I begin with Ola Rotimi’s words: ‘we are drifters in the modern world if
we do not know our history.’
A man will find trouble reaching where he is going if he does not know
where he’s coming from. Decolonization comes into play when discussing
post-colonialism. It is the deconstruction of the perception and attitudes of the
power and oppression that were adopted during the time of colonialism.
People who are cut off from their belief and heritage are easily
manipulated. So in addition to colonizing African land, Europeans also
colonized African knowledge, stripping them of their culture and heritage. In
this case we are reminded of Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’: Obierika has exclaimed that the white man has
put a knife in the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. It
should be noted that the greatest tragedy with colonialism was that it turned
our own kinsmen against us, brothers against brothers. So decolonization is a
process of change, of regaining and rediscovering oneself from the path one has
wandered from. In his ‘further analysis’ on decolonizing the African mind,
Uhuru Hotep explains decolonization as the process of overthrowing and then
removing the ‘Europeancentric’ or ‘Arabcentric’ value and belief systems
implanted in our minds by our public school mis-education, our Christian or
Islamic indoctrination and mass media manipulation that keep us
psychologically, emotionally, materially and spiritually tied to Europeans or Arabs
as their victims or servants. Chinweizu also educates that to decolonize the
African mind is to cleanse and liberate by re-Africanising the African mind.
The central objective in decolonizing the Nigerian mind is to oust alien
tradition. Chinweizu also suggests that it must be stressed, however, that decolonization
does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; that it simply means denial of
their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them.
It may seem far-fetched to bring up the issues of colonialism at this
time of the century; at the time of consciousness and social liberalism. Nonetheless,
one’s memory should be jogged in the line that, in a nation like Nigeria,
colonial powers destroyed the native tradition and culture and left the country
on a contraption. This led to conflicts when the country became independent; it
faced a new and greater challenge while developing a new nationwide identity
and self-confidence because it has long forgotten who and what it was.
Walter Rodney writes that colonial education was education for
subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion and the
development of underdevelopment. Rodney also observes that:
‘The educated Africans were the most alienated Africans on the
continent. At each further stage of education, they were battered and succumbed
to the white capitalist system, and after being given salaries, they could then
afford to sustain a style of life imported from outside… that further
transformed their mentality.’(275)
F. K Omoregie further explains in his essay ‘Rodney, Cabral and Ngugi as Guides to
African Postcolonial Literature’ that:
‘Colonial
education did more than corrupt the thinking and sensibilities of the African,
it filled him/her with abnormal complexes which de-Africanised and alienated
him/her from the needs of his/her environment. Colonial education has thus
dispossessed and put out the control of the African intellectual the necessary
forces for directing the life and development of his/her society.
We train our children with
English because we believe it is a way of civilization. For Mongo Beti, the
tragedy our nation is suffering today is like that of a man living in a world
he did not create and does not understand. How will such a man know what he is
doing or supposed to do?
Achebe, in a speech
entitled ‘The African Writer and the English Language’ said:
‘Is it right that a man should abandon his
mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and
produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been
given the language and I intend to use it.’ (Achebe, 1975)
To conclude, this paper is
not targeted to refute modernism or to argue against foreign ideas and beliefs.
Its objective is also not to abolish the idea of submitting to foreign power
because it’d be nearly impossible to do so since we have come to a point of
seemingly no return. Rather the objective is to make us become aware of what we
are and what we are not. One of Nigeria’s political problems, and arguably the
greatest, is the shadow of post-colonialism. In a society where its peoples
should be living with one defined identity, it yet struggles to find a common
goal because it lives in a modern world in which it does not yet understand.
©Stanley Chuck Uwaezuoke
Works Cited
Achebe, C. Things
Fall Apart. Reading: Heinemann, 1958
_____. The African Writer and the English
Language’ (1975)
Beti, M. Mission
to Kala. London: Heinemann, 1964
Chinweizu, Jemie, O. And Madubuike, I. ‘Toward
the Decolonisation of African Literature.’ Vol. 1, African Fiction and Poetry
and their Critics. Washington: Howard University Press, 1983
http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Post-Coloniasm
Omoregie, F. K. Rodney, Cabral and Ngugi as
Guides to African Postcolonial Literature. (2007)
Rodney, W. How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington:
Howard University Press, 1981
Rotimi, O.