The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Three bold words were inscribed on my primary school uniform badge: “Knowledge is Power.” Every student that attended Siganda Primary School was made to understand that knowledge is power.
Those words became a kind of communal slogan that was used to encourage parents to send their children to school. The villagers also chanted that slogan to encourage their lazy children to go to school or face a life of powerlessness. A few kilometres from the primary school there was the Siganda Secondary School that housed the seniors that had passed their Grade Seven and were being prepared for higher education.
Their uniform badge carried the declaration: “Khanyisa Mfundo” which is translatable to “education is light.” When I thought I had heard and seen it all about knowledge being power and light I entered Cyrene Mission School where the badge had a Latin inscription: “Luceat Lux Vestra,” which means “let your light shine.” The situation had truly gotten to another level in my world. I got to understand that I had been sentenced to a mission school to seek Power and Light. Sentenced, I mean, because at the time for me the line was very thin between boarding school and a prison. I survived a full six years at Cyrene Mission School.
Not that Cyrene Mission was not fun. I think my biggest laugh since I was born was at Cyrene. And the last time I danced was to a Black Uhuru reggae song, Guess who is coming to Dinner and Nigrea Love Dub in the Beit Hall at Cyrene.
I was a respected Rastafarian with a massive collection of Reggae music cassettes. With the bunch of losers that were my friends we were found skanking our lives away after school, and then at night when everyone went to bed we burnt the candles, studying, searching for some power and light in our lives. For the effort we scored scary marks.
We were jointly and severally accused of examination fraud and possible witchcraft because no one ever saw us studying but every end of the term our final marks came out obscenely high. We called ourselves the Heavy Duty Trucks that travel the road at night when small little cars are parked. I remember Bhekuzulu Mlilo and Wilson Masarirambi (may their souls rest in power) knocking it into the heads of our group that the brain, especially a powerful brain, works very well in the depths of the night when smaller brains are in dreamland.
One day a worried boy that I will not name because he is now an important chef in the Zimbabwean national security sector approached me with a big accusation of witchcraft. He said he was sure that whenever he read all what he understood from the book swiftly passed on to my brain, and he asked me to stop it! It was after a Parents and Prize Giving Day where I collected prizes for all the subjects in my class, except for that evil subject, Mathematics. The mystery was that none in my class had seen me studying. The fellow genuinely believed that I used big muthi to steal his data. The belief was caused by the habit that I had. During reading time I would post myself at the back corner of the class, start twisting my hair into dreadlocks and pulling up units of my beard that at the time was refusing to grow. As I did this I would look at him with the corner of my eye as if half asleep and half awake.
In veracity I was not watching this fellow. He only happened to sit by the window through which I watched out for approaching prefects and teachers that came to check who was studying and who was playing and disturbing others. I can confirm that with my bunch of losers at Cyrene Mission we had a secret knowledge society that studied only under the cover of darkness in the intestines of the dark nights.
If I look back carefully we were effectively organised and complemented each other, pulling up struggling members, and prepared for tests and exams using past examination papers. We were a scary group of 13 losers. I am sure that even after a long 20 years plus, if someone looks carefully at the halls at Cyrene Mission they will stumble on the graffiti to the effect that: 13 Rules!
Power and inequality
When politicians and scholars discuss inequality in the world they do so in political economy terms. Political power and economic power distinguishes powerful countries from powerless ones. Military might is another measure of power that separates the boys from the men in the comity of nations of the world. Physical strength and social power give not only survival but also dominance. It is the militarily and economically strong countries that call the shots in the planet. Political power, in a way, is just a decoration of the economic and military stamina that any country holds among other countries.
The politically powerful countries of the world prioritise their economic interests and advantages. And as much, countries use their economic advantage to earn and monopolise political interests. The world is, otherwise, a specifically Machiavellian place where power and privilege are important resources that must be sought and found by any means necessary. To be powerless is to be poor and voiceless.
Even in the village the man with big fields and a big kraal has a voice in the village gatherings, even if the content of the voice is pathetic his lousy opinions carry the day.
Through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Pentagon and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation the Euro-American Empire, for now, runs the world. For now, I mean, because the rise of China, India and some Asian countries is taking the world to another order. The Euro-American Empire appears to be on its way to second fiddle in a new world. My interest in this article is not the political economy of power. I am interested in the origins of inequality under the sun.
How did other people and other countries become more powerful than others? Where did they get the power to amass economic wealth and monopolise powerful gadgets of war. What are the roots of economic, military and political power that distinguish superpowers from other countries? There is no God that landed from below or from above and pronounced this country powerful and another powerless. The Euro-American Empire itself is an Empire of economic, political and military might. Why European and North American culture, including food and fashion, has become fashionable in the world is because it is the culture of the winners. Rulers decide what music we dance to, it seems.
Epistemic power: The real power
I want to press home the argument that it all began with knowledge and lack of it. Before Conquerors, colonisers and Empire-builders came to Africa Europeans had convinced the world that they had achieved Enlightenment and civilisation and could rule the planet. They claimed to be, and appeared to be the owners of modernity and modernisation.
The missionaries preached about a powerful God from the West that would save the whole world from fire. After we were all enchanted with the knowledge of the European and in awe of his God; we surrendered all our power and resources to him. The gun only came as back up to deal with resistance and disobedience; otherwise we had already knelt down to worship the white man for his knowledge. Economic power and military might that are the parents to political power are all children of some knowledge. How human beings, even as they are much smaller than some animals but continue to have dominion over wildlife is based on thought and knowledge that man possesses.
Decolonial scholars have for a long time now thought, spoke and wrote of knowledge injustices. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s trending international bestseller is the book: Epistemic Freedom that he published with Routledge in 2018. In this book Gatsheni convincingly argues that political and economic freedom may not be possible without a precondition of knowledge freedom.
Oppressed people, whether they are enslaved or colonised, are first and foremost knowledge unfree. Boaventura de Sousa Santos is another philosopher of Decoloniality that has published a classic of epistemology: The End of the Cognitive Empire, also a 2018 publication. Santos advances the argument that the Euro-American Empire that presently runs the world is first of all an epistemic Empire that managed to build an economic, political and military Empire. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of ‘cognitive justice’ which is in other words epistemic justice or knowledge and thought justice.
Before economic wealth, the first wealth that matters and that can lead to economic wealth is knowledge wealth. Even political prosperity and freedom must be founded on knowledge prosperity and flourish. Without a sound knowledge foundation political regimes lose their economic and political power the way the proverbial fool and his money are soon parted. Those people and countries that monopolise power are entities that would have monopolised some knowledge in the very first place.
The reason why every religion first has a creation story before it spells out what will happen after death is that once a person believes that the preacher knows where the world comes from he is also correct about where the world is going. Political, religious and economic regimes of the world are all based on some worldviews that are believed and circulated as wisdom.
Once someone has taken away your belief in your world and your life that person has taken you over; they can as well lend you their own belief system and you are a proper slave. A people’s culture and language, therefore, is important because it carries a people’s beliefs, values and knowledge.
The real inequality in the world, therefore, is knowledge inequality which leads to all other inequalities. Knowledge power is the first power, my primary school badge was, after all, right.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Free State: [email protected]
