Decolonization diaries

Decolonizing in Reverse: A Return of Memory:

History is often narrated as a straight line, yet the deeper movements of the world follow spirals.

Colonization—this long cycle of planetary rupture—did not begin in 1492, nor with the arrival of any ship. Its roots sink much further back, into the early hierarchies of the Tigris and Euphrates, when accumulation replaced reciprocity, centralized power overshadowed communal life, and the human gaze ceased to move with the rhythms of the earth.

From that point onward, the wound traveled: through Greece and Rome, through imperial Christendom, through modern Europe, and finally into Abya Yala. If this process unfolded along a path, then decolonization cannot take a different route. It must travel back through the very corridor that colonization opened, following the thread in reverse, like someone returning to the origin of a fracture.

Across Abya Yala, such a movement is already taking shape. There, where the impact was most recent and most devastating, something more than resistance is occurring. The peoples of Abya Yala preserve ways of thinking and living that preceded the colonial order. Their calendars, woven geometries, ancestral mathematics, territorial philosophies, and ethical systems hold pieces of a planetary memory that Europe lost long ago.

The strength of this resurgence does not come from idealization, purity, or cultural superiority. It emerges from continuity: Abya Yala never severed its relationship with the land, the sky, or the communal weave, even under invasion.

Time remains circular.

Reciprocity remains law.

Community remains the ground of meaning.

Oral tradition continues to bind language to place.

Knowledge remains inseparable from life.

This reawakening echoes across the Atlantic and invites another question:

What existed in Europe before Rome, before empire, before ownership?

Iberian, Celtiberian, Atlantic and Mediterranean cultures sustained—through many millennia—solar sanctuaries, solstice-aligned monuments, agro-astronomical calendars, ancestral symbols that resonate with Mesoamerica, the Andean altiplano, the Himalayas, and the Arctic Circle. Segeda, Stonehenge, the Atlantic megalithic rings, Cantabrian petroglyphs, and ancient swastika-like solar spirals all suggest that humanity once shared a common language of observation before the rise of imperial power.

There is an even deeper possibility:

Perhaps what we seek did not originate in Mesopotamia—perhaps it vanished there.

Many traditions speak of the world before the flood: Atlantean memories, submerged civilizations, and parallel myths on every continent.

These stories hint at a time when humanity held a sophisticated relationship with the earth and sky: mathematical, relational, cyclic, oriented to balance rather than control.

Whether literal or symbolic, these echoes point toward a memory older than empire, older than hierarchy, older than domination itself.

Wherever its true origin lies, the movement today takes on a clear shape:decolonization, in its fullest sense, seeks to heal the broken relationship that imperial history began.

It is not a return to the past.

It is the restoration of continuity.

In this task, Abya Yala occupies a central place.

The Indigenous nations of this continent, carrying wounds that are still open, hold the first fire of the return.

Their role does not arise from triumph or privilege, but from guardianship. They preserved what the colonial world forgot. They kept alive the knowledge that allows humanity to walk back toward itself.

For this reason, the present moment calls for a gesture that is philosophical, political, and ceremonial at once:

to recognize the peoples of Abya Yala as initiators of the planetary decolonial movement, as those who safeguard the memory that guides the way back.This recognition is not a favour given; it is coherence with reality. Without their endurance, the ancient thread of relation that once united the world would have disappeared entirely.

This Text is also an offering of gratitude.

Gratitude to those who kept the weave intact when violence sought to tear it apart.

To those who carried forward calendars, plants, songs, geometries, ethics, languages, and ways of living that continue to offer a compass in a disoriented world.

To those who resisted without ceasing to teach.

To those who heal while sharing.

To those whose pain has not eclipsed their generosity.

Decolonization in reverse is a movement emerging from Abya Yala toward the world, illuminating a pathway back to a time when the human being looked at the earth without claiming ownership and looked at the sky without seeking dominion.

The circle is moving.

The thread begins to draw itself toward the origin.And memory—long thought lost—has begun to breathe again.