Summary
Decolonising the mind means undoing colonialism’s hold on how people think, speak and see themselves, even after foreign rule ends. The phrase is the title of a 1986 book by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who located that hold in language. Colonialism, he said, turns learning around: “you do not start with where you are, but with where you are not”. Jailed after staging a play in Gĩkũyũ, he went on to write his fiction in it. Earlier, in 1909, Gandhi rejected a freedom that meant “English rule without the Englishman”; Frantz Fanon ended ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ (1961) urging the Third World not to imitate Europe.
Rationale
Our articles dwell on the conditions that keep dispositions in place. Gandhi and Ngũgĩ supply the converse: the rulers can go and the rule carry on, in the habits of mind they left.