal present of “primitive,” man, this is an anthropological myth. Therefore, having had to adjust to the predations of Homo Occidentalis does not and cannot render a nation obsolete. To suppose so would grant the enemies of human life a terrible power...
...Humorously, in the early days of Gold Coast nationalism, attorney J.B. Danquah, who would give Ghana its name, lectured a literary society while wearing traditional Akan attire. British officials reported on this and half jokingly accused Danquah of “going native,”...
...”going native,” was a term used to deride British officials who were seen as having gotten too involved in the local culture of the people they were overseeing. The joke here was that Danquah was a “native,” he was also Western educated, hence the accusation...
...Gold Coast nationalism, as was the case elsewhere in the late 19th century colonial world, was sparked in part by the fact that an increasingly Western educated colonized elite were being systematically excluded from status within the colonial structure...
...Scientific racism took hold, and whereas previously individual “educated natives,” who were sometimes also wealthy, enjoyed a level of prestige approaching equality in colonial outposts. Scientific racism necessitated systematic exclusion both socially and professionally...
...This Danquah case illustrates the kind of purgatory to which colonialism seeks to condemn the colonized. It seeks to both deny you access to prestige within the Western system of reality, while also denying to you your own system of reality...
...Decolonized nationality is not merely, or even primarily, a matter of performing the culture of one’s ancestors, this is simply, but importantly, a shortcut to the folkways of a world prior to colonization...
...While I treasure what of Africa remains in the folkways into which I was born, and what can be reaped further through study and camaraderie; the returning of the nation to the people is not a catalogue of practices, it is a sociopolitical decision, a revolutionary drive...
...Even if somehow nothing of Africa remained in my speech, even if the motherland were absent from my foodways, even if syncopation were foreign to my ears, I would share with my ancestors a thrill at the idea of a burning plantation house...
...We share across time and space the ideal of strangling the overseer with his own rawhide and driving him from the earth. My ancestors and I seek one and the same thing as one and the same, what Du Bois called the “wild pride of being,”...
...The reality of being a sovereign being and part of a sovereign people, whatever precise material forms it may take, is the reality of decolonization. One should indeed seek to purify one’s self of the colonist’s ways, but the decolonization is pure nonetheless...
...Lest I be accused of mystifying here, to be colonized is to have a certain concrete extractive material relation with another group of people. Once that has been concretely disrupted, what form national existence takes is up to the nation, or community, whatever term one uses.
