[by François Rastier]
Outside the cozy but confined academic sphere, decolonial ideology has taken on a geopolitical dimension in recent years.
Since independence, the colonial past has often been denounced by the regimes in power; but after three generations, the liberated peoples have the right to demand accountability from them, or at least to no longer be satisfied with the invocation of the past: this was the meaning of the remarkable essay by Hélé Béji, Nous, décolonisés (Arléa, 2008).
However, decolonialism posits that colonization never truly ended, at least not in people's minds, and that, embodied by systemic racism, it continues everywhere, even within the former colonial powers. Thus, decolonialism can align with the interests of existing tyrannies. When the trial that would condemn him for crimes against humanity opened in 2015, Hissène Habré exclaimed on the first day of the hearing: “Down with imperialism! Down with the new colonialism!” The court, composed entirely of African judges, was unimpressed by this decolonial activism ( Le Monde , July 21, 2015).
In 2017, Jacob Zuma, the notoriously corrupt—and decidedly polygamous—South African president, declared that the protests that would eventually lead to his resignation were “simply a defense of colonialism” [1] . Conversely, he exonerated Chinese penetration into Africa from any “neo-colonialism,” even though China’s influence continues to strengthen, as evidenced by the favorable votes of indebted African countries in international organizations.
For its part, Chinese propaganda, in order to deflect criticism of freedoms and in particular of the repression of the Uyghurs, which has been described as "cultural genocide," denounces the "white left." The pejorative term baizuo (白左, báizuǒ , abbreviated from 白人左派, báirén zuǒpài, lit. "white left") refers to supposed progressives committed to democracy and portrayed as neo-colonial moralizers. [2] .
However, far from being ungrateful towards anti-Western "left" radicalism, which led, for example, Michel Foucault to support Khomeini or Alain Badiou the Khmer Rouge, current neo-Maoist ideologues occasionally claim these authors to support their anti-democratic theories of domination.
Foucault's theory of the "power of discourse," which became huàyǔquán , aims to "replace an illegitimate domination (that of the 'other') with a legitimate domination (that of the CCP) by highlighting the limits and relativity of 'Western' discourses (on human rights, religious freedom and transcultural universals) aimed at justifying interference.
Chinese huàyǔquán thus borrows both from the “post-colonial” discourse denouncing the economic invasion of foreign powers and from the “postmodern” discourse aiming to make the universal value of truth culturally relative” [ 3] .
2.
Rivaling China in Africa, Russia has succeeded, notably through the Wagner Group, a private army led by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin [4] in gaining a foothold in Libya, Sudan, Mozambique, and the Central African Republic, where he serves as a praetorian guard for the incumbent president and controls mining areas. In October 2019, Prigozhin, along with another oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev, organized the first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi.
Prigozhin's main representative, the Franco-Beninese activist Kémi Séba, was then leading roundtables on the sovereignty of African states vis-à-vis the West and the defense of "traditional values." Jihadist Islamism is progressing rapidly in Africa, and Kémi Séba, trained in the Nation of Islam sect , is all the less concerned because in Mali, for example, decolonial propaganda is leading the government to negotiate with the Islamists… while simultaneously entering into military cooperation agreements with Russia [5] .
Kémi Séba is also known in France for having created the Tribu Ka, an African identity group dissolved after antisemitic attacks, which continued to inspire associations like the LDNA (League for the Defense of Black Africans), responsible for actions against the performance of Aeschylus's The Suppliants at the Sorbonne and the Tutankhamun exhibition at La Villette. Séba has long maintained ties with the Russian far right, notably with Alexander Dugin, co-founder of the National Bolshevik Party and champion of neocolonial aggression against Ukraine. This demonstrates that decolonialism, though considered far-left in universities and intellectual circles, can perfectly well prove to be far-right on the ground and support tyrannies subordinate to foreign powers like China or Russia.
The Russian breakthrough in the Sahel countries, supported by anti-Western conspiracy disinformation campaigns on social networks and contracts granted to mercenaries of the Wagner Group, crossed a new threshold when Kémi Séba was officially received by the president of the Malian junta on May 8, 2022. The activist did not fail to compare himself to Che Guevara and his host to Fidel Castro.
For those who might not have understood the significance of this meeting, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, published this comment: "France's displeasure with the Malian authorities' desire to ask for help from foreign security forces is nothing more than a relapse of colonial mentality which Europeans should have gotten rid of long ago" [6] .
The same decolonial rhetoric is now being applied to the decolonization of Ukraine. In an opinion piece published by the official Novosti news agency, T. Sergeysev states: “Everything Russia has done for the West, it has done at its own expense, making the greatest sacrifices. The West has ultimately rejected all these sacrifices, devalued Russia’s contribution to resolving the Western crisis, and decided to take revenge on Russia for the selfless assistance it provided. From now on, Russia will follow its own path, without worrying about the fate of the West, relying on another part of its legacy: leadership in the global decolonization process .”
Within this process, Russia presents a strong potential for partnership and alliance with countries that the West has oppressed for centuries and that have no intention of surrendering its yoke. Without the sacrifice and struggle of the Russians, these countries would not have been liberated. The denazification of Ukraine is simultaneously its decolonization, a fact that the Ukrainian people must understand as they begin to free themselves from the ghosts, temptations, and dependencies of the so-called European choice. [7] .
3.
