Hélé Béji. We, the Decolonized. Translated by Matthew B. Smith. Polity, 2025. 176 pp. 21. 35. Paperback. ISBN: 9781509562664.

Hl Bji, a Tunisian intellectual, asks a self-reflection question on what we, the decolonized, have really done more than fifty years after most African and Asian countries became independent.Giving a nonsentimental answer, she contends that political independence did not produce the freedom, dignity, or alternative humanism that inspired the decolonial initiative.We, the Decolonized offers a vivid self-critique of postcolonial societies that gained independence without achieving genuine liberation, a condition Bji calls "arrested decolonization."What makes Bji's intervention unique is her positionality-she writes as someone who lived through Tunisia's independence, whose family was part of the anticolonial elite, and who has watched how postcolonial power works for many years.Her father's role in Bourguiba's government situates Bji within the project of state building, lending her analysis both depth and accountability, as she critiques postcolonial failures from inside the struggle rather than from a distant or Westernized perspective.By the end of the book, readers are pushed to see decolonization not as a completed event but as an ongoing and unsettled process whose promises remain unfulfilled.The book's central argument is developed through Bji's examination of what she terms the "paradox" of decolonization.On one hand, decolonization represents "the most powerful and widely shared political aspiration that political consciousness has ever imagined, the revolution of all revolutions.It extended the promise of equality and self-determination globally, challenging European imperialism and affirming the dignity of colonized peoples.Bji observes that the decolonized adopted forms of governance that were modeled on those of colonial administrators, as if seeking to confirm the claim that they were incapable of self-governance.In doing so, they reproduced the same brutality they had endured under colonial rule.Rather than creating the "second-stage humanism" that would move beyond European models, postcolonial states often repeat colonial forms of violence through authoritarianism, censorship, corruption, and the restriction of basic freedoms.What distinguishes Bji's critique from conservative rejections of African independence or neocolonial bias is her refusal of conventional explanations.She does not attribute postcolonial failures to ongoing Western domination alone, even though she acknowledges the presence of neocolonial economic structures and foreign intervention policies.Bji does not imply that African cultures or people are by nature unfit for democracy, which is a racist argument she clearly rejects; instead, she argues for responsibility within the postcolonial world itself, insisting that as long as there is a