The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
A large part of understanding the world we are living in and comprehending how the world exactly works involves the himalayan task of unthinking and unlearning what we have been taught.
The global media and Euro-American academy have largely misled us on what the world is and how it works. Frustrated by the obfuscated way in which knowledge about the world and how it works has been presented Noam Chomsky in 2010 published one of the most important books in the present: How the World Works, a book that contains his telling speeches and lectures on the modern world system.
That there is monstrous creature that is the world system is one of the baptismal truths of decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation. Well before Chomsky’s canonical book another titanic leftist thinker Immanuel Wallerstein spoke and wrote of “world systems analysis” as a way of looking at and understanding the world, away from the simplifications and confusions circulated by scholars and theorists of globalisation and neo-liberal internationalism.
Globalisation theory, propaganda and ideology as presented by such spokespersons of Empire as Anthony Giddens conceals rather than reveal the coloniality of the world system. International Relations as a discipline of political studies and history has been complicit in glossing over the economic and political crimes of the Euro-American Empire that has, economically and politically, turned the whole world into a crime scene. Academic disciplines such as economics, political studies, history and even good old theology have in one way or another been mobilised to apologise for the coloniality and therefore criminality of the World System.
The mythical global village
The metaphor of a “global village” is one example of the propagandist language of globalisation theorists that wanted to paint a picture of the modern colonial world system as a paradisal village of happy people.
We in the Global South have learnt it the very hard way that the present world is neither global nor is it a village but a violently unequal and very hard place. The global village is a true neighbourhood of chiefs and commoners where the minority of the world’s population monopolises the world’s resources and eats on behalf of the many poor that are starving and dying off. True enough, prophets of globalisation like Giddens taught us a lot about the four dimensions of globalisation namely: The world capitalist economy, the nation-state system, the world military order and international division of labour.
The trouble with Giddens and such other fanatics of globalisation and neoliberalism as Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington is that they presented globalisation and its neoliberal politics and economics as good for everyone under the sun.
For peoples of the Global South globalisation could as well be a sexy nickname for good old imperialism. The coloniality of the world system is perfumed to smell like progress. We are told that, thanks to globalisation, worldwide social relations have improved linking distant localities in a way where the local has become international and the international local. Communication technologies have collapsed the world into one place and human mobility made the world a huge home for all under the sun.
That is not true. Very violent borders still separate peoples and countries, refugees and other immigrants still suffer racism, xenophobia and other ills suffered by oppressed and disposable peoples. The modern technologies that are boasted about are a luxury of a pathetic minority in the world and not a common possession that the poor bread eaters of the world have access to. In actuality, the fruits of globalisation are enjoyed by Americans and Europeans that can access the life and resources of any country in the world irrespective of distance and borders.
The whole world is open to the Euro-American Empire and its children while Europe and America are closed to the world. In many ways, the physical wall that US President Donald Trump threatens to build to fence off the Mexicans already exists in between the West and the Rest through stringent borders and other regulations that are forbidding to human movement. This explains why everywhere in America and Europe Africans are at worst called refugees and at best immigrants while white people from the West everywhere in Africa are called and treated as expatriates even if they have no education or any amazing skill. In the Global Village as a modern colonial village the white skin and western heritage are a powerful passport that opens all borders and doors for Westerners, even the most ungifted among them. The global village, if it is a village is not everyone’s village. Summary truth is that through conquest, imperialism and coloniality at large the Euro-American Empire has turned the whole world into its village where it does what it likes. The villagisation of the world that the Euro-American Empire has done is the main source of the fear and hatred that the West reserve for the rising Empire, China. Those that have stolen world power fear most to lose it.
The World System is Real
Margaret Thatcher, we are reminded by Wallerstein, had a personal political policy called Tina, There Is No Alternative, in full. She was not called the Iron Lady for nothing but her stubborn resolve. From what we know for ourselves she refused to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa and called the ANC a terrorist organisation beyond repair. She was a living system of a kind.
But one day in 1985 she wrote a moving letter to P. W. Botha advising him to urgently end political apartheid and release Nelson Mandela to allow a transition to democracy and black political rule. Nothing was to be lost and everything was to be gained by allowing black rule and democracy. Ronald Reagan and Thatcher had become convinced that to protect economic apartheid, political apartheid had to end. Through the agency of America and the UK, the world system had decided that the political order of apartheid was no longer profitable but dangerous for capitalism at a world scale. Like Thatcher herself the world system is unbendingly stubborn but when its interests are threatened it can be miraculously flexible. Anecdotally, many years after she had left office Thatcher, and her son Mark, were fingered in an attempted coup in oil rich Equitorial Guniea in 2004. There is no retirement in the service of the world system.
While the world system does not change, and its interests from conquest to the present remain the same, it is fond of changing the World Order, which is the order and direction of things in the world. Apartheid was seen as a political system in South Africa when it was a true world order.
The west, covertly and sometimes overtly, worked hard to preserve apartheid South Africa as an enclave of Europe and America in Africa. By the time apartheid ended, many of us do not know, the Boers had already developed a few nuclear warheads. Apartheid South Africa was going to be a nuclear power, the only one in Africa. The warheads could not be entrusted to black hands so they were quickly whisked to the USA for safekeeping in 1989 well before the clever blacks came to power.
Besides the end of apartheid, there are many epical and also epochal world events where the world system moved to protect its fundamental interests by shifting the world orders.
The Conference of Berlin in 1884-5 was one such event that created the world order of the colonisation and management of Africa. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has asked the stubborn question: “Can Africans create African futures within a modern world system structured by global coloniality? Global coloniality is a modern global power structure that has been in place since the dawn of Euro-North American-centric modernity.” To illustrate the point, Gatsheni cites John Keegan who made the telling observation that: “Four times in the modern age men have sat down to reorder the world — at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 after the Thirty Years War, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, in Paris in 1919 after World War 1, and in San Francisco in 1945 after World War II.” Noted here are events of the World System that changed the World Order. These events are events that were in the interests of the Euro-American Empire and at the expense of the Global South.
Not that the Africans have not tried, they have only been suffocated by the same world system.
Kwame Nimako for instance reminds us that: “Five times in the first half of the 20th century men have set down to reorder Africa — at the First Pan-African Conference in London in 1900, at the Second Pan-African Conference in 1921 in London, Paris and Brussels, at the Third Pan-African Conference in 1923 in London and Lisbon, at the Fourth Pan-African Conference in 1927 in New York, and at the Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester in 1945.” All these events somehow came to naught because the World System will not suffer a liberated and united Africa. The World System is real. Every day and night it is at work like an international secret society, it seeks to control what happens everywhere under the sun.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Braamfontein in Johannesburg, South Africa: [email protected]
