Decolonisation, properly understood, was never meant to be a permanent condition. It was a transition. A doorway through which nations passed from subjugation into responsibility, writes Lionel Jean Michel.
Africa has discovered a most accommodating word. It arrives dressed as virtue, speaks with the tone of moral urgency, and leaves with very little having been done except the rearrangement of blame. The word is decolonisation.
Once, it meant something grave and costly. It spoke of men and women who refused to remain subjects of distant crowns.
It spoke of the slow dismantling of empires that had planted flags and extracted wealth with a cold, mechanical efficiency.
It spoke of sovereignty wrestled back, sometimes through negotiation, often through blood.
One must be clear at the outset. Colonialism was not a misunderstanding. It was not a cultural exchange gone slightly wrong. It was, in many places, a system of extraction so ruthless it bordered on the grotesque.
Consider Leopold II of Belgium and his private dominion in Congo Free State. A king who scarcely set foot in the land he claimed presided over a regime where millions of Congolese were mutilated or killed in the pursuit of rubber profits. Hands were cut off not as a metaphor, but as accounting. A ledger written in flesh.
No honest mind can look upon such history and speak lightly of colonialism. And yet, the presence of a grave injustice in the past does not grant immunity to foolishness in the present. That is where the trouble begins.
What was once a precise historical term has been stretched into a universal solvent. It now dissolves responsibility, dilutes accountability, and conveniently erases the uncomfortable fact that nations, once freed, must learn the far harder discipline of governing themselves.
The modern use of decolonisation is rarely about dismantling unjust structures. It is increasingly about dismantling inconvenience. We are told, with an air of scholarly seriousness, that mathematics must be decolonised. Science must be decolonised. Engineering must be decolonised. One suspects that if time permitted, someone would propose the decolonisation of gravity, perhaps to allow certain objects the cultural freedom not to fall.
The absurdity would be amusing were it not so consequential.
Two plus two remains stubbornly four regardless of who teaches it. A bridge constructed on compromised equations collapses without regard for ideological intentions. The laws of physics do not bend out of courtesy to political sentiment.
They remain, in the most inconvenient way, true.
What is presented as intellectual liberation often amounts to intellectual surrender.
The deeper mischief lies not merely in the rhetoric, but in its effect. The language of decolonisation has become the most effective smoke screen. It allows a society to explain failure without examining it.
A failing municipality becomes a colonial inheritance. A derailed railway system becomes a historical grievance. A bankrupt state-owned enterprise becomes a victim of imperial design. One would think, listening carefully, that the colonial administrators had only just stepped out for lunch and would return shortly to resume their duties.
The dead empire, it seems, is eternally available for blame.
This habit produces a peculiar moral arrangement. If every present failure is the fault of past oppression, then no present actor need be held to account. Corruption becomes a footnote in a larger narrative of victimhood. Incompetence becomes resistance. Neglect becomes ideology.
It is a most elegant escape.
A minister may preside over decay and still speak the language of liberation. A bureaucrat may mismanage resources and still claim to be dismantling colonial systems. An academic may produce a thin argument dressed in thick vocabulary and call it revolutionary thought.
Words begin to do the work that actions refuse to undertake.
The tragedy is not merely rhetorical. It is practical.
While the continent debates whether knowledge itself must be decolonised, other parts of the world are quietly mastering it.
Nations that once stood behind Africa in industrial capacity now build advanced technologies, educate their children in rigorous science, and design systems that function with a reliability that borders on the miraculous.
They do not waste time asking whether calculus carries colonial residue.
They learn it. They apply it. They improve upon it.
They understand a simple truth. Knowledge is not a cultural possession. It is a universal tool.
Africa, by contrast, risks engaging in a grand intellectual spectacle where the performance of critique replaces the practice of competence.
There is also the curious romance of the pre-colonial past. One hears it spoken of in tones usually reserved for lost paradises. It was, we are told, a time of harmony, wisdom, and uncorrupted existence.
History is seldom so accommodating.
Pre-colonial Africa produced remarkable civilisations, intricate cultures, and systems of governance worthy of study. It also produced conflict, hierarchy, slavery, superstition, and violence.
To pretend otherwise is not pride. It is selective memory masquerading as identity.
A civilisation that cannot tell the truth about its past will struggle to tell the truth about its present.
