The West's Monsters Are Turning Inward | Prof. Aghogho Akpome

## Literature and a decolonial perspective The conversation begins with an insistence that literature and common sense can be powerful analytic tools when disciplines have become blind to history. Drawing on realist fiction and personal memories of reading Dickens, the participants—led intellectually by Prof. Aghogho Akpome—use narrative as a lens to interrogate present crises. The claim is simple but unsettling: the shocks people now call “new” are better understood as continuations of a long, structurally produced violence that literature helps render legible. Realist texts do not pretend to be neutral records; they dramatize relations of power and dispossession. When brought into conversation with decolonial scholarship, such texts become instruments for diagnosing how modern institutions normalize brutality. This approach rejects the neat boundaries of academic disciplines. Akpome argues that disciplinary silos—economics separated from political economy, literary studies kept apart from history—have enabled a collective amnesia. By foregrounding stories, epigraphs, and lived memory, the interlocutors seek to reconnect what modern professionalized knowledge systems have severed: material extraction, ideological narratives of civilization, and the daily lives of people whose labor and resources sustained Western affluence. Framing the present through literature is not nostalgia; it is a methodological insistence that the archive of harm is as much literary and testimonial as it is statistical. ## The long age of monsters A central move in the conversation is to relocate the temporality of crisis. Rather than a novel rupture, “monstrosity” is described as a longue durée: centuries of colonialism, genocide, ecological plunder, and epistemic erasure. What many call the “time of monsters” is, from this vantage, simply the lived reality of the global majority for generations. The shock expressed in Western public discourse—that the world has become dangerous—must be read against the fact that for most of humanity the world was always dangerous because Western modernity prospered on dispossession. The historical catalogue invoked is stark: from the Congo atrocities under Leopold to the opium wars, the Berlin Conference’s paternalistic justificatory language, and twentieth‑century interventions and sanctions that produced mass suffering. These examples are not rhetorical excess; they are meant to dismantle narratives that isolate violence as aberrant or recent. Instead, the conversation insists on seeing violence as constitutive of the international order produced by colonial capitalism. “Monsters” are not exotic anomalies; they are structural features of a system that for centuries externalized its costs. ## Colonial wealth and the global majority A recurring theme is the causal link between Western prosperity and global inequality. The claim is blunt: the relatively comfortable lives of many in the West were financed by extraction—of labor, resources, and sovereignty—from the global majority. The apparent contradiction that capitalism purportedly lifts all boats is resolved by specifying which boats were excluded. Scholarship and public rhetoric that treat capitalist expansion as a universal good have obscured the reality that a minority’s welfare depended on a world of impoverished and exploited populations. This argument reframes familiar debates about neoliberal crisis and populism. Economic downturns in Europe and North America are not new in kind; what changes is the orientation of elites when the ability to externalize costs is threatened. Where previously exploitation could be projected outward—to colonies, client states, and peripheral regions—new constraints force reorientation inward, producing the politics of fear and repression directed at domestic populations. The “end of externalization” is therefore not only an economic shift but a political tipping point: elites panic when the extraction frontier closes. ## African histories and colonial violence The conversation grounds its theory in African specificity, using regional events to illustrate global patterns. From the Batepá massacre in São Tomé and Príncipe to the Benin punitive expedition of 1897, the Ogoni crisis, and the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia, the historical record repeatedly shows colonial violence in forms that are both physical and epistemic. These are not discrete tragedies but episodes in a continuum of dispossession and dehumanization. Akpome emphasizes how colonial tactics—divide and rule, forced labor disguised as “plantation” economies, and institutionalized racial hierarchies—shaped later conflicts and state formations. The 1994 Rwandan genocide is cited as example of how colonial classifications and administrative violence can reverberate long after formal rule ends. Likewise, the Niger Delta’s environmental devastation and the obscene mismatch between resource