Agaciro and postcolonial humanity: Exploring the memory politics of colonial crimes in Western contexts

This article advances Agaciro as a decolonial approach for researching colonial memory politics. The concept is derived from a formerly colonised society and roughly translates as ‘relational dignity’. It represents a decolonial perspective that remains underutilised in memory studies, even as postcolonial scholarship has addressed colonial durabilities. Empirically, we deploy Agaciro thinking to analyse parliamentary commissions of inquiry into Belgian colonial crimes in the African Great Lakes region and the memory politics linked to experiences of colonialism in Belgium. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork and discourse analysis of commission documents to identify how forms of silencing shape Western-led discussions of colonial responsibility and memory. Foregrounding Agaciro reveals how dominant ethical and epistemological frameworks marginalise African perspectives and calls for more decolonial alternatives for rethinking questions of colonial memory and justice in memory studies and beyond.