Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 10: The Colonial Hangover

In Chapter 10 of the series, Chisom turns to coloniality, the empire that stayed behind after the empire left, the quietest form of the machine and the one that leaves no graves because it no longer needs them. Colonialism was the occupation, the flag and the date it ended. Coloniality is what did not end, the ranking installed in the mind and left running, and the chapter’s line is that the wrong is never the contact but the ranking bolted to it. It walks that ranking through six rooms, the language you think in, the god you answer to, the face in the mirror, what counts as knowledge, the map with Europe at the top, and the shape of what you want, crediting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Aníbal Quijano, and it refuses to let the word soften, because the ranking was installed by force, the sediment the violence left once it had finished with the body, which is why it still carries the word white terrorism. It proves the intent was written down, by Verwoerd building Bantu Education in 1953 and Macaulay in 1835, names the gendered ranking through Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and closes on the smallest freedom in this episode, that seeing coloniality does not delete it but converts the reflex from a master into a choice, with Chisom admitting it is still in her, and that she expects to be digging it out for the rest of her life.

Transcript

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So if you've come to this episode first, before the nine that came before it, here's the thing I want you to hold so the rest of this will make sense. When this episode says white terrorism, it is not calling white people terrorists. It is naming a structure, a machine built across five centuries to take a world and to rank the people on it so that the taking would be lawful. And the word white points to the design of that machine and not necessarily at the skin of whoever happens to be working it. I think especially for this episode, it's important that we hold that line. The episodes before this one dealt with the loud forms of the machines, so the grave under the church runs goals, the bodies in the water, the invention of race in labs, the border that kills by design. Those are the parts that we can see, the parts that leave evidence, the parts a person can point at and be horrified by. This episode is about a quieter, perhaps the quietest form. It's subtle and it's the most complete, the part of the machine that leaves no graves because it no longer needs them. Because it has moved into the one place where graves are never required. It has moved into our heads. It has become the way we see and it works on the people who can see too, including this person, myself, who is talking about this right now, which is the first thing to understand about it, and the reason no one gets to stand outside it and point fingers. Colonialism was the occupation. It had soldiers and a flag and an administrator, a place you could point to on the map and a date in the history books that hands you when it supposedly ends. Nigeria in 1960, India in 1947. The flags came down, the governor sailed home, the maps were recolored. And the world agreed that this thing was finished. But it was not finished. I think a lot of this episode(series) has mapped how it continues to organize the past, the present, and also the future. And beyond what is not finished, there is something that stayed. The occupation ended on paper in most places, and its logic did not, because the logic had been installed too deep to leave with the soldiers. It has been installed in the mind, in the mouth, in the mirror, in the very idea of what a good life is. The whole argument turns on one distinction. The charge is not that anything foreign arrived. Things have always arrived, cultures have always met and borrowed and remade each other, and there is nothing colonial about contacts as such. The charge is that the arriving came inside a ranking, a hierarchy that fouled the colonizers' language and God and knowledge and face above the ones already there. And that is the ranking, not the contact that stayed behind. Keep that line in your hand as you listen to this through everything that follows. The wrong is never that the English came or that the medicine or that the faith. The wrong is the order in which they were filed And in the fact that we are still filing by it. I know that it's alright fused, that you cannot in practice take the antibiotics without the system that certified it, or the English without the ranking that carried it, in this context, pulling contact apart from hierarchy in the historical record is often impossible. So the work is not to separate them in history. The work is to separate them in judgment, to keep the thing and refuse the other it came bolted to. So let's start with the mouth because I am essentially caught in the act as I speak in this podcast. And so are many of you who are listening to me. I am speaking in English and English is my first language. The one I think in, the one I dream in, the one I argue in. And that is true for a particular slice of the formerly colonized world. I mean, not most of it, because most of the colonized world is multilingual and holds its mother tongue still. I mean, I speak several languages. But look at what English is in our mouths, the fluence and the halting alike. It is the tongue that opens the door. in many contexts, it is the one that you must have to be hired, to be published, to be believed, to be taken for a serious person, while the mother tongue is the one you switch out of when the room turns official. