Bernard Forjwuor. Critique of Political Decolonization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. 304 pp. Bibliography. Index. $110.00. Hardcover. ISBN: 9780198871842.

Bernard Forjwuor provides an original critique of the existing decolonial studies literature, using the case of Ghana in Critique of Political Decolonization.The book is a modified version of his dissertation and evaluates the concept of political decolonization in Ghana.The book is divided into seven chapters, and the introductory chapter begins with many questions about concepts such as decolonization, freedom, independence, and justice.These are all broad questions that deserve in-depth research to answer.Forjwuor discusses Ghana's political independence from Britain and questions the continuity of colonialism in the country.He also criticizes liberal democracy as a concept, liberal democracies, and their "legitimate" plundering and exploitation of African resources after the Berlin Conference of 1884-85.The methodological approach of the book is based on theoretical and genealogical grounds, which is what Michel Foucault called the "history of the present," and its epistemological approach is post-positivist.He critically reexamines Ghana's independence and liberation, predicated on liberal democracy.In Chapter Two, Forjwuor discusses self-determination and political decolonization as products of the Enlightenment and Eurocentric approaches to politics.He argues that postcolonial political processes still contain coloniality, which "renders the meaning of political decolonization not only ideologically redundant but also materially bankrupt" (22).He discusses various approaches to the concept of political decolonization from the studies of Achille Mbembe, Adom Getachew, Jansen Osterhammel, and Kwame Nkrumah.Chapter Two includes a critical analysis of the self-determination rule; it suggests that colonies should have had a right to self-determination in accordance with their precolonial community structures.The UN Charter or Resolution 1514 contributed to the dependency of African peoples on the foreign political systems of the West.This chapter presents different types of colonial regimes; it considers Ghana as an indirect rule of British colonial territories, and evaluates "independent" Ghana as a failure that ended with the persistence of coloniality.Chapter Three discusses indirect rule in general, beginning with a lengthy discussion of Hegel's argument about Africans having "a childlike status" (71).The development of the mechanism of colonialism is the primary concern of this chapter.It also analyzes the origins of indirect rule in European history and its advantages for colonizers.Forjwuor argues that Africanization is a way of legalizing colonial rule with the help of democracy and "a new configuration of colonialism that will later be embedded in postcolonial democratic politics" (95).