[by François RASTIER]
originally published on the Point site
More than half a century after the end of colonization, at least Western colonization, decolonialism, an ideology developed in the following century, is experiencing a remarkable boom.
Oddly enough, he almost never mentions the role of anti-colonialist and internationalist currents, and he rewrites history "in black and white". We thus read that the 19the century would have been that of slavery, while it was that of abolitions, often by the colonizers themselves. However, historical reality matters little, since it is a question of "decolonizing the imagination" according to the formula everywhere taken up by Achille Mbembe, author of The postcolony.
Since independence, the colonial past has often been denounced by the regimes in place; but after three generations, the liberated peoples have the right to demand accountability from them, or at least to no longer be satisfied with invoking the past: this was the meaning of Hélé Béji's remarkable essay, We, the decolonized (Arléa, 2008).
However, decolonialism posits that colonization has never ceased, at least in people's minds, and that embodied by systemic racism, it continues everywhere, even within the former metropolises. Thus decolonialism can meet the interests of tyrannies in place. When the trial that would condemn him, among other things, for torture, extortion and crimes against humanity opened in 2015, Hissène Habré cried out on the first day of the hearing: "Down with imperialism! Down with the new colonialism!" The court, composed entirely of African judges, was not impressed by this decolonial activism (Le Monde, July 21, 2015).
In 2017, Jacob Zuma, South Africa's notoriously corrupt – and decidedly polygamous – president, said the protests that would eventually lead to his resignation were " simply a defense of colonialism "On the other hand, he exonerated Chinese penetration in Africa of any "neo-colonialism", while Chinese influence continues to strengthen, as evidenced in international organizations by the favorable votes of indebted African countries.
Competing with China in Africa, Russia has succeeded, notably through the Wagner group, a private army led by Yevgeny Prigozhin (also Putin's right-hand man and owner of the Internet Research Agency that allowed Trump's election) to gain a foothold in Libya, where he is waging war alongside Marshal Haftar, in Sudan, Mozambique, and in the Central African Republic, where he serves as the praetorian guard for the incumbent President and controls mining areas. In October 2019, Prigozhin organized the first Russia-Africa summit in Sochi with another oligarch, Konstantin Malofeev.
Prigojine's main representative, the Franco-Beninese activist Kémi Séba, then hosted round tables on the sovereignty of African states in the face of the West and the defense of "traditional values." Kémi Séba distinguished himself by his denunciation of colonialism, but he is also known in France for having created the Tribu Ka, an African identity group dissolved after anti-Semitic attacks, and which continued to inspire associations such as the LDNA (League for the Defense of Black Africans), at the origin of actions against the representation of Suppliants Aeschylus at the Sorbonne and the Tutankhamun exhibition at La Villette. Séba has long had ties with the Russian far right, notably Alexander Dugin, co-founder of the National Bolshevik Party and advocate of neocolonial aggression against Ukraine. This means that decolonialism, reputed to be far left in universities and the intellectual world, can perfectly well turn out to be far right on the ground and support tyrannies subordinate to foreign powers such as China or Russia.
Decolonialism is also widespread in South America, where influential authors such as Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel, one of the inspirations of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic, come from. However, the anticolonial argument is conveniently brandished by far-right politicians such as 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", before attacking his wife Brigitte Macron.
The following year, Nicolas Maduro opened with great fanfare in Caracas a National Institute for the Decolonization of Venezuela, with an inaugural conference whose star guests were Ramón Grosfoguel (opportunely introduced as "Caribbean", because he was born to a Puerto Rican father, while he has American nationality and teaches at the University of Berkeley) and Houria Bouteldja, long-time spokesperson for the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic..
Maduro had already created a Ministry of Ecological Mines, and is a master of wooden language: while Venezuela has been independent since 1811…, its decolonization obviously remains a program for the future. Of course, the post-Chavista regime remains dependent on China, its main creditor, and is now only supported by Russia and obviously by Cuba. Giving decolonial pledges to its supporters, its anti-Westernism therefore remains all the more opportune since the regime has been under European sanctions since the latent military coup of 2017 and that it flouts democratic standards. Amnesty International counted “8.500 extrajudicial executions” between 2015 and 2017. In a frank study, entitled “Is decolonial thinking soluble in the Venezuelan State?[1] ? », 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 imaginary of the anti-colonialist struggle was mobilized as a vector for legitimizing authoritarian and capitalist regimes implementing racist policies and internal colonialism ». The same author suggests taxing multinationals, instead of exonerating them, investigating the assassinations of intellectuals such as the indigenous leader Sabino Romero, and also protecting indigenous territories against the creation of « special economic zones ».
Decolonialism presents itself as anti-racist, since it equates colonialism with racism. However, it only denounces Western colonialism of the past — forgetting in particular Ottoman and then Turkish colonialism, Japanese and Chinese colonialism. Similarly, it only mentions the colonial slave trade, but never the Arab and African slave trades. It calmly forgets the abolitionist movements in Western countries and their victories throughout the 19th century.e century; the same goes for anti-colonialist movements in the metropolises in the 20th century.e century, so important during the Algerian War as during the Vietnam War.
Wouldn't decolonial antiracism be a form of racism, denial if not shameful? In the case of decolonialists like Kémi Séba, there is no doubt about it when he attacks the "leucoderms" (whites). The LDNA, his moral heir, unfurled a banner in La Villette in 2019: " Europeans & family, your genome is criminal, hypocritical, lying” (photo taken from their site).
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.
A preferred form of contemporary racism, anti-Semitism is not absent from decolonialism: Kémi Séba, a fanatic anti-Semite, was condemned for it. With transparent theoretical trappings, it returns in the writings of activists like Bouteldja, notably in his book Whites, Jews and Us (2016), then, with anti-Israeli justifications in a recent column on Mediapart, where she justified the multiple anti-Semitic threats against April Benayoun (Miss Provence) with remarks like: “You can’t be innocently Israeli[2] " Finally, Achille Mbembe, a decolonial thinker known for drawing on the Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt, caused a scandal in Germany with writings and conferences 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 complies with Sharia law and was adopted in Cairo in 1990. Its relationship with the Universal Declaration seems tenuous, and Sarah Leah Whitson, director of the MENA division at Human Rights Watch (HRW), recently declared: " Middle East and North Africa worst in the world for human rights ».
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, it of course presents itself as a movement of emancipation.