wealth and local well-being are offered as living testimony to extraction’s lingering effects. These stories complicate any account that treats postcolonial states as merely misgoverned; they reveal durable colonial architectures that have been repurposed rather than dismantled. ## Historical amnesia and a system turning inward A sharp critique in the discussion is directed at what is called Western historical amnesia. Public memory often frames colonialism as a closed chapter or confines culpability to distant ancestors, enabling contemporary elites to claim moral difference. The counter‑argument here is that such amnesia masks continuity: the institutions, financial instruments, and geopolitical habits of extraction persist. When external outlets for exploitation diminish—through anti‑colonial assertion, new geopolitical competitors, or economic shifts—the system does not gently reform itself. Instead it redirects pressure inward. This inward turn produces two intertwined phenomena. First, the securitization of domestic politics: states and elites adopt harsher measures to control internal dissidence, tighten surveillance, and criminalize protest. Second, ideological retrenchment: narratives of cultural superiority and civilizational mission are revived in new coatings—national security, economic nationalism, or “defense against disorder.” The result is a politics of containment that mistakes internal unrest for a breakdown of civilization rather than an expected reaction to constrained extraction. ## Western knowledge and decolonial alternatives The conversation also interrogates knowledge production. Western disciplines and academic norms are shown to have been complicit in naturalizing inequality. Economics that strips context from political relations, history that sanitizes conquest, and scientific reports that ignore ethical abuse together produce what Akpome and interlocutors call epistemicide: the killing of other ways of knowing. Decolonial thought, by contrast, insists on re-centering marginalized epistemologies and pointing to the ethical and political stakes of knowledge claims. Decolonial alternatives are not merely about adding excluded voices to syllabi; they demand rethinking foundational assumptions. Questions of development, progress, and modernity must be reoriented to account for extraction’s human and ecological costs. This entails humility in scholarship—accepting that mainstream disciplines often carry blind spots—and practical solidarity across regions and movements that share a common interest in dismantling exploitative structures. The conversation suggests that only when knowledge systems acknowledge their entanglement with power can they contribute to genuine change. ## Discussion: modernity, capitalism and socialism A recurring tension in the exchange is how to conceptualize modernity and possible pathways beyond exploitation. The speakers resist simplistic binary choices between Western capitalist modernity and state socialism as practiced in the twenti

The West's Monsters Are Turning Inward | Prof. Aghogho Akpome The world is not going through a "new crisis" just because the West is in trouble. Most parts of the world have been in crisis for hundreds of years due to the West doing fine. That's what's coming to an end and it seems it is this prospect of the end of exploitation that is scaring the elites into a frenzy against their own populations. Kyoto University Symposium 2026: "Geopolitics in the Time of Monsters" Presentation 12: Aghogho Akpome Aghogho Akpome challenges the idea that today’s crises mark a new age of monsters, tracing their roots through colonialism, capitalism and Western knowledge systems. Drawing on literature and African histories, he argues that prosperity for a minority has depended on exploitation elsewhere. The discussion explores modernity, socialism, cultural difference and the meaning of the West, with participants challenging and refining his claims. Akpome concludes by advocating decolonial thinking, shared interests and solidarity across societies rather than new hierarchies of supremacy. Aghogho's Links: University profile: https://www. arts.unizulu.ac.za/dr-a-akpome/ Research publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4538-360X Neutrality Studies Links: Neutrality Studies Substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Support Neutrality Studies: https://neutralitystudies.com/donate Neutrality Studies shop: https://neutralitystudies.com/shop Time Stamps 00:00 Literature and a decolonial perspective 02:36 The long age of monsters 05:45 Colonial wealth and the global majority 13:55 African histories and colonial violence 26:55 Historical amnesia and a system turning inward 32:16 Western knowledge and decolonial alternatives 39:29 Discussion: modernity, capitalism and socialism 48:36 Solidarity, cultural difference and the meaning of the West #Aghogho Akpome Thank you very much, Pascal. Is this on? Thank you very much, Pascal and Ango, and Jiang, of