Thomas Gladwin’s, Slaves of the White Myth: The Psychology of Neocolonialism, is an indispensable tool for decolonization. Instead of using a particular region as the basis of his analysis for studying western imperialism, he deftly uses the entire globe as his basis of analysis to demonstrate the rancorous effects of western imposition. With this type of methodology, Gladwin shows the western imperial pattern of domination via colonization, with all of its nuances, that has turned Indigenous populations the world over slaves of the white myth. To really understand the history and insidiousness of neocolonialism this book is a must have. Gladwin correctly shows how neocolonialism sprung from western colonial policies such as divide and rule, indirect rule, and much more.
While being a mere six chapters, including the introduction (Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Racism, Social Science, and The Future Enters the Present), this groundbreaking book provides the reader with a well-researched and detailed history of western imperial imposition, but more importantly it provides solutions to this genocidal imposition. Interlaced with anecdotes, Gladwin makes neocolonialism very understandable to the reader who might not be familiar with the history of western imperialism. No academic obstructionism to sound cleaver or a petty attempt at tenure, just clear and concise analysis. Gladwin also makes it abundantly clear that there is no true decolonization or national liberation under capitalism, since it was the European system of capitalism that facilitated and fortified the complete degradation and enslavement of the colonized. Again, Gladwin painstakingly details the historical precedence of this process.
The only thing that annoyed us about Gladwin’s Slaves of the White Myth was that throughout the book he referred to people colonized by the west with the misnomer of brown. To be fair he does explain this as a “literary convenience,” as a way for the reader not to be confused by “black and brown” so-called minorities in European majority polities (pg. x). We do have to say we found this “literary convenience” really annoying because throughout the book he liberally quotes from people such as Chinweizu, Peter Abrahams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Julius Nyerere, and many other respected Africans, and he keeps referring to them as “brown” and in the same fashion refer to them as African. Gladwin could have just as easily substituted “the colonized” for “brown” and maintained the same sort of “literary convenience” and sharpened his semantics. This, and the fact that he referred to Kwame Ture as “Stokely Carmichael” stating he was from Jamaica (see page 133), —by the time of this publication (i.e., 1980), Kwame Ture, hailing from Port of Spain, Trinidad not Jamaica, had changed his name from Stokely Carmichael—was the only issues we had with Gladwin’s Slaves of the White Myth.
We highly recommend you pick up this hard-to-find publication if you have the opportunity.
