The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Much like all theories and philosophies, decoloniality does what Edward Said called “travelling.”
In travelling theories and philosophies are carried by human heads, mouths and written pages across the world.
They get interpreted and misinterpreted as they move, distorted and manipulated too in their journeys. People in different geographic locations who have gone through different historical experiences give different meanings and understandings to travelling theories and philosophies.
It is for that reason that the stubborn Julius Nyerere and many other African leaders did not speak of socialism but African socialism because Africa had given refreshing and localised understandings and uses of Marxist thinking and ideology.
University students and some activist intellectuals in South Africa have represented and projected a decoloniality that is rich with African political and historical and political flavours.
It is a decoloniality that has graduated from naïve postcoloniality and has overcome the limits of nationalism and Marxism. It is a philosophy of liberation that has learnt from the strengths and weaknesses of such philosophies as gurveyism, Ethiopianism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, black consciousness and Afrocentricism.
For that reason, it is not a pure and innocent philosophy but a richly multi-vocal thought that has been strengthened and enriched by other philosophies of the past and the present.
It is an assemble of thoughts and practices that have been sharpened by anti-slavery and anti-colonialism struggles of resistance and liberation and as a result it is as old as it is new because it continues to struggle against old and new forms of domination.
More interesting about decoloniality is that there are many thinkers and activists that have practised and represented it without having to call it decoloniality as such, and this is as much as some have practised and represented other monstrosities and called them decoloniality.
It is simplicity at its simplest and naiveté to try to reduce a philosophy to a word. In this short article I seek to delve into the malcontents of decoloniality, a tribe of academics, not intellectuals, that seek to earn recognition for criticising and not critiquing, what they really don’t know and are unlikely to know.
They are found in almost any university in Africa and their only endeavour is to complain about this and that other theory but never advance an alternative. Some of them are black and African relics of the colonial university who owe too much fear and gratitude to their white and racist colonial professors and can therefore not be found in common with those that speak of liberation and decoloniality.
There is that one black African professor in the university in Africa who gets angry on behalf of white perpetrators and beneficiaries of coloniality in the academy.
This one is not even bewildered by the many white skinned intellectuals in the university that have risen to confront coloniality and embrace decoloniality as their own human liberation.
This one black and African scholar is not just Frantz Fanon’s black skin in a white mask but a true “colonial constable” that has internalised his own domination and marginalisation in the university so much so that he can’t imagine life beyond being a colonial subject.
Such a person is oppressed indeed who feels the compulsive urge to defend their own domination and marginalisation.
Fear and personal gratitude to colonial educators creates a complex inferiority complex that makes victims of coloniality defenders of their own domination and abuse.
Such colonial constables are even shamed by white decolonial thinkers, some of them beneficiaries of coloniality of knowledge and epistemic racism that have stood up to condemn and challenge coloniality.
He does not even feel his childish treatment from patronising racists that laugh at his attempts and failure to defend them when they can do so much better.
The Crusade of Fetson Kaluwa
Through activism and intellectual rigour, decolonial scholars, in the Global South and the Global North have pushed coloniality of knowledge in the westernised university to a critical corner. Perpetrators and beneficiaries of coloniality of knowledge can no longer walk tall on campuses.
Every university now claims to be decolonising this and transforming that, Africanising this and indigenising that because of the insurrection of decolonial ideas and activists in the academy. White people, as either beneficiaries or true perpetrators of coloniality of knowledge and cultural imperialism in the university, walk and work with a certain caution and humility that was never seen before. A moment of critical caution characterises the university in the present.
It is at that moment of critical caution that academics like Fetson Kaluwa at the University of South Africa have gained enough anger and confidence, at last, to stand up and defend the westernised university against decolonists. And the defence is the food of high comedy and tragedy combined.
Kaluwa preaches that decoloniality should not be taken seriously because it is not new, it is “old wine in new skins.” As if any decolonial thinker ever claimed that decoloniality was a brand new idea. Like a true colonial academic Kaluwa build his own imagination of decoloniality and then dutifully disputes it and expect applause.
Mathematically, Kaluwa alleges that a good 80% of decoloniality is postcolonial theory. Postcolonialism is important to Kaluwa because even the USA and other Euro-American countries are postcolonial societies. Postcoloniality and Postcolonialism are friendlier to empire than decoloniality is.
Most Eurocentric white persons in the university have been hiding their bigotry behind the thin language of postcoloniality that conceals the divide between oppressor and oppressed and that tends to pretend that colonialism and coloniality itself were a thing of the past when they are still raging even in the corridors where Kaluwa wishes to thrive.
