Decolonise the mind to power a green future

Green industrialisation in Africa is needed for the climate crisis and for a just development path

- Charlize Tomaselli

As the global race for critical minerals intensifies, from lithium in Zimbabwe to cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Africa finds itself, once again, rich in resources but poor in power. Green industrialisation is being touted as the continent's opportunity to move beyond extraction to manufacture green goods.

But this opportunity will pass us by if African leadership continues to be held hostage by the psychosocial legacies of colonialism.

This is not just about policy. It's about consciousness. Philosopher and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon warned us that colonialism doesn't end when the colonisers leave. It lingers in the psyche.

In Black Skin, White Masks, he wrote about how colonised people internalise the logic of their oppressors, aspiring to hold the power of the oppressor, governing in ways that serve global capital rather than their own people. He argues that this becomes a major obstacle to genuine liberation.

Across Africa, post-independence elites often reproduce colonial power structures preserving extractive economies, obeying the rules of the global capitalist order and prioritising the needs of foreign investors over their own citizens.

As South African analyst William Gumede has pointed out, South Africa remains a "postcolony", politically independent, but still economically manipulated. The apartheid-era structures of racialised accumulation remain intact, simply rebranded for the global neoliberal order.