In Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, a haunting moment reshaped his understanding of oppression. As a young man, he encountered a white woman scavenging for food in a garbage dump. Moved to compassion, he gave her all the money in his pocket. Later, he reflects on why the sight of a black person in the same circumstance never stirred him to similar action. The answer, he realizes, is the insidious grip of apartheid on his psyche: suffering among Black people had been normalized by a racist society, while white suffering felt aberrant, urgent, and worthy of remedy. Before Nelson Mandela could free South Africa he had to free his mind and heart. This story became my mirror. This story forced me to confront a parallel truth: colonization doesn’t just shape nations, it colonizes minds. As an Iraqi raised in the shadow of colonialism, I began to realize that I had to decolonize my own soul.

Confronting the Colonized Self

Iraq is a land scarred by Ottoman, British and later American occupation. I began to see how deeply colonial logic had seeped into my worldview. Growing up, I absorbed the unspoken hierarchies of value: Western ideas were “modern,” Arab traditions were “backward.” English-language media was sophisticated; Arabic stories were quaint. Even my aspirations were filtered through a lens of inferiority. Why did I assume success meant gaining a western education? Why did I measure my worth against Eurocentric standards? These weren’t just personal insecurities, they were the residue of centuries of colonial violence, internalized as self-limiting beliefs.

Decolonizing my mind meant interrogating every assumption. It meant reclaiming pride in my heritage without romanticizing it, studying Iraq’s ancient contributions to mathematics, philosophy and astronomy while also confronting the oppressive systems within my own culture. It meant asking: Who taught me to see myself this way?

The Immigrant’s Paradox: Benefiting from Colonial Legacies

When I moved to Canada, I celebrated its “multiculturalism” without questioning its foundations. Then digging into the history of my new country I uncovered stories of residential schools and stolen land. Suddenly, I saw the irony: I’d fled one colonized nation only to settle in another built on Indigenous erasure. My safety here was tied to histories of displacement.

This duality unsettled me.

As an Iraqi, I resented foreign intervention in my homeland. As a Canadian resident, I benefited from a state that still marginalizes First Nations. My newfound privilege didn’t absolve me; it implicated me. Decolonization, I realized, isn’t just about dismantling external systems. It’s about confronting our complicity in them.

Mesopotamia’s Lesson: The Cycle of Conquest

While reading about ancient Mesopotamia, I noticed a pattern: every “great king” boasted of subjugating neighbors. The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Akkadians all framed colonization as civilizing missions. Sounds familiar?

Yet in Arab and Muslim histories, our empires are often romanticized as “golden ages.” We mourn Al-Andalus’s fall but gloss over its conquest of Iberia. We praise Harun al-Rashid’s Baghdad without acknowledging the slaves who built it.

This selective memory troubled me.

My ancestors were both colonized and colonizers. Our pride in Islamic empires mirrored the Eurocentrism we criticized. True decolonization requires humility: reckoning with harm we’ve inflicted, not just harm we’ve endured.

The Human Urge to Conquer

Colonization isn’t a European invention; it’s a human flaw. From Mesopotamia to the Americas, groups have exploited others for power and resources. But I am full of hope. If I can become aware of the colonizer living in my head. I can also conjure a sense of freedom in its place.

Decolonizing my mind meant:

• Unlearning hierarchy: No culture is inherently superior. My Iraqi roots are as valuable as my Canadian present.
• Centering silenced voices: Seeking Indigenous, African, and marginalized perspectives in history, literature, media and daily life.
• Rejecting nostalgia: Honoring my heritage without sanitizing its complexities.

Conclusion: Freedom as a Daily Practice

Decolonization is not a destination but a daily choice. It’s catching myself when I judge an accent, questioning who writes the histories I trust, and amplifying those my ancestors silenced. It’s admitting that my “golden age” may be someone else’s nightmare.

Mandela wrote, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” True freedom begins when we uproot the colonizer within and refuse to plant new seeds of domination.

A Call to Dig Deeper:

If you see yourself in these words, start here:

1. Whose suffering do you normalize?
2. Whose land are you on? 
3. Can you celebrate your culture without mythologizing it?

The road is long, I continue to plow through. Yet, amid the weight of history, I find hope in the resilience of the human spirit. We are not condemned to repeat the sins of our past. Slowly, imperfectly, we are learning to transcend the impulse to dominate, to shed the toxic myth that one group must rise by erasing another. True liberation lies not only in breaking the chains of those colonized but in dissolving the colonizer’s shackles within ourselves: the delusion that power demands predation, that safety requires supremacy. To be free is to refuse both the cage of inferiority and the poison of superiority. It is to stand, at last, on the solid ground of mutual humanity where dignity is not a privilege to hoard, but a birthright to nurture. That is true freedom.

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”  — African proverb

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Your Turn:

Have you begun decolonizing your mind? Share your story or resources that helped you in the comments. Let’s grow together. 🌱