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Abstract

Over the past decade-plus, there has been a surge in anthropological writing on decolonisation. Yet, whereas mid-twentieth century anticolonial revolutionaries fought to uproot imperialism's extractive political economy, certain contemporary decolonial tendencies give primacy, instead, to asserting cultural/epistemological difference. This shift has motivated pertinent critiques, such as that of Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, of atavistic conceptions of decolonisation. Táíwò's dismissal, however, of the neocolonialism thesis and his conceptual uncoupling of imperialism's material and symbolic dimensions results in a one-dimensional polemic. What gets lost is the much-needed role of decolonisation as an ideological struggle in mobilising populations against an entrenched neocolonial political economy. With this debate as framing, I propose revisiting Talal Asad's 1973 volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, published at the height of anthropology's disciplinary anti-imperialism. The book's contributors detail how, amid intensifying anticolonial agitation, interwar anthropologists anxious about cultural change among colonised populations advocated a shift to indirect colonial rule through native elites, rather than an abolition of imperialism per se. While spurning colonialism's earlier assimilationist agenda, anthropological calls to institutionalise cultural differences among colonised populations resonated with an imperialist project of incorporating while subverting anticolonial demands. Amid present-day anthropological discussions around decolonisation, these insights remain relevant. This is because contemporary neocolonial relations operate in a manner akin to indirect colonial rule.

Keywords

Imperialism decolonisation neocolonialism Talal Asad indirect rule

Introduction

‘Decolonisation’, writes Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (2022: 4), ‘has lost its way’. What was once a project of Southern self-emancipation from Euro-American political and economic control has been side-lined, Táíwò (2022: 4) argues, by ‘a catch-all trope’ that is now deployed to perform academic ‘morality’ and ‘authenticity’ through a politics of cultural purification. Táíwò is not alone in questioning recent scholarly engagements with decolonisation. Leon Moosavi (2020), in an otherwise sympathetic account of the decolonial project, refers to this latter-day surge in the concept's scholarly uptake as ‘the decolonial bandwagon’.

Notwithstanding increased anthropological writing on decolonisation, disciplinary engagement with the concept is decades old. Eugene Ogan (1975), for instance, published ‘Decolonising Anthropology’ in 1975. Prior to that, Kathleen Gough (1967: 19) published ‘Anthropology and Imperialism’, wherein she argued that anthropologists had ‘failed to study Western imperialism as a social system or even to adequately explore the effects of imperialism on the societies we studied’. Responding in part to Gough's intervention, Talal Asad published, in 1973, his edited volume, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. It has thus been half a century since the book's release. Spurred by the demands of then-prominent anticolonial national liberation movements, the contributed chapters in Asad's volume stake out lines of analysis that are, I suggest, of enduring relevance amid present-day anthropological discussions around decolonisation.

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter's focus is British social anthropology in Africa during the interwar years. This was a moment when colonial administration on the continent was shifting over large areas to indirect rule. This historical context is significant, for Asad and contributors note an elective affinity between indirect colonial rule and the functionalist theory of interwar British social anthropology. At the time, European colonial rulers faced with increasingly restive native populations sought a new political arrangement that would at once incorporate and subvert anticolonial demands, while bolstering the overall system of colonial rule.

For the recuperative project of indirect rule, functionalist anthropology provided a serviceable ideological resource. Contributors to Asad's book diverge regarding whether, and to what extent, British social anthropologists actually influenced colonial governance. Yet, they all agree that the discipline's then-hegemonic functionalist theory resonated with the emerging rationale for indirect colonial rule. Previously, European powers had justified direct colonial rule by appealing to an assimilative ‘civilising mission’. The emerging rationale for indirect rule, by contrast, was a protectionist mandate ostensibly geared to conserving culturally defined native identities threatened by the disruptions of colonial modernity.

One of the strengths of Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter is the book's refusal of a one-dimensional caricature of interwar British anthropologists as sycophants of the colonial order (Asad, 1973: 16–18). To be sure, there were among this academic coterie outright imperial reactionaries. Most, however, saw themselves as liberals, and many vocally opposed ‘ideas of cultural and racial superiority among the colonial rulers, local white settlers, and in popular opinion back at home’ (James, 1973: 44). They were, in other words, the ‘progressive’ academics of their day. Yet, while adopting a ‘moral radicalism’ towards the assimilative ‘civilising mission’, these anthropologists by and large remained political moderates towards imperial rule more generally (James, 1973: 44–46). It is in calling attention to this contradiction that Asad's book advances beyond mere polemic—the contradiction of a ‘progressive’ anthropology buttressing colonial resilience in the face of native unrest. As the book's contributors show at length, the contradictory role of these otherwise progressive anthropologists was deeply informed by functionalist theory, which abstracted ‘tribes’ as discrete units of analysis, conceptually independent of world history, capitalist relations and supra-local population dynamics.

