Colonialism: The ‘perfect crime’ relentlessly reproducing its victims

Denunciations of the ‘evils’ of colonialism occur over and over again, as does an intermittent readiness to listen to them. But the wounds that have been inflicted cannot be healed, not least because the colonial systems in all their forms have upset the deep structures of the social, economic and political organization of the societies they have targeted.

Christiana Fiamingo writes:

Acknowledgements, reparations and restitutions must not be limited and punctual in their attempt to remedy the past, but will only be able to contribute in repairing a relations-system if they are in done in parallel to the promotion of equality in political, economic and decision-making relations.

In this sense, I argue here that remedying is different from repairing. It is a matter of ‘repairing the fabric and the face of the world’ (as Mbembe puts it), by systematically recreating a healed relations-system in order to thwart the uninterrupted resurgence of strong, prevaricating systems stagnating and reproducing weakness, given such an imbalance.