Anyway, All The Dogs Are Howling a POSSIBLE FUTURES Podcast Exploration 1: Basics Conversation 10: True decolonisation More on this POSSIBLE FUTURES podcast at https://decolonise.possiblefutures.earth/anyway Anna Denardin: Hi, this is Anna Denardin, and you are a fly on the wall here amongst the POSSIBLE FUTURES Collective. [dogs howling intro] Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz Omar Fanon remains the most relevant thinker on decolonisation to this day. An Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist, writer, and revolutionary, Fanon played a strategic role in connecting liberation movements across Africa. His work was inseparable from his life. From serving in the French army during World War II to studying medicine in France, and later joining the Algerian Liberation Front, his lived experience became the foundation for a relentless inquiry into what POSSIBLE FUTURES considers the four colonial harms: ecocide, genocide, ethnocide and epistemicide. Working in a French hospital in Algeria, Fanon treated both the psychological distress of French soldiers and officers who carried out torture to suppress anti-colonial resistance, and the trauma suffered by Algerian torture victims. This dual reality crystallised his understanding that decolonisation requires both psychological and political commitment. Through his writing, Fanon offered what reads like a clinical prescription, an unflinching treatment plan for the psychic infection of colonial hegemony. The medicine is harsh by design: to purge, to accelerate the collapse of colonial powers, cultures, and logics still living under new disguises. Fanon repeatedly emphasised the need for communities of practice rooted in their own contexts. He warned against the traps of abstraction, the failure to recognise one’s own biases, historical position, and cultural conditioning. Fanon called for a combative decolonisation, not referring to overt violence, but to active, collective, and often intense engagement in dismantling coloniality. This means moving beyond critique or token inclusion of non-Western thought. It demands direct action, the creation of social and material conditions where new worlds can emerge. It’s the passage from individual suffering to collective agency, from alienation to responsibility. Combative decolonisation is what POSSIBLE FUTURES see as real decolonisation, in opposition to decolonisation lite, that we already discussed in our first podcast episode. Now, the rhetoric of “decolonisation” has become a brand, mass-produced and self-neutralising. These performative psychological and political pledges function like an immune system gone rogue, defending the very organism that’s devouring itself: the same world order that is disintegrating under planetary systems collapse. — Samantha Suppiah: I spent the first 12 years of my adult life studying and working in the sustainability industry in Europe. When I returned to Southeast Asia for good, someone put me in touch with the wife of a state ambassador to the US who happened to be of Indian heritage. She ran some philanthropic foundation or something and also sponsored an orphanage that provided sustainable education, I think. It was a small operation for about sixty children that didn't seem very well funded. I have, anyway, long understood philanthropy to be a scam. But a mutual connection was very good friends with this person, and so I was asked to call her. I didn't think much would come out of it given that I instinctively knew that the vast majority of individuals at that systemic level are dangerous and corrupt. But I just decided to ask for some advice given that I came from the sustainable design world in the private sector and was building my Southeast Asia network from near-zero. I need to start somewhere after all, and... It was a 20min phone call in which I literally said three sentences, simply to introduce myself. She cut me off and launched into a confident authoritative monologue talking down to me and saying I need to make something out of my life, I have some useful qualifications, so I should join some international organisation, like the Asia Foundation or whatever, and stick at it for a few decades until I'm at the top of that organisational structure, and then I'll be able to "make real change". The call ended and I was so underwhelmed. All I remember thinking was, "okay, bullet dodged." If you think large international organisations are a force for good in the world, then you don't know how the world sustains a globalised political economy of harms, pains and traumas. They are where good goes to die, after a career of traps, exhaustion, and paralysis. This was the single experience that helped me discover very efficiently and rapidly -- within 20 minutes -- precisely what state of colonisation my home region Southeast Asia was in, straight from the horse's mouth. Total. Capture. This is my context. Collective liberation requires collective action, but too often, collective action requires collective suffering. And sometimes collective suffering doesn't mean that there is a way out, because everybody is trapped. This is where I often liken our experience in the colonies with animals in a factory farm. You can escape the farm, but there is nowhere to go, and there's no way to survive. This is where our colonisers have perfected the imperial operation of globalisation: promote amongst the colonised a belief that they are not suffering, that they are in fact enjoying the benefits of a colonial world order, even as their very existence is being made increasingly untenable, unfeasible, impossible. Reproduction rates must be kept as high as possible, the population must be kept as poor and uninformed as possible, food choices must promote sugar and fat to subdue stress responses, and the mass media machine must be highly effective at occupying