My motive for revisiting Asad's book now is to ask what analytical insights it might offer for anthropological engagement with matters colonial in the present. So motivated, I put the book in conversation with Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò's 2022 monograph, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. Táíwò's intervention is but the most extensive of retorts to the recent decolonial turn (see also Larsen, 2022; Okoth, 2021). I thus take it here as exemplifying an emerging critical stance. Táíwò points in his text to certain shortcomings he sees in contemporary scholarly approaches to decolonisation. Specifically, Táíwò argues that, in calling for an epistemological delinking from ‘Western’ thought, contemporary decolonial tendencies assert fetishised notions of cultural difference at odds with the actual epistemological dynamism and cultural hybridity present across the colonised and formerly colonised world. Informed by Táíwò's critiques, I turn to Asad's book to draw out lines of analysis that are, I suggest, of enduring relevance for present-day anthropological discussions around decolonisation. My argument is that Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter remains relevant because contemporary neocolonial relations operate in a manner politically akin to the indirect colonial rule that Asad and his contributors dissected so effectively. And while Táíwò raises some damning critiques of a certain notion of epistemological decolonisation, his dismissal of the neocolonialism thesis and his conceptual uncoupling of imperialism's material and symbolic dimensions prevent him from appreciating a more radical decolonial politics—a much-needed politics in the spirit of Fanon, Cabral and Rodney that demands ideological struggle against the rationalisation of neocolonial political economy. Táíwò thus conflates proponents of epistemological delinking with anti-imperialist revolutionaries who call for ideological struggle against neocolonial self-justifications. For thinking through this more radical decolonial politics, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter remains an important conceptual resource. The book illuminates how interwar anthropology's reification of culture, along with anthropological calls to institutionalise cultural differences among colonised populations, resonated with an imperialist project of incorporating while subverting anticolonial demands. More generally, the book points a way out of binary thinking about decolonisation.

I proceed below by considering the contradictions of direct colonial rule, and the parallel responses to these contradictions by European colonial administrators and interwar British social anthropologists, as elaborated by contributors to Asad's volume. I then turn to Táíwò's text, asking what relevance Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter might have in addressing the limits Táíwò sees in the contemporary decolonial turn.

Contradictions of an assimilative ‘civilising mission’

Colonial rule, writes Partha Chatterjee (1993: 10), was a contradictory phenomenon. It brought to the colonies ‘modular forms of the modern state’. Yet, it remained ‘destined never to fulfil the normalizing mission of the modern state because the premise of its power was a rule of colonial difference, namely, the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group’. This gap between the promise of modernity and its realisation informed enduring dissent to the colonial order – from legal claims to labour strikes to insurrection. Where, for instance, colonial rulers implemented a European code of law, seeking to incorporate colonised peoples as (subordinate) citizens of the colonial state, the latter demanded rights as citizens of the colony and empire (Mamdani, 1996: 37).

For Asad and contributors, the struggles of the colonised were catalytic. They pushed colonial authorities to reconceptualise colonial rule. And they fostered anthropological disquiet over the ‘civilising mission’. Roger Owen (1973: 223), for example, in his chapter, notes the enduring impact of anticolonial insurgency – highlighting, specifically, ‘the stimulus given to British officials by the [Indian] Revolt of 1857’. Stephan Feuchtwang writes similarly of the 1929 ‘Women's War’ in eastern Nigeria, where thousands of women protested colonial taxation, the fall in palm-oil prices and the elimination of Native Courts and the Warrant Chief system. After almost three weeks of conflict, the colonial government ‘had to call in troops to bring it to an end. They shot and killed large numbers of women’ (Feuchtwang, 1973: 126–127). Meanwhile, Richard Brown (1973: 191), in his chapter, writes of the ‘sophisticated industrial tactics’ that African strike leaders employed in labour disputes on the Rhodesian Copperbelt. ‘The explosion of anger by African miners in the strike of May 1935’, writes Brown (1973: 180), ‘led to Northern Rhodesia being given unaccustomed prominence in British newspapers, and it began to be realised that the Copperbelt presented novel problems of industrialisation, which were not to be found elsewhere in British Africa’. More broadly, the interwar years were a moment of burgeoning anticolonial nationalism. This was also, across the colonised world, a time of nascent communist mobilisation. The Communist Party of India, for example, was formed in 1925. And on the African continent, the Communist Party of South Africa and the (original) Egyptian Communist Party were both established in 1921.

