When Decolonization Gets Racist
I have a Nigerian friend, a philosopher. He teaches philosophy there, and when he came to Europe, he wanted to study Heidegger. A natural choice: one of the most profound German thinkers, whose reflections on Being have shaped generations. But his European advisors discouraged him. They told him to study witchcraft instead—“African philosophy.”
This had nothing to do with Heidegger’s past, nor his entanglement with the Third Reich. The message was simpler: an African should not study European thinkers.
But even if it were about Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations... do these Europeans really think an African cannot make up his own mind? That non-Whites require intellectual guardianship? Here the project of decolonization folds back on itself, turning into the very paternalism it claims to resist.
What was once about opening doors now becomes another form of gatekeeping. Instead of letting a philosopher be a philosopher, he is reduced to his passport, his skin, his geography. He is told: Stay in your corner. Think only in your category. It is no longer colonialism with gunboats, but the condescension is the same: you are not free to choose your intellectual inheritance.
The irony is that real decolonization would mean the opposite. It would mean a Somali philosopher could wrestle with Heidegger if he wished, and maybe even do something radical: turn Heidegger African. What would that look like? Perhaps Being-towards-death reimagined through the rhythms of oral tradition, the desert wind, the communal fire. Perhaps “dwelling” no longer as a hut in the Black Forest, but as the fragile balance of nomadic life. Philosophy survives only through translation and transformation. Aristotle became Muslim in Averroes, German in Hegel, French in Sartre, American in pragmatism. Why should Africa be denied this freedom?
But the new orthodoxy polishes the cage. It says: you must study your ‘authentic’ traditions as if authenticity were a prison sentence. That is not decolonization. It is colonial logic in reverse. The colonizer once said: you cannot enter our world of thought. Now the well-meaning academic says: you must not leave your own.
That is not liberation. That is oppression with better manners.