The persistent invocation of colonial blame performs another quiet function. It draws attention away from the most immediate and destructive force in modern African governance.
Colonial administrators did not siphon funds from public coffers last year. They did not award tenders to ghost companies. They did not neglect infrastructure until it collapsed under the weight of indifference. They did not engineer power crises through mismanagement and patronage.
These are not inherited sins.
They are contemporary choices.
That is internal corruption.
To attribute them to colonial history is to commit a peculiar moral confusion. It is to blame the ghost of a departed empire for the very real actions of living men.
One might as well blame one’s ancestors for a theft committed yesterday.
Yet the narrative persists because it is comfortable. It offers an explanation without requiring correction. It allows leaders to speak in the language of struggle while presiding over decline. It flatters the audience by assuring them that failure is not their fault.
Comfort, however, is a poor architect of progress.
The rejection of global knowledge under the banner of decolonisation is perhaps the most dangerous development of all. Science is dismissed as Western. Meritocracy is framed as colonial logic. Institutional discipline is treated as foreign imposition.
Thus, in the name of liberation, the very instruments of advancement are quietly set aside.
It is a curious strategy.
One does not defeat poverty by rejecting the tools that alleviate it. One does not build functioning systems by dismissing the principles that make systems function.
An aircraft designed without respect for physics does not become culturally authentic.
It becomes a coffin.
Reality, in its stubborn way, refuses to be negotiated with.
The Asian experience offers a sobering contrast. Many of these nations endured colonial domination, economic hardship, and political upheaval. Yet in the decades following independence, they did not engage in prolonged debates about the cultural ownership of knowledge.
They pursued it with discipline.
They built institutions where competence mattered. They educated their populations with seriousness. They embraced science not as a foreign intrusion but as a universal inheritance.
They did not decolonise mathematics.
They mastered it.
Africa now stands at a similar crossroads.
It may continue along the path of rhetorical liberation, where words multiply and outcomes diminish. Or it may choose the harder road of practical responsibility.
The work required is neither glamorous nor particularly fashionable.
It entails building institutions that function regardless of who occupies them. It entails rewarding competence rather than connection. It entails educating children in disciplines that demand rigour and honesty. It entails confronting corruption with a seriousness that leaves no room for ideological distraction.
It entails, above all, the courage to say something deeply unfashionable.
The greatest obstacles to African progress today are not always external.
They are often internal.
This is not a denial of history. It is a recognition of sequence. Colonialism damaged Africa. That is a matter of record. But history does not absolve the present.
It confronts it.
A nation may inherit difficulty. It does not inherit destiny.
The abuse of the word decolonisation has created a strange inversion. A term once associated with freedom is now frequently used to avoid it. Freedom, properly understood, is not merely the absence of foreign rule.
It is the presence of responsibility.
It demands accountability. It requires discipline. It insists upon truth.
These are not popular requirements.
It is far easier to gather in halls and speak of dismantling invisible structures than to repair visible ones. It is far easier to critique inherited systems than to build effective replacements. It is far easier to assign blame than to assume burden.
Yet civilisation has never been built on ease.
The danger for Africa is not that it remembers its colonial past too vividly. It is that it may remember it so selectively that it becomes an all purpose explanation for every present failure.
In that case, the past ceases to be history.
It becomes an alibi.
And an alibi, however eloquently expressed, cannot build a nation.
There is, however, a quieter and more demanding path. It does not rely on slogans. It does not flatter the listener. It does not provide immediate emotional satisfaction.
It asks instead for honesty.
It asks whether a broken institution is the result of historical inheritance or present neglect. It asks whether a failing system has been improved or merely explained. It asks whether the language of liberation has been used to advance society or to excuse its stagnation.
These are not comfortable questions.
But they are necessary ones.
In the end, decolonisation, properly understood, was never meant to be a permanent condition. It was a transition. A doorway through which nations passed from subjugation into responsibility.
To remain forever in the doorway, speaking endlessly of the room one has left, is to misunderstand the journey entirely.
Africa does not need fewer words.
It needs better ones, used with precision and restraint.
It needs fewer slogans and more substance.
It needs a generation willing to exchange the comfort of explanation for the discipline of action.
Freedom is not sustained by rhetoric.
It is sustained by truth.
And truth, in its quiet and uncompromising way, has no interest in smoke.
Lionel Jean Michel.