Daily Times

Recently, a wave of decolonization was invoked across the colonized world by protests, aimed at removing statue of Cecil Rhodes, a British colonialist who black students consider as the founder of apartheid system in Africa, from the campus of University of Cape Town. The protests were prompted by an action of a black student named Chumani Maxwele who, in a show of disregard for Rhodes, hurled a plastic box full of defecated content at the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the university. Soon after the protests gained momentum, the university succumbed to the protests and removed the statue. The incident got a domino effect, and resonated itself through protests at Oxford University where slogans of the protest “Rhodes must fall” reverberated in the corridors of the campus lying in the heart of United Kingdom. Students ‘disapproval of Rhodes’ statue at Oxford made the case more interesting as at that point Britain was being reminded by students’ lot of the colonized world through support of native English of its excesses in the past which it made ruthlessly during its colonization spree, and to which Britain is hitherto averse to face head on. Britain has always pretended to justify its colonization under the pretext of white man’s burden; in other words, in their constructed history of the colonized world, they portray that the colonized lot was an unruly mob who only became civilized once they came under the yoke of colonizers.

In an age of globalization, where construction of knowledge discourse is no one’s authority anymore as there is a flow of information across the globe and construction of knowledge has now become a joint venture between those who constructed it in the past, colonizers, and who followed, the colonized. Everybody is now claiming its space. Where the colonized are in retreat to uphold their laid superstructure and infrastructure; there, the colonized are bent upon scratching the surface to trace their roots and defy all they had been believed into by their colonial masters about their past. A decolonization has already started in the colonized world, and almost every tom, dick and harry has this conviction that salvation for their predicament lies in defying colonial blue prints for development and forging their own blueprints which are in sync with their past and their predilections.

The patent frustration in the colonized with respect to colonizers is so ripened that it only takes a spark to flare up the powder keg of resistance. Any act of rebellion resonates across the colonized states and forges a bandwagon on which the colonized lot rides to claim the space which their forefathers ceded. Where the students in University of Cape Town and Oxford campus in UK were stirred by the colonial excesses epitomized by actions of Cecil Rhodes, here in our part of the world, though there is no legacy of Rhodes, but there have been many skins embodying his soul and towed his line in letter and spirit. One of them is Sir Herbert Edwardes.

Sir Herbert Edwardes was the commissioner of Peshawar during colonial era. He established Edwardes College in Peshawar which has so far given birth to legends in different walks because of its unique learning atmosphere which entertains diversity in the conservative milieu of Peshawar. I personally did intermediate from the college, and I can claim without any doubt that my academic stint at the college was one of the best one. But like Rhodes, there is a flip side to Edwardes too.

It was Edwardes who embedded in Frontier Crimes Regulation Act, a draconian law through which Fata was ruled by the colonizers and is still under its rule after it became a part of Pakistan, a clause with respect to collective responsibility punishment.

According to the clause, under the law the government can make the whole community accountable for the misdeeds of some rogue elements within. Recently, sixty members of a tribe were detained under the clause after some of the government employees were kidnapped. FCR in its whole and the clause in particular are anachronistic to the zeitgeist of the present age defined by democracy.   

The other day, I was going through face book account and came across a post by one of my respected seniors in university having major in English literature, who is from Fata, saying: “Sir Herbert Edwards( his name is perpetuated in Edwardes College in Peshawar) invented the present day technique of collective responsibility in vogue in Fata. The sole purpose of this brutal law was to control the people of Fata. Under this draconian law, the whole tribe or khel was and is to be held responsible for the misdeeds of any of its members. Do the students of Edwardes College from Fata know this bitter fact? How can the people of Fata get rid of this indiscriminate colonial method of administration? Do we need to have our own #‎EdwardesMustFall to bring about change?”

“#Edwardesmustfall” invoked in me a mixed type of sensations. As an alumnus, I have great regard for Edwardes College and what I learnt there, I wish that for coming generation and will always be an advocate of its prestige as a great institution.

I do believe in #Edwardesmustfall but not in literal sense. I believe that there is a need to discuss what went wrong critically at institutions like Edwardes College, but #Edwardesmustfall must not be translated like #Rhodesmustfall translated in university of Cape Town.

I think that if an iota of critical thinking exists in our academia, this is dispensed in colonial institutions like Edwardes College. This is quite logical that we, in our quest for claiming space in the being defined history in the colonized world with respect to the decolonization, criticize people like Cecil Rhodes and Edwardes for what they did, but our quest should not make us blind toward sanity that says that knowledge should not be entertained with aversion even if it is other’s (colonial) knowledge or dispensed at other’s (colonial) institutions.

I think that the essence of academia lies in critical thinking and learning to be in agreement with disagreement. Our past values are anachronistic to our present; that is why, protests are erupting against values entertained in the past. We cannot get rid of the past; what we can do is to review the past and correct all its aberrations which we cannot afford in the present. This was the message that Oxford University administration gave to protestors and this is the message that fits with us too.

I strongly believe in decolonization. I believe that our salvation lies in becoming organic. The bandwagon set at present by #Rhodesmustfall is something like a life line for us which we must ride on. But our obsession with decolonization should not rob us of making a sane decision. We need to decolonize in the same coin the way we were colonized. Like the colonizers, first they colonized our minds and thus they colonized us inclusively; we, in our decolonization obsession, need to decolonize our minds first, and then build an infrastructure and superstructure of decolonization. Decolonization of minds comes through critical thinking which is at present dispensed in an iota of colonial institutions like Edwardes College, Government College University, Atchison College, and Forman Christian College in Pakistan. So, we definitely need to go for discussions full of scathing criticism in these institutions about draconian laws like FCR and many others, but should not resort to outright removal of colonial institutions and colonial knowledge.

The blogger is a graduate in Social Sciences from Government College University, Lahore. He can be reached at uinam39@gamil.com