Personal Reflections on Decolonization
Decolonization for me has been a matter of looking back, looking in, looking out, and finally looking ahead. Especially to my childhood years when in elementary school, we would have a horn hung around our little necks if we “broke English” by mixing it with our ethnic languages. It became a game throughout the day and the horn would get passed around to the next boy or girl.
It never occurred to me that was part of the process by which I got to learn English – through a process that made little children believe Indigenous languages were inferior. To this day, I still see this struggle reflected even at my place of work with the politicians whenever they rise to give a statement on the Floor of the House, and some of them struggle with English often attracting giggles, even though English is a third language or fourth for many Kenyans.
Today, I am not very good at speaking my ethnic language Dholuo. Neither am I at speaking English. My grandmother used to correct my Dholuo tenses all the time. My mother still does to this very day. For me now, I am undergoing some kind of reverse struggle, trying to (re)learn Dholuo, while also struggling oftentimes, to get a point across in English. It’s the irony of life. As Taiwo notes, “the schizophrenia-like condition brought about by going to school in one language and leading our non-school lives in another is one that we’ll carry with us forever” (Taiwo, 2022). “How did we get here?” As a Kenyan, the discourses of Mau Mau and colonialism is something we are familiar with. However, this familiarity is at the surface level. Piecing information together during my doctorate research, I started to discover a pattern in terrorism and security that I had been blind to all these years.
The pattern of coloniality manifested mainly through intellectual imperialism. However, stepping out of my research, it became clear that as much as I write about intellectual imperialism in counterterrorism, I am also a product of the same system, having been trained on the very foundations of Eurocentric knowledge. How can I then be vociferous about indigeneity being part of the process? I am conflicted, almost feeling stuck between the two worlds.
Looking in and confronting my own biases, I discover that just like many others, I am on a decolonization journey especially one that involves decolonization of the mind. Looking out, my journey becomes a process, not a destination. Looking ahead, every day is still a learning process. Decolonization is not an easy process. It is combative in all aspects and requires a lot of humility in accepting to change course, un(learning) and (re)learning that sometimes the solutions we are looking for, or even going abroad to find, are often close to home.
(Excerpt borrowed from: 𝘛𝘰𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘐𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘈𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘰 𝘊𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘪𝘯 𝘒𝘦𝘯𝘺𝘢. pg. 247).