Pitfalls of Anti-Colonialism

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

The failure, by mistake or design, to call political problems by their correct names has allowed coloniality to survive decades after decolonisation and political independence in the Global South.

When colonialism happened and Empire crash-landed onto the Global South some historians called it an epical event of conquest, others called it an epochal process of domination.

Epical described the magnitude of violence and epochal named the length of time and the durability of the colonial problem.

It was out of agony and frustration about the confusion in the naming and description of what colonialism was that Aime Cesaire asked the question:

“What fundamentally is colonisation?” The colonisers had their own descriptions of colonisation as the civilisation and modernisation of primitive and backward natives.

Some missionaries, those companions of conquest, called colonialism a process of the salvation and christianisation of the natives, giving them God to save them from eternal damnation.

The merchants, those traders and capitalists, that accompanied the colonisers understood colonisation as the opening of worldwide markets and expansion of avenues and vistas of commerce into the so-called Third World and heart of darkness. Behind all its names and nicknames colonisation was a violent and evil inauguration of an oppressive and exploitative system.

It was a global political and economic design that was to have deep and wide existential, cultural and spiritual local effects on the places and peoples of the Global South.

The colonised were displaced from their lands and dispossessed of their resources. Psychologically the colonised developed an inferiority complex where they began to believe themselves to be naturally poor, primitive and inadequate people.

The Argentinean semiotician, Walter Mignolo in his own agony about how colonialism and coloniality worked, observed that there was always a rhetoric that Empire used to cover its logic.

Modernisation, civilisation, christianisation, development, democratisation and human rights were rhetorical names that colonialism used to cover its logics of domination, oppression, exploitation, and dehumanisation.

Colonialism never called itself by its true name but it concealed its ugly self behind sweet nicknames, much the same way that deadly poisons are seasoned with sweet sugars to mask their bitter and lethal ingredients.

In this short article ideal with the problem of how those peoples, political parties and liberation movements, of the Global South tried and failed to undo colonisation and colonialism, I write of the political limits and failure of anti-colonialism to dethrone colonialism, resulting in the continuing march of coloniality in the Global South.

The Agony of the Decolonists

It was in a philosophical perplexity, in 2014, that the decolonist historian, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, noted that anti-colonialism in the Global South fought colonialism but failed to become decoloniality, hence political independence did not deliver liberation.

Anti-colonialists, Gatsheni noted, were largely those black and African elites that tried to use their educational advantage and social privilege to be admitted into the political and social class of masters in the colonial system.

Only when the colonial system in its racism and arrogance refused to admit them as equal masters with white colonial administrators did the anti-colonialist resort to armed struggles and radical anti-colonialism, otherwise these brave fellows were already prepared to be colonisers of their own people themselves, they had become black white men that Jean Paul-Sartre called “walking lies.”

In other words, anti-colonialists failed to destroy colonialism because they had already been corrupted and infected by the system of colonialism, they were already shareholders and stakeholders in colonisation and not liberation, they felt and conducted themselves as different and superior to their own people that, as peasants and toiling workers, were at the bottom of pyramid of colonial hierarchy.

In 2013, Peter Hudson, a discerning political scientist wrote of: “The State and the Colonial Unconscious” describing the social and psychological “dynamics” of how colonial mentality, colonial sensibility and colonial practices remained among the former colonised after decolonisation in South Africa, in 1994.

The idea of the “colonial unconscious” describes how colonialism works like a demonic spirit that possessed and infected the people and their political systems and remained intact well after political independence.

For the reason that anti-colonialism had become implicated and imbricated in colonialism, the struggle between colonialists and anti-colonialists became what Slavoj Zizek, not a decolonist but a post-political psychoanalyst, in 2016 called a “pseudo-struggle” and a “double blackmail.”

A pseudo-struggle is a fake struggle where too seemingly opposite but the same forces fight each other for a victory that is not for the benefit of anyone besides the fake fighters.

The natives of the Global South were doubly blackmailed by colonialists that promised them civilisation and development on the one hand and on the other hand by anti-colonialists that promised independence and development, yet both feuding sides delivered coloniality.

It is the political agony of the decolonists and of the places and peoples of the Global South that the anti-colonialists that fought colonialism ended up largely becoming symptoms of colonialism instead of being the true liberators that they were meant to be.

Anti-colonialism did not graduate into decoloniality but it remained entangled in colonialism. In its unconscious and subconscious, anti-colonialism was already carrying colonialism.

This observation and argument should not diminish that some and even most of the politicians and fighters in the liberation parties and movements were brave men and women that meant well, and some of them were maimed while others lost their lives in the struggles against colonialism.

As a philosophy of liberation, political movement and social activism, decoloniality would be much poorer if it ignored some of the heroisms of anti-colonialist struggles. To note the limits and pitfalls of anti-colonialism is to pick up the pieces and sew together a new beginning to the struggles for liberation in the Global South.

On the Decolonial Political Gesture

Some thinkers have in regret spoken of the need for the Moses political effect in the Global South.

The Moses Effect is a philosophical and political concept which holds that those that had fought colonialism and that had gone down to its mess and mud were not going to be the best people to lead independent countries, the same way in which the Biblical Moses was disqualified from reaching Canaan.

That nihilist German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche warned that: “beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster . . . for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

In that Nietzschean way, those that wrestled with colonialism had colonialism somehow not only gaze into them but also get into them and turn them into monstrosities. Much like the witchdoctors that fight witchcraft by getting involved in it and becoming true witches in the process.

Decoloniality begins in the naming of colonialism and in the understanding of it as an evil system that was put in place by Empire. Part of the limits of the anti-colonial movements was the failure to name colonialism by its name and understanding it as what it “fundamentally” was.

Picture colonialism as the willy devil that had a big bag full of names and nicknames that he went around calling himself by. He used these many different names as aliases, alibis and fetishes to mislead his victims about his true intentions.

Colonialism conquered and committed capital crimes by false pretenses. Decoloniality is a rejection of false names and false pretences but an insistence on dealing with colonialism and coloniality in their veracity.

When there is such a pseudo-struggle as that between ne-colonialists and post-colonialists in the present, what decolonial thinkers and fighters should do is to think beyond good and evil and fashion a political struggle that uses evil as an opportunity to learn and work for good.

China is where it is in the world today because at some point the Chinese had what Zizek calls “the courage of hopelessness” which is to look defeat and weakness in the eye and courageously work for future victory.

It is to think “tragically” and that is to admit the worst has happened and the best is no longer an option but a destiny.

Mao Zedong put this philosophy of tragic thinking and of the courage of hopelessness in very few words: “There is great disorder under Heaven, and the situation is excellent!”

-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founder member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Gaborone, Botswana: [email protected].