By Rita Okoye

Distinguished stakeholders in the academia have fingered current colonial power relations as influencing aid distribution.

This was part of the submissions made during the last Toyin Falola Interview Series held on Sunday across various social media and online platforms. The Toyin Falola Interviews is a series of discussions, hosted by Professor Toyin Falola at the University of Texas at Austin, that aim to amplify the voices of Africa and the African Diaspora.

Members of the panel, led by Professor Falola, were Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Professor Walter D. Mignolo, Professor Shose Kessi, Professor Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Professor Julia Suarez-Krabbe and Professor Oyewumi Oyeronke

While responding to the theme of the conversation, Decolonisation/Decoloniality, Professor Kessi noted that aid distribution to developing nations was subject to existing colonial structures and sentiments.  For her, “Before I became an academic, I had spent the first part of my career working in the international development sector and gradually realized the coloniality of development work and international aid. This then became the focus of my scholarship. At a time I was working with an international NGO affiliated to a university in the US and I had applied for a more senior position in my department that focused on programs in the East African region which is my home. I was not successful in my application and when I asked for feedback, I was told that I lacked African experience. As an African, that was a strange response; but I understood it as coded language. What they meant by this is that it was the wrong kind of African experience; they meant I had experienced the Peace Corps; I had not worked in an African village. So for them, as an African, I had the wrong kind of experience. This story and many others set me on the part to discover and uncover the coloniality of development industry, not just at the level of racial dynamics in the workplace but how global colonial relations of power are intrinsic to the aid industry. These dynamics cut across structural, bureaucratic, hegemonic and interpersonal spheres. These colonial frameworks are based on three key assumptions. The first and common underlying assumption and rationale for international development work is that the world is divided into developed and less developed nations, and that less developed are catching up with more developed nations, with the global South remaining peripheral and dependant on the expertise of development experts of institutions in the global North. The second assumption is that levels of poverty are used as measures of organising principles that determine levels of development. The third assumption which is linked to the first two is that as a result, colonized people are seen as the problem. People in the global South are portrayed as helpless, passive victims, afflicted by disease, destitution, violence, corruption and lacking knowledge and capability to get ourselves out of this mess. This message is very common, not only in discourses of international aid, charitable organizations and many academic projects but it is propagated by mainstream media. So in a way it has become commonsense knowledge. What these messages do is that they trivialize very complex issues and make power relations invisible. We are led to believe, for example, that the problem of the global South is money and food rather than political, structural and cultural oppression and exploitation.”

On his part, Professor Mignolo argued that colonization has always been a consequence of modernisation. “Colonisation is the consequence of modernization. There is no modernization without colonization. There is no modernity without coloniality. Modernity is not a historical period; it is a historical period for those who invented the concept of modernity. The concept of modernity foregrounds a series of narratives: theological, secular, philosophical. In order to constitute itself as modernity, they had to push out everything that does not fit the constitution of modernity. That is coloniality. Coloniality is the logic of oppression, dispossession, exploitation that the rhetoric of modernity hides. Decoloniality emerged as a result of conflict which refused the vision of modernity. Decoloniality is that consciousness that coloniality is common to all western colonialists. Decoloniality is a response to that narrative or vision of modernity,” he noted.

Professor Oyewumi expressed a note of caution in her assessment of the current arguments on decolonization. According to her, “I am speaking as an African located in history and experiences. I understand that from the very beginning, in the crucible of modernity called the new world, called Latin America, Africa has been present. That cannot be overemphasized. Too many Africans think that colonization started with the Berlin conference of 1884. No, Africa has been there from the very beginning. The emergence of race as a new category of humans that Hannibal talked about involved Africans. We must recall that Columbus had Africa with him when he washed up at Hispaniola. Africa was there from the very beginning because of the exploitation of our labour through the captive trade and institutions of slavery in the Americas. The colonization of Africa didn’t start in 1884. When we address colonization, there are two levels at which we must look at colonization: the global colonial and the local iteration which followed the Berlin conference. We are told that decolonization is about dismantling power hierarchies and then centring other experiences, other ways of knowing and being. I have misgivings about decolonization and decoloniality and the way we have been using it, not in terms of the act, not in terms of the fact that indeed certain things have to be decolonized. I have no issue with that. However the narrative of coloniality and modernity does not seem to totally take Africa into account. The story that decolonial theory tells is a new world story. It is a Latin American story. Decolonial is an orientation that I want to say the more it is used, it is so ubiquitous. It appears as though everything is to be decolonized. I find some of it disempowering. It creates a certain opportunity cost as Africans if all we are doing is every day is decolonizing.”

The interaction had over two million participants and prominent members of the audience who gave their intervention included Professor Richard Joseph, Luqman Muraina, Christopher Esike, T. Oloruntoba Oju, Flipa Pontes, Debbie Yeboah, Mary arez-Krabbe and Professor Oyeronke Oyewumi led by Professor Toyin Falola as moderator. Interview series has an audience averaging two million. Kinyanjui, Otive Igbuzor, Ghirmai Negash, Femi Omere, Rowland Caesar Apentik, Emina Hanik, Syed Muhammad Omar, Berta Vishnivert, Utitofon Inyang, Eugenia Anderson, Ebun Clark, Kathryn Toure, Aghogho Akpome, and Professor Richard Joseph.