Analysing Yourself in Someone Else's Language
A society can be emptied of its own ideas while keeping all its things. Then it borrows the coloniser's, and cannot understand why they do not work here.
The most uncomfortable idea in this book is not that the West is failing. Plenty of people enjoy that one.
It is Malek Bennabi's, and it goes the other way: that being colonised is not simply something that was done to you.
He called it colonisability. The condition a society develops that makes colonisation possible, and then, once it has happened, keeps it going after the soldiers have gone home.
Handled carelessly this becomes victim-blaming, and it is worth being precise about why it is not. Bennabi is not saying the conquest was deserved or that the conquerors were owed anything. He is asking a different question, and a more useful one: why, a century after independence, with the flags changed and the garrisons withdrawn, does so little appear to have moved?
His answer is that a society can be emptied of its own ideas while keeping all its things.