OPINION:
DECOLONIZATION: A SHORT HISTORY
By Jan C. Hansen and Jurgen Osterhamme
Translated by Jeremiah Riemer
Princeton University Press, $27.95, 252 pages
The authors of this book translated from the German refer in their preface to the word they have used as their title as a “pallid term,” but there is nothing pallid about the subject or their discussion of it. What they go on immediately to say about it indicates not just its complexity but the questions it evokes:
“A plethora of meanings, ambiguities, conflicting memories, and completing narratives makes it the focus of political and scholarly disagreements. Was decolonization essentially about obtaining independence from alien rule, or at least to the same degree about economic or cultural self-determination? Is it tied to colonialism as a system of rule, or does it apply to non-colonial contexts? When did it start, or when, if ever, did it end? … And, in hindsight, was it a failure or a success? Are a great deal of the current problems in the world to be blamed on a botched or incomplete decolonization?”
Immediately, it is apparent that this is a work not only valuable for its discussion of the topic, but for placing it in a context sorely needed in today’s hydra-headed discussions of the term and the word from which it is derived.
Inevitably, Anglophone readers tend to think of colonialism as a largely British phenomenon. How could we not after being endlessly reminded that “the sun never set on the British Empire” or that it occupied a huge slice of the world? Not to mention being bombarded with seemingly endless portraits of the Indian Raj on page and screen? Even our most recent ex-president focused attention on decolonization in Kenya, with his own complex paternal involvement in the process.
So it’s not surprising that even Americans associate colonialism with the British rather than our own mercifully brief foray into at it at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps this book’s greatest virtue is reminding us of what a global phenomenon it was by concentrating on the vast French colonial empire, as well as the Portuguese, German, Japanese and, yes, American realms.
“Decolonization” also traces the sometimes ludicrous echoes of this product of a previous age of globalism in our present version of it. It refers pointedly “to a special committee of the United Nations updating year after year a list of countries awaiting their release into independent statehood” — even now. It mentions the 1982 Falkland Islands war to maintain colonial rule by Britain and its conclusion in Hong Kong 15 years later, but I for one would have welcomed discussion of the special reasons why such islands as Bermuda and St. Helena, among a surprising number of others, remain colonies.
Similarly, I think the authors underestimate the part played by the notion of Pan-Africanism in not just accelerating but even enabling independent nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Without the seminal 1945 Pan African Congress held in Manchester, England — not mentioned here — I doubt that the “Wind of Change,” which struck British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan as a continental sweep toward national self-determination as he traveled through Africa, would have existed. Gandhi and Jinnah are mentioned, but contra Tolstoy and his determinist vision that if Napoleon hadn’t lived another similar figure would have stood in his place, would either India or Pakistan be as we know them today without the existence of those two figures on the subcontinent?
It is true that there is a certain amount of nostalgia for what an increasing number of number of folks in former colonies are finding in the good old days of foreign rule. Part of this is an inevitable disillusionment as a reaction to understandable euphoria following independence, but also because of the decline in the quality of leaders who have succeeded the founding fathers. I hear about this every time I purchase gasoline from the South-Asian immigrant near my home: his disgust with the state of his homeland and its decline in the seven decades since the end of colonial rule.
Few subjects have engendered as much tripe and nonsense as imperialism and colonialism, their discontents and dissolution, and the often ludicrous results of “postcolonial studies” increasingly entrenched in the academy and in countless articles and books. “Decolonization” provides a refreshing contrast to this evolving orthodoxy, partly because of its emphasis on posing questions rather than rushing to judgment. But also because the authors have a sharp eye for false nostrums and facile associations, allowing them to separate the wheat from the chaff among a vast historiography from which to draw.
The authors modestly aver at the outset that “This book does not claim to settle these controversies once and for all. Rather, it presents the issues as clearly as possible and outlines the most important arguments.” I think that they have succeeded in providing an admirable, if to my mind incomplete, overview. And it will allow readers to place their preferred pieces of the process into a reliable framework.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, California.
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