Taking Asian and African Agency Seriously
Kevin D. Pham
The day after my first book was published, I plucked a random book off my shelf and took it to the park to read for pleasure. After ten years of working on Vietnamese anticolonial thought, I could relax, at last, by reading something unrelated to Vietnam, or Asia, for that matter. But, as I read, I soon realized that the themes explored in my book were still following me around. “Hmm, theorists of decolonisation should read my book alongside this one. Doing so would be fruitful,” I thought.
In this brief essay, I explain why. I put my recent book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization (Oxford University Press, 2024), into conversation with Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst 2022). I show that, although my book and Táíwò’s have different aims and methods, our books are ultimately similar in that they resist temptations to conflate modernity, “the West,” and colonialism, and, most importantly, they take colonized and formerly colonized peoples’ (hereafter CFCP) agency seriously.
What Táíwò and I mean by “agency” is when CFCP act autonomously and “repurpose” foreign ideas and practices (including those of their colonizers or former colonizers) for their own societies (7). For instance, Táíwò approves of how some African thinkers have “domesticated (and not merely by mimicry) many ideas, processes, institutions, and practices that are routinely attributed to colonialism, but are in fact traceable to modernity and other causes” (7). The Vietnamese thinkers that I explored in my book did just the same. Táíwò and I celebrate this agency and we see that an obstacle to taking CFCP agency seriously is a contemporary insistence that CFCP “decolonize” by returning to some form of indigenous “authenticity” or “purity.”
To be sure, our books are different. Mine is about a country; his is about a continent. My book reconstructs the political theories of six influential Vietnamese thinkers from the first half of the twentieth century, showing how they debated ways of strengthening their people to stand up to French colonialism (1858-1954). By drawing on their writings and speeches addressed to their compatriots, I show how they were doing then what political theorists today would call “engaged comparative political theory.” They were comparing between various “Eastern” and “Western” philosophical traditions to find the right ideas for them. In different ways, these thinkers reinterpreted and adapted foreign ideas—from China, Japan, India, Germany, France, the US, and elsewhere—for their own ends.
Táíwò’s book, however, does not focus on historical figures who lived under colonialism, but makes a normative argument addressed to contemporary theorists of decolonisation and anyone interested in African political thought. At stake for him is advancement and progress in contemporary Africa. For Táíwò, a major obstacle to progress in Africa as well as scholarship in and on Africa is what he labels “Decolonisation 2.” Decolonisation 2 is the notion that decolonisation requires that people from ex-colonies get rid of “any and every cultural, political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past” (3). Proponents of Decolonisation 2, he laments, abuse the term “decolonisation,” stretching its meaning beyond its original definition: the process of “making a colony into a self-governing entity with its political and economic fortunes under its own direction” (3). In short, “decolonisation has no place where there is no colonial presence” (47).
I agree with Táíwò. When I use the term “decolonisation” in the title of my book (“Vietnamese visions of decolonisation”), I mean Decolonisation 1, not Decolonisation 2. But is Táíwò attacking a strawman? Are there really people who insist on some indigenous “authenticity” or “purity”? To address this, I will share two relevant anecdotes that occurred in the last month. After that, I will discuss how Táíwò and I engage with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a likely source of inspiration for proponents of Decolonisation 2. Then, I’ll end with a brief discussion of agency and how it relates to “victim blaming.”
First anecdote. During the discussion portion of a book-talk that I did, an audience member said that it seemed to him that the Vietnamese figures in my book “capitulated to colonialist doctrines.” I quickly said that I disagreed, but, due to time constraints, didn’t elaborate. Later, I identified the person and emailed him to ask what he meant. He replied: “I indeed said that they capitulated to colonialist doctrines. But that was a mistake, since it is much too narrow; I should have included all non-Vietnamese doctrines such as liberalism, Confucianism, Marxism, and so on.” He also remarked that he could not make sense of a tension between, “on the one hand, the insistence [of the Vietnamese thinkers] on originality and, on the other, the adoption of an eclectic set of existing ideologies with which these thought leaders were ultimately satisfied.”
However, I never argued in my book that these Vietnamese thinkers insisted on “originality” in the sense of being “pure” or “authentic.” Yet, I identified the source of confusion. In my talk, as well as in my book, I pointed to a claim made by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan writer:
“The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of nonachievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own.”
I said in my talk that this may have been true for some colonized peoples, but not for the Vietnamese thinkers in my book. Most of them did see Vietnam's past as a wasteland of nonachievement, but they didn't see it as the effect of a cultural bomb dropped by the French. They themselves could not identify a distinctly Vietnamese intellectual heritage given the enormous influence of Chinese culture from a thousand years of Chinese domination (111BC to 938AD). In response to this inability to identify great Vietnamese works, thinkers like Nguyễn An Ninh (1900-1943) criticized the Vietnamese for parroting Confucian ideas without thinking for themselves about the true meaning of Confucianism, and he urged the Vietnamese to create “great” works of literature by borrowing freely from Eastern and Western traditions.
