No, College Curriculums Aren’t Too Focused on Decolonization

On April 18, 1955, Indonesian President Sukarno took to the dais before a gathering unlike any that had ever been convened. “How terrifically dynamic is our time,” he exclaimed. “We can mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Africa and Asia on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the people of Asia and Africa!”

The participants who converged that day on a provincial Indonesian city were of widely diverse backgrounds. They came from 29 countries, and their languages, religious beliefs, and politics were as varied as their national dress. What they all shared was what Sukarno called “a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears,” and together, their nations accounted for more than half of the world’s population.

Sukarno posed a rhetorical question to the delegates: “How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism?” And he had good reason to wonder. A front-page headline that day in the Observer, his country’s sole English-language newspaper, had stated pointedly, “United States Refuses to Send Message to Asian-African Conference.”

In interviews before this meeting, which would come to be known as the Bandung Conference, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had flatly stated that Washington had no intention of sending anyone to Bandung and would not dignify the event with its recognition. Worse still, in private, Dulles’s aides poured racially tinged contempt on the gathering, reportedly mocking it as “the Darktown Strutter’s Ball.”

Soon, Bandung rightly came to be widely seen as the epoch-making progenitor of the Non-Aligned Movement, which would loosely draw together scores of countries freed from imperial rule. The delegates who gathered in Indonesia vowed to defend the rights of these newly emerging states and to resist pressure from the era’s two superpowers to choose sides in the immensely costly and perilous Cold War contest. They also demanded, among other things, respect for the equality of all races, the sovereignty of small nations, and the settlement of international disputes by peaceful means.

The Bandung era has occupied my thoughts for most of the past four years as I have neared completion of a book about the advent of independence on the African continent. But it has been front of mind for me for entirely different reasons since the recent gripping rise of a movement on U.S. campuses—originating on my own, at Columbia University—to demand an end to the war in Gaza and a new and free political order for Palestinians.

For months now, the birth of this campus movement has generated a spate of editorials and commentaries slighting the worthiness of decolonization as a topic; dismissing its relevance to the tragically vexed relationship between Israel and Palestine; and perhaps most surprising of all, seeking to blame the demonstrations and unrest at U.S. universities such as mine on a supposedly excessive focus on anti-colonialism in college curriculums.

Some of this voguish scorn for the topic of decolonization seems politically driven and of questionable good faith. Other currents have been more intellectual in nature. But both are seriously misguided. In the United States, the public has long been conditioned to believe that the most important achievements in living memory were those of what Hollywood and popularizing historians commemorate as the Greatest Generation. These were the Western men—who, when compared to the actual record, have been disproportionately represented as white—credited with the defeat of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II.

By emphasizing D-Day and figures such as U.S. Gen. George Patton and U.K. Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, popular depictions of this conflict commonly promote an inflated impression of the contributions of the United States and Britain in defeating Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Dating back to the time of that conflict, serious scholars have always known that the Soviet Union—itself totalitarian—carried the brunt of the battle against Nazi Germany.

The point here is not to denigrate the courage or sacrifices of the Westerners who fought in that war, and even less to question the imperative of defeating the Nazis. Rather, it is to challenge how Westerners have celebrated their history in ways that have wrongly overshadowed or crowded out of the picture another 20th-century story of freedom. Although this may seem jarring to a Western public, this story was at least as significant, and arguably greater, than the Allied triumph in World War II.

This other story of freedom, badly neglected when not outright scorned nowadays, was the triumph of “a movement of moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism,” in the words of the eminent Duke University historian Prasenjit Duara, that belongs under the heading of decolonization.

Between 1945 and 1965, this movement saw more than 50 nations emerge from European rule that dated back, in some cases, to five centuries. Working together, they not only achieved formal independence under new flags and anthems, but also helped democratize global governance, turning the United Nations General Assembly into at least a partial check on the power of the Security Council, most of whose members were the imperial powers whose most ardent wish was to cling to their prerogatives.

