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The National
3 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Meet the woman pushing to have Scotland 'decolonised' by the UN
Her years in the trenches fighting the decidedly unfashionable cause have left her exhausted, she tells the Sunday National. But she wouldn't be where she is – at the forefront of an organisation which claims 17,000 members and which she says can raise £40,000 in cash within a week – without drive and optimism. The 67-year-old, a former TV producer who lives outside Dunfermline, Fife, believes that the focus on the Scottish independence movement should be on the international stage. To this end, the campaign group Salvo, which she helped found, has backed a push by Liberation Scotland to present a petition to the UN to have Scotland recognised as a 'non-self-governing territory'. This would open the door to a UN-mandated referendum, in which neither the Scottish Parliament nor Westminster would have any say. (Image: PA) Critics say this is a cop-out which prefers a legal solution to a political problem. But Salyers insists that getting the UN to recognise Scotland as a colony is merely the first step, one which will open the political floodgates. People are divided, she says, into two camps. Either they believe that the international argument is 'irrelevant' and it is about domestic politics or they believe that appealing to the international community is a silver bullet which will make Scotland independent virtually overnight. 'That's completely wrong,' she says. 'In every single case of independence, decolonisation requires a democratic event,' she says. For her and her fellow travellers, the appeal to the UN is the route to that democratic event. 'We will keep going till it happens,' says Salyers. 'We're optimists – if we weren't we wouldn't be where we are now. I'm hoping for a miracle.' It perhaps reveals a sense of the scale of the challenge Salvo and Liberation Scotland have set themselves. During our interview, Salyers refers to her desire to change Scots 'grooves of thinking' about the country. She references the work of the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who examined the impact of colonisation on the psyches of colonised people. Scots, she believes, have suffered many of the same indignities the Algerians did under French rule. A controversial statement, no doubt, but it is not an argument Salyers shies away from, stressing her profound belief that Scotland is as much of a colony of Britain as was, say, Ireland or Trinidad. It is in reference to the latter country – where she lived with her father who ran a power plant during that country's passage to independence – that one of Salyers's most provocative arguments arises. Trinidad and Tobago became independent through negotiation with the UK Government, but had it been down to a referendum, Salyers argues, her father should not have had a vote as he was not from there. (Image: Colin McPherson) So must it be for 'passers-by and temporary residents or people with two homes who happen to come up to Scotland sometimes', she says, in the event of a second Scottish independence referendum. Salyers would prefer the template provided by the New Caledonia referendum, where voters had to prove they met one of eight criteria to cast a ballot for or against remaining part of France. That cast a fairly wide net, though did require voters or their parents to have been born in the territory. If Liberation Scotland's push at the UN is successful, the path to independence is still by no means clear. But if it is rejected, Salyers seems unlikely to want to throw in the towel. 'We're kind of conditioned by a referendum that you win or lose, to see everything in those terms,' she says. 'It's not always like that, in fact, it very rarely is. It's very rarely like the verdict in a court or a black-and-white outcome.' Salyers says that neither she nor her colleagues draw a salary from their campaigning work, 'and nobody gets expenses, I'll tell you that'. Their motivation comes down to a sense of hope that she says is absent from the mainstream Scottish independence movement, who have 'packed up their bags and gone home', in her words. Instead, they hope to offer an alternative to the arguing with 'that big, blank wall of Westminster', says Salyer. At the moment, much 'stock' is being put in the UN General Assembly meeting in New York this September, which may provide the point at which Liberation Scotland hands over their petition to officials to have Scotland recognised as a colony. (Image: NurPhoto) Salyers is hoping that things fall into place once that hurdle is overcome. Labyrinthine bureaucracy at the UN means that something as simple as changing the mineral water sold in its Manhattan headquarters can take 'four years', says Salyers. 'However, it can also turn on a dime.' The grandmother-of-one certainly hopes that Scotland's case will be a sea change moment. 'My ambition is to have done my part, seen this happen and sit back and actually be retired and spend some years of my life learning to keep bees and go for walks and being able to stop,' she says. 'I'd be very discouraged if I thought this was going to take a decade.' Salyers may be waiting some time. In her New Caledonia example, the territory had been on the UN's decolonisation list since 1986. To date, the South Pacific islanders have had four independence referendums, the first in 1987. At the most recent, held in 2021, New Caledonians voted by 96.5% to 3.5% to remain part of France.
