Where Are We Heading With Independence?

Amid the impacts of the pandemic, it is very relevant for us to continue to remember the historical awareness in the context of the colonial realm versus the realm of independence as a universal dichotomy.

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” So wrote the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy about the meaning of the COVID-19 pandemic (Financial Times, 3/4/2020).

This pandemic, for her, calls us to leave the world of “a doomsday machine that we have built ourselves, […] the wrecks of prejudice and hatred, greed, data banks and dead ideas, dead rivers and sooty skies” .