Decolonise the mind to power a green future

Mail & Guardian

25-04-2025

Extraction: Among the green minerals is copper, which is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, South Africa and Namibia.
As the global race for critical minerals intensifies, from lithium in Zimbabwe to cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa finds itself, once again, rich in resources but poor in power. Green industrialisation is being touted as the continent's opportunity to move beyond extraction to manufacture green goods.
But this opportunity will pass us by if African leadership continues to be held hostage by the psychosocial legacies of colonialism.
This is not just about policy. It's about consciousness. Philosopher and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon warned us that colonialism doesn't end when the colonisers leave. It lingers in the psyche.
In Black Skin, White Masks, he wrote about how colonised people internalise the logic of their oppressors, aspiring to hold the power of the oppressor, governing in ways that serve global capital rather than their own people. He argues that this becomes a major obstacle to genuine liberation.
Across Africa, post-independence elites often reproduce colonial power structures preserving extractive economies, obeying the rules of the global capitalist order and prioritising the needs of foreign investors over their own citizens.
As South African analyst William Gumede has pointed out, South Africa remains a 'postcolony', politically independent, but still economically manipulated. The apartheid-era structures of racialised accumulation remain intact, simply rebranded for the global neoliberal order.
South Africa, like many other African states, once aspired to become a developmental state, a model that channels state resources, market incentives and civil society mobilisation to uplift the population. But those ambitions have been steadily eroded by a fear of capital flight, the discipline of debt and an elite class too comfortable with the status quo. The result? A state that protects monopoly and financial capital while failing to deliver justice, dignity or economic inclusion for the majority.
This mindset is evident in the budget crisis, where the ANC insisted that increasing VAT was the only viable way to raise revenue, while rejecting the option of raising wealth or corporate taxes, citing fears that the wealthy would exploit loopholes or withdraw investment.
This fear is not simply political. It is psychological. It is the 'colonial wound' Fanon described, the inability to see ourselves as agents of our own futures. This matters because African green industrialisation is not just about climate. For Africa, it offers an opportunity to break with patterns of extraction that have served external interests, and instead pursue a path that centres sovereignty, justice and economic transformation.
Green industrialisation means using Africa's mineral wealth not simply for export, but as strategic leverage to build domestic and regional value chains. This demands that we rethink the logic that underpin industrial development, moving beyond linear models focused on capital gains, and toward approaches that are regenerative, redistributive, circular and socially embedded.
Africa's green industrialisation can follow different pathways, from mainstream strategies to transformative ones including decarbonising industries such as construction, infrastructure and renewable energy generation, developing domestic processing and manufacturing capabilities of critical minerals such as in battery technology, public transport systems and energy-efficient appliances tailored to African contexts.
Transformative strategies challenge extractivism and embrace ecological, socially owned and circular models. These may include large-scale recycling, repurposing and urban mining of metals and minerals already in circulation to reduce the demand for new extraction; transitioning agriculture and agro-processing away from industrial inputs and fossil fuel dependencies toward agroecological systems that restore soils, enhance biodiversity and build food sovereignty; community and socially owned renewable energy production, ensuring energy transitions serve public needs and are not captured by corporate or elite interests and democratising ownership and decision-making in green industries.
If scaled, these efforts can do more than boost national economies, they can transform lives. Locally rooted manufacturing and processing will create jobs, support small businesses and build skills in communities. Cleaner energy systems will lower household energy costs and reduce environmental harm.
Most importantly, this shift can create a future where development is people-centred, less dependent on volatile global markets and driven by Africa's needs and capacities.
As highlighted in the Alternative Information and Development Centre's report The Controversy of Green Energy: Unmasking Southern Africa's Critical Mineral Sacrifice Zones, the expansion of green energy and green industrialisation, must not replicate the injustices of past and present mining regimes.
But none of this is guaranteed. Without a conscious political project, and leaders willing to resist neo-colonial pressures, we risk simply greening the same extractive, unequal and externally-dependent model we've been trapped in for decades.
In recent months, US President Donald Trump has proposed sweeping new tariffs. Framed as a strategy to protect American workers and reduce reliance on China, these protectionist measures aim to promote domestic industry, assert US economic sovereignty and reconfigure global trade in favour of American interests.
The proposals have not been universally welcomed. Allies and rivals alike have raised concerns, and many economists warn of rising global trade tensions. Yet few countries have the leverage to meaningfully resist or retaliate. Only large power blocs — such as the European Union or China — have the capacity to push back. The rest, particularly in the Global South, are often left managing the ripple effects of such shifts, with limited room to shield their economies from external shocks.
This geopolitical asymmetry is further illustrated by recent policy developments in the European Union. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), for example, imposes carbon-related tariffs on imported goods such as steel, aluminium and cement. While presented as a climate policy, The CBAM risks penalising developing countries that lack the resources to decarbonise at the same pace as Europe, which will affect our ability to green industrialise. Instead of supporting low-carbon transitions in the Global South, it is more likely to entrench global trade hierarchies under the guise of climate justice.
Similarly, the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act identifies strategic minerals essential for Europe's green transition and sets targets to secure them through domestic extraction and 'strategic partnerships' abroad. African countries are expected to supply these materials under conditions dictated by European industrial needs, not African development priorities as in the case of Namibia's green hydrogen projects. This reinforces an externalisation of ecological and social costs — where Africa provides the inputs for a green transition it is largely excluded from shaping or benefiting from.
Yet when African governments adopt similar tools to assert their interests — through export bans, local content requirements, beneficiation mandates or industrial tariffs — they face strong resistance. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank warn of 'market distortions'. Investors threaten divestment. Commentators label such measures 'protectionist' or 'populist', even when they are embedded in democratic development agendas.
What emerges is not simply a contradiction, but a structural reality: the rules of global trade and investment are shaped by power, and power determines who can bend or rewrite those rules. When large economies intervene to protect or reindustrialise, it is accepted as strategic. When African states seek to do the same, they are expected to remain 'open' and 'market friendly'.
This is why African countries must build the political and institutional power to define their development paths, not by mimicking the West, but by advancing decolonial and redistributive alternatives.
Regional solidarity, democratic control over resources and policies grounded in the realities of African economies must be central to that project.
To succeed, Africa must delink from exploitative global systems — whether controlled by Washington, Brussels or Beijing — and build robust, pan-African institutions and markets. This means deepening continental trade through the African Continental Free Trade Area, harmonising industrial policies, and investing in shared infrastructure and research systems.
But it also means reclaiming ideological ground. Development cannot simply be about GDP growth or investor confidence. It must be about dignity, equality, ecological sustainability and the right of people to decide their own futures.
Fanon believed freedom wasn't just about ending colonial rule — it was about freeing the mind. Gumede, echoing this, argued that the path to African emancipation requires 'a self-awareness of the subservient position that the continent occupies in the global matrix of power', and a conscious break from the 'socio-economic and political structures that make exploitation and domination possible'.
Africa's green transition won't succeed with leaders afraid to act, to disrupt, to imagine differently. It won't succeed with extractive elites beholden to foreign capital. It will only succeed if we decolonise not just our economies, but our consciousness.
And that is the hardest revolution of all.
Charlize Tomaselli is a senior researcher at the Alternative Information and Development Centre.