Amid this flourishing of anticolonial revolt, British social anthropologists practised a studied ambivalence. Often outspoken in their moral condemnation of direct colonial rule, their politics towards imperialism per se remained moderate. They were, writes Wendy James (1973: 41), ‘reluctant imperialists’. In this regard, Malinowski is exemplary, and he figures as such in numerous chapters. It is, however, in the contributions of James and Feuchtwang that Malinowski serves as a central focus. James (1973: 51) informs us of Malinowski's ‘undoubted desire to shake up the placid colonial establishment’. Malinowski decried, for example, ‘wholesale massacres of natives by whites’, the theft by European colonisers of ‘the best African lands’ and the monopolisation of African ‘economic organization’ in ‘the hands of Western enterprise’ (quoted in James, 1973: 57, 63, 67). Yet, conceptually, Malinowski remained committed to functionalism – to the notion of harmonious, pre-contact cultural wholes. This led him to decry colonial-era African socio-cultural transformation as but ‘disintegration’, for which the ‘cure’ was ‘reintegration’ – a restoration, that is, of an authentic pre-colonial unity (Feuchtwang, 1973: 96).

In the context, however, of growing nationalist and revolutionary movements across the colonised world, Malinowski's ‘moral radicalism’ came to appear ‘increasingly conservative’ (James, 1973: 43). The doyen, writes James (1973: 68), ‘was afraid of extreme [anticolonial] nationalism and the political dangers of its spread, and was not committed to a revolutionary position’. Instead, Malinowski ‘merely suggests some liberal reforms and the need for the continuance of some elements from the traditional past’ (James, 1973: 69). If colonial administrators eschewed such measures, Malinowski warned, the effect would be to ‘drive [colonised peoples] into the open arms of world-wide Bolshevism’ (quoted in James 1973: 54). And so, where countering revolutionary anti-colonialism was the goal, indirect rule was proposed as the means.

Indirect colonial rule as a recuperative project

Indirect rule, Malinowski argued, was to be welcomed, for it would ensure ‘the maintenance of as much as is possible of the Native authority instead of its destruction’ (quoted in Feuchtwang, 1973: 91). This ‘progressive’ preference for indirect colonial rule was shared broadly among Malinowski's contemporary British anthropologists. It was, moreover, a politics that resonated with the discipline's then-dominant functionalist theory. Functionalist anthropologists, Asad (1973: 111) writes, ‘stressed consent and legitimacy as important elements in the political systems of relatively small homogeneous ethnic groups… which were seen and represented as integrated systems’. Understood as integrated systems, colonised ethnic groups were, in an ahistorical functionalism (Forster, 1973: 25), conceptually frozen in time and abstracted from the tumultuous flow of human history. ‘The functionalist anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’, writes Feuchtwang (1973: 83–84), involved ‘a wholesale break’ with the ‘historical (diffusionist) anthropology offered in Britain until the 1920s’.

This theoretical break with historical/diffusionist anthropology is politically significant. Diffusionist anthropology had understood cultural transmission and hybridity as inescapable facets of human social life. Such an understanding informed Robert Lowie's (1920: 441) celebrated remark that cultures are ‘a planless hodgepodge… a chaotic jumble’, which develop through ‘borrowings’ across cultural difference. Where, by contrast, functionalist anthropologists romanticised ‘tribes’ as discrete units of analysis – bounded, homogenous, integrated and consensual – social–cultural transformation was interpreted as but disintegration from without, exclusive of any agentive ‘borrowings’ from within. It was this reified conception of bounded cultural wholes – present, as well, in concurrent US cultural anthropology – that Eric Wolf would later rebuke with his felicitous billiard ball simile. ‘By endowing nations, societies or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects’, wrote Wolf (1982: 6), ‘we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls’. What is more, Malinowski's value-laden discourse of ‘disintegration’ delegitimised cultural hybridity. A particular affront to functionalist sensibilities was the ‘de-tribalized’ African – urban, educated and assertive – who critically engaged European concepts, laws and self-justifications. What indirect rule offered here, Malinowski argued, were ‘ways of avoiding certain new developments in the situation of contact, notable among which is the educated native (who has found voice and judgment) who challenges the colonial right’ (quoted in Feuchtwang, 1973: 92).

Indirect rule, then, whatever the progressive conceits of its advocates, was deeply reactionary. It sought to ‘preserve old forms’ (Owen, 1973: 243). But not just any old forms. Advocates of indirect rule were ‘anxious to incorporate the conservative classes [among the colonised], notably the rural landowners, into the machinery of [colonial] government’ (Owen, 1973: 242). Meanwhile, functionalist anthropologists downplayed the salience of class divisions among colonised peoples, while stressing popular consent to ‘traditional’ elites (Asad, 1973: 105) – elites who were to be incorporated as intermediaries in the colonial order.

