Decolonization has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West's direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing 'morality' or 'authenticity;' it suffocates African thought and denies African agency.
Olúfemi Táiwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of 'decolonization' to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonization industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds 'decolonization' of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society's foundations. Worst of all, today's movement attacks its own cause: 'decolorizers' themselves are disregarding, infantilizing and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.
This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today's 'decolonization' truly serves African empowerment. Táiwò's is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesizers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.
Reparations for slavery have become a reinvigorated topic for public debate over the last decade. Most theorizing about reparations treats it as a social justice project-either rooted in reconciliatory justice focused on making amends in the present; or, they focus on the past, emphasizing restitution for historical wrongs. Olúfemi O. Táiwò argues that neither approach is optimal, and advances a different case for reparations-one rooted in a hopeful future that tackles the issue of climate change head on, with distributive justice at its core. This view, which he calls the 'constructive' view of reparations, argues that reparations should be seen as a future-oriented project engaged in building a better social order; and that the costs of building a more equitable world should be distributed more to those who have inherited the moral liabilities of past injustices.
This approach to reparations, as Táiwò shows, has deep and surprising roots in the thought of Black political thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr, and Nkechi Taifa, as well as mainstream political philosophers like John Rawls, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Anderson. Táiwò's project has wide implications for our views of justice, racism, the legacy of colonialism, and climate change policy.
