Hélé Béji, a Tunisian intellectual, asks a self-reflection question on what we, the decolonized, have really done more than fifty years after most African and Asian countries became independent. Giving a nonsentimental answer, she contends that political independence did not produce the freedom, dignity, or alternative humanism that inspired the decolonial initiative. We, the Decolonized offers a vivid self-critique of postcolonial societies that gained independence without achieving genuine liberation, a condition Béji calls “arrested decolonization.” What makes Béji’s intervention unique is her positionality—she writes as someone who lived through Tunisia’s independence, whose family was part of the anti-colonial elite, and who has watched how postcolonial power works for many years. Her father’s role in Bourguiba’s government situates Béji within the project of state building, lending her analysis both depth and accountability, as she critiques postcolonial failures from inside the struggle rather than from a distant or Westernized perspective. By the end of the book, readers are pushed to see decolonization not as a completed event but as an ongoing and unsettled process whose promises remain unfulfilled.

The book’s central argument is developed through Béji’s examination of what she terms the “paradox” of decolonization. On one hand, decolonization represents “the most powerful and widely shared political aspiration that political consciousness has ever imagined, the revolution of all revolutions. It extended the promise of equality and self-determination globally, challenging European imperialism and affirming the dignity of colonized peoples. Béji observes that the decolonized adopted forms of governance that were modeled on those of colonial administrators, as if seeking to confirm the claim that they were incapable of self-governance. In doing so, they reproduced the same brutality they had endured under colonial rule. Rather than creating the “second-stage humanism” that would move beyond European models, postcolonial states often repeat colonial forms of violence through authoritarianism, censorship, corruption, and the restriction of basic freedoms. What distinguishes Béji’s critique from conservative rejections of African independence or neocolonial bias is her refusal of conventional explanations. She does not attribute postcolonial failures to ongoing Western domination alone, even though she acknowledges the presence of neocolonial economic structures and foreign intervention policies. Béji does not imply that African cultures or people are by nature unfit for democracy, which is a racist argument she clearly rejects; instead, she argues for responsibility within the postcolonial world itself, insisting that as long as there is a refusal to engage in serious self-examination and a tendency to blame the West for everything, no meaningful or lasting progress can be achieved. The book’s moral and intellectual power comes from the double criticism of neocolonial power and postcolonial governance.

Béji’s writing incorporates personal memory, philosophy, and political critique. She starts with a childhood shaped by nationalism, where politics and private life were inseparable, making postcolonial failure not only a political crisis but a personal betrayal of her generation’s hopes. Throughout the book, Béji moves between the singular “I, the decolonized” and the collective “we, the decolonized” to highlight the tension between personal responsibility and shared failure, especially in her analysis of how postcolonial states internalize colonial forms of rule. Béji describes how running across a national police officer in the street awakens the fear of the lingering figure of the colonial officer who now haunts the street in national uniform. This image shows how political independence alters sovereignty without changing the everyday experience of state violence. Béji also examines how democracy became “a new religious force” imposed by the West, a kind of moral obligation which remains unachieved in postcolonial societies, producing a constant sense of judgment in which the decolonized are judged as “undemocratic” and by extension, treated as less than fully human. Béji’s analysis of religious fundamentalism constitutes one of the book’s most contentious contributions, as she refuses to treat it as a mere return to tradition and instead frames it as a response to the failures of modernity itself. In her narrative, religion reclaims authority at the point where secular politics, nationalism, and humanist ideals fail to produce freedom, dignity, or collective significance, leading to what she terms a counter-philosophy based on faith rather than political rationale. However, this diagnosis is accompanied by a more concerning historical context. Béji consistently portrays Europe as having already navigated the challenging transition from religious morality to civic secularism, whereas Muslim societies such as the ones in North Africa seem to be situated at a preliminary, unresolved phase of the same process. Her assertion that democracy and freedom can only emerge following the “death of God,” an ideological divide she attributes to the European Enlightenment, directly characterizes decolonized societies as delayed or incomplete manifestations of a European experience.

Béji moves between broad categories such as “Europeans,” “Muslims,” “the West,” and “our societies” without sustained attention to specific historical contexts or internal differences. The result is a philosophically rich reflection on the moral fatigue of modernity, even as it risks reproducing hierarchies and diminishes the diversity of decolonized histories and political imaginaries. Béji’s thoughts are based on Tunisian intellectual and political life, but the book keeps making claims that “the decolonized” is a universal category, ignoring the deep historical, cultural, and political differences that shape postcolonial paths in different parts of the world. Most importantly, gender is still very underexamined. Béji does not theorize how patriarchy structures the failures of postcolonial states or how men and women experience the interruptions of decolonization differently, except for a brief acknowledgment that women often returned to more constrained forms of existence after independence. Researchers in African feminist studies will find these insights especially engaging. We, the Decolonized represents a vital and timely intervention. Béji insists that decolonization should neither be romanticized nor abandoned, but approached as an ongoing process of dealing with its unfulfilled promise. Béji expresses a difficult optimism that rejects both blaming others and political fatalism by making the decolonized face both their power and their limits. For scholars of postcolonial studies, decolonial politics, North African and African studies, this is an interesting book to read. For a wider audience, it offers a clear and troubling reflection on the unfinished work of independence and the moral obligations it still places on us. Béji’s voice forces readers to think about what decolonization has not delivered and the duty that falls on those who inherit its unresolved goals.