Anthropological endorsement of indirect rule, Helen Lackner (1973: 145) writes in her chapter, was also deeply paternalistic. For amid escalating anticolonial revolt, anthropologists sought to ‘protect the natives by maintaining their traditional, pre-colonial institutions’. Yet, ‘tradition’ is not static. While many cultural forms among colonised populations appeared continuous with pre-colonial antecedents, their content had been transformed through insertion into colonial political structures and the extractive circuits of European capital. Indirect rule, then, was less a project of cultural preservation than it was of creation. ‘The object’ of indirect colonial rule, Malinowski proposed, ‘is to create in Native authority a devoted and dependable ally, controlled, but strong, wealthy and satisfied’ (quoted in Feuchtwang, 1973: 92). Under this arrangement, ‘non-Western tradition’ marked not a site outside of coloniality, but instead an alternative modality of colonial rule (Mamdani, 1996: 18)

The reactionary implications of indirect rule did not go unnoticed by colonised peoples. Within burgeoning anticolonial liberation movements, African revolutionaries, writes Ramón Grosfoguel (2021: xxi), were often wary of traditional ‘ways of thinking’ for anticolonial struggles, due to ‘the complicity and collaboration of colonized tribal leaders from pre-modern’ social systems in upholding colonial rule. Anthropologists, in short, were seeking to preserve ‘traditional’ cultural forms that many among the colonised had no interest in preserving.

The original decolonial moment

Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter was published following the mid-twentieth-century success, in terms of formal independence, of most anticolonial liberation movements around the world. It was this world-historical transformation, catalysed by the struggles of colonised peoples, that fuelled disciplinary reappraisals of interwar anthropology. ‘Since the Second World War’, Asad (1973: 12) writes,

fundamental changes have occurred in the world which social anthropology inhabits, changes which have affected the object, the ideological support and the organisational base of social anthropology itself. And in noting these changes we remind ourselves that anthropology does not merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but that the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it.

With the formal independence of most colonised countries, few anthropologists would openly defend colonial rule, indirect or otherwise. Yet, David Price (2016) makes clear in Cold War Anthropology that anthropologists continued to be enrolled in the service of empire, albeit an empire now structured around neocolonialism. The case of Clifford Geertz is illustrative. Price (2016: 96–98, 128–130, 378) documents how the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded, as part of a broader anti-communist strategy, Geertz's fieldwork in newly independent Indonesia, the results of which Geertz published in his 1963 monograph, Agricultural Involution. The book is a Rostovian critique of Sukarno's socialist policies, in which Geertz blamed the country's poverty on collectivist ideology, downplayed the impact of colonial plunder and Cold War ‘relations of dependency’, and called ‘for Western administrators to interrupt the Javanese involuted economic stagnation’ (Price, 2016: 97; see Geertz, 1963: 80, 153). Two years after the book's publication, the US-backed Indonesian army ousted Sukarno, massacred up to a million Indonesians and installed General Suharto as a US client (Bevins, 2020: 155). Geertz later claimed he was unaware the CIA had funded his research (Price, 2016: 96).

Neocolonialism, argued Kwame Nkrumah (1965: 227), is a geopolitical configuration in which metropolitan states employ political, economic, military or other means to enforce – against the interests of another, nominally independent, country's citizenry – unequal transnational relations of value extraction. Aside from direct and indirect military intervention, neocolonial mechanisms include, denounced Thomas Sankara (1988: 65–66, 119–123), conditional loans and donor-driven aid that reproduce relations of political–economic dependency. As Walter Rodney (1990: 59) quipped, neocolonialism was a means to ‘Africanize exploitation’ on the continent by installing amenable client states in the service of metropolitan capital. So understood, neocolonialism operates as a form of indirect rule through a ‘native’ ruling class. Domestic opposition to such arrangements has informed decolonial demands that go beyond formal independence. Walter Rodney's exposition, in the 1970s, of the decolonial project is clear. ‘One has to give a social content, an ideological content to the programme for decolonization’, wrote Rodney (2022: 297).

Whereas decolonization was, some years ago, understood as Africanization, one now has to talk about socialism as an integral part—not a later stage—of the very process of decolonization itself. Without speaking about reorganizing the class relations within Africa, one is not in fact addressing oneself to cutting the reproduction of capitalism as it has reproduced itself in Africa over the last five decades or more.

Neocolonialism is thus an extractive arrangement politically akin to the indirect colonial rule that British anthropologists endorsed in the interwar years. It works, as Malinowski proposed, through ‘Native authority’ by installing endogenous elites as ‘a devoted and dependable ally, controlled, but strong, wealthy and satisfied’ (quoted in Feuchtwang, 1973: 92). Under such conditions, decolonisation requires an egalitarian reorganisation of domestic class relations as means to wrest political control from a comprador elite.