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o named this about four decades ago in the book Decolonizing the Mind. Basically, the moment the colonized child learns that his or hers or their own language is the tongue of the playground. And the punishment and the colonizers is the tongue of the future and the reward. The Empire did not need to erase the other languages. It only ranked them to make one the ladder and the rest the ground. And then to leave. And the ranking went on climbing without it. And naming this changes none of my fluency. I see the hierarchy plainly, and I still write, speak, dream in English, because English is still the language that to a large degree organizes the world. It is the language that reaches. Which is precisely the difficulty. None of it is undone by being seen. That is what marks it as something built into you and me and not merely a habit that we could drop. Now let's move to the gods. The point is not the truth of any faith in particular, which I have no standing to weigh and I have no interest in weighing. The point is the ranking of the faith. Christianity arrived in much of Africa on the ships, in the way episode seven, I believe, described in this series. And Islam arrived across other parts of the continent centuries earlier by trade and by conquest of its own. So more than one empire did this, and I'm not laying it only at Europe's door. but watch the gods that survived. They're usually the imported gods, whichever one. They became simply God, the unmarked case. while the God who was there before became juju or fetish or Superstition, the missionary's vocabulary kept and repeated now by the descendants of the very people it was coined against. So ask which faith was called a religion and which a belief system, which gets a cathedral and which gets a glass case in a museum, which was probably also stolen, which is worshipped and which is studied. A person can hold an important faith with a whole and sincere heart, as millions do. And the ranking still runs on over their heads in the definitions deciding whose God is a God and whose is a curiosity. The hierarchy never needed the missionary to stay in the country, it only needed them to stay in the dictionary. now let's look at the mirror. In episode eight, I covered the racial ladder, basically the ranked coming to believe the ranking. And this is where that ladder goes on leaving long after the science that invented it has been discredited. It lives in the skin lightning cream sold on every corner from Lagos to Manila to Mumbai. A market worth billions built on the promise of being less of what you are. It lives in what is considered professional, how you show up in the world, how you present, how you dress. To things like the nose judged too wide, the features called ethnic or exotic, as though somewhere there were a face that was simply a face, the default, and every other face a departure from it. Listen, in one of my previous podcasts, I think it was maybe last year or earlier this year, I had on Dr. Yaba Blay and she reframed something for me about skin lightening. And I have come to see and believe that frame because The woman lightening her skin is very often making a clear eyed calculation about a world that really would treat her better for being a lighter shade. that is not false consciousness. It is an accurate reading of a rigged room. And she is not necessarily a fool for making it. That is the cruelty of it. The ranking is real enough that acting on it is rational and every rational act of accommodation tightens the ranking one more turn. What is rigged is not the woman's choice, it is the room that makes that choice make sense. now let's herbalist what is allowed to count as knowledge. Some of what the colonizer brought genuinely works better. The antibiotic, sure. It does what a lot of things before it could not do. And the herbalist - and the vaccine is not equal in the one thing a medicine is for, which is keeping you alive. Pretending they are gets people killed. It is its own kind of colonized thinking, the romantic kind that flatters the past instead of facing it. The crime is not that Western knowledge sometimes wins. The crime is who was handed the sole authority to judge the contest. and the thousand-year-old medicine is traditional medicine or folklore. Before either is tested by default, by the ranking. The colonizers record of the past is history and the griot's is oral tradition, the softer and smaller word, What gets to be called science, evidence, rigour and what gets filed under belief and custom and myth is decided by institutions the empire built and languages the empire left, so that a body of knowledge is treated as guilty until a Western authority certifies it as innocent. The Empire did not only bring things that worked, it kept for itself the right to decide what counts as working. And that monopoly and not the antibiotics is where the ranking lives and exists. Now let's widen out that picture to