The Sunday News
In the biblical narrative as represented in the beatitude of Mathew 5:5 Jesus the Christ counselled that “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Like many other prophets and philosophers, Christ valorised humility and the decolonial habit of thinking from below and philosophising from the humble pedestal of the underdog.
Away from the ignorant arrogance of the Eurocentric philosophical mindset and worldview, in his 2012 rendition of “Globaletics” Ngugi wa Thiongo discusses the wealth of the knowledges and wisdoms of the poor in the world. Using the power of money, the force of arms and the arrogance of Eurocentric knowledges Western modernity is fast driving the planet to destruction and humanity to extinction.
What Slavoj Zizek has described as the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” and the signs of the end of the world are the global financial crisis, growing social inequalities, terrorism and the ecological crisis that is eating the planet away rapidly. Like the Latin American philosophers of liberation Paulo Freire and Enrique Dussel, Ngugi wa Thiongo believes that the world will be recovered from decline and decay, not by the self-eating cleverness of the enslaver, the coloniser and the conqueror but by the wise humility of those that have been reduced to byproducts of history, the rejected stones that the Christ prophesied are to be the cornerstones of the infrastructures of the future.
Western modernisers and pretenders to civilisation that control weapons of mass destruction, money and have erected Eurocentricism as the one and only knowledge in the world are incapable of rescuing the planet from the degeneration that they have caused in the first place, because as the European genius Albert Einstein opined, a problem cannot be solved using the same logic that created it. Liberating the planet from its present entrapment in coloniality and the civilisation of death requires a rebellion from Eurocentric, slavish and colonial ways of sensing, thinking and knowing. It is for that good reason that Ngugi wa Thiongo believes that the poor, sensing, thinking and knowing from their condition of poverty have the strong and rich answers to the pressing questions of the world that the rich and powerful conquerors have created.
Enter the Lucifer and the Cartesian
Modern colonial education as designed by the Eurocentric mindset and imperial sensibility produces rich thinkers and arrogant but really ignorant swinging graduates. The university itself has been styled as an Ivory Tower, an oasis of wisdom within a sea of ignorance where the peasants and the masses of the poor are regarded with contempt as barbarians.
Gifted Zimbabwean novelist Charles Mungoshi created in Waiting for the Rain, the character of Lucifer Mandengu who got a little bit of Western colonial education and grew a very big head. Like a typical swinging graduate of the colonial school he bemoaned his birth among the poor peasants, “I am Lucifer Mandengu, I was born here against my will, I should have been born elsewhere.”
Like the biblical Lucifer, the colonially-educated Lucifer is a traitor and a sellout. In his limited and limiting colonial mindset he thinks his own people; the population that brought him up are backward sellouts who suspect and do not understand him, when he is the turncoat that the people no longer understand. The typical colonially educated Lucifer has no known intellectual goods, letters or books that his people can learn from, but he spends all his emotional and intellectual energies preaching about his education and educatedness. He expresses disappointment and regret in his people and bemoans why in the first place he was born among them. When the people in their humble wisdom engage him in talk and in argument he rushes to pathetic obscurantism and unleashes technicist sophistry, largely exposing the poverty of his thought that covers itself with arrogant verbiage.
Times without number he talks about working for the people but the works have not been seen by the people except the noise and invectives that he throws at the people. Our Lucifer and the swinging graduate is a descendant of Rene Descartes of the “I think therefore I am” mantra.
His alleged knowledge is his fetish, his supposed education has become his total identity despite the fact that its fruits and products remain unknown to all but himself. In his imagination, the whole world out there is looking at him and talking about him, and the society that parented him is full of envious losers that spend their nights and days misunderstanding and accusing him. In reality, the swinging graduate is so behind in the race of thinking and knowing that he tragically believes he is leading.
The swinging graduate has a false image of himself, his slender achievements and fragile abilities in understanding life and society are totally unknown to him. Colonial education systems in Latin America and Africa produced these swinging graduates in their numbers and made them managers of their people on behalf of the colonial administration, they became black white people who saw their own people as savages, and became experts at self-celebration. Swinging graduates and colonially educated Lucifers are dangerous people who think that their opinions and unprocessed emotions and instincts are wisdom. Every other humble thinker who rises up among the people is seen by them as a pretender and irritating competitor.
Every sentence of the Lucifer and the Cartesian has the “I.” Iology and Egology are the philosophies of the Lucifer and the swinging graduate.
The Gift of the Poor
South African Anthropologists John Comaroff and his Scottish wife Jean Comaroff bemused the decolonial community in 2012 when they published a punchy book on “theory from the South” and how “Euro-America is evolving toward Africa.” It is not a joke anymore when powerful white scholars admit that Empire is swallowing its pride and is beginning to learn from its victims. In the 1970s, a young Steven Bantu Biko had already opined that it is the poor victims of apartheid in the Bantustans of South Africa who were going to humanise the modern world.
Decolonial thinking as thinking from the poor by the poor from the underside of Western modernity provides the wealth of humility and the philosophies of liberation. There is no spending time talking about education and knowledge but energy is expended in grappling with the human condition and liberation. Unlike the colonially-educated Lucifer, the swinging graduate whose knowledge spends its life admiring itself before the mirror, twisting, turning and strutting in exhibitionism; poor theory of the poor and the wisdom of the oppressed mines for answers to the pressing daily questions of life. Ngugi wa Thiongo is a Professor of literature and the humanities who has dedicated his entire literary vocation in thinking with and about the peasants and their struggles with the world that Empire has fashioned.
Even from the universities of the West and the belly of the beast, Ngugi’s philosophy and intellectual project still rhymes with the pulse of his Gikuyu villagers and peasants. Everyday, the decolonial philosopher battles to connect with his people and not haranguing the people to connect with him in his sorry location in arrogance and the ignorance of colonial sensibility.
Societies of the Global South in Latin America and Africa do not deserve nor do they need any more swinging graduates and Lucifers. What are needed, in Africa and Latin America, are not vanguards who arrogantly pretend to lead their people from the enlightened front. Needed are the rearguards, who walk with their people and lead by obeying, ask questions and do not command as the Zapatistas of Mexico do. The Lucifer and the swinging graduate who stand on top of the Ivory Tower and sings out his intellectual credentials that are nothing but pure colonial wind must humble himself and become part of his people, understand them and be understood by them or live with judgement of the people who see his habits and tendencies for what they are, and who experience his arrogant education as the poison that it really is.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in Pretoria: mailto:[email protected].