The natives must be decolonised

An imperialist relation can thus endure despite formal independence. Decolonial demands, consequently, have aimed at more than juridical sovereignty. Yet, ‘decolonisation’ has come to have divergent meanings. And in contemporary academia, Rodney's conception of decolonisation remains marginal. In any case, it is not Rodney's conception that Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò centres for critique in Against Decolonisation.

In anticolonial liberation movements, decolonisation was understood as a project of self-emancipation from Euro-American political and economic control. It is from this understanding that more recent conceptualisations diverge. This is especially the case, argues Táíwò (2022: 206), among decolonial theorists who ‘mostly live in the old colonialist redoubts of Europe and America or are forever addressing their main audience there’. As Táíwò (2022: 8) sees it, more recent academic framings of decolonisation have come to imply that any phenomenon appearing to retain ‘Western’ influences ‘must be purged from the postcolonial world’. This would include ‘any and every cultural, political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past’ (Táíwò, 2022: 3). It is this understanding of decolonisation that Táíwò rejects, but not out of any defence the colonial order.

Rather, such an approach to decolonisation, Táíwò argues, is paternalistic, as it dismisses the efforts of the colonised, and of people in ex-colonised countries, to critically engage with, selectively borrow and creatively domesticate ideas from outside their borders, including ideas of ‘Western’ provenance. It is thus puritanical in its refusal ‘to take seriously the complexity of African agency’ (Táíwò, 2022: 183–184). ‘When new elements come into our [African] world’, counters Táíwò (2022: 92), ‘we must expand our linguistic framework to accommodate them and, in so doing, expand our world. We do this by turning old words to new uses, thereby extending their semantic fields or by borrowing concepts from other linguistic registers to capture and make sense of the new reality. In doing so, we simultaneously enlarge our original register by domesticating the new borrowings in it’. With this understanding of cultural transformation, Táíwò (2022: 122–125) advances a theory of epistemological dynamism akin to the diffusionism that interwar functionalist anthropologists notably rejected. A corollary of dismissing such agentive cultural borrowings by the colonised is that colonialism comes to be ‘identified as the only agent of causation in the process of superimposition’ (Táíwò, 2022: 93). So understood, epistemological change in the South can only ever indicate ‘epistemicide’ (Santos, 2014). Present-day academic conceptions of decolonisation thus appear, in Táíwò's characterisation, much like the functionalism of interwar anthropologists, for whom social–cultural transformation was interpreted as but disintegration from without, exclusive of any agentive ‘borrowings’ from within.

The cultural-linguistic borrowing to which Táíwò refers has been a creative process. It has involved the ‘idiomatisation of colonial languages by colonised users’ (Táíwò, 2022: 127). More generally, Africans have creatively made ‘new syntheses informed by both their autochthonous inheritances and those borrowed from other sources’ (Táíwò, 2022: 138). Táíwò's argument here recalls that of Ashis Nandy, for whom cricket, despite the colonial history of its introduction to India, has since become more South Asian than British. ‘Cricket’, writes Nandy (1990: 1), ‘is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English’. It is, then, from an appreciation of dialogic cultural construction that Táíwò rejects a rigid dichotomy between ostensibly distinct cultural spheres. ‘If we accept the Manichean binary represented by the “Western” versus “African” model’, Táíwò (2022: 139) argues,

and insist that any element of the ‘Western’ in the ‘African’… taints the latter as colonial, it is easy to see how such a model is likely to block us from taking seriously the dynamic evolution of social phenomena in any given context. Borrowings in one direction are delegitimised and in the other are labelled thefts. The mutual learning that is standard fare in human interactions… is almost legislated out of consideration.

If cross-cultural borrowings are delegitimised, what then is legitimate? The politics of such a decolonisation, Táíwò (2022: 157) argues, amounts to a reactionary cultural nationalism – a quest for ‘some pristine “African” way of being’. ‘Much of the decolonisation discourse’, writes Táíwò (2022: 87), ‘lends itself to the proliferation of atavistic retrievals and essentialist characterisations of cultures and their manifestations, which have little connection to history’. So understood, decolonisation would involve ‘scouring your inheritance for things that are not contaminated’ (Táíwò, 2022: 89) – a politics expressing ‘an unhealthy preoccupation with origins or an unhelpful attachment to supposed authenticity’ (Táíwò, 2022: 125). The result, Táíwò (2022: 88) concludes, would be ‘a monument to a dead past’.

