Colonisation has been going on for as long as empire with multiple origins in space and time around the globe. As a little boy I daydreamed into the Scottish Highlands to run with the resistance as the English attempted domination beyond Hadrian’s Wall, the previous boundary of the Roman colonisation project[1]. Does the process of colonisation continue until the empire has destroyed the local language and all its conceptions, consigned any pre-empirical aesthetics as quaint artefacts of a primitive past and trophies in the crown jewels and museums? Does it continue until the land and people are entirely remade in the coloniser’s image through the imposition of the empire sanctioned religion? It is not complete until everyone believes the magnanimous veneer of ‘all the empire has done for us’ and we sing ‘God save the queen, fascist regime’.
Frantz Fanon, writing from the receiving end of colonisation as an African in the 1960 believed the violence of the process was still naked and unambiguous in the European’s colonies and that violence should be returned for emancipation. Marx and Engels described the deceivers and soothsayers of European politics as the maintainers of exploitation of the workers and their followers also took the path of violence. The insights of their critique of capitalism live on but their attempts to predict the future proved naïve and wrong. Fanon saw the European workers of the 1960’s as confused and seduced by the soothsayers and deceivers but that the exploitation was obvious in the colonies where it was done by the army and the police. The violence came at the barrel or butt of the gun to ensure the exploitation machine remained productive. In Europe the exploited could retreat into their home for respite but in Africa the enforces gun would follow you into the home at any time and once it could do this it was also in your mind at every moment. To the horror of many like Hannah Arrent, Fanon embraced violence as a means of decolonisation but looking at the subsequent history of liberation and formation of various African states it does not look like the process of decolonisation extended into the mind, yet.
George Orwell’s first job was a military posting in Burma and in a short essay ‘Killing an Elephant’ he describes an incident where an elephant had gone wild in a marketplace and the expectation was that he would kill it. He walked the streets and a crowd formed and followed to witness the event. He did not want to kill it but felt compelled by the expectation of ‘the natives’. He shot it. He reflected that the roll of the coloniser was to wear a mask that impressed the natives and eventually you become the mask. The freedom of an oppressor is an illusion, we are all enslaved by the structures of empire. Fredrick Douglass makes the same point about the corruption of slave owners by the institution they benefit form. Power does not give itself up but to realise it will be wielding you, not the other way around, may save you from its siren song.
Politics and economics are interwoven and in dynamic exchange. The modern state owes much to the conception Hobbes outlined in Leviathan, but he also owned shares in the Virginia Company, one of the first corporations, like the East India Company, that very soon grew to rival the states as centres of imperial power through capitalism. The historical shift in the locus of power from aristocratic regimes to the merchants has only served to make the extractive structures of empire more opaque. Now witness the fossil fuel lobby’s influence on a state’s political parties as corporate capture of the state. At the bottom of these power structures people traumatised by poverty are caught living day to day for survival. Further up the line the moderately disempowered live in fear of falling to the bottom without the benevolent support of their saviours as they are corralled into various caste-based animosities.
One of the tricks of colonisation is to establish its modes of being as the only option in the name of progress[2]. It imposes a failure of the imagination on the diverse possibilities of a culturally complex social species. One thing it imposes is a change of scale in the organisation of society. Thatcher’s quote ‘no society, only individuals and families’ was straight out of the imperial handbook. Empires breaks a culture down to divided and conquered individuals embedded in mechanistic structures larger than the functional units we, as a social species, have evolved to inhabit - Dunbar’s number puts this at 150[3]. Meanwhile crony capitalists effectively hunt in packs at this scale. Attempts to organise the disempowered and centrally administer mass society to match concentrated exploitative power may result in some redistribution of wealth but it also represents a failure to identify and decolonise our minds of one of the conceptual foundations of empire; structures that concentrate not distribute power. Que the propaganda machines to define our enemies for us in the great battle between good and evil - revolution is just a turning of the wheel of fortune for who getas to define the good.
The history of empire, colonialism and slavery relegates the majority of the colonised and enslaved to modern day poverty regardless of the superficial renovations of modernity. Marcus Garby advocated and attempted to establish businesses for the descendants of African slaves in the Americas and met significant resistance, often covert, from the USA government, Martin Luther King identified poverty as the load that must be lifted and Malcom X, like Steve Biko, identified the need for their people to self-identify in their own terms with no reference back to the colonising culture. This is not easily done from a position of economic dependence and passive resistance may buy a little time, but it will not turn the tide.
Decolonisation happens in the mind but is easier to achieve from a position of material, economic independence. The wave of colonisation sweeping around the world brought cultural destruction and intergenerational trauma. Its impact runs so deep in some family histories it has become hidden and a new knowledge synthesising people and land is arising. Many of us no longer live where our ancestors lived. In other places the wave of colonisation has only recently broken and the knowledge and modes of being that pre-existed it live. Cultural diversity, like biodiversity, is critical for the resilience of our species in a changing world. This does not exclude the interaction through trade of materials and ideas, but it is not compatible with extraction to centralised powers of empire, either state or corporate, justified by propaganda of some god given superiority and gift of salvation. Decolonisation, if done properly, may take time but need only be done once. The structures of colonisation need not be perpetuated. The village raises the child, and it is at this scale we can stand or fall to the extractive structures of concentrated power.
[1] These founding myths of boyhood oversimplified the dynamics of evolving capitalism and overlooked the complicit role of the landowners in play during the highland clearances, but the instinct was strong and clear – resist and repel the empire. [2] See Movie ‘Cry Freedom’ – dialogue at 27:40 that nails this perfectly [3] Based on study of primate social group size ratio to neocortex volume
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