Indian Express
5 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
Mother-tongue in the classroom: A welcome step, but don't rush it
During a class on 'cultural capital', my students and I found ourselves discussing the role of the English language in the Indian context. The conversation turned out to be a comparison with countries like France and China, where people have deep-rooted pride in their language. In contrast, many of my students admitted that they barely know their native tongues — some can understand them, but few are able to speak or write with confidence. They expressed a quiet sense of loss, even as they acknowledged the prestige and professional opportunities that come with speaking 'good' English in India. It is this sense of confusion that shapes my view on the CBSE's proposal to introduce mother-tongue instruction at the primary level. I find it hard to take a definitive stance, but if I had to describe my position, I would call myself a sceptical supporter. The idea of supporting one's mother tongue comes from many writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Frantz Fanon, and J M Coetzee, who have long written about decolonising the mind and reclaiming identity through native languages. Their work highlights how colonial legacies and global hierarchies have privileged English and sidelined local languages, entrenching cultural and cognitive hierarchies. Yet, even if we agree in principle, practical questions remain, like which language to choose in a country as linguistically diverse as India. That's why the ongoing language mapping exercise in schools is not just welcome — it is essential. While I agree that collecting languages children speak at home is a smart and necessary step, I think it should have been done before issuing the directive. Children are now entering school at a much younger age than in the normally enter school at about three years of age. For a child entering school for the first time, everything is unfamiliar — the space, the people, the routines and expectations. Language, at the very least, can offer continuity and comfort. The emotional security of being taught in the language spoken at home can ease this early transition and help children settle into learning more naturally. Having said this, we also do see a generation of students in elite private schools who are growing up with little connection to their native languages. At home and in public life, most children communicate in English. They are growing up within a single language system, disconnected from their linguistic roots. Mother-tongue instruction holds the potential to reverse that trend. When children are taught in a language their families understand, learning becomes a shared experience. Parents and even grandparents, especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, can engage more actively with their child's education. This strengthens the link between home and school and can lead to improved outcomes. Critics argue that such a directive may disadvantage children later, given English's dominance in higher education and the job market. But this policy move is about the primary level, where the focus should be on building core literacy, numeracy, and confidence. The transition to English can still happen, but must take place thoughtfully. What we need is a gradual, well-supported, and pedagogically sound design for that transition. Even from a cognitive standpoint, support comes from UNESCO and UNICEF, which advocate for mother-tongue instruction in early education. Early literacy in the mother tongue lays a strong foundation for later academic achievement. Teaching in English from day one, especially to first-generation learners, often results in confusion and lower overall comprehension. This topic made me think of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'symbolic violence'. The term is used to describe a wide range of actions that involve imposing meaning or authority in an arbitrary way — actions that appear neutral or natural but actually reflect power. The education system, through form and content, exercises symbolic violence in different ways — it imposes ideas, values, or norms that carry hidden power. English-language instruction can be seen as a form of symbolic violence where students are alienated from their mother tongues. Instruction in the mother tongue is a pedagogical choice that resists the treatment of children's home languages as inadequate or inferior. Choosing which language to prioritise in each region will involve tough decisions, and owing to India's multilingualism, there are no perfect answers. Ensuring that schools once again do not fall into the cycle of symbolic violence by imposing a few people's mother tongue on others is important. Now that the CBSE directive has been issued, what matters most is how this is implemented. The timeline for implementation raises serious concerns. Expecting schools to pivot over a single summer break, already too short, is unrealistic. Overhauling curricula, training teachers and preparing materials will take time. Without this investment, the risk is a superficial rollout driven more by political optics than pedagogical substance. One should not reduce a well-intentioned intervention to another hurried rollout. Done right, this could be the beginning of a more inclusive, just, and effective education system. The writer is a Sociology teacher in a Delhi school