course, and everyone who was involved in organizing this. I do not take for granted that you found me worthy to address this distinguished company of scholars and commentators. I will draw, as this slide suggests, on literature a bit, because that's what I learned in school. That's what I was employed to teach before I got involved with people like Pascal. My approach will be non- disciplinary. I might have to say a bit about that later. But I had a conversation with Warwick yesterday, and Radhika, you highlight also when you talk about economics versus political economy. I'll say something about that. How the operation of received, settled disciplines has been complicit in some of the crises that we have faced for, I would say, centuries, not just decades. The adoption of a non-disciplinary approach relies a lot on good old common sense, which, in my view, has suffered a lot from the onslaught of disciplinarity and a lot of decolonial scholarship, which I don't think many people in this room may be -- 1 of 16 -- familiar with. All right, so this will just be in the background. Don't follow the slides. I begin with reference to Ambassador Bartolo's opening keynote, where he said, "Why is this time considered the time of monsters?" It's completely consistent with my initial reactions to the topic, Pascal. It is not a critique, but that struck me. I will title my talk provisionally, "Is the End of the Long Dark Age at Hand?" The long age of monsters, of monstrosity, the long age many of my colleagues in South Africa, in Africa, would also describe as the age of coloniality—is the end at hand? I'm trying to respond to the third task you gave to us: do a diagnosis, do a prognosis, and if you are bold enough, hazard therapy. I'll try to do that. So this poem—I'll come back to this poem—1794. How do I use literature? I use, in particular, realist literature, which doesn't pretend to be factual. It discloses its fictionality. However, it has been a very important source of commentary on realities, on documentable, documented realities. So I'll use it as a way of approaching the real, the factual. And if you read the poem, I'll leave it there for some time. If you did literature in school, I'm sure, Alexander, coming from England, Charles Dickens' works in the 1800s. I was very impressed by Oliver Twist as a child. I read Oliver Twist. My father was also a literature teacher, so we had a nice small library in the house. My mother was also a teacher, and I used to go to her office, and I used to read. I fell in love with the Harmsworth's Junior Encyclopedia. Do you know that? Yeah, but my dad taught literature, so we read—we were taught Oliver Twist in school. We also taught David Copperfield. We were, my father's family, a very ordinary, you could say, if we use the terminology, lower-middle-class family in Nigeria. I was born in 1971. But the poverty that we saw in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield was gripping us. We didn't experience that kind of poverty. We were a big family. My mother had eight of us. My dad had nine kids by the time he died in 1999. And you know the African system where your cousins could live with you. So there were times we were ten kids at home. But we didn't experience anything close to the kind of poverty we read about in Oliver Twist and in David Copperfield. That's just a background. This is a reminder to our friends, brothers, co-humans in the Western world that this is a picture of the start of the modern system of colonialism, of capitalism that we experience. This is how horrible it was for the majority of Western citizens when this tradition of colonialist economy, of political economy, was inaugurated. So why does Pascal say it's now? I think it's because imperialism, colonialism enabled the export and the externalization. Also, I would say the universalization of the darkness and the monstrosities that characterized capitalism. That export and the reciprocal extraction of resources from every part of the world enabled the industrialist and colonialist ruling classes to absorb large percentages of their local populations into the sphere of the minority. So it would seem... So if you're analysing from England, let's move forward, fast forward to, let's say, the 1970s. Let's say the period before the 1980s, the Thatcher and Reagan period of neoliberal politics, when things were really good, so to speak, -- 2 of 16 -- relatively, for most people in the middle class in the global North. It would seem that the majority enjoyed, benefited from colonialism, but they always did so at the expense of the majority of humankind, is the point I want to make. #Pascal Because a lot of the analysis of capitalism today. #Aghogho Akpome I think it's premised on the false impression that capitalism can benefit the majority. So you could have the majority of people in the West, which, as Kishore Mahbubani reminds us today, currently constitutes a mere 12% of the world's population. So that enjoyment, so