the attention of the people with vacuous emotionally sensational content that they are already addicted to. Self-dehumanisation is a vicious cycle of intergenerational abuse. Colonised culture is a perpetual motion machine that operates indefinitely without any external energy source. Because these mechanisms did not start with European colonisation -- these are civilisational mechanisms of subjugation and control of social classes. But they have been industrialised and turbocharged by European colonisation, particularly in the post-war era in which colonial innovations such as systems of management of multinational corporations and supply chains, and systems of propaganda through entertainment and social media. These systems have consolidated power through lawfare and hardware, through legal gymnastics and technological development. — Anna Denardin: The ambassador's wife is the perfect specimen of what Fanon diagnosed: the colonised elite who have internalised the coloniser's logic so much that they become its most effective enforcers. Those who succeed within these large international organisations mostly succeed because they traded their capacity for systemic disruption for institutional legitimacy. And now they guard the gates more zealously than any external coloniser ever could, because their entire identity depends on believing that their position represents "progress". Real disruptors are unemployable in these spaces. These organisations don't want their business models interrogated, their funding sources examined, their theories of change dismantled. They want diversity that photographs well but thinks identically like them. Your factory farm metaphor cuts really deep. You can do your best to escape from systems of harm, but often it feels like it's equally difficult to find ways to survive outside the cage. This is where I think community becomes both essential and insufficient. Community can hold and resource you through the disorientation of divestment, but can only get you so far when the very conditions for sustaining life otherwise continue to be systematically eliminated. And the reproduction of colonial harm becomes automated through this architecture of impossibility. What makes it even more insidious is the manufacturing of contentment you described. The colonised aren't just trapped, they're eager to call their cage freedom, to call their captors providers, to call their subjugation opportunity. The cage has become so sophisticated that most people can't even see the bars. And yet we're still here, trying to find the cracks, because… what else is there? — Samantha Suppiah: Precisely. Communities who fight for, and even win, their freedom from colonisation will simply replicate colonial mechanisms that create and sustain colonial harms, unless they are actively pursuing true decolonisation. I am referring to regularly purging coloniality from within your community, as often as you clean your house. Which I hope is at least once every couple weeks. Not judging. But we all know, it gets harder to do it the longer we leave it. Fanon has showed us the deepseated nature of the colonised condition, and pointed to a practice of discipline based upon ruthless clarity in understanding how coloniality has worked and continues to work on the level of the individual as well as the collective. He has broken down the various facets of this insidiousness and has described the religious diligence required in striving for true decolonisation. This is the work, and it will take generations. It's a strange situation where only those who have survived and transcended Stockholm Syndrome – who will be the best guides. Those who have experienced and participated in the seduction of coloniality – at the heart of imperialism – and then saw it for all the evil that it is and have taken real life decisions to step away from this relationship, from this complicity… These, in my humble opinion, are the best experts. This is because they have seen inside the beast and are intimately familiar with how it thinks, how it reacts, what leverage it has, and how it operates. As you laid out earlier Anna, psychological treatment is needed to purge colonial powers, cultures and logics. Communities of practice rooted in their own contexts, guarding against traps and failures, building strategies to counter the mechanisms of coloniality. This is what Fanon told us is necessary. To avoid and undo all the colonial harms of ecocide, genocide, ethnocide and epistemicide. This is the only way Fanon prescribed to create social and material conditions where Global South and indigenous sovereignty is free to exercise its collective agency. There is no one-size-fits-all, no blanket solution, no copypastable Western framework, no business model, no regime-change operation. There is only an innate desire for liberation. — Anna Denardin: Exactly. Decolonisation is an intergenerational project. Colonisation took centuries to consolidate, and it will take centuries to be undone, requiring not only long-term purging but also constant diagnosis, self assessment and recalibration towards collective health. The fact that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, no fixed framework or replicable steps, forces us into a different kind of awareness, a constant attentiveness to our surroundings and ourselves. You must learn the hard way how to become a systems dissector and a self-reinventor. You are perpetually being made and remade by your own mistakes, learnings, and unlearnings along the way. Each new experience reveals another layer requiring excavation and a renewed commitment. What worked in one context may not work in another. Colonialism relies on isolation, dissociation, denial. To reclaim embodiment committed to decolonisation is a way to access the kind of knowledge that the ego fears confronting. This knowledge hides truths