You need to decolonise your mind

It’s not spring, so it wasn’t spring cleaning. It was pure catharsis.

Some might say the real colonial occupation in Western liberal democracies is not the one the textbooks denounce, but the ideological one they themselves carried. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o coined the phrase in a very different context. The irony is that the phrase now travels more easily in the opposite direction.

From the late 1970s and 1980s, imported theoretical apparatuses such as postcolonial theory, applied postmodernism, and critical approaches to identity, established themselves inside Australian universities and then cascaded into teacher training, curricula, and public discourse.

Much of it arrived via French high theory in the late 1970s and 1980s. Thatcher was alert to the broader cultural and educational dangers of the time. Australian universities largely were not.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, You need to decolonise your mind.

THE WOKE COLONY OF THE MIND RADICALISES KNOWLEDGE

When the idea of colonisation is transplanted into Western liberal democracies, it demands a purge of the Enlightenment inheritance itself.

Universalism, evidence, the possibility of knowledge independent of the knower’s… pic.twitter.com/3xxCSFRABJ

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) July 30, 2026