Decolonising the mind

This axis takes its name from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who argued in 1986 that the most enduring colonisation was not of territory but of the mind, and that the mother tongue is central to identity. He himself stopped writing in English to write in Gikuyu.

In Colombia, education on our own terms has a legal framework: Law 70 of 1993 mandated an ethno-education policy for Black communities and created the Afro-Colombian Studies Curriculum, made compulsory in every school by Decree 1122 of 1998. That it exists on paper and not in classrooms is precisely the work that remains.