Living decoloniality, practical examples of decolonial
re-existence through the aid sector, a podcast by Carla Vitantonio with the support of the
Center for Humanitarian Leadership.
Welcome to a new episode of Living Decoloniality.
I am Carla Vitantonio and the sounds and noises you hear in the background are from the city
where I live and work Havana, Cuba.
My guest for today is Dr. Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence.
I have been reading her and following her for years.
Many of the things I write and practice have also been influenced by her voice and I would never
imagine that one day I could contact her directly and interview her.
But here we are. Let’s listen to Salmah as she introduces herself for us.
My name is Salmah Eva Lina Lawrence. I was born in Port Mosby in Papua New Guinea when it was a
territory under the protection of Australia. Not exactly a colony but colonized nonetheless.
A place where apartheid existed and signs proclaiming white’s only littered Port Mosby.
As a child I was always puzzled why foreigners were able to dominate spaces to the extent that Christopher
Robinson, a colonial administrator has a memorial plaque on Samarai Island that proclaims,
and I quote “Christopher Robinson, able governor, upright judge and honest man, died 20th June 1904
aged 32 years. His aim was to make New Guinea a good country for white men.” End quote.
What gave Christopher Robinson the right to make my homeland a good country for white men I wondered?
And perhaps I wondered this because I come from a culture that is about as decolonial as you can get
in our present era. My mother’s culture is matricentric, part of which is matrilineal descent,
which has long enabled women to inherit land and other forms of wealth. Women have also long
head bodily autonomy enabling them to marry and divorce as they choose and to plan their families
as they choose. Besides matrilineal descent another feature is matrilocality meaning that typically
on marriage it is the husband who will move to take up residence on the wife’s land.
If they divorce it is the man who must leave and return to his country.
This results in women having lifelong security of residents for herself and for her children,
and the latter are usually free to move between the different households of their parents.
This type of matricentric governance has significantly shaped gender relations in this part of
Papua New Guinea and because I spent a large part of my childhood with my maternal grandparents,
I was significantly influenced by their matricentric sociality. This sociality has followed me
through university in the UK, a career in the city of London, and my transition from the private
sector to international development. And of course it has profoundly influenced how I think about gender
and also how I think about coloniality and decoloniality. Salmah and I both refer to the framework of the
colonial matrix of power when we look at our sector. However, while talking to her,
I had the impression that her positionality and experience had allowed her to use, apply and
bend these concepts to the reality of her work and life. And in fact this is what she answers to
the question, what is coloniality for you? Coloniality for me has three deeply and
inextricably intertwined aspects, the colonialities of race, gender and knowledge. Theorists of the
modernity coloniality matrix have described these as technologies of power. They are deeply embedded
hierarchies of dominance and control that have shaped much human life since the Europeans made
their mission to expropriate and appropriate land and resources that belong to other peoples.
I contend that it is not possible to dismantle coloniality unless all three colonialities
are being addressed simultaneously. Let me illustrate the inextricably intertwined nature of the
colonialities of knowledge, race and gender with a story. A while ago I came across an
on-line news article about an Australian volunteer in the Papua New Guinea Highlands.
The volunteer was apparently teaching the women from the Highlands agricultural skills.
Now the people of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea have practiced agriculture continuously
for the last 10,000 years. And in recognition of this, UNESCO has designated the Kuk Swamp
in the Wahgi Valley a heritage site because of evidence of cultivation from at least 6,000
years ago. And this evidence includes systems of drainage that enhanced the cultivation
and addressed the challenges of feeding grain populations. In light of this evidence of millennia
of agricultural practices in the Highlands, what I wondered could this white Australian woman
teach Papua New Guinea Highlanders about agriculture? Well apparently she demonstrated how to
cultivate tomatoes and lettuce. Foods that are not part of the daily diet and would presumably
have been grown to sell. Nonetheless, the knowledge that she shared hardly rates to the technological
and technical complexities that the ancestors of the Highlanders negotiated and mastered
and then passed down the generations to the present day complexities that included both cultivation
and domestication. The article claimed that the woman taught agriculture when all she did was
introduced two different crops that were not native to the region. Papua New Guineans travel
around the country do this all the time, taking plants from one location and introducing them into
another location. This is not called agriculture. Agriculture is what Oxford defines as the science
or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing
of animals to provide food, wool and other products. But because a white woman is doing this,
it all of a sudden becomes agriculture. The knowledge the white woman is sharing is presented in a
vainglorious estimation by the reporter. What about the knowledge held by women of the Highlands? Well,
whilst valorizing the white woman’s efforts, the article made zero mention of the skills of the
Highlands women, so the reader is left to assume that the women of the Highlands know nothing about
agriculture. This anecdote is a manifestation of an ongoing injustice rooted in the colonialities
of race, gender and knowledge that excludes and/or devalues knowledge as held and produced by
particular groups of people and which contributes to and maintains these colonial hierarchies.
The embedded assumption is that the knowledge held by a white woman must be superior to that
held by black women, indeed, that black women possess no knowledge of any value. What does this mean
for development practitioners? While this coloniality of knowledge acutely inflicted by both race and
gender is deeply embedded in the international development sector. The whole premise of development
is that development practitioners know best how to do development and especially know best how to
do gender because they have been trained in minority world institutions to see through a minority
world lens. But what does this premise do to local knowledgees and how are these valued or discarded?
