African Anti-colonialism in International Relations: Against the Time of Forgetting

Abstract

Africa's condition and position in the world today is routinely described and analysed in terms of weakness, fragility and failure. These categories dominate academic study of Africa's postcolonial condition, especially within IR and cognate fields of political science and development studies, 1 as well as policy and media discourse. Implicit in the broader IR discourse on Africa's "failure" is a rather contemptuous attitude towards and analysis of anticolonialism and decolonization. The tone of much of the mainstream scholarship about postcolonial African statehood and sovereignty implicitly and at times explicitly endorses colonial rule, apparently lamenting the rushed and ill-informed process of independence (for example Hyden 2012).According to Robert Jackson, decolonization is responsible for "bringing into existence a large number of sovereign governments which are limited in their capacity or desire to provide civil and socioeconomic goods for their populations" (Jackson 1990: 9). This attitude ensues from the discipline's failure not only to acknowledge the centrality of colonialism and its legacies to the making of the modern international order, but also to consider colonialism and anticolonialism in theoretical terms, as experiences and relationships of international relations which demand serious critical reflection (Grovogui 2001). This chapter develops this line of argument by focusing on notions of time and historical temporality. Scholars have recently started to expose how discipline of IR has long examined world politics and the international without reflecting critically on assumed and historically specific structures of and ideas about time (Hutchings 2008;Hom 2010;Agathangelou and Killian 2014a). The result is that dominant Western notions of time and history remain entrenched within contemporary analyses of international relations. As Andrew Hom points out, "excluding time from academic investigations of social phenomena prolongs and empowers its hidden influence"

Between appropriation and assassination

“…Indeed, “decolonisation” and “decolonising” have emerged in the last three or four years as a standard organising theme for mainstream academic conferences in the social sciences, albeit not without considerable critique of the appropriative tendencies of the rhetorical moves – including “moves to innocence” (Tuck and Yang, 2012) – affected through such gatherings (Esson et al , 2017; Noxolo, 2017; Bhambra et al , 2018, p. 4). In facing imperial collusions and seeking decolonised alternatives, Branwen Gruffydd Jones (2006) argues against wilful ignorance and other “moves to innocence” (Tuck and Yang, 2012) towards the kind of shame Edward Said identified for critical scholars working within hegemonic institutions: “an acute and embarrassed awareness of the all-pervasive, unavoidable imperial setting” (Said, 1995, p. 34). And perhaps some of these syllabi are already, as I write, being soundly decolonised and their “disturbing complacencies” (Varadharajan, 2019, p. 183) being rethought.…”