the map itself. We carry in our heads a map with Europe at the center and near the top, drawn by people for whom Europe was the center and the top. And we call it, without a second thought, the map of the world. We measure every country against a thing called development. Some of what development measures is not colonial at all. A child surviving to five, a mother surviving the birth, clean water, electricity, the ability to read, These are close to universal human goods, these are basic human rights, and no amount of theory should ever be permitted to sneer at a well that works, that has clean water, or a vaccine that reaches a village. The wrong is not in wanting children to live my gosh, I want children to live everywhere they exist. I'm talking about here is the move that fixes the colonizers' entire way of living. Its dress and its diet and its family shape and its cities and its faith as the single destination the whole species of human being is working towards. So that a society is graded not on whether its people are fed and free and happy and thriving, but on how closely it has come to resembling Europe. Progress became a synonym for westernization. Civilized became a synonym for European. Listen, the scale that measures the fed child is an absolutely fair scale. The scale that measures the whole of your life against one small corner of the world and reads the distance as your backwardness is a rigged one. And it reaches finally into what we want. The brightest child in Lagos and Dakar and Accra still dream very often of leaving of the visa, of the life understood without anyone having to say it to be more real and larger somewhere in the old metropole. And part of that wish is simply correct because the Metropole really does hold more, especially with bad governance, corrupt systems, failing institutions. The Metropole holds the schools and the salaries and that sense of safety. It holds them in part though because they were taken from the colonized world So the child who wants to follow the wealth is not deluded. She is following the weld to where it went. But there is a second layer beneath the rational one. And that layer is the ranking, the half-buried belief that the center is not merely richer but more real. that consequence and seriousness and true life happens there, and only echo in the countries that have been colonized. That to arrive in the countries that have colonized is to become a full person. And to remain in countries that have been colonized is to remain a smaller one. The economics of the wish is sound. The metaphysics of it, the part that ranks the human being by postcode, is the part that was installed. And there is a ranking I've not given its own register or airtime here, though it runs beneath every one of them. And because it is its own series and its own book, and not a paragraph necessarily in this one, but I do want to say that colonialism did not only rank the races, it installed a gender order. The Victorian arrangements of men and women carried in and laid over societies that had ordered themselves. along other lines entirely. The Nigerian sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi argues that in Yoruba society before the British, seniority, not gender, was the organizing principle, that the language itself did not cut the world into man and woman, way English insist upon, and that woman as a fixed and lesser category was in significant part a colonial import. installed through the same instrument as everything that has been covered in this series and this episode, the law, the mission, the school. I mean, we see similar claims in different nations and groups now known as ethnic groups like the Igbo people and other nations across the African continent and beyond. I think this topic alone of gender earns an entire series of its own, and I will consider doing one. But I just wanted to name that here because if this episode never once named the installation of gender, it would perform the very erasure it exists to expose. And I'm not about that. That said, there is a word for all of this and that word is coloniality. And it is not mine. The Peruvian sociologist Annibal Quijano named the coloniality of power a generation ago. And Nelson Maldonado Torres and Walter Mignolo. Sharpen the distinction I have been leaning on this entire episode. The difference between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism was the occupation, the soldiers and the flag and the dates it ended on paper. Coloniality is what did not end. The ranking the occupation built and then left running in the language and the God and the mirror and the definition of knowledge and the shape of ambition, so thoroughly installed that it now feels like reality itself rather than a thing that was made. by particular people for particular propos. colonialism was the crime. Coloniality is the crime scene that became the neighborhood lived in so long by so many that so many of them can no longer see it as a scene anymore. It is simply how we live. It is simply how things are. The concept Coloniality has been discussed and expanded since in so many mind opening ways, and I am giving credit to where that comes from. What I do want to say, or perhaps add to the discourse, is a placement. This episode has tracked one specific machine across now 10 episodes, and coloniality