Such a politics of atavistic cultural retrieval, shorn of alternative ideological moorings, leaves itself open to elite capture. Thus, while many anticolonial African revolutionaries rejected ‘collaborationist and distorted chieftaincies’, contemporary proponents of decolonisation, Táíwò contends, ‘in the name of identity and authenticity, embrace these backward institutions and practices almost without criticism’ (Táíwò, 2022: 151). The case of Walter Mignolo is illustrative. In the name of decoloniality, Mignolo endorsed a text by Hindutva proponent Sai Deepak. Regarding the problematic politics of this move, Priyamvada Gopal has elaborated in detail. ‘Some months ago’, explained Gopal (2022),

we had a book emerging from the belly of the Hindu right-wing, which has embraced, not decolonization, but the idea of the decolonial, and insists that what India needs is a return to Hindu epistemology, to Hindu knowledge, which of course is quite specifically Brahmin epistemology and Brahmin knowledge. And we had Professor Mignolo endorse this book, written by a very hardcore activist of the Hindu right who was, on the face of it, saying the West has been damaging, the West is the oppressor, and that we need to return to Indian sources. And although Professor Mignolo did withdraw his endorsement after an outcry, to me, the question is: why did you endorse this in the first place? And that isn’t just a question of a lack of knowledge of where the author was coming from. Rather, isn’t there something in the idea of the decolonial—to pull out another body of knowledge, to turn to the pre-colonial, to pull out something that isn’t Western and replace the Western by it—that is a ready-made recipe for what happened, which is the failure to question what these so-called non-Western epistemologies are and what their content is.

To illustrate a more critical, dialogic approach to anticolonial thought, Táíwò points to certain exemplary figures, of whom Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral are most notable. Frantz Fanon, Táíwò (2022: 30–31, 61) stresses, sought no ‘illusory pristine past’, nor Amílcar Cabral some ‘spurious authenticity’. Both anticolonial militants instead saw ‘hybridity [as] the very core of human civilisation’ and thus refused ‘atavism, identitarian politics… and other forms of cultural nationalism’ (Táíwò, 2022: 62).

There are, then, certain parallels between the conception of decolonisation that Táíwò critiques and the functionalist framework that British anthropologists deployed in their endorsement of indirect colonial rule, as elaborated in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. Of such parallels, Táíwò is aware. Indirect colonial rule, Táíwò (2022: 212) observes, called for ‘the preservation of African customs whether the Africans wanted such preservations or not’. Likewise, functionalist anthropology construed micro-local social formations as discrete, integrated wholes, while delegitimising ‘borrowings’ across cultural differences. As with functionalist calls for the ‘reintegration’ of harmonious pre-contact cultures, the contemporary decolonial imperative, Táíwò (2022: xvii) writes, ‘seeks to return us to an earlier period of precolonial splendour’. And while not a point that Táíwò raises, Sujata Patel (2021) observes that latter-day theorists of decoloniality, while seeking to articulate ‘alternative epistemologies’, have ‘turned away, unfortunately from political economy and from economic development in decoloniality’. Such being the case, decolonisation would echo the politics of indirect colonial rule, whereby extractive imperial relations remain, but are obscured under a veneer of ‘traditional’ cultural forms.

Decolonisation as an ideological struggle

Insofar as Táíwò is correct in his characterisation of contemporary decolonial discourse, his critique is quite damning. Decolonisation would then be but an atavistic cultural nationalism dismissive of all those who, in colonised and ex-colonised countries, have sought to critically engage with, selectively borrow and creatively domesticate exogenous ideas. The problem, however, is that decolonisation as an enduring demand cannot be reduced to such a project. To suggest that it can is a strawman. There are, to be sure, certain ‘decolonial’ tendencies that approximate what Táíwò is critiquing. Walter Mignolo is again illustrative. In place of Samir Amin's (1987) call for political–economic ‘delinking’, Mignolo (with Walsh, 2018: 7, 44, 106, and passim) proposes decoloniality as an epistemological ‘delinking’ – a fashioning of autonomous ‘houses of thought’ purified of all ‘Western’ ideas. As noted above, such a politics, where ideologically unmoored, leaves itself open to elite capture. That is to say, decolonisation so understood risks being co-opted as but a metaphor for diversity and inclusion under existing property relations (Tuck and Yang, 2012) or worse, by calling for cultural purification against hybridity, as fascist rationalisation. There are, however, more sophisticated positions. And in this respect, Táíwò errs in singling out Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for censure, as I will explain below.

The target of Táíwò's critique is thus a politics akin to the ‘Africanisation’ project that Rodney likewise found inadequate. Yet, Táíwò does not take up Rodney's proposed alternative. This political blockage, I suggest, stems from two notable shortcomings in Táíwò's argument. First, Táíwò downplays neocolonialism as a constraining political–economic formation. Specifically, in considering Nkrumah's writing on the topic, Táíwò rebuffs the claim that something like an imperialist relation can endure in the post-independence period – at least, not under ‘liberal representative democracy’, which Táíwò (2022: 27–29, 218) sees as ‘a self-correcting mechanism’. Yet, in rejecting the neocolonialism thesis, Táíwò misconstrues Nkrumah's argument. Consider the following:

If anybody holds France responsible for her ex-colonies’ decision to tie their currency to the French Central Bank and regards that as evidence that colonisation never ended in those countries, I beg to differ. What were African leaders who signed on to such deals thinking when they did? Yes, they were subject to threats. But we must either hold them liable for their lousy choice or we must assume that they are, one and all, minors who could not say no to their ‘guardians’, the French. (Táíwò, 2022: 47)

In analysing neocolonialism, Nkrumah did not claim that complicit African elites were lacking in agency, as Táíwò (2022: 38) suggests. Nkrumah (1970: 56) argued, rather, that European colonial powers had responded to mass anticolonial struggles by cultivating ‘a new African elite, closely linked with foreign capital’. Such individuals saw their personal interests served through continued foreign investment under the unequal geopolitical arrangement that followed formal independence. These individuals may have acted in the service of imperialism, but they were not ‘dupes’ – a term that Táíwò (2022: 180) incorrectly imputes to the neocolonialism argument.

Curiously, Táíwò (2022: 46) himself provides evidence of a neocolonial relation where he details how, in 1960, the Nigerian government agreed to the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact, ‘which would allow the former colonial power to have a military base in the newly independent country’. Táíwò (2022: 46) rejects seeing this as a neocolonial intervention because, when the pact became widely known, ‘public opinion, led by opposition parties and the new country's intellectuals and students, forced the abrogation of the pact’. Yet, brief though its lifespan may have been, the pact was nonetheless explicitly denounced in Nigeria at the time as a neocolonial manoeuvre (Wyss, 2016: 977). Moreover, comprador Nigerian elites endorsed the arrangement against what the wider population saw as their collective interest. Overturning the pact thus required a popular struggle over the meaning of postcolonial sovereignty – a struggle very much decolonial in character. And while the success of this struggle is historically significant, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) maintains, at present, 34 military bases across the African continent – a significant imperial footprint that has been subjected to extensive domestic opposition (Turse, 2018).

The second shortcoming in Táíwò's argument is his conceptual separation of political/economic decolonisation, on the one hand, from cultural/ideological decolonisation, on the other hand (Táíwò, 2022: 5). ‘These two concepts’, writes Táíwò (2022: 69), ‘are neither continuous nor is there any necessary connection between them’. Decolonisation as political and economic emancipation is a project that Táíwò embraces. But he sees this as having been achieved with the realisation of juridical sovereignty – or ‘flag independence’, as he calls it (Táíwò, 2022: 27). Moreover, as Táíwò sees it, ideological struggle was unimportant even during the pre-independence anticolonial movement. The reason, Táíwò (2022: 75) contends, is that ‘the colonised never accepted’ colonial ideology. Surely, as Táíwò suggests, there were always ‘native’ critiques of the colonial order. But if colonialism's material–ideological force had no impact on the minds of the colonised, then what are we to make of ideological struggles like Steve Biko's Black consciousness movement in apartheid South Africa? ‘The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor’, Biko (1978: 68) asserted at the time, ‘is the mind of the oppressed’. The fact that Biko was murdered for his activism suggests that, at the very least, the apartheid government saw the Black consciousness movement as a threat. Even Amílcar Cabral, whose rejection of atavistic cultural nationalism Táíwò invokes to support his position, argued along such lines. ‘If imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression’, Cabral (1979: 143) argued, ‘national liberation is necessarily an act of culture’.

By analytically uncoupling imperialism's material and symbolic dimensions, such that colonial political and economic domination had no impact on the consciousness of the colonised, Táíwò falls back on a classic Cartesian mind-body dualism – the principle of mental autonomy underpinning rational choice theory, and liberal politics more generally (see Mitchell, 1990). Vijay Prashad counters this with the obverse, materialist position. ‘The only real decolonization’, Prashad (2022) contends, ‘is anti-imperialism and anticapitalism. You cannot decolonize your mind unless you also decolonize the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality’. Prashad may ultimately be correct. But his framing neglects the much-needed role of decolonisation as an ideological struggle that enables anti-imperialist politics—an ideological struggle against the rationalisation of neocolonial political economy.

