The Sunday News
Scholars have written about it from several vantage points. But it seems that Bob Marley put it even better and simpler in his “Ambush in the Night” classic.
There is no need to guess who the Rastafarians talk about when they sing of “Babylon” the “system” or simply “they.” In this case Bob Marley sang that: “Trying to belittle our integrity now. They say what we know is just what they teach us. And we are so ignorant.” The politics of knowing and knowledge in the present world is a real ambush in the night because they are not obvious but operate at the level of the real but unconscious.
The racism of juridical colonialism and legalised apartheid was much better because it was enshrined in constitutions and declared in policy documents, billboards and other signs. In actuality, coloniality itself is more dangerous than colonialism and slavery combined because it operates below and above the obvious. Coloniality is pure witchcraft in that it can even mobilise and deploy its victims to be its perpetrators and defenders.
Besides the cultural industries that combine the media and the arts the racial unconscious is at its more virulent and toxic in the field of education, especially higher education that is involved with research, inquiry and the attempts at discovery and invention. In the classic “Ambush in the Night” Bob Marley sings that the fight is for power.
The occupations of research, intellectual inquiry, discovery and invention cannot be left to serendipity because to invent is to create and to own the world through knowledge. Afrocentrists of this world such as Molefi Kete Asante have produced quantities of literature that proves how African and black knowledges and inventions have been stolen, usurped, appropriated or simply bought out of their owners so that they come to be known in the world as products of western invention. Money and opportunity have also been used to ensure that any inventive thinker, artist or intellectual in Africa once “discovered” is quickly enticed to migrate to America or anywhere in Europe so that their cultural products, ideas or inventions are produced from somewhere in the West as western goods or services. As a result, the cream of African social scientists, human scientists, engineers and other natural scientists are almost all producing from the West as employees of western institutions and organisations, their products are western.
Can we give you a Father Please?
Whenever a black or simply African genius arises in the arts, in academia or in industry there almost always is going to be a European or American that will appear as a promoter or discoverer of the black talent. These discoverers and promoters of black talent almost always come as the Greeks that carry gifts, literary adopting the black and African genius, and not in so many words making it known that were it not for them, the talent would have gone to waste somewhere in rural Africa.
Europeans and Americans are very quick to volunteer parenthood for any talented African. During the days of juridical and administrative colonialism, the parents appeared as a different and generous white man or white woman who pities a poor black person and sends them to school or overseas where the African rises to be a rare achiever, but only by white discovery and promotion.
Another form of parenting black and African thinkers and inventors by Europeans and American appears through the politics of naming, influences and citations in academia. For instance, when the gifted Zimbabwean novelist Dambudzo Marechera appeared with a different way of writing that he forged from his wide reading and sheer linguistic embroidery and experimentation there was a struggle amongst western literary gate keepers from publishers to university professors to name Marechera’s work. An even bigger struggle was in trying to find out which European or American writers “influenced” him.
Suddenly T.S Eliot, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Frantz Kafka and Allen Ginsberg were brought forward as writers who were supposed to have influenced Marechera, a writer who by all accounts, wrote better than all the westerners combined. Any black talent or genius must be attached to some American or European influence or otherwise the world will be forced to admit the impossible truth that Africans and blacks can also be original inventors. A truth that the present world cannot live with is that there is original imagination amongst Africans. Any book by a Western writer that was found in Marechera’s collection of books after his death was supposed to be a clue as to which western writer he owed his abilities to.
Who is your Grandfather?
In academic research students are expected to cite their sources as part of proof that wide and deep research has been done and ensuring that they do not violate copyright by presenting other people’s ideas as their own, plagiarism. Literature reviews are also another way in which students can show that they have covered their ground by engaging with a number of scholars in their field of research. In short, reviewing the literature of other scholars and engaging with it in affirmation or in negation is part of the expected intellectual rigour in higher education.
Behind this legitimate and understandable academic and intellectual academic expectation the racial and political unconscious has wormed itself in to enforce racism in research and knowledge production. Lewis R Gordon has emphatically raised this problem of the politics of citations and influences. For any idea that a diligent black and African student may raise, they must cite one or two dead or living European or American men, once a while a woman, as the original source of their insight, or else their work is not sufficiently referenced. As a result, black and African scholars end up being simple expert literature reviewers instead of being legitimate producers of insights in their own right.
Even when a creative sociology student in Africa originates a concept or even a theory about society, for it to be considered and graded, the poor student must show how it originates from Max Weber or how it is similar or at least inspired by something that Max Weber wrote for instance. It is the same in psychology, a black and African psychoanalyst is either Freudian or Lacanian or they are not in the game. In political studies too, for a black and African opinion to stand on two legs and be accepted it must be related or connected to either Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli or any of the dead ancient European or American philosophers. No matter how brilliant and original an insight a black student has come up with, it does not exist until a western father or grandfather is identified for it.
The Challenge of Authority
Africans and blacks have been in the academy of the world for a very long time now. Africans have published a lot for them to begin citing each other’s work and relying on each other for influences and inspiration. This rich possibility is prevented by gatekeepers in form of scientific committees and publishers of intellectual work. Books and journal articles are rejected or accepted for publication by scientific committees that evaluate their scientificity and intellectual value. Those books and journal articles that cite the right authorities, the approved fathers and grandfathers of knowledge stand a much greater chance of being published. In the westernised and Eurocentric university teaching has stopped being a marker of great intellectuals, the number of publications and the rate at which a scholar’s work is cited is what makes success or failure.
Academics and intellectuals are promoted based on their publications and citation rates. For the love of success and the jingle of the coins of Judas, every clever African scholar ends up knowing who to cite and not to cite in order to be published. In the process, the intellectual products of blacks and Africans are suffocated and squeezed out of circulation by the system of the racial unconscious in the academy. It is the racial unconscious because it is not declared in any regulation or policy document but it is active and operational. There are also political rewards for black scholars especially budding wannabes who seek to build names by rubbishing, discrediting, sometimes deliberately distorting the work of established black scholars to create an unfavourable online footprint for their work. The authority of the work of an author is eroded by the way it is distorted, diluted or even savaged by even an unknown blogger or opinion columnist as it is considered to reflect on the quality of his or her scholarship. Because of the racial unconscious, it is tough being black and a scholar.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: [email protected]