is the same machine. The one, the graves and the borders and the invented race belongs to, seen at a later stage. Quijano named the water. My narrower claim is where the water sits in the life of the thing, that this is not a separate subject standing beside white terrorism, but white terrorism itself arrived in one of its final forms. And here's the part that makes this the business of this episode and not a lament for lost authenticity. If you return to the line I asked you to hold earlier, coloniality is not the contact, it is the ranking that arrived with it. And two things about the ranking have to be said plainly because this series or these episodes, also hardest words, rests on them. The first thing is that the ranking was installed by force, not offered as an idea. Nothing in this chapter is soft power that arrived by polite suggestion. The mission schools was not an imitation. It was an instrument and the child who spoke his own language in its yard was punished for it. And the society that refused the new order was broken to it by the same guns and families and prisons the earlier chapters have counted. Coloniality is not the gentle cousin of white terrorism, it is what that terror left behind in the mind once it has finished its work on the body. The sediment of the violence, the shape. The fear took after the fear itself had gone quiet. That is why it still carries the naming of white terrorism because it was installed by white terrorism. The second is that a great deal of it was not accident but design written down on purpose by men who told us plainly what they were doing. in 1953, introducing the Bantu Education Act that would school generations of Black South Africans into servitude, Hendrik Verwoerd probably butchered his last name, soon to be the country's prime minister, said there was no place for the African in the European community above the level of certain forms of labor, and asked what use they were in teaching an African child mathematics. It will never be permitted to use. old mission schooling he complained had misled the African child by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he was not allowed to graze. And he built a system to make certain the child will never again mistake those pastures for his own. Not the word he reached for without thinking, European. He used it as the whole of the white South Africa used it as the plain synonym for white, which is the argument of this specific chapter spoken aloud by a man building the machine. A century before him and half a world away, Thomas Babington Macaulay had drawn the same blueprint for India, that the Empire should form a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect, a buffer that would go on ruling in the empire's image long after the empire itself had sailed home. Two men, two continents, and two centuries apart, describing the same plan in almost the same words. The occupation of the mind understood by its own architects as the conquest that would outlast the flag. That is not an emergent drift. Some of it did settle in by structure, by market, by mirror, with no one to sign it, but enough of it was drawn up on paper that we can finally retire the comfort of believing that no one meant it. They absolutely meant it. Someone meant it. It is written and documented in fact. They wrote it down. And they signed their names. And the design worked, which is the last thing to see. What was put in by force and by forethought no longer needs either to keep running. this is the machine as is most complete. not the graves which need killers, and not the burden which needs guards, but the form that needs nothing further, because it has become the water, self-reinforcing, handed down from parent to child as nothing more than the way the world is. The terror no longer has to be performed because the ranking it has installed has quietly become the common sense of some of the ranked. And I have to say that it was also never total, which is a thing this episode has to note, because a portrait of a flawless installation is its own kind of erasure. The colonized then painted as empty vessels who simply took the programming, when in truth they resisted at every single turn. They kept the languages that the schools tried to shame out of them. They hid the old gods inside the new saints. the histories the textbooks denied and built out of the collision itself whole new tongues and fates and music that were neither the colonizers nor the ancestors, but a third thing, alive and defiant. Coloniality is Powerful, but it is not omnipotent. and the very fact that it has to be resisted, that it can be resisted, that it can be seen and named and fought is the proof that it is a structure and not a law of nature. I mean because no one has ever had to resist gravity, at least I hope not. You resist a thing. That was built, you endure a thing that simply is. This coloniality was built. and it's not Africa's alone, which is something I can say as someone who is African, as someone who is Nigerian, as someone who hosts this podcast. I can say it plainly to keep the argument from shrinking into any sense of private grievance. Coloniality is the water the whole formerly colonized world swims in. The Filipino nurse trained from start for export. The Indian engineer coached to sand down the accents that will mark