The Sunday News
The enterprise of coloniality has subjected the oppressed into presumptuous inventing variant superficial “paradigms of difference”.
Today we look at ourselves through lenses of imperial hierarchies and ontological marginalities set by the enemies of Africa to define the “African experience”. As such all the oppressed of the world embrace one other contrariwise and hence our localised self-antagonisms on the basis of clanism and territorialism. We only perceive ourselves in terms of ideological differences though we all aspire to break chains of coloniality and all global forces holding us at ransom. We use unsubstantiated barometers of measuring the exertion of oppression by the empire in its pursuit of our respective displacements mainly in Africa and Latin-America. However, once in a while we have found epistemic solace in Marxism to construct convenient outlooks of homogeneity.
The long antiquated effect of Marxism through socialism and communism in Africa has come in as an imperative epistemic armour to demystify existing paradigms of difference housed in our provincialised prejudices of “being” informed by coloniality. As such, the “Workers of the world unite” emblem has played a critical role in its attempt to solicit a common trajectory of liberation for the oppressed all over the world.
However, it has failed to be decolonial. As a result, from time to time the oppressed have internalised prejudices against each other. This assertion comes out clearly in the work of Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth — and Nkrumah’s epistle — Class-struggles in Africa. We now have superior versions of Africanness which are borrowed from the pedagogies of our variant imperial subjectivities. This is led to insignificant debates of being an authentic African or not — were your ancestors taken into captivity or not?
Did you take part in conventional liberation warfare? In the process, inclusive strategies to confront coloniality have been defeated. These questions prove that since time immemorial African nativism in all its forms from Negritude, Garveyism, and pan-Africanism up to nationalism need to be safeguarded from those who claim to be its proponents.
Who owns “decoloniality”?
In the 60s Afro-Americans were engrossed in the discourse of “Black power” as part of their fight for civil rights and Black ontological restitution. However, their reference to Africa and connecting their struggle to the continent and the underpinning notions of being African was dismissed as invalid and detached from the struggles of the continent. It was narrowly assumed that the progeny of former slaves had limited — if not any credentials to use Africa (geographically) to assert their humanity in the western hemisphere.
The conclusive narrowness of this essentialism made it appear as if the progeny of slave men and women has no legitimate entitlement to Africa — they were a flock biblically personified in the legend of the prodigal son.
A typical example of this line of thought is captured in one of Fela Kuti’s outspoken moments: “you Black people in America speak of Black power as if you draw your inspiration from America.” This sarcastic remark by Fela questioned the cosmological oneness of Africa which was a making of history.
The statement blindly dismisses the struggles of the Africans dotted around the globe. Today one may posit a similar question in an attempt to critique the trajectory of decoloniality of knowledge in Africa. This is because the subject of “decoloniality” arguably has its origins in Latin-American scholarship. As such, most pan-Africanists and nationalists may half-heartedly accept its tenets. This is a result of paranoia which has been created by the role of White liberals in Africa’s struggle for independence.
However, the purpose of this article is to substantiate that conversations on epistemic disobedience have been pursued by thinkers of African origins.
What we are now embracing as the decoloniality of knowledge is nothing new to Africa in explaining the conditions of our subjugation and the quest for our liberation. Achebe, Appiah, Senghor, Mafeje, Marechera, Mbeki, Mudhimbe, Asante and Biko have significantly contributed to the decolonial trajectory.
This position responds to questions which construct the tenets of decoloniality by Grosfoguel, 2008:11: “Can we produce a radical anti-capitalist politics beyond identity politics? Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism?’
Why guillotine the “Rhodes” in us?
Few months back South-African universities embarked on the march for the decoloniality of knowledge under the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall preconceptions. In the same fashion, university students in England, the United States, France, and the Netherlands expressed radicalised demands for the decolonising the university. These attempts to decapitate coloniality in the learning space substantiates dissatisfaction with cumulative disproportions in the access to education. The initiative taken by South-Africa queries the cantankerous connotation of symbols which adore and glorify hangovers of coloniality guised as history preservation conceived by reconciliation.
Truth be told, such statues are a memory of expansionism, xenophobia, slavery, and other numerous forms of African ontological dismemberment.