It is here, by advancing a dialectical argument between these two opposing positions, that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's intervention becomes relevant. Táíwò argues that Ngũgĩ embraces a cultural nationalist politics. ‘Ngũgĩ's identitarian/pedigree-focused approach’, writes Táíwò (2022: 120), ‘is most unhelpful’. But this is a gross misreading of Ngũgĩ's argument. In his influential 1986 monograph, Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ adopts a Nkrumaist critique of neocolonialism and its comprador classes. The African ‘petty bourgeoisie born of the colonial schools and universities’, Ngũgĩ (1986: 20) wrote, ‘looked forward to a permanent alliance with imperialism in which it played the role of an intermediary between the bourgeoisie of the Western metropolis and the people of the colonies’. Against this comprador class, revolutionary African intellectuals, Ngũgĩ asserts, must side with, and write for, the continent's peasant and proletarian majority. This is because popular culture is a critical site of ideological struggle in the revolutionary movement. Comprador elites may deploy ‘traditional’ culture to obfuscate imperialist relations of domination and exploitation, as was the case under indirect colonial rule. But so too, revolutionaries can deploy counter-hegemonic cultural discourse to mobilise mass action against imperialism, as was the case in anticolonial struggles around the world. Thus, Frantz Fanon, with whom Ngũgĩ aligns his politics, argued that, as a vehicle for contesting colonial propaganda, ‘the transistor radio has been transformed into a revolutionary implement as powerful as the gun’ (Gilly, 1965: 7). To be of relevance for mass politics, postcolonial intellectuals must therefore, Ngũgĩ contends, write in the vernacular – languages that are, in Africa, by and large not European in origin. Ngũgĩ's turn to indigenous language is therefore not a conservative move. Nor is his turn to tradition. For Ngũgĩ aligns himself not with ‘tradition’ per se, but with ‘the revolutionary traditions of an organised peasantry and working class in Africa’ (Ngũgĩ, 1986: 29). Such an embrace of endogenous radical traditions is not, in itself, atavistic.

And far from being ‘identitarian/pedigree-focused’, as Táíwò suggests, Ngũgĩ (1993: 22, 24) explicitly endorses cultural ‘cross-fertilization’ and ‘borrowing’, while openly incorporating into his thinking ideas from Marx, Lenin and other European intellectuals (Ngũgĩ, 1986: 13, 54, 63–64, and passim). Here, Ngũgĩ's approach to decolonisation finds support in Achille Mbembe's subsequent writing on the topic. For in defending a decolonial politics, Mbembe (2021: 62–63) similarly repudiates a search for autochthonous authenticity and calls instead for ‘disenclaving theory’. Likewise, Malaysian socialist Syed Hussain Alatas, a key figure in Southern decolonial thought (Moosavi, 2020: 335–336), drew centrally on Marx to contest the imperialist ideology used to rationalise coercive colonial capitalism (Alatas, 1977: 8–10). And finally, Ngũgĩ wrote an enthusiastic foreword to the very book in which Walter Rodney spurned a simplistic notion of decolonisation-as-Africanisation, a project that would merely obscure neocolonial relations of political subordination and value extraction. Decolonisation, Rodney (2022: 297) argued, instead requires a revolutionary reorganisation of domestic class relations so as to wrest political control from a comprador elite and thereby break the imperial relation. It is this decolonial politics that Ngũgĩ (1986: 39) endorsed – a decolonial politics aimed at realising ‘a higher system of democracy and socialism in alliance with all the other peoples of the world’.

Conclusion

On its publication in 1973, Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter shed important light on an elective affinity between interwar functionalist anthropology and indirect colonial rule. European colonial rulers, faced with increasingly restive native populations, sought a new political arrangement that would at once incorporate and subvert anticolonial demands. To this end, functionalist anthropology provided a serviceable ideological resource. By abstracting ‘tribes’ as discrete units of analysis, functionalist anthropology fetishised ‘traditional’ cultural forms in ways that enabled European administrators to incorporate ‘native’ institutions into colonial administrative structures, thereby obscuring enduring relations of colonial domination and exploitation.

In Against Decolonisation, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò targets for critique a particular conception of epistemological decolonisation that parallels the functionalist call to restore ‘traditional’ cultural forms. Yet, by dismissing the neocolonialism thesis, Táíwò misses the enduring relevance of a more radical decolonial politics. He thus conflates proponents of epistemological delinking with revolutionaries who call for ideological struggle against the rationalisation of neocolonial relations. Here, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter offers further pertinent insights, for neocolonialism operates through a ‘native’ ruling class in a manner akin to the indirect colonial rule that Asad and contributors so effectively parsed. Under the neocolonial arrangement, a more radical conception of decolonisation aims at an egalitarian reorganisation of domestic class relations as means to wrest political control from a comprador elite and thereby break the imperial relation. Yet, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argued, this radical conception of decolonisation must nonetheless embrace popular culture as a critical site of ideological struggle in mobilising mass participation against imperialism. By illuminating these matters, Talal Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 50 years since its publication, holds enduring relevance for present-day anthropological discussions about decolonisation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Geoff Aung, Julia Eckert and two anonymous reviewers for their input on earlier iterations of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Stephen Campbell

Stephen Campbell is Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of Border Capitalism, Disrupted: Precarity and Struggle in a Southeast Asian Industrial Zone (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Along the Integral Margin: Uneven Development in a Myanmar Squatter Settlement (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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