about the self that ego-defense mechanisms have locked away for survival. But accessing it through the body cuts through the intellectual bypass that lets us theorise decolonisation without actually changing. This is the importance of lived experience, the “combative” decolonisation Fanon insists on: struggle not only with external structures but with the colonial patterns that reside within, refusing both numbness and spectacle in favour of grounded transformation. I think one of the most important capacities to develop in terms of decolonisation is humility. You can fail forward far faster and learn much more deeply when your ego steps aside. When you stop defending your innocence, your good intentions, your progressive credentials, you can actually see what's in front of you. This humility also enables you to repair damages caused with more agility and integrity, to apologise without centering your own feelings, to change behavior without needing applause, and to take accountability without collapsing into shame. It allows you to see yourself and the contexts you are embedded in with greater clarity, so adjustments are made earlier, with less collateral damage. — Samantha Suppiah: Egodeath, humility, accountability, and justice. What you are describing Anna sounds a lot like religious practice towards spiritual development. Coming to recognise our own shortfalls, our hubris, our persistent imperfections, and acknowledging and respecting regulation of our undesirable or harmful habits and behaviours – that is to say, systems or practices to self-regulate and to respect, support and uphold societal regulation – all towards societal betterment for peace and contentment. We all eventually face a divine day of judgment, or in the case of reincarnation, the spirit keeps the score. Spiritual growth is all about learning how to master being human, with lessons embedded within the cards that we are all dealt in life. This is all about becoming our higher selves, no matter our socioeconomic status. Structured religion is structured like this because religion is how human societies are supposed to regulate, attenuate and mitigate civilisational harms. It's not a certification standard because obviously those things don't work... It's a system of justice, be it in the human realm or in the celestial realm. This is a structure that is not immune from egotraps, of course. There are limits to the ability of structured religion to regulate civilisational narcissism or excess... And it hasn't done well against coloniality. Even though modernity may look like the religion forming the societal backbone of modern Western civilisation, I would argue that it is not. Religions, despite their flaws, are structured and operationalised for spiritual growth. Modernity does not do this. It does not pretend to do this. It is more accurately seen as a cult that is structured and operationalised for spiritual decline. As a mechanism to maintain modern Western civilisation, modernity is a cult which has sought to demonise and destroy all other religions through colonial genocide, ethnocide and epistemicide. The cult of modernity worships Western technology and wealth-hoarding fascists (a.k.a. the globalists), to justify the "benefits of development" delivered by an authoritarian global regime built and assured by centuries of European colonisation. Decolonisation is that which effectively combats, weakens and eliminates this cult of modernity. This is what creates space for indigenous and traditional cultures and traditions to take root once more and grow back into the spaces it had been hacked away from. Controversial side note: Decolonisation is actually not a left-wing liberal pro-globalisation idea. It is a right-wing conservative one rooted in traditions, seeking sovereignty through protection from globalisation's forces of corruption and destabilisation. — Anna Denardin: The pursuit of spiritual practice and self-improvement through these ritualised, daily actions has become increasingly disconnected from religion. And I am going to use a radical example, but recently, I was struck by a video about the rise of new-wave Evangelical churches in Brazil — often referred to by the English name “The Church”. These churches transform spiritual practice into entertainment spectacles complete with VIP rooms, snacks, massage chairs, gospel music concerts, and even raves. The very disciplines meant to cultivate humility, empathy, and transcendence now breed narcissism, self-centering, and an entitlement to comfort. This is just one example of the superficiality we live in. The same can be said for so many other things, including decolonisation. True decolonisation, as Fanon understood, cannot be a comfortable process. It requires constant melting, peeling, it's a messy, weird, and sometimes ugly process that happens in confrontation with normalised violence, this is also what we experience in our many years of working with decolonisation. It means developing critical consciousness that questions the structures we've internalised as natural, that interrogates our complicity in systems of harm. As Fanon wrote in Wretched of the Earth that, "Decolonisation, which sets out to change the order of the world, is obviously a program of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding." Decolonisation is "inherently violent" in the sense that it involves the complete dismantling of oppressive relationships, aspects of the self, and structures around, which could be summarised as the violence of radical transformation, not of brutality. True decolonisation, like an authentic spiritual practice, demands the hard, ground-level work of questioning, challenging, and developing the critical skills that are necessary for genuine health. — POSSIBLE FUTURES Crew: This is Anna Denardin. This is Samantha Suppiah. Anyway, all the dogs are howling.