The idea to decolonise the university was welcomed by many of us who are inclined to African nativist intellectual, political and cultural proclivities. Being a pan-Africanist myself, I found it worth to subscribe to the idea of decolonising the university — what a way to re-live our aspirations of African liberation in the 21st century.
The script of decolonising the university is emancipating to the mind of the African which has been subject to coloniality. This is because African liberation’s successive maturity has continued to suffer stagnation since the delusion of Uhuru crippled into Africa. Tragically, the struggle of “being” has failed to go beyond decolonisation. This has seen the concealed internalisations of coloniality within Africa’s governance institutions and knowledge banks as aptly explained by Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni:
“Decolonisation did not succeed in removing coloniality.
Coloniality must not be confused with colonialism. It survived the end of direct colonialism. In “postcolonies” it continues to affect the lives of people, long after direct colonialism and administrative apartheid have been dethroned. What, therefore, needs to be understood is not just the ‘not yet uhuru’ postcolonial experience but the invisible vampirism of technologies of imperialism and colonial matrices of power that continue to exist in the minds, lives, languages, dreams, imaginations, and epistemologies of modern subjects in Africa and the entire global South.”
This is why it is imperative to demolish statues which create a remembering that dismembers. This is because the statue of Rhodes in this modern age legitimises his power.
The statue is a conservation of his coloniality personhood which must not be given a place in any modern civilisation:
“His statue — and those of countless others who shared the same conviction — has nothing to do on a public university campus 20 years after freedom. The debate therefore should have never been about whether or not it should be brought down. All along, the debate should have been about why did it take so long to do so.” (Mbembe 2013: 3).
In as much as a plethora of liberal schools of thought can submit the argument of Africa’s moral mandate to conserve the memory of Rhodes, the continent has a superior mandate of ravaging coloniality into pieces instead of preserving the legacy of imperialism. There are no two ways about that and being moderate is not the way to go about it:
“To bring Rhodes’ statue down is far from erasing history, and nobody should be asking us to be eternally indebted to Rhodes for having ‘donated’ his money and for having bequeathed ‘his’ land to the university. If anything, we should be asking how did he acquire the land in the first instance.” (Mbembe 2013: 3). Professor Mbembe further asserts that demolishing ‘ . . . Rhodes’ statue down is one of the many legitimate ways in which we can, today in Africa, demythologise that history and put it to rest — which is precisely the work memory properly understood is supposed to accomplish’.
This seemingly unreasonable form of thinking indicates how much decoloniality is a wage of war against systems of institutional residences of colonial power. Therefore, decoloniality of the university remains key in achieving the true unchaining of the African mind.
Re-centering the centre and rethinking the notion of “thinking”
Some time in 2016, I attended the Unisa International Decoloniality Conference. The conference was a follow-up on the university insurrections experienced by South-Africa in anticipation of the decoloniality of knowledge. Issues raised include decolonising the space and architecture, negotiating the shift of the geography of knowledge, problematising the existence of the Bantu education system among other coloniality cancerous matters in “free” South-Africa.
This conference was very unique as it advocated for sustainable space for probing epistemic replacements of knowledge production. The conference served a bold negation of Western knowledge reproduction.
This is because Africa has produced several critical thinkers who are not acknowledged with the uppermost esteem they deserve. Some of our African philosophical assets are regarded as radical and unreasonable; but the question is; reasonable and rational to who?
Therefore, Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni is justified to argue that we must shift the geography of knowledge. We need to eradicate old colonialiaty customised thinking and start thinking the process of thinking itself.
We need to start finding our humanity in the writings of our own philosophers. This is because all thinking did not end with Greek philosophers.
We cannot continue finding epistemic solace from curators of imperialism as if they are the Alpha and Omega of all thinking.
Today the university prides itself in the ideas of Karl Marx, but African philosophy is argued to be archaic — gothic and antiquated. The Unisa conference loudly exclaims that African epistemologies must reclaim their space in the centre of philosophy, science, religious romanticism, theatre, aesthetics and historical materialism.
Whether or not the idea of decoloniality is spearheaded by Latin-American scholars the role the university in Africa is to place African knowledge at the centre of other borrowed knowledge(s).
How long should we advocate for globalisation in the absence of ecology of knowledge(s).
How long will we celebrate African liberation when Africa is in the periphery of knowledge hierarchies? Azvigoni!
To be continued
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network — LAN.
Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected]
