Mind and Matter: Comparing the frameworks of decolonization found in Tuck & Yang and Thiong'o
Photo Credits: The Guardian
“The loss of a language translates into the loss of an entire system of knowledge, communication, and beliefs”
– Bolanle Ayokoyo, A Nigerian linguist based in the University of Ilorin in Nigeria
The twentieth century was a time of great uncertainty for the Portuguese empire. A period rife with clashes between indigenous resistance and colonial repression throughout the African colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde islands, and São Tomé and Principe, Portugal sought to cling hard to it territorial conglomeration that was slowly breaking at its seams. In an attempt to manage and tranquilize the growing—and oftentimes violent—native dissatisfaction, in 1911 Portugal established the Ministry of Colonies which spearheaded the creation of distinct colonial governments constructed to respond to the sociopolitical conditions of each population’s “state of civilization” (Harrell-Bond & Forer, 5). Existing within the backdrop of the rapidly deteriorating imperial hegemony, however, the economic and political ineptitude of the Portuguese government confounded to make the efforts of the new colonial governments ineffectual. Because of this, attempts at the exploitation and expropriation of native’s land and body were haphazard and easily thwarted by even the most disjointed of resistance movements.
It was only after the military coup of 1926 that the colonial system of exploitation became frighteningly systemized, resembling elements of the antiquated system of slavery that had been abolished in the last century (Harrell-Bond & Forer, 8). Two years following his appointment as the Minister of Finance, Dr. Antonio Salazar reneged the former decentralized colonial administration and instituted a policy of unification wherein all power would emanate from the heart of the Portuguese empire—Lisbon. This policy simultaneously legalized a new division within the African colonies: indígenos, a category that included the majority of the black population, and assimilados, or those select few Africans who had reached the threshold of civility that would qualify them for partial citizenry. To become an assimilado, one would need to prove that they have fulfilled a variety of requirements, including being over the age of 18, being employed with significant earnings, attaining a high level of education, and having a fluent grasp of the Portuguese language (Minter, 23).
Evidently, then, aside from being in possession of material resources, the penultimate marker of civility was the complete surrender to the colonial life-world as indicated by one’s willingness to forsake their native tongue in favor of that of the oppressor. The colonial violence imparted upon indigenous populations did not just stop at their bodies. In the classroom, Portuguese colonial education did little to attend to the preexisting epistemic and value systems of the colonized. Instead, the primary aim of childhood education was to “teach the Portuguese language, to inculcate Portuguese values and to develop in the pupils a conscious identification with Portugal in order to strengthen national unity” (Minter, 30). Writing in lament of the ideological stagnancy of postcolonial African nations, Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in Decolonising the Mind writes that “the physical violence of the battlefield” is always transmuted by “the psychological violence of the classroom” (Thiong’o, 9). School, then, has always been the primary site of cultural warfare. Calls to civilize through education became the immediate means of repression and elimination. Time and time again, the cultural institutions of education and language have been fashioned as sites of contention, where the interests of colonial indoctrination and liberatory consciousness raising are in a perpetual state of war. Some, like Thiong’o, recognize the urgency of this warfare and argue that the battle cry of freedom must ring in the minds of the colonized as much as it does through the land. Others, like indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that to focus on such is to commit the crime of a settler move to innocence, wherein the real work of decolonization is occluded by the ideological work of liberatory pedagogy.
This paper functions as a clarification of the theoretical debate between Thiong’o and Tuck and Yang, where the former believes that decolonizing the mind is necessarily primary to the process of decolonialism and the latter believe that its prioritization is an insincere move towards the imperative of decolonialism. In what follows, I begin by clarifying the position of both sides, reconstructing the decolonial ideal that each camp is beholden to. While Thiong’o holds that decolonization is functionally and importantly incomplete without the seizing back of one’s mind, Tuck and Yang argue that decolonization, as a process of unsettling the settler, requires that one prioritize the more material process of land relinquishment and indigenous reacquisition—to sideline the material objective is to impede upon true decolonial practice. From here, I go on to answer which ideal captures that which is most fundamental to decolonialism. I argue that the recognition of the dual importance and mutual reinforcement of both the material and the ideological that is present in Thiong’o and absent in Tuck and Yang transforms mere practice into the liberatory praxis that better fulfils the goal of ridding the subjugated of their colonial chains.
Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind functions as a love letter to the wave of African nations who had recently won their material freedom from the West. Despite the lack of their formal chains, Thiong’o recognized that the Achilles heel of the decolonial quest for self-definition was the inability for such definition to occur within the cultural and linguistic arenas of the indigenous lifeworld. Thiong’o reflects on his experiences within the colonial education system. Here, the use and teaching of his native tongue Gikuyu was prohibited. The force of this prohibition was not only mediated by the cane of the white man, but through the ridicule of his very own brethren. “Children,” Thiong’o writes, “were turned into witch hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative- value of being a traitor to one's immediate community” (Thiong’o, 11). Intellectual progress was measured through the acquisition of English and through one’s ability to articulate white western values. Put succinctly by Thiong’o, education became “determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing that dominance” (Thiong’o, 12). The implications of this linguistic and ideological imposition were manifold. This is because, as Thiong’o identified, language is not merely a means of communicating with the other, and the cultural self is not a purely translatable entity. Instead, language is the medium through which culture is expressed. On the relation between language and culture, Thiong’o writes the following:
“…Communication between human beings is also the basis and process of evolving culture. In doing similar kinds of things and actions over and over again under similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patterns, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences and knowledge emerge. Those experiences are handed over to the next generation and become the inherited basis for their further actions on nature and on themselves. There is a gradual accumulation of values which in time become almost self evident truths governing their conception of what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, courageous and cowardly, generous and mean in their internal and external relations. Over a time chic becomes a way of life distinguishable from other ways of life. They develop a distinctive culture and history. Culture embodies those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which they come to view themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people's identity, their sense of particularity as members of the human race. All this is carried by language. Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable froth the language that makes possible its genesis growth banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next” (Thiong’o, 14-15).
In this way, language and culture exist as both mutually-reinforcing dimensions of the social self. The colonial project works to dictate the way that its victims relate to the world around them. If decolonization is the liberation of the subjugated self from the hands of the colonizer, then it is Thiong’o’s position that the practice of liberation must attend to all aspects of the self—the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.
Tuck and Yang center their discussion around the settler-colonial state. Colonialism is often theorized in two forms: externally and internally. Under the framework of external colonialism, the world is separated into first and third, where the empires of the “first” world exploit and expropriate the resources found in the Indigenous “third” worlds for the purpose of fortifying the wealth of the colonizing empire. This is opposed to internal colonialism wherein the colonizer engages in strategies of the biopolitical management of people, land, and other aspects of the natural world within the so-called borders of the imperial nation. Settler colonialism involves the intricate interplay between the external and internal modes of colonialism, as it perceives Indigeneity as both enemy and ward of the state due to the lack of spatial separation. At the center of settler colonialism is the issue of “land,” not only because it constitutes the basis of wealth-making for the settler, but it also sits at the center of Indigenous epistemology, ontology and cosmology. The call for decolonization under a settler-colonial context, then, becomes fraught due to the lack of spatial separation between the colonized and the settler—empire, settlement, and internal colony occur simultaneously. Instead of genuine approaches to the project of decolonialism, however, Tuck and Yang argue that educational advocacy and scholarship have made insincere attempts to engage in said projects.
The term “decolonization,” according to Tuck and Yang, has been coopted by the logic of settler-colonialism, stripping the term of its action-oriented specificity and replacing it with a more vague and rhetorical nature. For Tuck and Yang, then, the core to decolonization is encapsulated by the oft-repeated slogan “land back.” For these thinkers, it is only through the repatriation of land back to its original stewards that decolonization can truly take root. Decolonization, then, is steeped in materiality. Settler-colonialism, which is constructed upon and within an enmeshed system of settler-native-slave, serves to complicate the roles and desires of various non-white groups in relation to the Indigenous communities upon whose land they occupy. Thus, the metaphorization of decolonization lends the term to being amalgamated into the greater rhetoric of social justice or human/civil rights causes in a way that often sustains narratives stemming from settler-colonialism.
