In 2025 the President of Burkina Faso told the West: ‘Before your missionaries, we knew the language of the rivers and the laws of the sacred forest’ (Black Rebellion 2025, at 06:20). The irony was lost on him that he delivered this message from the gilded halls of Putin’s neo-imperial Russia while donning an Order of Saint George ribbon, a symbol of contemporary military aggression. Yet, his words do carry certain weight for the praeter- colonial mind. Indeed, the writer and intellectual Joaquín trujillo Silva, one of the finest pens the land of Chile has ever produced and another great example of the praeter-colonial mind, once wrote about imperialism: ‘what is a conquest? It is the moment when an “other” arrives and everyone feels compelled to speak to them in their language’ (Trujillo 2019, 268).

Another author, the Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, once included a ‘Statement’ in his famous book Decolonising the Mind that is reflective of Trujillo’s characterization of linguistic conquest in all its gentle brutality:

> This book, Decolonising the Mind, is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now on it is indeed Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili all the way. Though, I hope that thru the age old medium of translation I shall be able to continue dialog with all'(Thiong’o 2005, xiv).

why would an internationally acclaimed author ever say something like this? This statement is perplexing to someone who has chosen English as the preferred vehicle to convey all the ideas about the praeter-colonial mind contained in this book in the hope that they may reach a larger audience, while Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o essentially writes a breakup letter to english in the preliminary pages of Decolonising the Mind. Why do that? Writers trade in words, so giving up an entire language as a tool to practice the wordsmith’s craft is a choice no author would ever make lightly, especially if it entails giving up the tool to express ideas, today’s lingua franca. Only a prior abusive relationship with English can prompt such a radical decision to break all bonds with what has hitherto been experienced as familiar – perhaps too familiar.

That is exactly what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o denounces in Decolonising the Mind, when he reflects on the pernicious effects of colonialism and the spiritual subjugation of his native Africa:

> The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their habitat, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non- achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; as an example, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own (Ibid, 2).The way the cultural bomb is deployed by imperial powers is less physical and more psychological, as he further explains:

the Shadow of the Past: Anti-Colonial Ideations and the Allure of ‘Reverse Colonialism’

Ideations of anti-colonial resistance often give rise to captivating, and sometimes unsettling, thought experiments. Some examples manifest as ‘reverse colonialism’ or ‘revenge colonialism’ – counter-narratives of alternate history where the oppressed become the oppressors, subjugating their former masters.Laurent binet’s Civilizations offers one such vision, imagining the Incas conquering Europe, including Spain and the Holy Roman Empire (Binet 2019). Similarly,Raoul Peck’s Exterminate All the Brutes (HBO 2021) includes jarring scenes of Black slave traders dominating white captives,a deliberate provocation designed to challenge Western imperialist narratives.

These narratives are fueled by a profound anti-colonial sentiment,a deep-seated ’empirephobia’ as María Elvira Roca terms it (Roca 2020). This drives a desire not merely for liberation, but for a reversal of fortune, a counter-subjugation of former oppressors. It echoes Said’s concept of ‘Occidentalism’ as a reaction to ‘Orientalism’ (Said 1994, 349; Massad 2015), a means of asserting authority over the West by redefining it. Though, as Gandhi wisely cautioned, “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.” We cannot afford to be consumed by anti-colonial rage, especially when a ‘praeter-colonial mind’ requires nuanced understanding of the historical paths that have led us to the present.

revenge of the Nerds

A New Year’s Eve gathering with Chilean friends studying at Oxford University brought this dynamic into sharp focus. We found ourselves deeply engaged in discussions of Anglo-Saxon thinkers like bernard Williams, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin – a natural consequence of studying within that academic tradition. yet, the familiarity of the conversation was striking. We had engaged in similar debates, analyzing the same figures, years prior in Chile.

It felt as though our intellectual space, our Hispanic rescue, had been re-colonized by Anglo-Saxon academia. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s concept of the ‘cultural bomb’ resonated – its impact had been subtle, yet pervasive. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in legal theory and international law. A Spanish legal philosopher, speaking in chile, once urged a rediscovery of Latin american scholarship, highlighting the strength of certain Chilean thinkers – figures, I shamefully admit, about whom I knew little.

Our debate unfolded within a context already aware of such controversies. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, originating in South Africa in 2015, had spread to the UK (Chaudhuri 2016).At Oriel College, Oxford, a statue of Cecil Rhodes, a notorious British colonizer, stands as a potent symbol of this ongoing debate.

The Perils of Premature Delinking

the sources he had to use, then, to tell the story of the evolution of a field of knowledge, international law, are all fairly homogenous. There have been in recent times some attempts at diversifying said sources,and I will come back to these new approaches later. For now, I can say that my own academic journey has led me to rediscover some of those voices from the periphery that have been hitherto ignored or forgotten. I think of a study I conducted alongside my colleague Daniel Brunstetter on the role the Tlaxcalteca tribe played in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, as they sided with the conquistadors in a remarkable exercise of agency to get rid of the colonial yoke of a local empire, the Aztecs (Brunstetter and Lobo 2024). I also think of a work of literary analysis where I combine Chilean and Ukrainian epic poetry from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to identify commonalities and themes about empire and national identity (Lobo 2024). All of this has resulted, I believe, in me becoming a more knowledgeable scholar without having to sacrifice an inch of the precious western canon every academic is obligated to cite to be taken seriously.

And yet, it is indeed also necessary to mention the downside of decolonizing the curriculum if it happens to be implemented in the wrong way. Walter D.Mignolo calls ‘decoloniality’ the process beginning after the Cold War, whereby the ‘colonial Matrix of Power’ is dismantled such that formerly oppressed peoples may ‘delink to re-exist, which implies relinking with the legacies one wants to preserve in order to engage in modes of existence with which one wants to engage’ (Mignolo 2017, 40-41). Simultaneously occurring, Fanon points out how one of the first effects of decolonization is ‘the remarkable flight of capital’ from the former colonies (Fanon 1963, 103). What if that drain also includes human capital? What if it backfires and by forcibly ‘delinking’ our systems of knowledge from the Western canon we stunt the progress of our best minds out of an obsession with reconnecting with our roots, whatever that means?

This kind of anti-colonial driven brain-drain is already happening in Russia, where the government’s openly anti-Western rhetoric and policies have pushed skilled workers out of the country (Smith 2023). This includes Russian scientists, who cannot do research anymore in the lingua franca of science, English, as their government has forbidden them to publish in international journals (Fazackerley 2022). Now we won’t be able to access their findings, and they have increasingly less access to ours, thus undeniably hurting the accumulated knowledge of humankind. Has it been worth it to ‘decolonize the Russian curriculum’ if we are all dumber for it?

The Post is Passé

timothy Snyder recently remarked: ‘The central political problem of the twenty-first century is: what to do after empire?’ (Ukraine World 2024,at 21:19).Accordingly, Robert D. kaplan has pointed out that today ‘the imperial mindset is experiencing a disturbing afterlife’ (Kaplan 2023, xvii). but what dose the ‘post’ mean in ‘post-colonial’ anyway?

Back in the early 1990s,

Published: 2025/11/16 11:49:16