Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization

2. In the Snare of Colonial Matrix of Power

2 In the Snare of Colonial Matrix of Power Introduction The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge , of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalised and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual. It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural. [...] The colonisers also imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning. At first, they placed these patterns far out of reach of the dominated. Later, they taught them in a partial and selective way, in order to co-opt some of the dominated into their own power institutions. Then European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. [...] European culture became a universal cultural model. The imaginary in the non-European cultures could hardly exist today and, above all, reproduce itself outside of these relations. (Anibal Quijano 2007: 169) Africa is still entangled and trapped within the snares of the colonial matrix of power. Quijano (2007: 168-178) identified the key contours of the colonial matrix of power as consisting of four interrelated domains: control of economy; control of authority, control of gender and sexuality; and, control of subjectivity and knowledge. This chapter deals with the impact of this colonial order on the African continent and the African minds since the onset of colonial encounters. Frantz Fanon correctly noted that colonialism was never simply contented with imposing of its grammar and logic upon the ‘present and the future of a dominated country’. Colonialism was also not simply satisfied with merely holding the colonized people in its grip and emptying ‘the native’s brain of all form and content’. Rather, ‘By a kind of Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization 38 perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it’ (Fanon 1961: 67). It is therefore important to track the mechanics and manifestations of the inscription of hegemonic Western forms of knowledge and coloniality of power and to unpack how colonial modernity succeeded in pushing African forms of knowledge into the barbarian margins; and by that fact depriving African people of initiative and agency to take control of their destinies. The chapter focuses on the processes of universalizing Western particularism through epistemological colonization (colonization of the mind) that decentred pre-existing African knowledge systems. It posits that the worst form of colonization of a people is that which created epistemological mimicry and intellectual dependency. As Quijano (2007: 169) observes,, this ‘colonization of the imagination of the dominated’ remains the worst form as it dealt with and shaped people’s consciousness and identity. Our concern here is the manifestation of ‘coloniality’ rather than ‘colonialism’. Nelson MaldonadoTorres has differentiated coloniality and colonialism in this way: Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus coloniality survives colonialism . It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and everyday (Maldonad-Torres 2007: 243). Toyin Falola (2001: 262) also emphasized this same point by admitting that the impact of the West ‘is even more direct’. What began as colonial encounters in the fifteenth century produced both historical and intellectual realities mediated by inferior-superior relations. As a historical reality, Africa was integrated into an international system on terms defined by the West. African intellectuals cannot escape the reality of this integration . Neither can they escape the fact that the ideology that drives scholarship is controlled by the West nor that what African scholars have done is primarily to respond. For instance, nationalist historiography was a response; so was cultural nationalism before it, and both faced the challenge of countering negative Eurocentric ideas about Africa (Falola 2001: 262...