Mail & Guardian
6 days ago
- General
- Mail & Guardian
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: A writer who refused to bow
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has died. But if ever there was a writer who prepared us for this moment, for the refusal of forgetting, for the insistence that the spirit of resistance cannot be imprisoned, it was him. Born in colonial Kenya in 1938, Ngũgĩ's life was shaped from the beginning by rupture and fire. He witnessed the brutal violence of British colonial rule, the fracturing of communities under settler capitalism and the psychic wounds left by forced conversions, Christianisation and land dispossession. He was also shaped, by the courageous resistance of the Mau Mau uprising, that great peasant revolt that has often been sanitised into nationalist myth. But Ngũgĩ did not trade in myth. He held the truth in his hands, raw, inconvenient, luminous. For many in the Global North, Ngũgĩ was first encountered through the deceptively simple novels of his early career: Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965) and A Grain of Wheat (1967). These were works written in English, in the mode of a young man taught to believe that the English language was the vehicle of modernity. But Ngũgĩ would later reject this lie so forcefully, so completely, that it would cost him his freedom. And in doing so, he would chart one of the most radical literary and political journeys of our time, from a colonial subject to a prisoner of conscience, to a living weapon of decolonisation. Like Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ took on the betrayal of predatory postcolonial elites with the same fury that he confronted colonialism. In 1977, after staging I Will Marry When I Want with villagers at Kamiriithu, a Gikuyu-language play that tore into the heart of post-independence corruption and neocolonial betrayal, Ngũgĩ was detained without trial. In prison, he wrote Devil on the Cross in Gikuyu, on toilet paper, using a smuggled pen. It was a defiant act not just of storytelling but of linguistic reclamation. From that point onward, he would write first and foremost in Gikuyu, translating his work into English only later. As he declared in Decolonising the Mind, 'African writers must choose to write in the languages of their people … the language of real life, of work, of struggle.' This was not the kind of superficial gesture common in performative forms of decolonial posturing. Ngũgĩ understood language as infrastructure, as the battleground where cultural memory, political power and selfhood are contested. To decolonise the mind, one must dismantle the internalised grammar of empire. And yet, it is his final towering novel, Wizard of the Crow (2006), that best captures the full scope of his vision. Written in Gikuyu and translated by Ngũgĩ himself into English, this nearly 800-page epic is a grotesquely comic, eerily prophetic tale of a fictional African dictatorship called Aburĩria, a mirror held up to the postcolonial state. Here, language shifts and warps like the body of the dictator himself. Time becomes absurd. Gender fluidities are hinted at and then crushed under patriarchal panic. The body politic is both spectacle and corpse. The ruler of Aburĩria, known only as 'The Ruler,' is an egotistical despot obsessed with being deified by the Global Bank. His ministers compete in a frenzy of sycophancy, constructing a Tower of Babel-style monstrosity called Marching to Heaven to honour him. In this theatre of grotesquerie, we meet Kamiti, an unemployed philosopher-turned-healer who assumes the identity of the 'Wizard of the Crow', and Nyawira, a feminist revolutionary and leader of the underground Movement for the Voice of the People. Their love, forged in resistance and trickery, is one of the most quietly radical elements of the novel. It is gendered solidarity, not romance, political tenderness, not bourgeois desire. Through magical realism, satire and parable, Ngũgĩ lays bare the mechanics of postcolonial authoritarianism, not as a betrayal of the nation but as its logical continuation under the rules of global finance. The Ruler's body literally inflates with the disease of power. The Global Bank operates like a god demanding tribute. In this world, development is disease, progress is punishment and the nation is a prison. The grotesque becomes the logic of governance. And this is not just an African story. In Wizard of the Crow, we already meet the