At my book-talk, my interlocutor took this to mean that Ninh insisted on “originality.” But Ninh’s emphasis was on “greatness” not “originality.” Common to all the thinkers I examined was their explicit embrace of foreign ideas without any insistence on a “pure Vietnamese” theory or culture.
My interlocutor was left satisfied with my explanation and with how I resolved his perceived tension. Yet, I found his choice of words to be puzzling. He had conflated “non-Vietnamese doctrines” with “colonialist doctrines,” and framed these Vietnamese thinkers’ adoption of foreign ideas as a kind of “capitulation.” I would not use “capitulation” to describe what these Vietnamese thinkers were doing. Rather, they were actively and creatively interpreting foreign ideas to address their own problems. Phan Chu Trinh (1872-1926), Vietnam’s first democrat, was convinced that adapting European liberalism and democracy could enhance Confucianism in Vietnam. Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969), the father of Vietnamese communism, combined Confucian self-cultivation and Leninism to articulate a “revolutionary morality.” In short, these thinkers engaged with foreign ideas, transformed them, and made them useful for their aims of “Decolonisation 1.” They were exercising agency.
The second anecdote. I co-host a podcast on Vietnamese history called Nam Phong Dialogues with a Vietnamese American friend named Yen. Her name is pronounced in Vietnamese (Yến) kind of like “Ian.” But, growing up in the US, she and others pronounced her name like the Japanese currency. On our podcast, we pronounced her name in the latter way. I later learned that several Vietnamese listeners criticized us for it. One even refused to continue listening to the podcast because of it, and another told me: “Why are you pronouncing her name the American way? I thought you were all about decolonisation.” This person seemed to suggest that by pronouncing Yen’s name the Americanized way, we were enacting a kind of colonialism, and to pronounce her name the Vietnamese way would be resisting that colonialism. But is there “colonialism” here? Yen was content in pronouncing her name in either way. In permitting the American pronunciation, is she manifesting some form of false consciousness or “colonial mentality”? I do not think so. To say that she has “colonial mentality” is to deny her autonomy—her agency—to choose for herself how to pronounce her name.
The two anecdotes above suggest that Táíwò is not attacking a strawman. There is indeed a widespread assumption among ‘decolonialists’ that CFCP should, in Táíwò’s words, “forswear, on pain of being forever under the yoke of colonisation,” any ideas and practices that contain “even the slightest whiff of the colonial past” (3). My interlocutors in these anecdotes express a similar sentiment promoted by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, an enormously influential figure in studies of postcolonial theory. Táíwò engages with the same passage from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o that I quoted above, in which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o insists that colonialism drops a “cultural bomb” that makes the colonized feel inferior about their own culture and therefore distance themselves from it. Táíwò criticizes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o for presuming that this is what all colonized peoples experience and even asks if it is the case for the Vietnamese: “I think it would be a stretch to say that what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes captures the experience of Indians with British colonialism, or that of Vietnamese with French colonialism” (75). Indeed, as I mentioned above, many Vietnamese saw Vietnam's past as a wasteland of nonachievement, but on their own terms. And rather than allowing this perceived “wasteland” to make them distance themselves from their Vietnameseness, they were motivated to reconstruct Vietnamese identity anew.
I do think, however, that Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has a point. One quibble I have with Táíwò is that his book overlooks why some “decolonialists” might end up insisting—even wrongly so—on the “authenticity” or “purity” of Decolonisation 2. A reason they support Decolonisation 2, it seems, is that there are indeed some CFCP who unfortunately embrace the culture of the colonizer while, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o mentioned, distancing themselves from or denigrating the behavior, ideas, and culture of their own society. This tendency is also what Amilcar Cabral criticized in his speech “Identity and Dignity in the National Liberation Struggle” as he described native bourgeoisie who were “culturally uprooted, alienated, or more or less assimilated” (45). I know of some Vietnamese who praise everything French while denigrating everything Vietnamese. Internalized inferiority exists, and Táíwò does not seem to give attention to this troublesome tendency which is a source of rightful ire for proponents of Decolonisation 2. My guess is that Táíwò would also frown upon such behavior; it is different from creatively repurposing the ideas from colonizers for one’s own society. At stake is national dignity. In the eyes of the masses, a native who displays fawning praise for the colonizer while denigrating their own people is an obstacle to national dignity. In my book, I show how Vietnamese thinkers ultimately wanted to construct a sense of national dignity and pride, a desire common to all colonized peoples in response to the indignity and humiliation of colonial domination. However, the problem with proponents of Decolonisation 2 is that they overcorrect.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously advocates that African literature should be written in African languages. As Táíwò points out, this is partly inspired by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s own experiences of being raised at home with his native language and then going to “colonial school” where he was educated in a colonial language. Thus, a “harmony” in his life was “broken”: “The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture,” he explains (76). Yet, again, Táíwò points out that “Not all of us who share similar experiences to those of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have processed it the same way as him” (76). Furthermore, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s insistence that Africans use “African languages” is problematic, Táíwò argues, because the question of ‘What is an African language?’ is “by no means a simple question” (120). There are “few written languages, apart from hieroglyphs and ideographs, original to Africa, and most languages have rendered using the Latin alphabet.” Furthemore, languages are thoroughly hybrid: “For instance, many Yorùbá words are borrowings from Arabic, Hausa, Nupe, Portuguese or English, not to mention Edo, Esan and Akan-Twi. So much for ‘absolute autochthony’!” (122).
