The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
In this world of fake news and alternative facts conspiracy theory has become a true intellectual discipline. In circulation there are so many theories concerning the government of the world.
Most fruitful minds explain power and wealth in the world as controlled by secret societies, mafia communities and dark cults that have worldwide networks. I have no resources in the present to affirm or deny the existence of such organisations, the easy thing to do is to live and think as if they exist and are busy at work.
It seems to me that every serious community of people that take life with some importance would have a few men and women that sit, not in public places, to plot its future, this cannot be different with the world community.
Other rich minds prefer to understand the governance of the world as the sole property of the divine being or some other elementary spirits of the universe and that is the reason religion remains one of the biggest mover and shaker of the hearts and minds of people in the globe, because of fear and also love, people must have a mighty protector that they believe in, who is the explanation and reason for all existence. Otherwise the world would be a very vacant and strange place.
There are written records of the existence of the Free Masons, a secret society that was formed in 1717 and is supposed to be in existence today, directing the political and economic affairs of the entire world.
The Bavarian Illuminati is also said to have survived from the Enlightenment era to this day when it is understood to be recruiting celebrities, controlling the flow of money and power. Both these are secret societies that are understood to be working with Lucifer himself as they have totally replaced God in their power to make and unmake fortunes and destinies.
Most students of history remember the record of a 1920 organisation that was called the Elders of Zion. This was said to be a secret Jewish society that was planning to take over the world. Closer to home in South Africa the Afrikaners had their Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret nationalist organisation that worked to secure the Afrikanerdom. Like creation stories the narratives about secret societies and their different agendas are supposed to help us understand how the world works and where it is possibly going.
Decoloniality: How the world works
Decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation has its idea of how the world works with coloniality as the invisible power structure that is constituted in the modern world system. A colonial power matrix is in place that functions through governments of the world, big businesses and other entities. The interconnectedness and networking of these organisations to make a world system is what is called the world order, how the world works. When he coined the term “coloniality of power” in 2000 Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano did not really invent anything new but came up with a fresh way of understanding a colonial and imperial problem that had haunted thinkers and leaders of the Global South for centuries. By the coloniality of power and colonial power matrix decolonial theorists have come to mean the structures and institutions of power, control and hegemony that emerged with the modern world of colonialism starting in 1492 and are still at large.
Steve Martinot has done a lot of research seeking to understand and explain the link between modernity and coloniality in a way that clarifies how the world came to be arranged the way it is today. Blaming the condition of the world on secret societies and on God or evil spirits is not enough.
Theorists and political thinkers should be able to explain using concepts and theories what exactly happens in the economic and political affairs of this place and that is what decolonial philosophers worldwide are doing from their different vantage points.
In a strong way Sigmund Freud managed to use his psychoanalysis to show how civilisation and its developmentalism suppressed the free animal in human beings, frustrating and traumatising them, leading to their psychological sickness and physical death.
Karl Marx explained how capitalism in its modernisation of the world created a cruel system that made the wealth of a few depend on the hard labour of many which made the world an unequal and a very sick place. Both Sigmund Freud’s crisis of the unconscious and Marx’s surplus value concepts tried to explain invisible forces that drove the world. Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx were reformists and not decolonists.
The Colonial Power Matrix
It all began with the control of world economies. The lands of the conquered and colonised were invaded and appropriated and their free labour was taken over, owned and controlled by powerful industrialists. Money was given currency of exchange for goods and services and was deliberately made scarce. Invisible forces called economic and market forces were invented to justify the scarcity of money, goods and services.
What is called the economy in the world is a kind of invisible moody and bad tempered god that normally favours the evil and punishes the poor individuals and countries. Global financial institutions were created to supervise and condition this system and its ill-tempered god.
Next is the control of power and authority. The military might and technological superiority of conquerors combined with the control of economies and finance described above to monopolise power and authority in the hands of a few countries. Countries that resist the world system are either bribed with monetary rewards or punished with economic sanctions.
As a last resort that is always hanging in the air dissenting countries and peoples can be militarily disciplined and punished. New technologies and gadgets are used in the true Orwellian way to put surveillance on individuals and populations, to put them under firm control.
The control of culture has come as cultural imperialism, religion and the spread of western culture across the world. Western and Christian values of individuals, families and communities are marketed as the real and the right values for all human beings under the sun.
The way human beings relate with nature and their environment has been shaped according to the capitalist world system that has reduced all nature to natural resources and raw materials for productivity and profit. Cultural industries control human desires and tastes, pleasure and happiness are packaged and sold as products in the market place.
The last pillar of the colonial matrix of power is the control of knowledge and manipulation of identities and belonging. The capture of social imagination. Since the Enlightenment era westerners have pretended that through their science, art and philosophy they have truthful answers for all the problems and challenges of the world.
Western knowledge has been elevated to a god and God reduced to an object of the superstitious and ordinary. The world has been mapped, cut up into boundaries and borders and people’s movement controlled in a way that has created some hells and some heavens on earth. Identities and belonging have been so politicised such that those who are foreigners and those that are citizens become eternal enemies anywhere. Differences according to skin colour, place of origin and culture are highly political issues in the present world.
Sigmund Freud successfully showed what the traumas of the world do inside human beings. Psychological violence breaks the psyche and spirit of the person and drives them mad and miserable. Karl Marx showed how the capitalist economic and social system impoverishes many and wrecks them down to pathetic objects that are candidates for death. Decoloniality combines the psychology of Freud and the sociology of Marx to seek to understand the invisible forces and visible structures and institution that oppress and exploit individuals and societies.
Whether the world is governed by a good God in competition with evil that seeks to undo his work, or it is controlled by secret societies and mafia communities is a subject that will continue to excite living people. What can be observed is that both sociological and psychological sicknesses of human beings are not natural but caused by human beings and the systems and institutions that they have created for better or for worse.
Decoloniality
Like what Edward Said noted about “travelling theories” that get used and abused in their movement in the world, decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation falls into all sorts accidental and untrained hands and heads, and its name is used in all different kinds of projects, even the justification of evil itself. Fellows with nothing to say will say anything obscure and write gibberish and give it the name decoloniality for fashion and sport.
Decoloniality uses the framework of the colonial matrix of power to understand how the world works, that is the archaeology of the philosophy, its excavation and investigation of the world. Every diagnosis of a problem must be followed by a prescription of a cure or solution, in other words for every archaeology there must be an eschatology or utopia that is aimed.
Decoloniality proposes not just decolonisation; coloniality has successfully resisted decolonisation that is why we are all still living in neo-colonial countries today. The ultimate utopia of decoloniality is liberation which refers to the dethronement of domination and oppression and the creation of new institutions and social structures to secure that freedom.
There are big countries in the world, powerful organisations and individuals that have benefited from the present world system and have become complicit in its evil and sickness so much so that they can no longer be decolonisers or liberators.
For that reason, decoloniality is a philosophy and also what Paulo Freire called “pedagogy of the oppressed.”
Since there is no way an oppressor can be a revolutionary, only the oppressed and dominated can heal the world.
When dominators, exploiters and oppressors use decoloniality they use it as an ideology and propaganda to mask evil in much the same way Lucifer and his expelled angels recite verses.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected].