Further, the metaphorization of decolonization allows settlers to make a claim towards innocence by falsely reconciling their guilt and complicity while simultaneously framing the conversation away from the colonized native and around the survival and futurity of the settler. Generally, settler moves to innocence are “those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 10). Settler moves to innocence as characterized by Tuck and Yang are insincere. They are those actions that make a false claim towards accountability yet maintain the dominant logics which antagonize the Native. Tuck and Yang categorize attempts at decolonizing the mind as one such move to innocence. “Another settler move to innocence,” the two write, “is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 19). Granted, Tuck and Yang acknowledge the power of consciousness-raising practices:
“…curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work” (Tuck & Yang 2012, 19).
And yet, Tuck and Yang assert that, despite how liberatory this practice might feel, the “front-loading” of critical consciousness building more often than not acts as a barrier to decolonization (Tuck & Yang 2012, 19). Here, it is critical to recognize that—at least, at the outset—it is not the act of conscientization itself, but its front-loading; the prioritization of critical consciousness building at the beginning of the process of decolonization. The basic assumption here is that the psychological and the physical exist as two distinct and separate domains, with one—the physical—taking preeminence. Under this framework, then, the act of decolonization should primarily be physical: a genuine move to innocence must primarily act on the world and not on the mind. This sits in slight opposition to Thiong’o’s characterization of decolonization, which posits the two realms as mutually-reinforcing equal counterparts.
I take issue with the ordering upon which Tuck and Yang’s discussion is premised and argue that such framing ultimately hinders the project of decolonialism. Beginning in 1819 with the Indian Civilization Act and culminating in 1869 with the Peace Policy, the United States adopted an ethic of cultural retribution against Indigeneity through the means of education. Together with several denominations of the Christian church, the US authorized the construction and operation of multiple Indian boarding schools across the nation. For almost an entire century, Native youth were either voluntarily or forcefully stripped from their lands and were subjected to what can only be called torture in the name of assimilation. These institutions, epicenters of cultural genocide, had one goal in mind. Encapsulated by Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of one of the most notorious boarding schools in the nation: to have “kill[ed] the Indian,” was to have “save[d] the man” (1892). “Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation,” spoke Pratt at an 1892 convention on the effectiveness and necessity of Indian boarding schools. “They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it” (Pratt 1892). As was the case with Portugal, Britain, and all colonial empires, the dissemination of the ideology of division and colonial superiority that began in the classroom is the first site of warfare. Without subjugating the soul of the colonized, the colonizer would remain unable to consume the land for which he craves.
In his most famous essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” the late historian Patrick Wolfe argues that the logic of elimination that underpins settler colonialism is both negatively and positively manifest. Negatively, the logic of elimination aims to eradicate the native through the “liquidation of Indigenous people” (Wolfe 2006, 388). Positively, this logic seeks to replace what was once native culture with the culture of the settler who fashions himself as the neo-native. The positive dimensions of the logic of elimination are accomplished through a variety of means, but notably through re-education initiatives such as the boarding schools. These strategies serve as a means of epistemic imposition, or the supplanting of settler epistemologies and ontologies onto native ones. For a settler to decolonize their mind is for them to deprivilege the dominant epistemic structures which reify the logic of elimination that sits at the core of settler colonialism. It is to win the battle of the soul. It is to finally regain the right to define the self according to one’s own terms. In this sense, I believe Thiong’o gets it right. Through an education that cultivates critical consciousness and through a language that encapsulates the history, values, and culture of the colonized, as the oppressed learn about the world and what a liberatory future might look like, they simultaneously transform the world into structures that serve their liberatory ends. This is the true sense of decolonization.
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Harrell-Bond, B., & Forer, S. (1981). Guinea-Bissau: The Colonial Experience. American Universities Field Staff. https://www.icwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/BHB-18.pdf
Minter, W. (1972). Portuguese Africa, and the West. Penguin Books.
Pratt, R. H. (1892). Kill the Indian, and Save the Man. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/
Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the Mind. Zimbabwe Publishing House.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Wolfe, P. (2012). Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native (2006). Settler Colonial Studies, 2(1), 226–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2012.10648834
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