The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
THERE is little doubt that the world was supposed to be a Pentecostal place. A place where human beings are different, come from different places, speak different languages and have different interests yet they share the world in beauty, creativity and peace.
Not that the world was supposed to be a paradise where there are no arguments and creative friction, that kind of peace only takes place in the cemeteries.
Friction and conflict in the process of sharing space and resources in the world should not necessarily lead to domination, wars and exploitation.
Regrettably, human difference has not been used as an opportunity that it is supposed to be but it has been manipulated and exploited as an excuse to dominate and oppress others. At a biblical scale, white supremacists have used their white difference to dominate and exploit those peoples of the world that are not white through slavery, colonialism, imperialism and coloniality at large.
Men have used their male and masculine difference to oppress and suppress women from world affairs to work places and domestic spaces of individual family households. Young and active-bodied peoples have taken advantage of their youthful difference to denigrate and marginalise the elderly.
Some old and powerful people have taken full advantage of their age to minimise young people to mafikizolos and nothing in the work place and at home, this is ageism and oldism combined. Ageism and oldism are ideologies of power and age that are deployed in treating young people as incomplete human beings, human beings under construction or the so called “leaders of tomorrow,” a tomorrow that really never comes. People with normatively able bodies have marginalised, exploited and oppressed those men and women that live with some inabilities of mind and body, this is ableism. Ableism is a toxic ideology of coloniality.
Because of capitalism and its appetite for products and productivity, people with bodies that are incapacitated from labouring and producing are considered surplus and disposable people and stigmas are created against them. Cultural, religious and spiritual differences have also been corrupted, manipulated and used in the world to attack and attempt to annihilate others.
In the name of this and that god, crusades and terror have been carried out that have left huge cemeteries and have made the world a truly godless place where human differences are used as an excuse for violence against the powerless others. Decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation and as an ethics of humanisation aspires for a world that Melissa Steyn has described as a place where human beings can be “different together,” and that is where being different in colour, culture, religion, age, ability of body and historical origins is not criminalised but accepted and legitimated as part of human diversity under the sun. The plant and animal world, in what is called biodiversity, has shown that being together in difference is really what is true, natural and just. In many ways, the true and just world should be a social, political and spiritual ecosystem characterised by difference in togetherness and competition without violence and that is the decolonial ethics of liberation and the human.
Beyond the Celebrations
The subject of human difference and human diversity is as old as the world and the human race itself. There has been a flourish of literature and philosophies that encourage us to embrace our differences and even celebrate our diversity as people.
Importantly, even such toxic ideas as apartheid and its philosophy of “separate development” was a way of embracing and celebrating human diversity. Sociologists like Geoffrey Cronje produced theories and policies that justified apartheid as a way of separating people for their own development, purity, happiness and good.
Intellectuals and politicians such as Hendrik Verwoerd fed on such theories and policies to present apartheid as liberation and good for human beings.
For Zulus to live in Zululand, Vendas in Venda and Sothos in Lesotho was presented as a glorious idea when it was a way of keeping blacks divided, whites in power and enjoying a monopoly of the resources in the country. For that reason, simple ideas about embracing and even celebrating our diversity as human beings should be questioned and their intentions and essence examined.
Apartheid pretended to embrace and even to celebrate human diversity and difference when in actuality is was a political and economic strategy of inequality that promoted whites and demoted blacks.
At a world scale the Euro-American Empire and its world system talks about globalisation, individual continents of the world talk about political and economic integration, individual nation states talk about national unity and corporations and organisations talk about teambuilding and teamwork as ways of managing and engaging with difference and diversity of human beings.
From globalisation to teambuilding in small organisations, the way human difference and diversity are embraced and celebrated really does not challenge human inequalities and different power relations. Globalisation itself has its chiefs and its commoners.
Critical diversity consciousness (CDC) as a decolonial concept that I write about today is a way recognising, accepting, respecting and working with difference and diversity beyond simple embracing and celebrating it. Simple embracing and celebration of human diversity can be a political cover up for toxic human inequalities and social injustices. There is a political and intellectual need to go beyond embracing and celebrating difference and diversity to legitimating it and working with it in justice and veracity.
Melissa Steyn has contributed to decoloniality in teaching on Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) as a way of reading and thinking about the workings of power, privilege and oppressions. Critical Diversity Literacy is a tool of unmasking oppressions and dominations that are concealed in daily languages and practices and in world political and economic systems. Critical Diversity Consciousness is the decolonial political and intellectual attitude and sensibility which holds that there is more to human difference and diversity beyond simple celebrations and embracings, there is need for diversity actuation.
Beyond the Anthropocene
Anthropo is a Greek word for human. Anthropocentricism is a bad intellectual and political ideology where human beings tend to “centre” themselves ahead of other objects and beings in the world. Above I have been belabouring the topic on human difference and diversity. Decoloniality and its Critical Diversity Consciousness and Critical Diversity Literacy do not end with the legitimation of human diversity under the sun.
For purposes of liberation and life in the planet, human beings need to rise to the critical ability to co-exist with non-human beings, plants, animals, objects and the air.
Water, the air, plants and rocks are, in justice, all objects and beings that need to live so that the planet can continue to exist. Capitalist economic and political ideology has produced a system where nature has been reduced from a living being into natural resource to be exploited by human beings for power and profit.
The summary of Eurocentric Enlightenment thinking is that human beings with their science and philosophy have now “mastered,” which also means dominated nature. Nature has been able to resist being mastered by throwing up countless natural disasters and toxic processes of climate change that man with all his science and philosophy is not able to control.
The lesson is that man, with all his science and philosophy, should learn to look after nature so that nature can look after man. A relationship of master and servant between man and nature is bad for the planet and for man. For that reason, anthropocentricism, the unwise thinking that man can be the master of the universe, is a colonial ideology that is ultimately bad for the earth and for humanity.
Africans before colonialism and before capitalism understood this well, there were animals that were not hunted, trees that were not cut and lands that were not supposed to be tilled in respect of nature as a living entity. Nature was not just a natural resource in pre-colonial Africa but it was a collection of other living entities that were respected and legitimated. That is why some rivers and mountains had names of people and some animals were given certain meanings and symbolisms in Africa.
African religions and traditions had rituals and ceremonies that were for the purpose of maintain co-existence and respect between man and nature.
Before European and American intellectual tourists come to teach Africans how to conserve and preserve nature, plant and animal life, they should start by learning how before colonialism Africans did not live an anthropocentric life.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Cape Town, South Africa: [email protected]
