Bernard Forjwuor, "Critique of Political Decolonization" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Dec 31, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Bernard Forjwuor, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, explores critical ideas in his book, which challenges the notion of political independence in post-colonial contexts like Ghana. He argues that independence often becomes a reconfiguration of colonial power rather than true decolonization. Forjwuor connects Ghana's journey to broader African experiences, critiques IMF and World Bank influences, and emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary approaches to understand colonial legacies. His insights push boundaries in the study of justice, freedom, and democracy.

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INSIGHT

Independence Didn’t End Colonial Influence

Bernard Forjwuor argues that Ghana's political independence did not fully remove colonial structures because external institutions like the IMF and World Bank continued to shape national policy.
He shows that a sovereign democracy can coexist with persistent colonial economic and political obligations that mutate rather than disappear.

INSIGHT

A Broader Ontology Of Colonialism

Forjwuor adopts an expanded ontology of colonialism drawing on Ajeet's taxonomy: settler, exploitative, and mixed forms plus direct and indirect rule.
This broader frame reveals colonialism's varied expressions beyond the narrow UN definitions.

ANECDOTE

Play Inspired His Concept Of Performance

Forjwuor recalls watching the Ghanaian play A Land of Million Magicians which critiqued IMF and World Bank impacts in Nima.
The performance inspired his use of performativity to analyze declarations of independence and political acts.

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What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved?

In Critique of Political Decolonization (Oxford UP, 2023), Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accomplishment of political independence or self-determination in Ghana. He argues that political independence is insufficiently a decolonial claim because it is framed within the context of a country, where a permanent colonial settlement was never deemed necessary for the consolidation of future colonial political obligations. So, while territorial dissolution was politically engineered by Ghanaians, the colonial merely reconstitutes itself in different legal and ideological forms.

Forjwuor offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom, and constructs multiple conceptual bridges between traditional disciplinary fields of inquiry including politics, history, law, African studies, economic history, critical theory, and philosophy and political theory. Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean, and asserts that decolonization is primarily a question of justice.

Bernard Forjwuor is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a scholar of black political thought, and his research focuses on the philosophical, critical, and theoretical claims advanced by global black political thinkers. His recent work challenges the ways the colonial and the racial are routinely affirmed as extinguished in the liberal democratic affirmation of sovereignty.

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