It might be poor or simple wishful reading but Kaluwa has made the outlandish claim that decoloniality seeks to participate in the deconstruction of “all known knowledges” as Eurocentric.
Not only that but Kaluwa has claimed that decoloniality is against intellectual “merit” when the decolonial scholars whose work and success make him lose sleep are rigorous world class scholars that he can only contemptuously call “cult figures.”
Most decolonial scholars are not “so what” academics whose intellectual reach and stamina does not reach the length of their nose but are compelling thinkers that scare colonists and their constables.
While Kaluwa and others write literature reviews decolonial scholars generate insights and expand debates, change lives and institutions.
Like Donald Trump in reference to Barack Obama, Fetson Kaluwa has demanded to see the long birth certificate of decoloniality. Where and when decoloniality was born has occupied Kaluwa’s very busy mind.
Decoloniality was born everywhere against coloniality and when coloniality emerged. Latin Americans and Africans have been learning from each other’s slavish and colonial experiences and are producing philosophies of resistance. The Asians too have had their own experiences and learning and teaching points in coloniality and decoloniality.
Right inside the bowels of white Euro-America white intellectuals have stood up against coloniality and what it stands for. Sweating it out all night misreading books in a hurry to locate the birthplace and birthtime of decoloniality will be left to the Donald Trumps and their black constables whose speciality can only be epistemic racism and epistemic xenophobia in the academy.
The value of ideas in decoloniality is measured on what they bring to human liberation, life and the intellectual conversation in search of the same.
Kaluwa might after all be a good academic, doing all he can to measure the percentage of postcoloniality in decoloniality, excavating the birthplace and birthdate of decoloniality, supervising Olympics and sports of what is newer and older in ideas, but true decolonial intellectuals are producing ideas that have rallied multitudes and are changing universities and other governing institutions in the Global South.
Regular academics will continue manufacturing comforting myths and fictions to solicit colonial hugs and pats on the back in the westernised university but that does not change the weather; and that the university is being decolonised and must be decolonised.
While academics like Kaluwa spend time carrying out DNA tests on decoloniality, many black and white intellectuals are working with it, expanding and amplifying it to answer pressing intellectual and political questions of the day.
Against the punishment and resistance of colonial constables among lecturers and supervisors, multitudes of black and white students are adopting decoloniality as a theoretical and philosophical framework.
The Decolonial Political and Intellectual Gesture
Contrary to the fictions and myths about it, as I have written before, decoloniality is not an anti-modern but anti-colonial intellectual and political movement.
Except in the claims of those that have not understood it but wish to be famous for it, decoloniality is not against critical cosmopolitanism but against abstract universalism and shallow liberal claims to common humanity that conceal colonial invented inequalities and hierarchies.
Decoloniality is working intellectually and politically for a university and a world that has epistemic and human diversity, not an ignorant world that hugs onto pretentious claims to common humanity when beneficiaries and perpetrators of coloniality still keep their unfair privilege, even if they share coffee and hugs, with some black African constables.
Decoloniality is not a simplistic feel good philosophy of liberation and humanism. It will not participate in concealing but unmasking oppressions and dominations.
The luxury of calculating the age and excavating the birth places of ideas belongs to the epistemic and ontological racists, epistemic xenophobes and their constables but the duty to seek liberating “epistemologies of the South” is the property of committed intellectuals of which decolonists are part.
Right at UNISA where Kaluwa is trying and failing to think and write from, there are compelling black and white decolonial thinkers that are publishing in world class sites, but Kaluwa pretends they don’t exist and quotes from USA based decolonial thinkers of the Global North and the Global South to press the fragile idea that decoloniality is a foreign dogma.
You have not cited a scholar if you have not cited whites in the world of some academics. Some malcontents of decoloniality are fragile, cold and dry colonial academics that cannot cause intellectual controversy for advancing but opposing powerful ideas.
Sandew Hira was right that the title of professor, no matter how colonially achieved, can allow a person to purvey nonsense as if it was scientific knowledge.
The weight of even a compromised and compromising educational title can allow a “miseducated Niger” and a true intellectual “house Niger” to throw cheap jibes at his own liberation for the pleasure of his enslavers.
A decolonised university where different human beings and their different histories and skin colours can enjoy dignity and epistemic privilege will be liberating even to those that are so enslaved that they will write books denying that they are enslaved.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria.: [email protected]