him on a call. The whole Global South measuring itself against a center it did not choose and steadily learning to find itself wanting. The structure went everywhere the empires went, and the empires went nearly everywhere, and it stayed on after all of them, which is the deepest reason the operators of the machine can now be anyone in any color at all. Coloniality installed the ranking beneath every one of them. Once the ranking is inside everyone, colonizer and colonized together, the machine no longer cares in the slightest whose hands are on it. there is a cruelty in this that I don't think the other episode named with specificity. A junta can expel a soldier. It's hard to throw out an occupier who is not occupying you but has become you, who lives in your first language and the answered prayer and the face in the mirror and the ambition you are proudest of. There is no flag left to lower. And the answer is not self hatred and it is not an impossible scrubbing down to a pure original. The answer is the same as the whole series has been working towards. And I have to be honest about how small it is. Because I said earlier that coloniality is not undone by being seen. And that sits in an apparent contradiction with the freedom I am about to offer. So let me just resolve it rather than leave it hanging. Seeing does not delete the reflex. It converts the reflex from a master into a choice. You might still feel the pull towards what is considered norm by Western standards and what is not appropriate if it is not Western. The pull does not switch off because we have named it, but feeling it while naming it is a different condition from feeling it as nature. That is the whole modest freedom that I can offer here. It's not necessarily a hundred percent liberation or a hundred percent cleansing, but it is an end of being run without your knowledge, to see the thing clearly, to know that what feels like nature was actually built, that what feels like your own taste and your own faith and your own common sense was in part installed. by particular people, Some of who wrote down that they were doing it For the particular purpose of making the theft of your world feel normal to you. And pass unremarked. You do not have to tear the house down, but you can stop mistaking it as a fact of life or fact of nature or weather. Name it accurately. Coloniality is the empire that stayed behind after the empire left. and you can finally see it, And a thing that you can see is a thing that you can at least begin to make a choice about, which is the single freedom this whole structure of white terrorism was built to keep many of us from. and I will not stand outside this and point, you know. I have spent years on these questions, turning this framework on my own life, interrogating my positionality and the systems of belief I was handed, the most honest thing I can say is that coloniality is still very much in me. That is my baseline assumption. It is not a thing I have cleared and now can diagnose in others from a safe distance, but it's a thing that I carry in tastes that I did not choose, in assumptions that I catch myself while I'm making and saying them, in systems of beliefs that I hold on to when I find out a little bit too late, and in reflexes, I am still learning to see and unlearn. the work of excavating it does not end. I'm not sitting here recording this podcast from the far side of it. I'm recording from inside it, still digging, still actively working to exorcise it from myself. And I expect to be digging for the rest of my life. The empire that occupied the land eventually left. The empire that occupied the mind, arguably never did. And it does not need soldiers because it has us. It lives in the language we think in and the gods we answer to in the face we prioritize and look at in the mirror and in the life. We were taught to want. I will not and cannot pretend that I stand outside of it. It is in me too. I am still digging it out, as I said. And I think I'd be doing this work forever. And for me, that is not a sense of despair. It is the work because a thing you can finally see is a thing you can finally begin to choose about. And that choice is one of freedom. This entire structure of white terrorism was built to. keep us apart from and away from. for me, I am 100% committed to continue to learn, unlearn, and relearn whatever I need to to continue to choose consciously and intentionally. Alright. So this is where I leave this one. Sit with it. Argue with it, I learned a lot from y'all, so let me know what you think. Challenge my thinking, expand it. That's what this is for. And as usual, if this is kind of thinking you want more of, I write a weekly newsletter called The Weekly Clarity and you can find all the details in the show notes. And as always, I will end by saying that clarity for me is always about accountability. It's not about shaking trees. It's just really about the work of taking responsibility and being accountable for how we show up in the world and how we also impact those around us. So and here's the ask. Share this episode widely to people you think need to hear it and also to your network. subscribe to Overnight Wisdom wherever you get your podcast so the next episode finds you. I am Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom. And I am so glad to have you here.