PREMIUM Are African intellectuals trapped in a kind of cognitive dissonance? The African scholar speaking about territory to a group of other scholars from outside Africa, begin their encounter from a point of ‘smallness.’ Weekend Just now Listen

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famous phrase ‘decolonising the mind’ is probably one of the most (ab)used urging by an African intellectual.

But there is never doubt in the minds of users of this phrase, especially in academic circles or among activists who wish to demonstrate that Africans are still in some kind of (neo)colonial trap, some kind of cognitive dissonance; that the African born and raised during colonialism and even in the state after the end of colonialism carries with her or him strains of some kind of colonial infection - cultural, social, spiritual, economic, political, intellectual etc.

This suggestion most affects the African intellectual?