How does this premise speak to the priorities of communities where development interventions take place?
One has to question the foundations of the education that development practitioners receive,
in what ways does this education help or hinder those who are steeped in the cultural
specificities of whiteness. To see that these are exactly that cultural specificities that are not
universally accepted. Colonialities perpetuate it through educational institutions and through
the practices of international development. Coloniality is the default setting of both these sectors.
If both the educators of development practitioners and the development practitioners themselves
could learn how to reorient their thinking towards the decolonial, they would be able to take the
path of least time because decoloniality places value on knowledge and experiences that are not
formed from whiteness. Hearing Salmah’s example, so many episodes of my early career as a
project manager emerge in my memory. The way our system works did so much harm. There’s a part of
me that would like to indulge in guiltiness. And then I remember that this would withdraw energy
from what I’m trying to do now, supporting change. I ask Salmah to share advice or practice,
stemming from her research. So I’d like to share two reminders and one practice.
And the first reminder is this, the Buddha is said to have warned against the perils of thinking
that the finger pointing at the moon is the moon. He cautioned that the pointing finger is but a tool,
a guide without which one might not see the moon. Now the work of development practitioners is the
finger pointing at the moon because for development to be successful it has to be embraced by the
communities and societies in which development takes place. The pointing fingers are the practice
of development. The moon is the actual changes to ways of living that are embraced by a population
because their experiential assessment has demonstrated to them that the development intervention
is of benefit to them. Development practice such as the management of funds, the design of programs,
even the building of infrastructure, this is development practice. It only becomes development when
it is valued and used by that community. The other reminder is the practice of humility.
We live on a planet of an estimated 80 billion humans who live in a myriad of environments,
physical and social. Who are we to think that we have the answers for people whose lives are vastly
different to ours? My experience and my research demonstrate that humans want the material
comforts that development brings but they do not necessarily want to change the cultural
and social structures in which they are embedded and then forcing this type of change generates
resistance and it’s harmful. Another practice, well actually the only practice I’m going to talk
about because I’ve given two reminders. The practice that I want to talk about is indigenization.
I use indigenization to describe place-based practices generated by those who occupy that place.
So let me expand on this. I said earlier that three colonialities sit at the heart of the
modernity-coloniality matrix and influence all other colonialities and these are the colonialities
of race, gender and knowledge. Therefore any action to drive systemic change towards decoloniality
must address all three. For example it’s insufficient to focus only on gender equality in international
development programs. Systemic change of a decolonial nature demands equal attention to how the
coloniality of race and the coloniality of knowledge inflict the discourse and practice of gender
and development. In other words a policy and programmatic focus on gender equality must also have
a corresponding focus on knowledge justice and the enabling of indigenization in that context.
A minority world organization cannot practice the method of indigenization in the majority world
since what is indigenous to the minority world context will be colonizing in the majority world
context. This is because the methodology of indigenization is place specific. If I as a Papua New
Guinea claim to be practicing the method of indigenization in Gadigal country in New South Wales
Australia, then I am practicing colonization since only Gadigal people can practice indigenization
in their country. So what is the minority world organization to do when transformative
decolonization or decoloniality requires the practice of place-based indigenization in lieu of either
translation or the forceful imposition of a colonial language and its attendant ways of
thinking and being. I suggest that a minority world organization can seek to become aware of its
practices in order to decolonize and that whilst it cannot practice indigenization outside of
its own context, it can enable and support an unencumbered practice of indigenization in the other
context that it works in. If you’re from the majority world, then you can be asking yourself
how you can drive indigenization in your context. And as a response to the inevitable concern that
indigenization means the encouragement of harmful cultural norms, I put to you that all societies have
both harmful and life-enhancing norms. For example, whiteness has many harmful norms,
including the technologies of power that I named earlier. For majority world people, the process
of indigenization starts with the identification of positive and life-enhancing norms.
Now why can’t minority world people do this? Because in our existing social environment,
it inevitably becomes an act of colonization when one society is interpreted through the lens
of the dominant society. So in a nutshell, to address the technologies of power that are the
colonialities of race, gender and knowledge requires practices that are oriented to dismantling
these power structures and one of these practices is indigenization or the enabling of indigenization.
And this is also the recognition that knowledge is emplaced.
I’m sure that like me, you would like to hear more from Salmah, her personal website and the link
to her training sessions are in the caption of this episode.

It is an unusual cold day while I record
in the middle of December 2024. I have spent the day thinking about how to bring living
decoloniality to the humanitarian leadership conference that will be held in Doha in April 2025.
If you also want to participate, check on the Center for Humanitarian Leadership website.
Registrations are still open. Until the next episode.
 

You listened to living decoloniality. Practical examples of decolonial
re-existence through the aid sector. I am Carla Vitantonio and you can reach me through my
Spotify and speaker channels or through my Instagram Carla Vitantonio. This podcast was deliberately
recorded with minimum technical equipment trying to preserve as much as possible the feelings and
intentions of those who participated. If you liked it, please subscribe and share it through your
network. Living decoloniality was produced in partnership with the Center for Humanitarian
Leadership. The logo is a present from Eugenio Nittolo