The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
IN all its crimes of conquest and the violence against humanity the Euro-American Empire always has compelling excuses and convincing justification.
That the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia and America were inferior to European peoples in all matters is a colonial myth that was supposed to be justified by scientific research.
In the historical processes of imperialism, colonisation and enslavement of indigenous peoples of the Global South, in all their violence, scientific research became a major excuse and justification for Empire. It is for that reason that, led by Linda Tuhiwayi Te Rina Smith, a female indigenous Maori scholar in New Zealand, decolonial philosophers believe that the word “research” from the perspective of colonised peoples is a “dirty word” in so far as it became instrumentalised in the means and ends of Empire.
Whenever elitist scholars and accessories of coloniality in the university today want to marginalise peasants, the poor and indigenous communities from knowledge production and decision making they always invoke the world “research” and academic titles. What the professors say in terms of observations and opinions the peasants should not dispute because the learned men and women speak from “research” and “scientific research” for that matter.
A lot of criminality of thought and ignorance itself, in the academy and the media, is covered up behind the fetish and talisman of “research.”
Decolonially speaking, scholars and activists in the Global South should raise their eyebrows whenever the word “research” is mentioned, they should watch out for criminality of thought and ignorance covered and concealed behind the claim of “research.” University students in both the social sciences and the humanities in the Global South and elsewhere will identify with the claim that research methods and methodologies do not only occupy pride of place in the academy but also exercise a kind of tyranny.
One is really not a student or a scholar if their research methods and methodology are not approved and certified as compliant and up to the pronounced standards. In a way, there is a kind of madness in the tyranny of methods and methodologies in education and knowledge production and dissemination at large. A lot of violence, domination and marginalisation of black people, women and other peripheral peoples is hidden behind claims of research methods and methodologies.
In the first place, whose method and whose research, for what ends are questions that should be asked. In a word, research methods and methodologies are not true and innocent laws of research that were given to men and women by a good god who lives in the sky, but they are man-made formulae and tricks that are used to search and find certain ideas for use and abuse by human beings with certain political and other interests. Neutrality and objectivity of research methods, from journalism to scholarship, are a violent colonial myth that must be challenged at every curve and turn.
The decoloniality of a thinking woman
At Sunday School African children are given an image of God as a white old man with a short temper, long beard and lives in the sky. At university, not in so many ways, students are given the image of a philosopher, scientist and inventor as a white man with long beard and lives, if not dead already, in Europe or America.
Thinkers and knowers are not represented as black or as women, no. Just like the Euro-American figure of God, the thinker, scientist and inventor is supposed to be white, male and of western origin and geographic location. Ramon Grosfoguel has narrated the history of how during the conquest of the Americans in 1492, knowing and thinking women that had advanced indigenous knowledge of midwifery, rain making and medicines were burnt at the stakes, accused of witchcraft and the practice of criminal spiritualities.
Thinking women, even today, are suffered in the westernised university as kinds of witches if not worse. Such women as Linda Tuhiwayi Smith and Maria Lugones who are not white but have proven to be influential citizens of the corridors of the world academy are true “decolonial witches” that are challenging the Euro-American model and image of what a thinker is.
Zimbabwe, Africa and the entire Global South has girls in primary, secondary and high schools, ladies in universities and civil society that should be celebrated as “ decolonial witches,” formidable thinkers that are overturning colonial and patriarchal stereotypes. Women, in the present world order, are supposed to be emotional, passionate, sensitive and nothing more, thinking must be left to men, especially white males. That coloniality must fall and it is falling.
Linda Smith is an indigenous Maori woman of New Zealand who in 1999 published a ground breaking book, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. After that book, decolonial research in the Global South will never be the same as the madness in Eurocentric methodologies of research has been unmasked and debunked. Something is formidably revolutionary when a woman of colour, writing from the perspective of indigenous and colonised peoples, overturns major assumptions and the madness of Empire.
Decolonial witchcraft is exactly that, the achievement of what is supposed to be impossible, thinking women are creating a new province in the world and the world system is not going to be the same, coloniality is in trouble.
Who we are, from where we speak
Another “decolonial witch” of the Global South, Paula Moya, wrote in 2011 that decolonial thinkers should think and write from their locations and as who they are, non-Europeans, non-Americans, victims and survivors of Empire. This is the point that Linda Smith makes that research methods and methodologies should be relevant and alive to the worlds and experiences of indigenous peoples.
It is a crime against humanity, for instance, in a school in Africa for primary school students to be taught that what is white is “as white as snow” when there is no snow in Africa and the same students might never see snow in all their lives. Euro-American research methodologies are as irrelevant and as criminal as the naturalisation of snow in Africa where there is no snow.
In other words, geo-politics and bio-politics are important in research and knowledge production. True to Audre Lorde “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” the research methods and methodologies that long bearded European men have given us are not relevant and adequate enough to decolonise our minds and to undo Euro-American coloniality in the Global South. In simple ways, people really do not need to be white, European and male in order to think, it is a colonial fallacy.
Recognising a decolonial witch
History and society must at long last, Patti Lather argued, be viewed also from the vantage point of the colonised and the indigenous peoples. That is what Linda Smith has done with the Maori aborigines of New Zealand. Smith provides “a counter story” to the Western narrative and prevents the death of indigenous sensibility.
The same way in which Ugandan philosopher Dani Wadada Nabudere urged that philosophy in Africa should be studied with the benefit of Afrikology, an African world view, Linda Smith has proposed decolonial research methods that benefits from the Whakapapa thoughts of the Maori indigenous peoples. It is not enough to deconstruct Eurocentricism but it is to reconstruct new decolonial methodologies that centralise and privilege the indigenous histories and sensibilities.
This does not mean a nativist return to precolonial Africa, as some pretenders to decoloniality propose, but it is to ensure that Africa is a province among other provinces in the world, that Africans are people among others in the planet, it is coloniality itself to seek to return the African to the caves and restore him or her to the animal skin attire. In dethroning Euro-American methodologies Smith and others have studied European thinkers and scientists enough to be able to punch holes in their methods, they have not boycotted but critically engaged Eurocentric thought.
Decolonial witchcraft, a term that I have played with elsewhere, refers to the dissident imagination and imaginative banditry of decolonial scholars that do “unheard of things” to coloniality. It is the insurrection of the underdogs, the use of limited opportunities, scarce resources in the Global South to inflict maximum damage on the modern and colonial world order in the present.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria, in South Africa: [email protected]
