The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Area studies as a family of academic disciplines that sought to understand the world from national settings, regional contexts and cultural backgrounds has encountered an analytical paralysis, it is exhausted.
World Systems Analysis as propounded by Immanuel Wallerstein has expanded Area Studies to permit a world systemic understanding of history and politics in the globe, but it has predominantly been championed by white and Euro-American intellectuals that carry the baggage of Eurocentricism in their scholarship.
The history and condition of the Global South has been a huge cry for scholarship that understands the developing world from a global perspective and that critiques, at the same time, the world from a perspective of localities in the peripherised world.
Decolonial theorists, jointly and severally, have filled this gap by providing panoptic research and perspectival critiques that have helped unmask Empire and propose decoloniality.
Today I treat the subject of the intellectual interventions of Sabelo Jeremiah Ndlovu-Gatsheni who has critically expanded both Area Studies and World Systems Analysis to fashion what I call Critical Empire Studies, a brand of decolonial intellection that seeks to unmask the workings of Empire at a world scale while valorising “epistemic freedom” and intellectual justice for knowledges and histories of the Global South.
For his intellectual labours, in South Africa and in the international decoloniality movement of scholars Gatsheni has been recognised with the Ali Mazrui Award for Research. As the founder and leader of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) he has mentored, supervised and produced a multitude of decolonial young scholars that are presently troubling the academy of the Global South with vivid currents of critical intellection.
Currently the head of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute at the University of South Africa and in charge of change management and scholarship development in the same university, the Zimbabwe-born historian and development theorist has found himself in the stormy waters of intellectual research and academic administration in the troubled South African academy where his skills and insights are most relished.
Gifted with intellectual endurance, a devilish intellect and trained by such rigorous scholars as Terence Ranger and Ngwabi Bhebhe, Gatsheni is one kind of a human institution, a walking library. With 14 books under his belt and more than a 120 journal papers and book chapters Gatsheni has become a professor’s professor. Such numbers in intellectual production are boasted by retired professors and the tribe of emeritus professors that are no longer found in today’s cut and paste academy, and Gatsheni is only turning 50 years strong in a few days’ time.
From the National Question to Empire.
The research interest that haunted Gatsheni’s doctoral studies was the national question, especially the injustice of how colonialists used concepts such as democracy to demonise African pre-colonial nations as having been primitive and autocratic.
Gatsheni proved, for instance, that principles of good governance and consultative leadership flourished in the pre-colonial Ndebele nation.
In his “do Zimbabweans exist?” monograph that was published in his sojourn at the Open University in England, 2009, Gatsheni delved into the challenges of nation building, the bringing together of different identities and histories of people into one nation after colonialism, a question that still troubles Africa.
Statecraft and nationcraft have been nuanced by Gatsheni as fundamental tenants of decolonisation where colonial residues and vestiges should be undone if African countries are to shake off ethnic schisms and conflicts in the aftermaths of administrative colonialism.
The thorny subject of colonial borders that still haunts Africa has also occupied Gatsheni’s research where he has with the likes of Ali Mazrui before him, described “the bondages of boundaries” that haunt Africa long after the colonial administrators who enforced them have departed.
Because of colonial borders and maps, economically and politically, Africans have remained closed from each other but tragically open to the Euro-American machinations of Empire, where Europeans and Americans have ease of movement and trade in Africa more than Africans themselves.
Gatsheni has scrutinised African national projects and deciphered how, in the main, coloniality still remains powerful and an organising principle of how nations are formed and governed.
For a long time, the Post-Marxist scholars, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt dominated the world academy with their description of Empire and how it works in the world.
Besides Negri and Hardt, Niall Ferguson also achieved some prestige in his nuancing of the British Empire and its march in the world.
The analysis of all the above mentioned European scholars suffered a paralysis and a poverty of ignorance of the Global South, they saw the world from a Eurocentric and therefore limited vantage point. Gatsheni’s 2013 publication of Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity, provided a true decolonial breath of fresh air as he provided a disputation of the myths on Empire that post-colonial theorists and post-modern scholars were circulating.
Using his thoroughgoing training as a historian and his facility for wide and deep reading, Gatsheni demolished the trusted Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentricism that had for very long monopolised the sphere of Empire studies.
The research output and book that has placed Gatsheni firmly in the African canon of scholarship is his 2013, Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonisation, published by CODESRIA. In this book Gatsheni provides a decolonial reading of African history and nuances the limits of decolonisation that have seen African countries continue in colonial and imperial subjection decades after political independence.
A Nocturnal Operative
Gatsheni’s work schedule is a flooded river of administrative and academic activities. If he is not attending to university administration issues he is supervising students or marking dissertations that come from all over the world’s universities.
At a given time there are always present or pending seminars, conferences, summer schools and keynote addresses to be delivered locally and internationally. The irony with universities is that they employ productive scholars for their intellectual and academic work and then literally immobilise them with administration work that has nothing to do with their gifts and abilities, for that reason most intellectuals are buried by administration work and are never to be seen again in intellectual circles.
Not so with Gatsheni. He is as prolific as he is artisanal and rigorous. Frequently he is asked the question, “when exactly do you read and write?” When it comes to reading Gatsheni is a nocturnal operative, sleep is compressed to a few hours with the rest of the nights dedicated to reading and writing.
In reading Gatsheni is messy and vicious, scribbling over books as he makes notes and writes comments as if examining a poorly written essay. A book that has been read by Gatsheni is an unsightly object of ink and other marks.
The home library is a forest of books on which notes have been scribbled and marks made and some pages folded for special attention.
In marking books and recording notes on the same pages he commits to memory impossible quantities of data that explain his photographic memory and recollection of details.
Typing is done with one hand and it is done speedily and accurately. Gatsheni commands a lucid prose and has a reputation for what Edward Said called “contrapuntal” analysis, an artisanal ability to always provide many competing and complementing ideas to every point that is being made.
Rule number one of the workshop of Gatsheni is that books should always be read from cover to cover and not in opportunistic selection, an old fashioned but reliable method that provides the student with sound grip on ideas.
For Gatsheni at 50 years of age, scholarship has slowly but surely escalated from a profession to a vocation, and ideas have become fundaments and tools in the struggle for a “world where other worlds are possible” a decolonial idea that is expanded in his forthcoming book, A World without Others, a book that critiques political and intellectual fundamentalism and proposes epistemic justice.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria. [email protected].
