Decolonizing the Mind: Reclaiming Our Stories, Symbols, and Systems

By RJB World Foundation

Introduction: The Colonization Within

Long after the flags were lowered and the treaties signed, colonialism persisted in our minds, our languages, and our systems. The physical structures of empire may have crumbled, but the psychological architecture remains embedded in how we think, learn, and relate to ourselves. To decolonize the mind is not simply to critique history, but to heal from it to excavate the truths buried beneath colonial narratives, and to rebuild a future grounded in indigenous wisdom, symbols, and self-authored stories.

At RJB World Foundation, this is more than theory. It's our lived mission. We believe that the decolonization of thought is the foundation upon which true empowerment is built. This article explores how reclaiming our stories, symbols, and systems is not just a cultural imperative but a revolutionary act of spiritual, intellectual, and communal liberation.

1. Storytelling as Resistance: Reclaiming the Narrative

For centuries, Africa's stories have been told by outsiders, filtered through foreign tongues, reduced to tropes of savagery, and repackaged for Western consumption. The African continent was portrayed as a void "a dark continent" until Europeans arrived to 'enlighten' it. This narrative, repeated in textbooks, films, and policy documents, shaped not only how the world sees Africa, but how Africans see themselves.

To decolonize the mind, we must reclaim authorship. Oral histories, ancestral tales, and indigenous philosophies hold the keys to who we truly are. Reclaiming our stories means writing our own books, making our own films, documenting our own heroes, not as victims or villains, but as architects of civilizations, stewards of sacred traditions, and innovators in our own right.

At RJB Foundation’s Ancestral Codex School, this principle is central: we don’t just teach history, we remember it. We unearth voices that colonialism sought to silence, and we center indigenous knowledge as a source of pride, not shame.

2. The Language of Liberation: Speaking Ourselves into Power

Language is not neutral. It carries worldviews, encodes beliefs, and structures how we relate to reality. Colonial education systems forced African children to abandon their mother tongues in favor of English, French, or Portuguese languages that could not carry the full weight of indigenous knowledge, emotion, or cosmology.

This linguistic erasure was not accidental; it was strategic. By cutting us off from our languages, colonizers disrupted the transmission of wisdom, spiritual teachings, and communal identity. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o argues in Decolonising the Mind, the restoration of language is essential to the restoration of consciousness.

RJB Foundation is pioneering a Yoruba Medium Curriculum, teaching science, mathematics, and technology in Yoruba. We do this not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity. Because a people who cannot think in their own language cannot fully think for themselves. To speak Yoruba while solving an algorithm is to affirm that intelligence wears African skin.

3. Reclaiming Sacred Symbols: From Fetishization to Empowerment

African symbols, cowries, the Adinkra, Nsibidi, Odu Ifá were once tools of knowledge, communication, and spiritual alignment. But under colonial rule, they were demonized or reduced to exotic motifs. Sacred geometry was called superstition. Divination became 'witchcraft.' Spiritual artifacts were looted and placed in European museums, stripped of context and power.

Decolonizing the mind requires us to reclaim these symbols, not just as art, but as encoded intelligence. They are not relics; they are keys to cosmic understanding, ways of knowing that modern science is only beginning to grasp.

At RJB Foundation, our educational modules weave these symbols into STEM learning, demonstrating how Ifá binary logic aligns with computer science, how Yoruba cosmology offers models of sustainability, and how African symbols can guide ethical innovation.

When we wear, speak, and teach these symbols, we are not performing culture. We are participating in a legacy of encoded truth, storytelling, and metaphysical order.

4. Healing the Wounds of Colonial Education

The colonial classroom was designed not to educate but to indoctrinate. Its aim was to produce clerks, not creators; imitators, not innovators. It privileged Western history, values, and logic while erasing indigenous thought systems. African children were taught to admire European philosophers and scientists while remaining ignorant of their own ancestors’ contributions to medicine, mathematics, and metaphysics.

This dissonance created a psychic split between who we are and who we are told to be. Between our dreams and the structures that contain them.

Reclaiming our educational systems means re-centering our cosmologies, pedagogies, and ways of knowing. It means building schools not just as sites of instruction, but as sanctuaries of cultural memory and creative liberation.

RJB Foundation’s Ancestral Codex School is one such sanctuary. Prefabricated, mobile, and rooted in both tech and tradition, it challenges the idea that quality education must be foreign or expensive. We teach Python and proverbs, HTML and heritage because our future depends on our ability to integrate, not separate, our knowledge streams.

5. Restoring Indigenous Systems of Governance and Justice

Colonial rule dismantled African systems of governance systems that were often communal, consensus-based, and deeply spiritual. In their place, imported legal and political structures took root alien frameworks that prioritized control over connection, punishment over restoration.

Decolonizing the mind also means reimagining governance through ancestral lenses. Yoruba Ifá jurisprudence, for instance, offers a sophisticated model of ethics, accountability, and balance, guided not by rigid laws but by divinatory wisdom and communal well-being.

What if conflict resolution in schools was based on oracular insight and restorative justice? What if leadership was measured by spiritual alignment rather than accumulation of power? What if we designed systems that mirrored the interdependence found in nature and spirit?

This is not regression; it is renaissance. A return to wisdom that modern systems have yet to match.

6. Embracing Technology Without Losing the Soul

Too often, African development is framed as a race to catch up with the West. In this model, technology is seen as the highest form of progress, and ancestral knowledge as an obstacle. But what if the two could dance?

African spirituality teaches us that everything, including stone, circuit, or soul, has energy, intention, and spirit.

Technology, when aligned with purpose and ethics, becomes a tool for healing and transformation.

At RJB Foundation, we believe in spiritually guided innovation. Our tech curriculum is infused with indigenous ethics. We don’t just ask "what can we build?" but "why, and for whom?"

From AI to ancestral archives, we envision digital ecosystems that serve community, preserve culture, and promote justice. Our dream is not to build the next Silicon Valley in Africa, but to birth something deeper: a Sacred Valley where innovation honors spirit.

7. The Spiritual Core of Liberation

At the heart of decolonization is spirit. Colonization was not only physical and cultural, it was spiritual. It severed us from our ancestors, our altars, and our intuitive knowing. It replaced initiation with indoctrination, and prophecy with policy.

True decolonization means returning to the source. Not merely for identity, but for instruction. Our ancestors were not just historical figures. they were engineers of energy, stewards of seasons, guardians of balance.

When we reclaim our spiritual practices, our rites, rituals, and revelations, we access a dimension of intelligence that transcends textbooks. We learn to dream beyond borders, to act from alignment, and to lead from the inside out.

This is why RJB Foundation teaches Ifá not as superstition, but as science, psychology, and soul technology. In the 256 Odu Ifá are not just poems, but algorithms of the human experience maps for healing, innovation, and ethical living.

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Future

To decolonize the mind is to reclaim the power to imagine, define, and build our world. It is to reject the lie that our ancestors were ignorant, our symbols meaningless, or our languages inferior. It is to remember that long before colonization, we were philosophers, scientists, builders, and dreamers.

At RJB World Foundation, we are reclaiming this truthm, not just in words, but in structures, syllabi, and spiritual practice. We are not waiting for permission. We are writing new chapters, guided by ancestral light.

The future belongs not to those who imitate the colonizer, but to those who remember who they are.

Join us.

Let’s decolonize the mind. Let’s reclaim the stories, symbols, and systems that will birth a new world.

To learn more about RJB Foundation, visit www.rjbworld.org or contact us at connect@rjbworld.org.