Decolonisation is a waste of time

I remember, before I learnt to read, I would look through cartoon books and make up stories in my head. Every time it was a different story, although I suppose there were some favorites and common themes. The point is that after I learnt to read I could no longer really think that way anymore. Things became more set in stone.

Or perhaps a better example might be what happens to the characters in your head before and after you watch a movie. Before the movie they are your impressions but after seeing the movie they tend to get overwritten by the actors.

In the same way we don't really remember what our ancestors thought like before colonisation. Oh we might have artifacts, text or hints in stories but that way of thinking is gone. I has been overwritten so many times by the new ideas we have been introduced to that it is just the ghost of the memory of a smile that we didn't see.

We cannot think the way we might have before there were human rights, one or many gods, before the food, the technology. The experience of being exposed to the coloniser colonised us just by the experience of being exposed. It created possiblities that were not there before.

Nothing says this better than the idea of decolonisation. Has there ever been a more colonised thought? You have to have been colonised to think it up and the first step in any decolonisation would be the removal of the idea of decolonisation. We are not just the colonised, we are part of the colony and there is no way back. The best we can do is to pick the parts we like and move forward.

We cannot decolonise our minds, and if we can't do that then we certainly can't decolonise the cultures that are made from those minds. All that will happen is that we end up colonising someone else.