Decolonialism is also widespread in South America, with influential authors such as Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel, one of the inspirations of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic.
However, the anti-colonial argument is also conveniently brandished by far-right politicians like Jair Bolsonaro: to the fears expressed by Emmanuel Macron in August 2019 about massive deforestation in the Amazon, Bolsonaro responded that the President of the Republic was a "colonialist".
The following year, Nicolas Maduro opened a National Institute for the Decolonization of Venezuela in Caracas with great fanfare. The inaugural conference featured Ramón Grosfoguel, conveniently presented as "Caribbean" because he was born to a Puerto Rican father (even though he has American citizenship and teaches at the University of Berkeley), and Houria Bouteldja, a long-time spokesperson for the Party of the Indigenous People of the Republic.
Maduro had already created a Ministry of Ecological Mines and is a virtuoso of doublespeak: while Venezuela has been independent since 1811, its decolonization obviously remains a future agenda. Certainly, the post-Chavista regime remains dependent on China, its main creditor, and is now supported only by Russia and Cuba. Offering decolonial assurances to its supporters, its anti-Western stance is all the more opportune given that the regime has been under European sanctions since the covert military coup of 2017 and that it flouts democratic norms. Amnesty International counted 8.500 extrajudicial killings between 2015 and 2017. In an uncompromising study entitled "Is Decolonial Thought Compatible with the Venezuelan State?" [8] . An opponent noted: “ After independence, in many cases, such as when Boumediene welcomed Che Guevara and various representatives of anti-imperialist or independence movements while repressing Algerian communists and persecuting the Kabyles, the imagery of the anti-colonial struggle was mobilized as a means of legitimizing authoritarian and capitalist regimes implementing racist policies and internal colonialism.” The same author suggests that Maduro tax multinationals, instead of exempting them, investigate the assassinations of intellectuals like the Indigenous leader Sabino Romero, and also protect Indigenous territories against the creation of “special economic zones.”
4.
Decolonialism presents itself as anti-racist, since it equates colonialism with racism. However, it only denounces past Western colonialism—notably forgetting Ottoman and then Turkish colonialism, as well as Japanese and Chinese colonialism. Similarly, it only mentions the colonial slave trade, but never the Arab and African slave trades. It conveniently ignores the abolitionist movements in Western countries and their victories throughout the 19th century ; likewise, it overlooks the anti-colonial movements in the metropolises of the 20th century , so crucial during the Algerian War and the Vietnam War.
Isn't decolonial anti-racism a form of racism, denying it if not outright shameful? In the case of decolonial figures like Kémi Séba, there's no doubt about it when he attacks "leucoderms" (white people). The LDNA, his moral heir, displayed a banner in La Villette in 2019: " Europeans & family , your genome is criminal, hypocritical, and deceitful" (photo taken from their website).
More nuanced in appearance, intellectual currents develop that race is a social construct and therefore construct a "white" race that conveniently only includes whites. They would be dominant by birth, by virtue of a "white privilege". Only the Russians are apparently exempt from the "whiteness" that essentializes the whiteness of "leucoderms" to make it a mentality - if need be unconscious. To the two traditional forms of racism, physical racism and the racism of mentalities, is thus added, as an ultimate avatar of a sociologizing theory of ideologies, a racism of "social positions".
By an insistent coincidence, "anti-racist" racialism exempts from any accusation African potentates, Saudi feudal lords, Russian and Chinese oligarchs, who are never counted among the dominant, unlike the Aquitaine postman or the Polish plumber.
Antisemitism, a privileged form of contemporary racism, is not absent from decolonialism [9] : Kémi Séba, a fanatical antisemite, was convicted for it. With transparent theoretical trappings, it reappears in the writings of activists like Bouteldja, notably in her book Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous (2016), and then, with anti-Israeli justifications in a recent opinion piece on Mediapart, where she justified the multiple antisemitic threats against April Benayoun (Miss Provence) with remarks like: "One cannot be Israeli innocently" [10] " Finally, Achille Mbembe, a decolonial thinker known for relying on the Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt, caused a scandal in Germany with writings and lectures deemed anti-Semitic (see in particular the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20.04.20).
Let us return to the origins of contemporary racist theories. Terrified by the Enlightenment, democracy, human and citizen rights, reactionary ideologues have set about destroying the concept of humanity through racialist theories (Gobineau), taken up in various ways by the Nazis and their collaborators.
Today decolonialism also rejects the concept of humanity, which is in line with the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights, which conforms to Sharia law and was adopted in Cairo in 1990. Its relationship with the Universal Declaration seems very tenuous, and Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the MENA division at Human Rights Watch , recently stated: "The Middle East and North Africa are the worst in the world in terms of human rights" [11] .
Finally, decolonialism establishes Islamism as the main factor in the decolonization of the contemporary world. Grosfoguel describes the political theology of the Muslim Brotherhood as "democratic." It is therefore not surprising that Grosfoguel, like Bouteldja, faithfully supports Tariq Ramadan.
By its rejection of "white" universalism, "white" feminism, secularism, democracy, and even the rule of law, all assimilated to the "whiteness" of a fantasized West, decolonialism meets the wishes of various contemporary tyrannies and in fact favors their oppressive policies. But practicing the inversion of values to its advantage, it presents itself of course as a movement of emancipation.
NB — Reserved for subscribers, an initial version of this article appeared in Le Point magazine in February 202. It has been revised, expanded and updated here.
