The Sunday News
In the scheme of decolonial thinkers epistemology is not only a theory and a method of understanding knowledge and ways of knowing in the world, it also entails the political activism of searching for decolonial and liberating strategies that can break the present economic and political stalemate in the globe.
What is frequently called the decolonial turn is a worldwide intellectual and political movement towards a radical realisation that we are all trying and failing to live postcolonial lives in a colonial world.
Countries and their citizens are trying to live free lives in an unfree world. The burden which is also the perplexity of decolonial scholars and political activists is the urgent need to awaken the world to the reality that the long nightmare of coloniality is still going on in the modern world.
The epistemological break or epistemological rupture that is being demanded by activists and scholars of the World Social Forum is an explosion of new insights, fresh concepts and novel ideas that can inform a worldwide economic and political revolution, a radical change from the present world order that is characterised by slavery, colonialism, apartheid and imperialism that are continuing in many guises and forms for the peoples and communities of the Global South.
One of the burdened and perplexed scholars and activists of the decolonial turn who are demanding an epistemological break and an insurrection of decolonial ideas is Boaventura de Sousa Santos of the University of Coimbra in Portugal and a distinguished legal scholar of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States of America. Santos’ intellectual and political activism has been centred mainly on awakening Europe and Europeans to that there are other places in the world besides Europe, other peoples besides Europeans and other knowledges and understandings of the world and life besides the Western perspective.
In the intellectual and political charge sheet of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, one of the capital crimes of the modern world besides social injustices has been “cognitive injustice” where the histories, cultures and knowledges of the people of the South have been at best marginalised and at worst erased and silenced, this has created devastating political and social consequences for non-Western peoples in the entire planet.
As one of the leading intellectual and political activists in the World Social Forum, Santos has amplified the call for “counter hegemonic globalisation,” in reference to cosmopolitanism and internationalism in the world that does not reproduce but eliminates inequalities and discriminations.
As part of the Alice research project that he leads, the call for “leading Europe to new ways of sharing the world experience” has been Santos’ organising principle and rallying call to scholars in the North and the South.
In the worldwide decolonial intellectual and political movement Santos is one of the many agitated and irritated European philosophers that are leading the conversations for the dewesternisation and decolonialisation of the world.
In 2014, as part of his intellectual and political activism for “justice against epistemicides” as “genocide” or “mass murder” of the knowleges and histories of the peoples of the Global South, Santos published a punchy collection of essays in the volume:
Epistemologies of the South. In this telling book, Santos circulated many decolonial concepts and insights including the ideas of “Sociology of Absences” and “Sociologies of Emergences” that I will clarify in the conclusion of this short article.
An Urgent Call for Expanded Horizons in 2017
In his latest circular to friends throughout the world Santos has raised an urgent call for the expansion of decolonial horizons and imaginations. Before that Santos raises alarm over that the eight richest people of the world own more wealth than half of the world’s poor population.
This happens as countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have been destroyed under the guise of democratising and developing them.
Like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky before him, Santos reminds the world that in 1979 and 1980, the United States of America in the mountains of Afghanistan trained Islamic jihadists and armed them for the purposes of repelling a Russian invasion and expansionism that threatened the Western control of the world and that those trained militants are the same that are being fought by the US and allies as terrorists today.
Santos describes the present world order as a throw away world where big powers create problems during the darkness of night and pretend to solve them during the light of day, training militants and suicide bombers at the taxpayer’s expense and some years after spending more taxpayers’ money and many lives fighting the militants and suicide bombers that are now political correctly called terrorists.
This deception is so deep that Americans who are losing their healthcare are made to believe that their problem is Mexicans and other Latin American emigrants.
Ordinary Europeans are made to believe that their problem is the influx of refugees and exiles into Europe; they are not told that refugees and exiles are produced by European and North American imperialism in the world.
In South Africa, Santos observes, decolonisation and liberation from apartheid were poorly negotiated and handled in a way that allowed apartheid another life, but ordinary South Africans are convinced that their problems are caused by Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans and other black peoples from other African countries.
In short, lies have been circulated as truths while the abnormal has been normalised in the modern colonial world system that Santos engages with in his latest missive. For the reason that the world has taken a deceptive, unjust and colonial turn, thinkers and activists of the South in the main, and their allies in the North need to expand their horizons of thought and action, that is the message that Santos presses home.
The Epistemological Break
Within the decolonial turn as a political and intellectual turn away from the present colonial condition of the world, Santos has demanded an epistemological break, an explosion of thoughts and ideas towards social justice, cognitive justice and decolonialisation of the world. In the political and intellectual universe of Santos, like it is for other decolonial philosophers, even earlier ones such as Aime Cesaire, Europe and North America have created problems for the world that they are not capable of solving.
It is the oppressed, dominated, exploited and marginalised peoples of the world that can lead an insurrection of ideas and insights that can liberate the world.
The Sociology of Absences that Santos demands is a political and intellectual excavation by thinkers and activists to uncover the absent political and social possibilities in the world. Santos asks for creativity and courage in the invention of new realities and opportunities in the shaping of a new world experience.
Histories, theories and practices that have so far been hidden and made to be absent in the world experience and world conversation must be uncovered.
The Sociology of Emergences entails the invention of new political and economic policies and strategies that undo the damage in the world and allow the emergence of new future possibilities in a world that has lost hope. For this to happen, Santos counsels that the West must come back to the world, this time not as an enslaver, coloniser and civiliser but as a student that is willing to learn from other civilisations.
The future of the world might lie somewhere not in capitalism or socialism, not in democracy, development and human rights as they are presently defined and pretended in the current world order, a new liberating humanism has to emerge from the victims of this world.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria in South Africa: [email protected]
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