Saying Goodbye to Decolonization

By Sankofie | Published August 3, 2025 | 6 Comments

For some time now, and I mean maybe more than a year or so, I have been literally haunted by my spirit.  Can you imagine? My own beautiful spirit behaving like a Jamaican duppy and haunting me? And all about a word…decolonization.  This is not a ‘new to the Jamaican space’ word.  It has been around since at least the 1930s, when, since all good and bad things must come to an end, the British began their yet to be completed leave taking.  The colonization of Jamaica, began by the Spanish, continued by the British and persistently thwarted and resisted by the colonized, had to be sacrificed at the ancestral altar. In today’s biblical days of Jamaica, the offering keeps burning and decolonization keeps swirling in on its ever upward-rising fumes.  It is time to stop. Put the fire out completely.    I have come to realize that the haunting is an ‘invitation,’ to use a kind word that downplays the imperative I feel in my spirit, to do exactly that.  It is, in fact, more than an invitation, it is a mandate from the cosmos to move beyond the perspectives and meanings of decolonization.  My spirit posits that this word allows us to keep centering colonization even as we are ‘meaning’ to move away from it. It makes cowards of us, as, even as we are seeking ourselves we keep lauding their system of oppression every time we open our mouths.  Spirit demands that to manifest the transformation we seek our language itself must first become trans-formative. Decolonization has done its time. We must now claim and reposition Africa and other indigenous spaces, places and peoples in our global history and culture. Is there a word for that? Just a Thought.