Frances Martin and Fatima Pirbhai-Illich

During the spread of colonialism across the world, land became a white possession. In the service of the home European nations, for the settler nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States of America, as they moved to independence, land and ownership, land, ownership and property, as white possessions, became translated into nationhood, and citizenship as white possessions. That is, the nation was created according to the image of those in power, and that is the white settler Europeans, and legally only those who are in possession of land have a right to vote, and therefore the right to count as full citizens. This has continued into contemporary times through the use of binary categorizations of citizen, immigrant, us, them, superior, inferior, included, excluded, and so on. We therefore believe that there are no decolonized spaces; all are caught up in the colonial matrix. So if we bring that to education, we argue that sites of education, including classrooms, are also white possessions. And they're organized in such a way to maintain those unequal power relations, to keep schools, universities, classrooms, curricula and methods of instruction, culturally white -- i.e., Euro-Western. And power, by its very definition, is derived from the ability of people or groups in society to impose through coercion. And the imposition of white Euro-Western colonial ways of doing education is achieved both explicitly through rules that govern behaviour through timetables that govern lessons, and implicitly through, for example, methods of instruction, teacher-student relationships, the hidden curriculum, and so on. In a recent conversation that we had with a scholar from the Global South, internal colonization was mentioned. They spoke about how even when independence was achieved, decolonization of the mind did not automatically follow. So new governments continue to colonize the local populations and through colonial structures, and the ways of being inherited by these countries continue to be perpetuated. They stated, ‘After the British left, they left exactly the systems as they were and handed them directly to the Africans, totally unchanged. So the only thing that changed was the skin tone of the people who went in; every other thing remains exactly the same: the way the hierarchies, the oppressive ways, the access was limited to certain people. So what has happened is that our own people are our own colonizers. And I don't know whether that is better or worse, because these are the people you trust. It's not being oppressed, as you know, something from outside.’ The focus of our work therefore is on decolonizing the mind and along with it, raising an awareness of how it might be possible to develop other forms of education and research relationships that are not coercive or oppressive.