to speak, by Western publics was always at the expense of the global majority, of the vast majority of the world's population. It gave many Western pundits and scholars the wrong impression that capitalism can work for everybody. But I think they deliberately kept that part out: everybody except everybody. Everybody here except everybody in the world. So why do I say "The Long Age of Monsters"? Ambassador Bartolo said it also. It has always been like that. He made a very brief reference to it, maybe because he's a diplomat and not a literary scholar. Ever since the inauguration of Western hegemony, the world—the vast majority of the peoples of the world—have lived in darkness. It has been a monstrous age, centuries of monstrosity, of erasure. So I work in South Africa. I'm transitioning to becoming part South African. You know Nelson Mandela, right? Except that he is not Nelson. He is actually Rolihlahla. It was when he got to school and encountered the white man that he was told, "Ah, Mandela we can manage. You'll be Nelson. You'll be Nelson. Just be Nelson." All right. And that has happened. My father had to adopt an English name. My mother had to adopt an English name. Luckily, they were quite conscious early. So my parents' eight children, none of them has an English name. You couldn't protest. You would lose lunch. You would lose your food. My mother insisted that you, you are a Gogo. I won't bother you by asking you to pronounce my name and see if you can pronounce it correctly. But when I started teaching in South Africa in 2010, it was my favorite thing with first-year students. I love teaching first years. So I'll come to class with my name there. Of course, it's a Nigerian name. It's not familiar to them. My accent is also not familiar to them. And then I'll offer them, since 2010, I would offer them certain marks, five or 10 marks. I can't remember. It changes according to my mood. I'll offer them five marks for pronouncing my names correctly. Since 2010, my five marks are still with me. All right, so I won't bother you. I won't ask you. You are not first years anyway. So it's been a whole—it's decades of erasures, of genocides, of massacres. Decades of epistemicides, mass murder, lynchings. I mean, centuries. Jim Crow. Ecological devastation. I come from the Niger Delta, and since 1971—oil was discovered in large -- 3 of 16 -- quantities in Nigeria in 1958. It partly contributed to the war over Biafra that some of the older scholars in this room might know about, that ended in 1970. So I come from that place, but I don't see the money. #Mattias Desmet I don't see the money. #Aghogho Akpome An aunt of mine, about 15 years ago, her house in our village, in our paternal village, was destroyed by a pipeline explosion. But we still don't see the money. See, guys, I should be like an ExxonMobil exec. I should travel first class. You know what I'm saying? If we think of the money, the oil that has been extracted from my hometown. Every century since Columbus, every decade, every continent has experienced the monstrosity of Western hegemony. And all this was done in the pursuit of progress, right? And the mission to—that's the point I was making yesterday, Arta—to civilize, civilizing mission. There is an article in the Berlin Conference communiqué, Berlin Conference communiqué, I think it's Article Six. It's still available, still available. It says the mission is to take care of the moral conditions of the savages, of the natives. But we all know what has happened over this period. If you have time, look this up. Number one, Wode Maya. Wode Maya is a young guy. He's Ghanaian, and he does travel videos. It's a genre that I've fallen in love with. I always liked to travel as a child. Problem was my dad and my mom. The books I read, my dad bought, and the encyclopedias I read in my mom's office. I saw a lot of the world and I wanted to travel. So Wode Maya does this, but what he does these days, he's got quite a following. He's got over two million subscribers. He goes to many African countries. And in this particular edition, which I stumbled on by mistake, I'm not an ardent follower of Wode Maya, but I stumbled on this. How many of us know of São Tomé and Príncipe? Okay, you see. See where it is? Tiny islands, not very far from Nigeria, near the equator. And in this story, if Pascal, if things were different, I would have played a few minutes from this video. It tells the story of a particular massacre, what is called the Batepá massacre, in 1953, committed by Portuguese colonists. And people were thrown into a well. Because after the so-called abolition of slavery, the Portuguese insisted they used people on the island to grow cocoa. And at that time, São Tomé and Príncipe competed with Brazil as perhaps the top-producing places of cocoa in the world. They also produced coffee. And you know a lot of the coffee we drink comes from East Africa, right? Even today, Kenya in particular, tea. So the formal colonial documents were th