Introduction

Resistance in Africa is primarily a response to the coloniality reproduced by the postcolony and global multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Coloniality is the location of power within which resistance emerges, radiates and is disciplined into emancipatory reformism bereft of revolutionary transformation. It is itself a central motif of global imperial designs, but it must not be confused with colonialism. Colonialism entails a political and economic relation in which sovereignty of a nation and a people ‘rests on the power of another nation, which makes such a nation an empire’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243). Coloniality emerged as a result of colonialism but it survives it. It is a power structure that defines and permeates ‘culture, labour, inter subjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243). Coloniality is embedded in books, cultural patterns, common sense, self-image, aspirations of self, and other various aspects of African experience since the time of colonial encounters, and ‘[i]n a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243).

Coloniality operates through assumption of various disguises and markers including religion, ethnicity, epistemology, and even notions of beauty and its opposites. As such it forms an ideal entry point to analyse the unfolding character and dynamics of African forms of resistance.