Do we need decolonial teaching?
That’s an interesting question.
Because before we start deciding what needs to be decolonised, we might want to establish what exactly we mean by colonial in the first place.
Especially in Europe, there are remarkably few places where the population living there today can claim an uninterrupted history of peaceful, indigenous continuity.
Europe has been conquered, occupied, assimilated, enslaved, displaced and reorganised so many times that trying to identify some pristine native population becomes almost comical.
The Romans were very good at it.
They conquered enormous territories. They destroyed resistance. They enslaved people. They moved populations. They imposed their language, laws and culture. They absorbed local elites and eventually absorbed entire peoples into something that became Roman.
But the Romans were hardly unique.
They were simply one particularly successful example of something human beings have been doing for as long as human beings have organised themselves into tribes, kingdoms and empires.
Conquest is not a European invention.
Colonial empires were not some historical aberration that appeared in the fifteenth century when Europeans suddenly developed an unfortunate appetite for domination.
They were the norm.
The exception was usually the absence of one.
My father used to put it rather more brutally.
He always said that we are the children of the winners.
Because those who lost were usually killed, assimilated, enslaved or some combination of all three.
It is an unpleasant way of looking at history.
It is also remarkably difficult to argue with.
Look far enough back and almost every population becomes the descendant of somebody who won something.
A piece of land.
A war.
A migration.
A succession dispute.
A massacre.
A marriage.
A conquest.
A famine.
A collapse of an empire.
We are all standing on layers of history in which somebody arrived, somebody was displaced, somebody adapted and somebody disappeared.
And yet there is a growing tendency to tell history as though there was once a world of harmonious peoples living peacefully in balance with nature until the Europeans arrived and ruined everything.
This is particularly visible in some accounts of the history of North America.
The story goes something like this:
There were the indigenous peoples.
They lived in harmony with one another and with Mother Earth.
They had a sustainable relationship with nature.
They did not really have the destructive impulses of European civilisation.
Then the Europeans arrived.
And everything went to hell.
It is a beautiful story.
It is also a fantasy.
North America was not a paradise before Europeans arrived.
It was a continent populated by human beings.
And human beings have always been extraordinarily good at killing one another.
Tribes fought tribes.
Territories were conquered.
Populations were displaced.
People were enslaved.
People were killed.
There were massacres.
There was torture.
There was rape.
There was annihilation.
There were wars in which the objective was not to defeat another group but to eliminate it.
There were societies that expanded at the expense of other societies.
There were alliances, betrayals, migrations and shifting balances of power.
In other words, there was history.
Not some prelapsarian paradise.
History.
That doesn’t make what European colonisers subsequently did acceptable.
It doesn’t excuse massacres.
It doesn’t excuse dispossession.
It doesn’t excuse slavery.
It doesn’t excuse the destruction of cultures.
It doesn’t excuse anything simply because somebody else had done something similar before.
But understanding history requires us to resist the temptation to turn one side into angels and the other into demons.
And this is where the idea of decolonial teaching becomes interesting.
If decolonial means that we should examine history from perspectives that were previously ignored, absolutely.
If it means that we should understand what happened to populations subjected to European conquest, absolutely.
If it means that we should examine the economic, cultural and political consequences of colonialism rather than simply congratulating ourselves on the achievements of European empires, fine.
History should be broadened.
It should not be sanitised.
But if decolonial teaching means replacing one simplistic historical mythology with another, then we haven’t achieved much.
We’ve simply changed the villains.
And the same problem exists when we look at Africa.
There is a tendency to describe Africa as though Europeans arrived in a continent of peaceful societies and introduced violence.
Again, reality is considerably more complicated.
African societies fought one another.
Kingdoms expanded.
Empires conquered.
Populations were displaced.
People were enslaved.
Wars were fought.
Massacres happened.
Rape happened.
Entire populations could be subjected to another group’s rule.
Some African kingdoms built their power through warfare and slave trading.
Some groups destroyed or absorbed others.
Some became powerful precisely because they were better at organised violence than their neighbours.
None of this makes European colonialism morally innocent.
It simply makes it human.
And that distinction matters.
Because if we want to understand colonialism, we need to understand the underlying phenomenon rather than pretending that Europeans invented it.
They didn’t.
What Europeans did was industrialise, expand and eventually globalise a set of behaviours that had existed for thousands of years.
European colonialism was different in scale, technology and global reach.
That matters enormously.
But it was not the beginning of human domination.
Nor was it the end.
The last great colonial empires are not European.
Russia is still an imperial power.
China is still an imperial power.
Their relationships with neighbouring territories and peoples make considerably more sense when viewed through the old language of empire than through whatever euphemisms modern diplomacy prefers.
And there are others who would very much like to recreate the old imperial model if history would give them the opportunity.
The difference is that the world has changed.
The age in which colonial empires could simply be built and maintained as a normal feature of international politics is largely over.
At least for now.
The interesting question is therefore not whether colonialism was bad.
Of course it was bad for the people being colonised.
The interesting question is whether we actually understand it.
Because there is a difference between teaching history and teaching moral theatre.
History is messy.
It contains victims who were also perpetrators.
It contains conquerors who were later conquered.
It contains people who were enslaved by one group and who enslaved another.
It contains cultures that disappeared and cultures that survived by assimilating others.
It contains empires that considered themselves civilised while behaving with extraordinary brutality.
And it contains Europeans who were colonised long before they became colonisers.
That last part is particularly inconvenient for the neat version of the story.
Europe was invaded, conquered and enslaved repeatedly.
The Romans conquered Europe.
The Vikings raided and settled it.
The Mongols reached deep into it.
Ottomans expanded into it.
Various Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Scandinavian and steppe peoples displaced, absorbed and destroyed one another over centuries.
There was no European Garden of Eden waiting for colonialism to arrive.
There was just humanity.
And humanity has always been complicated.
Perhaps that is what we should be teaching.
Not that colonialism was harmless.
Not that European empires were somehow innocent.
And certainly not that the victims of colonialism should simply get over it.
But neither should we construct a mythical past in which everyone was peaceful until the Europeans arrived carrying their particular brand of evil.
That isn’t history.
It is another mythology.
And if the purpose of decolonial teaching is to free us from inherited narratives, then it should probably start by freeing us from that one too.
Because the most dangerous way to teach history is to make it morally comfortable.
History should make us uncomfortable.
It should force us to recognise that the people we descend from were not necessarily good people.
It should also force us to recognise that the people we feel sorry for were not necessarily good people either.
They were people.
And that is both less comforting and much more interesting.
The world was never divided neatly between colonisers and colonised.
It was divided between human beings who had power and those who didn’t.
And those positions changed.
Again and again.
The winners became losers.
The conquered became conquerors.
The enslaved sometimes became enslavers.
The assimilated became the assimilators.
And eventually, after enough centuries have passed, the survivors tell the story.
My father was probably right.
We are the children of the winners.
The question is whether we have enough intellectual honesty to remember that the winners were not necessarily the good guys.
And neither were the losers.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260731190606869