Two Mistakes Worth Avoiding on the Way Back

Before describing what recovering an older wisdom actually looks like in practice, two mistakes are worth naming plainly, because both are tempting, and both lead somewhere unhelpful.

The first is romantic nostalgia — treating whatever existed before colonial rule as a perfect, conflict-free ideal that simply needs restoring exactly as it was. This is not accurate, and pretending otherwise does no one any favours. Every pre-colonial society carried its own internal tensions, its own real inequalities. Age-based systems that distributed authority across generations could also marginalise the young. Land systems that protected communal ownership often gave women only secondary, insecure claims to it. None of this was a lost paradise. And the world has genuinely changed since then — global economic integration, modern medicine, communication technology, none of which older governance systems were built to address, and none of which anyone is seriously proposing to discard.

The actual goal is not restoration. It is recovery — specifically, of certain foundational principles that were systematically undermined: land held in trust rather than treated purely as a commodity, authority accountable to the community it serves, individuals understood as embedded in relationships of mutual obligation, and the plain fact that a community's legitimate standing exists prior to, and independent of, whether any outside power chooses to recognise it.

The second mistake runs in the opposite direction — treating everything produced since colonial rule began as permanently tainted, and therefore to be rejected outright. This is equally unhelpful. A genuinely strong constitution, built through real participation, embodies real continuity with older principles, however modern its language. Legal tools built on colonial-era foundations — the right to information, the right to organise, the right to bring a case in the public interest — can still be used in service of exactly the sovereignty this project is describing. Modern communication allows organising at a scale older systems could never achieve. None of this needs to be treated as a betrayal of tradition simply because it did not exist before colonial contact.

The real work is not choosing between an old way and a modern one. It is standing firmly in the old way as a foundation, and engaging the modern world selectively, on your own terms — taking what is genuinely useful without surrendering the ground you're standing on.