This desire extended beyond the U.N. to the new global financial arrangements then being engineered. Countries from what would become popularly known as the Third World sent delegates to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the foundation of a new global economic system and established the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. John Maynard Keynes, the celebrated British economist who also served as a delegate, deplored non-Westerners’ presence at the historic New Hampshire gathering and complained that it was “the most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years.”

But how is it that of all places, I have wondered, the United States has found so little room to embrace—or better, celebrate—the story of global decolonization? Why have so many recent commentators there treated it almost like a bad word? After all, the United States’ own national foundation is rooted in liberation from colonial rule. In that same Bandung speech, Sukarno noted, “On the 18th day of April, 1775, just 180 years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”

What might we learn if we opened our minds to the actual record of the colonial past in what became the nonaligned world? We would come to see how European nations led by Britain and France enlisted colonial subjects from Asia and Africa to labor, fight, and die in large numbers for the cause of European freedom in the 20th century. We would see how Europe’s old powers partially financed their recovery from the devastation of World War II on the backs of Asian and African miners and farmers, whose exports of tin, manganese, cocoa, rubber, and many other commodities replenished European treasuries.

We would learn that even in the postwar years, some European countries briefly sustained a regime of forced labor on Africans that was not far removed from enslavement. We would come to see how a tiny minority of British settlers in Kenya employed violence on a massive scale and confined native populations to tightly policed camps in the 1950s so that they could control the country’s richest farmlands. We would learn of the attempt to get into the colonial game by imperial latecomers such as Italy, which killed as much as one-eighth of the population of Ethiopia through aerial bombing and poison mustard gas in the 1930s. We would see how Portugal, still unsated after centuries of colonial rule, fought to sustain its control over colonies in present-day Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau into the 1970s, aligning itself with apartheid-ruled South Africa in the process.

We would understand how little Europeans invested in education, health care, and basic infrastructure in the African colonies that they ruled, making the continent’s relative poverty and instability today a lot less mysterious.

We would learn that at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, Europe justified its claims over Africa and its wealth on the basis of the supposed “white man’s burden.” Its tutorship promised to bring education to the continent. Yet in the early decades of the 20th century in British-ruled places such as the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), for instance, only a tiny percentage of children went to primary school, and the colonial government had still not bothered to open a single high school. We would learn that by the time it obtained independence from Belgium in 1960, the Democratic Republic of the Congo entered the world as a new nation of 15 million people with only 30 university graduates, and how Brussels almost immediately backed a secessionist movement in Congo so that it could control the country’s formidable storehouse of minerals.

Could it really be true that Western schooling and especially higher education have expended too much focus on subjects such as these? This is only the barest of catalogs—I’ve said nothing of catastrophic colonial famine in India, or the German genocide in colonial Namibia, or the 19th- and 20th-century partition of China by European powers and the promotion of opium addiction there by Britain. Many in the United States would be surprised to learn that their country, too, participated in the trafficking of opium to China, which was an early source of the fortunes of famous families such as the Astors, the Roosevelts, and the Forbes.

Or is it the case, rather, that most of us learn little or nothing about this colonial past, and of the grand narrative of freedom explaining how imperial rule was overcome around the world? The political tableau of the scores of countries that have gained independence in the past three-quarters of a century is, of course, a mixed one, but, as we must also learn, so is that of the West.

A lot of the anxious criticism of anti-colonial learning, I believe, is motivated by a desire to shield Israel from inclusion in a history so ugly and tragic. The wish is understandable, but questions such as these will ultimately be resolved by facts more than arguments. Israel once proudly ranged itself on the anti-colonial side of history, working assiduously in the 1950s and 60s to build strong relations with newborn states in Africa to share with them lessons and techniques of nation building. This, too, is little known nowadays. Israel’s best assurance of being on the right side of the colonial question in the future will depend on ending its dominion over millions of Palestinians and helping to usher in the birth of another new independent state.

Update, May 3, 2024: This article has been updated to provide additional examples of prominent U.S. families that profited from the opium trade.