future — a spectacle of power obsessed with worship, paranoid about dissent and surrounded by ministers so stupid and servile they parody themselves. This is not just an African story. In the United States The Ruler is reborn in orange skin, yelling on Fox News, flanked by cronies who echo his lies, drunk on performance and grievance. As Ngũgĩ made clear that the absurd is a structure, not an accident. But Wizard of the Crow is not merely critique. It is a manual of survival. It insists on the subversive power of storytelling, the plasticity of language and the insurgency of laughter. It gives us spells, not the supernatural kind but the magic of those who refuse to die quietly. What Ngũgĩ taught us, especially those of us working and writing from the Global South, is that liberation must be total. You cannot free a people without freeing their tongues, their bodies, their histories, their archives, their dreams. In a world where Euro-American liberalism continues to demand to be respected as a great moral authority while it continues its long blood lust, now most visible in the agonies of Palestine. Ngũgĩ's refusal to write in English was more radical than any slogan. It was a withdrawal of consent from the epistemology of empire. In a moment in which decolonial posturing is often insufferably bourgeois we must affirm Ngũgĩ's refusal of abstract theory. He was always concerned with the poor. With peasants. With workers. With women and men who labour and laugh and conspire and survive. Ngũgĩ was a Marxist, and his Marxism was never academic. It pulsed through his literature, in the rhythms of Gikuyu oral storytelling, in the community workshops of Kamiriithu, in the bodies of characters like Nyawira who refuse subordination to both domesticity and the state. Ngũgĩ wrote against the singular hero. Against the myth of the nationalist saviour. Against the idea that liberation is a flag or a parliament. For Ngũgĩ, the masses were the protagonists. The collectivity was the hero. Even in Wizard of the Crow, where Kamiti could have become a messianic figure, he retreats. He is shaped and saved by Nyawira, and together they dissolve into the revolutionary underground, not as symbols, but as catalysts. Ngũgĩ also took women seriously, even as he struggled, at times with fully unlearning the patriarchal codes embedded in tradition and revolution alike. His later work, including The Perfect Nine (2020), reclaims Gikuyu mythology to centre female protagonists, exploring disability, desire and divine power through poetic epic. It is a late-life meditation on gender and creation, a text that invites rereading and feminist critique. That critique will have to grapple with the shock that exploded through the literary world in March 2024 when Ngũgĩ's son, Mukoma, took to Twitter to claim that his father had abused his late mother, Nyambura. Mukoma's sister, Wanjiku, appeared to dispute the allegation. At the moment the facts do not appear to be clear. Al Jazeera took down the article it had published on the allegations saying: 'In light of fresh information, Al Jazeera English is unable to support some elements of this article, whose text we are withdrawing from the site.' To read Ngũgĩ today, especially from South Africa, is to confront our own betrayals. Our own post-liberation rulers drunk on vanity, greed and violence. Our subordination to the demands of capital. Our own crises of language, where English and a Europeanised form of Afrikaans dominate elite spaces, while isiXhosa, isiZulu, SeSotho, and others are treated as relics of the home, not instruments of thought. It is also to recognise the quiet brilliance of resistance, in shack settlements, in feminist groups and networks, in union struggles, in autonomous student reading groups, in WhatsApp forums of working-class learners. Like Kamiti and Nyawira, our people know how to conjure survival amid enduring oppression and its accumulation of pain and trauma. Ngũgĩ was never awarded the Nobel Prize, despite decades of speculation. But he didn't need it. The people who needed to read him found him. He gave us language as a weapon. He gave us stories as conspiracies. He gave us laughter that bites like acid. To lose Ngũgĩ now, in the midst of so much backsliding and betrayal, is to feel momentarily unmoored. It is to wonder: who will write us back into being? Who will remind us that our tongues are sacred? That the crow, the scorned, unwanted black bird, is a prophet? But Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o prepared us for this too. He taught us that the dead never die in vain. That the story never ends, it only passes hands. He also taught us that stories are complex and that liberators can also be oppressors. Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist
Mail & Guardian
25-04-2025
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Decolonise the mind to power a green future
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.
