The Colonial Master Asks You to Thank Him
by Jídé Salawu
Bruce Gilley’s paper “The Case for Colonialism,” arguing that colonial imperialism was a blessing for the people who were colonized, was first published in the Third World Quarterly in 2017, and it became instantly infamous. It created an academic firestorm, with thousands of academics signing petitions demanding retraction, apologies, and the rolling of editorial heads; nearly half of the journal’s 34-member editorial board resigned, claiming that the paper had been published without having passed peer review. Eventually, threats of violence against its editors led Gilley to ask TWQ to withdraw the piece.
Many of Gilley’s claims were laughable, such as the idea that Nigeria had no effective system of government of its own before the British arrived. The Ọ̀yọ́ empire had a system of checks and balances centuries old. In Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani tells the story of how African political institutions were undermined, the consequences of which remain visible to this day.
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