The Decolonisation of Identity

We are living in an age that cannot stop asking the same question: Who am I, really? Beneath the performance, the portfolio, the passport, and the politics — who is there? For individuals, nations, and entire continents, something essential was lost. And reclaiming it requires more than politics can offer.

In this groundbreaking monograph, Abasiam Akpan, founder of Regenesis and identity strategist, argues that the deepest and most enduring legacy of colonialism was never the extraction of land or resources. It was the colonisation of self-understanding: the imposition of external definitions of personhood upon individuals, nations, and entire continents. Decolonisation, therefore, is not primarily a political project. It is an ontological one.

Drawing on the Identity Thinking framework, this work takes you on a rigorous three-part journey:

Part One: What Is Identity? Discover the architecture of the self across three levels: Original Identity (the self as designed), Adaptive Identity (the self as shaped by environment), and Abnormal Adaptive Identity (the self built around wounds). Learn why reclaiming identity is not a journey backwards — but a journey beneath the wound, past the adaptation, past the construction, to the design that was always there.

Part Two: How Identity Becomes Colonised. Through engagement with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonising Methodologies and the work of Frantz Fanon, Akpan reveals the epistemological gateway of colonisation: before a people can be told who they are, someone must first be established as having the authority to know. Explore the five mechanisms of vulnerability, from the disruption of meaning-making systems and the displacement of identity custodians, to the installation of shame, the economics of compliance, and the colonisation of aspiration itself.

Part Three: What Reclamation Requires. This is where the book delivers its most original and transformative claim: what the colonial encounter collapsed was never original identity at all. Original identity: grounded in love, authored by the One who made the person, cannot be destroyed, only suppressed. The evidence? The collapse itself. Through the diagnostic Moral Fruit Test, you'll learn to distinguish original design from adaptive construction by what an identity produces under maximum pressure.

Whether you are a scholar, development practitioner, national builder, faith leader, or an individual on your own journey of self-recovery, The Decolonisation of Identity offers a complete framework for understanding and reclaiming what was never truly lost.

Identity. Reclaimed. Reimagined. Regenerated.