Regarding the “language question” in the Vietnamese context, both Chinese and Vietnamese were used in Vietnam until the early 20th century when Vietnamese became the main language. The Vietnamese language was written with Chinese characters until Portuguese missionaries developed a Latin script for it in the seventeenth century. Known as quoc ngu (Vietnamese in Latin script) would then go dormant and then be revived again when the French came in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although the French promoted quoc ngu as a means for easier colonial control, Vietnamese anticolonialists also promoted it. For the latter, promoting quoc ngu would make the masses literate more quickly, which would help with anticolonial mobilization because they believed it was easier to learn than Chinese characters and it was cheaper to print.
Most of the six influential Vietnamese thinkers in my book were not writing in Vietnamese. Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh wrote primarily in Chinese, while Nguyễn An Ninh, Phạm Quỳnh, Nguyễn Manh Tuong and to a lesser extent, Hồ Chí Minh, wrote most of their political texts in French. However, like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, most of these thinkers did insist on the imperative to develop quoc ngu and use it as Vietnam’s main language as opposed to other available options (Chinese, French, Vietnamese in Chinese characters, etc.). Nguyễn An Ninh, though he admitted that he was more comfortable writing in French than in Vietnamese, implored the Vietnamese to develop their language. Phạm Quỳnh saw Vietnam’s language as containing the “essence” of the nation. But at the same time, figures like Phạm Quỳnh explicitly drew on French and Chinese languages to develop quoc ngu rather than insist on some purity. Though they insisted on using the Vietnamese language, they embraced the fundamental hybridity of the Vietnamese language. Here, Táíwò is right to say that purity is impossible, and those he criticizes are right to say that colonized and formerly colonized peoples desire a culture, identity, and language to proudly call their own.
Although proponents of Decolonisation 2 may make good points, as I mentioned above, I ultimately sympathize with Táíwò. Not all theorists of decolonisation take the agency of CFCP seriously, because doing so would mean admitting that CFCP have some responsibility for the situation that they find themselves in. This is troublesome from the point of view of proponents of Decolonisation 2 because, if the situation is tragic, taking agency seriously becomes “victim blaming” and therefore unjust.
However, “victim blaming” can clearly be empowering. Proponents of Decolonisation 2 tend to place most or all the blame for Africa’s contemporary problems on “neocolonialism.” However, Táíwò argues that the failure of African societies to achieve “states headed by governments that respect the inviolate dignity of their citizens and are answerable to them” after “flag independence” cannot “solely or even principally be attributed to colonialism” (30). Táíwò refers to Obafemi Awolowo who “pinned the blame squarely on the shoulders of African leaders themselves and their failure to firmly exercise their own agency” (29). Táíwò insists that he is not saying Awolowo is necessarily right but that proponents of Decolonisation 2 “would do well to rebut arguments like his” (30).
Similarly, the Vietnamese thinkers in my book engaged precisely in what we would call “victim blaming” while living under French colonialism. And they found it to be deeply empowering and motivating for anticolonial struggle, much like how Gandhi blamed his compatriots by saying “the British did not take India from us. We gave it to them.”
In 1907, Phan Bội Châu wrote to his countrymen: “Those whom I blame most deeply are my people themselves.” Phan Châu Trinh lamented: “It is a shame that our people … cannot look after their basic personal needs and prepare for their old age, let alone think of society or humanity. How could we not respect the Europeans if they are so superior to us?”
Nguyễn An Ninh said: “If we take stock of the purely literary and artistic achievements that have been produced here, the intellectual legacy of our ancestors would certainly be meagre alongside the heritages of other people … Today when India and Japan are producing thinkers and artists whose talent and genius shine forth as brightly as those of Europe, Vietnam is but an infant that does not yet even have the notion or power to grope toward a better destiny and genuine deliverance.” Phạm Quỳnh scolded young people: “The youth lack personal power, strength, temper of character, that vigour of spirit and that moral virility.” Hồ Chí Minh declared in a letter: “Instead of blaming others, I think it is more reasonable to blame ourselves. We must ask ourselves: ‘For what reasons have the French been able to oppress us? Why are our people so stupid? Why hasn’t our revolution succeeded?’” And, after the French were finally expelled in 1954, Nguyễn Mạnh Tường shamed revolutionary leaders for having “alienated their individuality and even their personality, replacing it with a double of themselves whose reactions are remote-controlled from the outside.”
These thinkers attempted to shame their compatriots into productive, anticolonial, nation-building projects. They embraced the idea of agency because they knew they could not rely on any other more powerful entity to punish the French. And for them, agency meant adapting whatever ideas and practices were useful, regardless of the source, for their own purposes. They took their agency seriously, and so should we.
Dr. Kevin D. Pham is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam.