Francisco Lobo
These powerful words, full of passion and righteous indignation, were written by Thiong’o in 1986. However, the ‘decolonization’ project remains alive and well today, as evidenced by the active battlefronts of academia and the so- called ‘culture wars’ (on which I will have more to say in the next chapter). Many of our major struggles today have to do with war and political violence, and they are as pressing as they are palpable for way too many victims of their material destructiveness. Yet, as the UNESCO constitution states, ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’ (UNESCO 1945, para. 2).
As this study is intended to offer food for thought for the praeter-colonial mind, this chapter will focus on the intellectual challenges of colonialism and its many discontents – including anti-colonialism, decolonization, and post- colonialism – and the ways in which the praeter-colonial mind can make sense of all of them and negotiate the cognitive dissonance that arises between the past and the present, between what is imposed and what is inherited, between the natural and the naturalized.
No comments:
Post a Comment