👆🏼Excerpts:
“On September 8, 2017, the Third World Quarterly published my article “The Case for Colonialism” ….Within minutes of its appearance, a great controversy arose on social media. Over the ensuing weeks, half of the journal’s editorial board resigned in protest and the editorial staff in London received credible death threats. On September 21, I assented to the withdrawal of the article in the interests of the physical safety of the journal’s editorial staff.”
“[The article] has its origins in 2012, when I stumbled upon the final book of Chinua Achebe [“There Was A Country”] while at an academic conference. Achebe’s many positive comments on colonialism led me to delve deeper into the legacy of this supposedly anti-colonial figure, resulting in an article which I later published in African Affairs.”
“I submitted the article first to the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding. The editor there, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, gave it a desk approval and asked me to strengthen the policy-relevant aspects of the paper prior to sending it for peer review. The paper then received one positive and one negative review. Lemay-Hébert then asked his editorial board whether he should publish the paper and was told that it was too politically controversial to publish. The “fear of political backlash” determined the decision not to accept it, he wrote to me by email. I next turned to the Third World Quarterly in which I had previously published two peer-reviewed articles, one of which took a clearly pro-colonial standpoint.”
“…the article has been the subject of countless essays, conference panels, seminar discussions, and journal articles. It has over 130 citations in Google Scholar at this writing. It is the ninth “most read” article in the Third World Quarterly’s forty-two-year history, even though readers can “read” only the withdrawal notice. Oddly, the Third World Quarterly has begun to allow authors to cite the original withdrawn article, albeit only critically and in a way that directs readers to the withdrawal notice rather than to the published version in Academic Questions, as, for example, in Fasakin’s recent article continuing a long tradition of blaming colonialism for Africa’s contemporary woes.”
“…Ochonu writes with puzzling logic: “British colonialism was just as disruptive to Africans’ lives when it failed to exploit them as it was when it did.”
