The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
One of the greatest constructions of Empire about the conquered natives of the Global South has been that the indigenous people do not think. Conquest was politically supported by a political and intellectual assumption that the natives had no knowledge, no history and therefore no memory to talk about. For that reason, when a university such as the Durban University of Technology (South Africa) organises a whole international conference on indigenous knowledges, it engages in decolonial defiance.
Empire and the modern colonial world-system that it created did not construct or produce the indigenous person as a producer of knowledge but an object of the thought and knowledge of the conqueror. It is a true decolonial insurrection that the former colonial subjects and descendants of the slaves are claiming themselves like this as thinkers and knowers.
The colonial and imperial scheme of things, at a world scale, did not have the plan that one day an international conference will gather to appreciate and celebrate indigenous epistemologies, the epistemologies of the south and the philosophies from otherness, that was not in the agenda. To declare indigenous knowledge and appreciate the same is therefore deep political and philosophical business, philosophical in the existential and liberatory sense of the word.
Decolonising thought on Indigenous Knowledges
The way we think about indigenous knowledges should be decolonised, that is my observation and argument, which is the proposition I seek to deposit. Decolonising thought on indigenous knowledge involves what Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni calls re-thinking thinking itself. It involves unlearning what we have been taught in order to re-learn what will take us out of the dark hole in which Empire planted us. We must begin this by humanising indigenous knowledges, putting a human face and human factor to them.
There is no language or knowledge that ever walked alone on its legs in the streets. Languages and knowledges are carried by human bodies that include native and dark indigenous bodies of Africans, Asians and the Latin Americans. So, the point is that indigenous knowledges are not abstract objects in the air but material subjects that are peopled and enworlded. Knowledges are located in biography and geography.
Decolonising the thinking on indigenous knowledges requires that, like Frantz Fanon said, we abandon sterile litanies and old habits learnt from the West and normalised in the rest of us. Indigenous knowledges are no longer to be adopted as fashions and trends in the university, as tourist resorts where European and African intellectual tourists visit indigenous languages for academic retreats and holidays.
We must not just take research interests in indigenous knowledges because indigenous people take life interest in them. It is a very colonial thing to treat indigeneity for a tourist attraction and an academic resort. We must not, decolonially speaking, perform indigeneity and endogeneity as in theatre and drama; we must live them as existence.
There is a temptation to be resisted here. The nativist temptation, that is for most of us too tantalising to resist, must be overcome. It looks so easy and even right to reduce indigenous knowledges to racist and nativist slogans. We most frequently resort to indigenous knowledges as protest and rebellion. Indigenous knowledges are far bigger than that. They are not a nativists stick with which to beat the nearest white person, no, they are knowledges of liberation that will liberate black and white people of the world at once. They cannot be reduced to tools of anger and revenge, no. Indigenous knowledges are far too bigger than ideology and intellectual propaganda.
Our decolonial friends, the Afrocentricists, are never tired of telling us the truth that most of what is called western knowledge is made out of knowledges, arts, sciences and philosophies stolen and usurped from Africa and Asia by Empire builders. Eurocentricism, in other words, owes us a lot of our knowledge that it now calls its own. It is not only the gold and diamonds that were siphoned away to the West, even wisdom and art. My point here is not just that but also that in what is called African indigenous knowledge, in Ubuntu ethics themselves, we can now find western and Eurocentric sensibilities. Our knowledges have been in many ways colonised and invaded for the good and sometimes the worst. No knowledge has been left pure and innocent. To carry indigenous knowledges as if they were puritanical objects would be to reduce them to naivete.
What we can boast about as indigenous people is that it is our sciences, arts and philosophies that will eventually save humanity in the planet. The relationships that indigenous people have enjoyed with nature, with wildlife and plant life, with water and the air have over centuries been healthy and sustainable. Empire can learn from us, not the other way round, how to preserve the earth and live respectfully and sustainably with the elements of geography and spirituality. Those who conquered enslaved and colonised others and nature, cannot be our teachers on preserving nature and humanity.
The Decolonial Indigenous Universe
We need to De-Monumentalise Empire. What Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and I call Demonumentalising Empire in a forthcoming publication is the decolonial business of unthinking monuments of Empire. As part of conquest and colonial settlement Empire gave its names to our places, mountains, roads and lands. Empire baptised our very bodies in names and sensibilities. Colonial statues, names of places and of people that are all over the Global South are signatures, emblems and flags with which Empire signed its power of conquest on us.
It is no accident that the #Black Lives Matter Movement protests have toppled statues of slave traders and monuments of Empire.
Demonumentalising Empire is the decolonial act, physical and symbolic, of un-naming ourselves in order to re-name ourselves properly, undoing the signatures of Empire in our geographic and mental landscapes. I mention our mental and psychic landscapes because Empire has long invaded those inner-worlds of ours. Not only the geographic colonial maps and borders must fall, even the spiritual and psychological borders that we have mounted in our minds and hearts against others must go.
There is a need to care of ourselves. To ensure that there is no Empire builder or Empire sensibility right inside ourselves. When we are tempted to classify and discriminate others according to race, tribe and nationality we are tempted to imitate the conqueror. When we classify and hate along the lines of ability and inability of body and mind, along the lines of gender and age, we are reproducing conquest, and we must do exactly that, stop it.
There is no province in the decolonial universe, in the decolonial world, for racists, tribalists, nativists, sexists, ableists, ageists and the perilous xenophobes. Citizenship to the decolonial universe demands the passports and permits of decolonial love and liberatory solidarities with the other, the other that comes in many ages, colours, sizes, origins and belonging.
The decolonised and liberated university and world is that universe of life where epistemic diversity walks hand in hand with human diversity. The decolonial world is a Pentecostal world where different people of different tongues and turns lives together in critical understanding and liberty from domination and oppression.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the Durban University of Technology in KwaZulu Natal. This piece is a simplified version of a Keynote Address at DUT, before the International Conference on Indigenous Knowledges, 15 to 17 September, 2020: [email protected].
