Timothy Burke points out that “anti-colonialism” as a blanket political philosophy doesn’t exactly make sense:
African anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t entail any specific view of the state, capitalism, globalization, liberalism, or the desirability of French cuisine. Among the anticolonial activists of Barack Obama Senior’s generation across Africa were devoted American allies in the Cold War, explicitly pro-capitalist figures, hardcore cultural conservatives, devoutly Catholic or Christian leaders, anarchists, socialists, Anglophiles and Francophiles, Maoists, and so on. You name it. The hard thing is to find any African of that time who had a secondary school education or higher and was overtly procolonial, though there are some interesting cases who I think historians should study much more than we do.
Look, the point here is that Dinesh D’Souza knows that conservatives will hear “Kenyan anti-Colonialism” as “get whitey.” Matthew Yglesias asks, whether conservatives disagree that “British colonialism in East Africa was morally wrong.” Well, as far as D’Souza goes, the answer is probably yes. In a 2002 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, D’Souza defended colonialism as something ultimately really awesome for the colonized, that is, as long as they weren’t too savage to benefit from the gifts of their godlike Western colonizers.
While I was a young boy, growing up in India, I noticed that my grandfather, who had lived under British colonialism, was instinctively and habitually antiwhite. He wasn’t just against the English; he was generally against white people. I realized that I did not share his antiwhite animus. That puzzled me: Why did he and I feel so differently?
Only years later, after a great deal of reflection and a fair amount of study, did the answer finally hit me. The reason for our difference of perception was that colonialism had been pretty bad for him, but pretty good for me. Another way to put it was that colonialism had injured those who lived under it, but paradoxically it proved beneficial to their descendants. Much as it chagrins me to admit it – – and much as it will outrage many third-world intellectuals for me to say it — my life would have been much worse had the British never ruled India.
It’s not really surprising that the possibility of positive-sum relations between colonizer and colonized could have occurred without the massive injustices that went hand in hand with colonialism doesn’t occur to D’Souza because conservatives generally look at foreign affairs in zero-sum terms. That said after reading this, D’Souza’s screed on Obama and anti-colonialism sounds more and more like a personal issue.
