The Unending Chain: Confronting the Colonialism Within
We often speak of colonization as a historical period, a chapter of empire that began and ended. But what if we have it backwards? What if this isn’t a chapter, but the very theme of the story? The impulse to colonize appears woven into the human condition itself. From the Greeks and Romans to the European empires forged in the Enlightenment’s furnace, the pattern repeats: a dominant group, convinced of its superiority, imposes its power, values, and gods upon others. The European project was uniquely devastating because it didn’t just conquer land; it set out to conquer reality itself. It weaponized knowledge to create racial hierarchies and a “civilizing mission” that justified its violence. This was a psychological siege designed to reprogram the minds of the colonized, to bury a deep and lasting sense of inferiority within their very souls.
This leads us to the great, painful paradox of our time: the loudest voices preaching against this coloniality often speak in the language of the colonizer. The theories we use to diagnose our pain, postcolonialism, decoloniality, are largely Western constructs, taught in Western-style universities and debated in English. We use their frameworks, their logic, and their jargon to plead for the value of our own. It feels like trying to use the master’s key to unlock a door the master himself built. This leaves us with a profound confusion: in our righteous fight to decolonize, are we unknowingly building a new colony of the mind? Are we, in our desperate search for freedom, simply rearranging the furniture in a house we never designed?
This abstract struggle finds its most potent expression in the mundane rituals of daily life. I recall an incident during my tenure at a news channel. We were on a break, a time meant for respite and informal connection, when a colleague noticed our Digital News head (DN) approaching. Suddenly flustered, he advised us all to stop talking and “look busy.” This was not a request born of genuine dedication, but a conditioned reflex of fear and subservience.
In that moment, the grand narrative of coloniality collapsed into a single, telling act. Here was no foreign oppressor, but a local elite. The demand was not for tribute or conversion, but for the performance of productivity, a drama of admiration to unearned authority. My response was to appeal to logic and equality: why should we feel compelled to act unnaturally during our designated time? The DN was a colleague, a worker like us, and his presence did not negate our right to autonomy during a break.
This incident is a microcosm of the internalized colonial mentality. It reveals how we perpetuate the very hierarchies we claim to oppose through our own passive acceptance. We create gods of our superiors and accept the role of supplicants, believing subservience is necessary for survival. In doing so, we grant them permission to treat us as inferiors. The colonizer, in this sense, doesn’t always come from outside; we are often colonized by our own elite, a phenomenon that creates a pervasive “local coloniality” that must be studied with the same rigor as its foreign counterpart.
This brings us to the essential question: if the intellectual tools we have are potentially compromised, how do we achieve true emancipation? The answer may lie not in a new theory, but in a return to a fundamental principle: “Tawheed” (the Oneness of God).
Faith in Tawheed is the ultimate antithesis to coloniality of every kind. It establishes a supreme authority that transcends all earthly power structures—foreign or local. When one internalizes that ultimate sovereignty belongs only to the Divine, the authority of every DN, every elite, and every system is radically relativized. They are diminished to mere mortals, temporary occupants of a fleeting status. This belief system does not require Western jargon to articulate; it is an internal, spiritual revolution that provides the epistemological independence we seek.
Tawheed offers the master key to a door we ourselves design. It gives the emancipation of mind and body by freeing us from the idolatry of man-made authority. It is the foundational act of decolonization, asserting that our worth, identity, and purpose are derived from a source beyond the grasp of any empire or elite. The journey to decolonize our world begins with this most personal of victories: the liberation of our own souls from all chains, seen and unseen. Only then can we stop “looking busy” for any master and finally stand tall, in genuine and unperformed freedom.
