"If decolonization was an event at all, its essential philosophical meaning lies in an active will to community— as others used to speak of a will to power. This will to This community is another name for what could be called the will to life. Its goal was to realize a shared project: to stand up on one’s own and to create a heritage. In our blasé age, characterized by cynicism and frivolity, such words might cause only snickers. But at the time of decolonization, many were ready to risk their lives to affirm such ideals. These ideals were not pretexts for avoiding the present or shirking action. To the contrary, they acted as catalysts, and served to orient becoming and to impose a new redistribution of language and a new logic of sense and life through praxis.4 Colonization was perceived as neither a destiny nor a necessity as the decolonized community tried to establish itself on its ruins. It was thought that by dismembering the colonial relationship, the lost name would resurface. The relation between what had been, what had just happened, and what was coming would be reversed, making possible the manifestation of one’s own power of genesis, one’s own capacity for articulating difference and for expressing a positive force. In addition to the will to community, there was the will to know and the desire for singularity and originality. Anticolonial discourse had, for the most part, espoused the postulate of modernization and the ideals of progress, including where it criticized them either explicitly or implicitly. This critique was animated by the quest for a future that would not be written in advance, one that would mix together received or inherited traditions with interpretation, experimentation, and new creation to leave this world and go toward other possible worlds. At the heart of this analysis was the idea that Western modernity was imperfect, incomplete, and unfinished. The Western claim to epitomize the language and forms in which any human event could arise, and even to have a monopoly on the very idea of the future, was only a fiction. The new postcolonial world was not condemned to imitate and reproduce what had been accomplished elsewhere.5 Because history was being produced in a unique way each time, the politics of the future— without which there would be no full decolonization— required the invention of new images of thought. This was only possible if one committed oneself to a long apprenticeship in signs and their modes of encounter with experience— an apprenticeship in the time specific to the sites of life.''6

Achile Mbembe