The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
To maintain economic and political power in the world, Europe and North America have always policed what people think and know. Power cannot be sought, found and kept without a firm grip of the flow of information and knowledge.
In Europe itself, consequences were dire and deadly for any thinkers and philosophers who questioned the hegemonic and ruling knowledge of the day in the ancient world. For questioning truths about the religion and politics of his day, in the year 399 Before Christ, Socrates was accused of irreligion and forced to drink poison that killed him.
For talking endlessly about the rot in European society and the criminal “origins of inequality” among human beings in the world, in the France of the 1750s, Jean Jacques Roussaeau, the father of the “social contract” was isolated, exiled and persecuted until he lost his mind and died in misery. In 1492, the Spanish burnt Islamic libraries to erase Islamic history and knowledges that were not supportive of the power and idea of Europe.
Women that were healers and traditional midwives were accused of being witches and of being possessed by demons and were burnt at the stakes because their spirituality and knowledge contradicted European science, in what constituted the genocides and epistemicides (killing of knowledges) in the sixteenth century. It was as late as 1976, at his tenure at the College De France that a gay French philosopher, Michael Foucault canonically lectured and wrote on the way in which hegemonic power relies on the control of knowledge and that knowledge itself relies on power for its perpetuation and sustenance.
In the French and European academy, Foucault faced fierce opposition and marginalisation in his life time and even today his ideas face stigmatisation, decades after his death on 25 June 1984. From Socrates through Jean Jacques Rousseau, Michael Foucault and Slavoj Zizek at the present, Europe has had many European philosophers and intellectuals that question and challenge the Euro-American Empire, its power and knowledge. Noam Chomsky and John Pilger have also been some of the few European leftist intellectuals who have done a lot of intellectual damage in unmasking the crimes of empire in the world. These brave European thinkers, speakers and writers however, have remained Eurocentric critics of Eurocentricism. They might critique empire but they do so without a direct experience of what decolonial philosophers such as Argentinean semiotician, Walter Mignolo have called the “colonial difference.”
The colonial difference is the direct experience of the effects of slavery, colonialism and imperialism that some Asians, the Latin Americans and Africans have had over the centuries. For the reason that the intellectual fashionability and political trending of Decoloniality has attracted even those writers, especially in Europe, Latin America and Africa, who do not care to read and understand the philosophy but spew their raw emotions and prejudices and call them Decoloniality, the Decoloniality International collective has resolved to take the pains to explain what Decoloniality is and what it is not.
It is part of epistemic racism and Eurocentric prejudice that any philosophies that are produced by Africans and Latin Americans can be known by anyone even without reading and studying them, whereas European and North American knowledges require specialists and experts. As a result, even in the South African Decoloniality movement, Decoloniality presently suffers brutal misinterpretation, distortion and co-optation even by racists, nativists and white supremacists. The diction of Decoloniality, terms and concepts are just harvested and thrown, and stringed around for their sound than for their sense, and pompously called Decoloniality to beguile unsuspecting audiences. In brief, I seek to explain the trinity of Decoloniality and that is, the relationship between power, knowledge and being.
Twins of Euro-American Philosophy
For centuries the Western academy has divided thought and philosophy into two categories; continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. Continental philosophy refers to that Euro-American philosophy that is concerned with the search for the meaning of life and things in the world. Analytic philosophy is that Euro-American critical interrogation that seeks to establish the truth or falsehood of ideas and concept in the humanities, social sciences and even the natural sciences.
In short, continental philosophy and analytic philosophy can; from a position of colonial difference, be called colonial philosophies in that most ideas of racism, white supremacy and conquest and colonisation were generated and disseminated by continental and analytic philosophers and were then implemented by explorers, conquerors and empire builders in the Global South. The racism and prejudice that colonialists and imperialists like Cecil John Rhodes practiced and implemented, they learnt from western continental and analytic philosophers at Bologna, Oxford, Coimbra and other ancient European academies.
The Birth of Decoloniality
Decoloniality was born in rebellion to the Euro-American philosophies. It is an extended family of liberatory philosophies and theories that, at a planetary scale, dispute and seek to demolish the knowledge and understanding of the world that Euro-America has erected in the planet. The first important quality of Decoloniality and its subsidiary philosophies and theories is that it seeks to directly engage with the human problems that peoples of the Global South face in the world. The problems of power, knowledge and being that Euro-America created through slavery, colonialism and imperialism are called coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being.
Decoloniality arises to unmask these colonialities and to propose liberation from their effects that include poverty, underdevelopment, disease, inferiority, marginalisation, ignorance and misery. Coloniality of power is defined by the western monopolisation of economic and military might, nuclear arsenal and the hegemony of the NATO alliance. Coloniality of knowledge is realised in the control and monopolisation of information and knowledge in the world by the West, the manipulation of the news media, control of the education systems, religion and the effects of cultural imperialism. Coloniality of being is observable in white supremacy, racism and the inferiorisation of non-European peoples, their dehumanisation and exploitation in the world by the capitalist and Eurocentric world system and its various orders.
Presently, some philosophers of the Global South are busy conceptualising understandings of coloniality of nature, the capitalist destruction of the environment and nature, and the coloniality of spirituality, the uses and abuses of religion to control lives of the people in the Global South. Black Consciouness that was fronted by Steve Biko, Afrikology that was flagged by the Ugandan Dani Wadada Nabudere, Africana Existentia philosophy that is peddled by Lewis R. Gordon and the Caribbean Philosophical Association, Afrocentricity that Molefi Kete Asante teaches are but a few of the philosophies of the Global South that rhyme well with Decoloniality.
The Theology of Liberation and Philosophy of Liberation that were spread by Enrique Dussel and other African and Latin American thinkers are also some of the foundational ideas of Decoloniality. Severally, Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 classic, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, has been found important and enriching to Decoloniality and its understanding of coloniality in Africa.
The Flourish of Decoloniality and the confusion
Almost every university in South Africa and even the government of South Africa is presently talking about decolonising this and decolonising that, from the university itself to the media and the church. In the process a lot of deliberate and even accidental confusion has arisen. For instance, Decoloniality is not decolonisation, infact decoloniality believes that decolonisation in Latin America and in Africa was a myth because coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being remained in effect after countries were decolonised.
Decades after 1994, for example, South Africa remains racialised, the economy is in the hands of whites, the media and the education system are tilted against the history and the lives of the poor black people, coloniality is alive after apartheid is said to be dead. The spirit of Decoloniality is the spirit against coloniality and for liberation. Racism, xenophobia, nativism, sexism, tribalism and other abuses of difference for exploitation and oppression of one by the other are condemned in Decoloniality. Both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, extremisms and prejudices are opposed by the Decoloniality ethics that have found support even among some influential philosophers and intellectuals in Europe and America.
The following instalment of this column will circulate a number of concepts and practices of Decoloniality that political and intellectual activists of such countries as ours, South Africa and the rest of Africa can find liberating and helpful in contributing to the global fight against the tyranny of coloniality.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic who is based in South Africa: mailto:[email protected].
