The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
A careless but well-meaning friend of mine recently asked me what he thought was a big and career changing question.
Before he asked his big question he repeatedly begged me not to be offended, many other people wished to ask me the same question, he said, but were either shy or afraid for my feelings, or careful about my otherwise windy temper, but he as my dear friend, was not going to let the sleeping dogs lie as the question was important to me as it was to him.
I downed my beer and prepared for the end of the world, but it was only to be another evening on the proverbial creation day:
“Why, if you are a true decolonial philosopher do you spend so much money and time on Western books and scholars, you spend more time reading Slavoj Zizek and some dead western white men?” He had parental care written on his eyes as he asked the question, and also the look of a concerned psychiatrist. He shook his head and licked his lips awaiting my confession and shame. What the enslavers and colonisers thought and what their children and descendants think is important for decolonial theorists and activists, was my answer.
To go to bed in ignorance of what Empire thinks and is planning is to lead a truly unexamined life. Ideas of western thinkers from Socrates in the ancient world to Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler in the present are still the ruling ideas of our world that are being applied by governments, are being taught in universities and schools, are circulated in the Global media and have captured our imaginations in many ways, we live in the ideological prison of Empire. What Michel Foucault called the “archeology of knowledge” is the ability of living scholars and researchers to dig into past ideas and understand the thoughts and ideas that shaped the world to what it is today. Political, economic, religious and cultural ideas of dead and living Euro-American thinkers are the ideas that continue to design and maintain our world in the Global South. It is as best innocence and at worst naivete not to know what the monster has in mind, the Sun Tsu from the East and Machiavelli from the West, both agree on this.
After our short but hopefully meaningful exchange, my good friend concentrated on the beer and the soccer match on the television screen than hung at the corner of the cool joint from where I do my own archaeology of knowledge. Even as soccer is not my thing, I find it not a philosophical habit to lose my temper and raise my voice over grown men having battle over a little ball in an open field, I kept on pointing into the sky saying “Arsene knows! Arsene knows!” My friend is a religious Arsenal follower. Even as Arsenal was being clobbered the beer flowed the more I exclaimed “Arsene knows!”
The beer was too good and I was also too sozzled and shy to ask why he spent all his waking life worrying about and watching white men chasing a little ball. In thought and in sport, recreation, fashion and popular culture the white man has captured our souls and imprisoned our minds, we need to find a way out, first by understanding how he got us here, by getting into his mind, and then understanding what we can do to free ourselves. And how we can use the wisdom of the monster against himself, how we can pick up our pieces and glue ourselves together again.
A Guilty Parentage of the State
Defenders and apologists of Empire and their cousins the denialists and celebrants of slavery, colonialism and imperialism make sport of reminding us that we should be grateful to the West for modernity and civilisation. The unfortunate reality, however, is that every great idea and invention that Empire ever gave to the Global South had a sinful intent and an evil agenda behind it. Such philosophers as John Locke are presented in history studies and philosophy as our lords and saviours who invented the idea of the state. They are venerated as messiahs who brought us from the state of nature where we lived like beasts to a state of law and modernity where we now live constitutionally and ethically. What is not in the syllabi and the curricular, and what is not discussed about such thinkers and inventors of the state is that they are the same evil geniuses that conceptualised how oppression, colonialism and exploitation of one by the other should be legally and systematically carried out, how oppression and domination should be executed with the legal and democratic consent of the oppressed. They theorised how victims should be mad to participate in their victimisation like the proverbial chickens that celebrated the festival on which they were to be slaughtered.
In the seminal essay “Essay on the Understanding of Human Nature” Locke decoded and described the human being in a manner that moved the world at the time. Like Thomas Hobbes, he observed how human beings initially lived in a natural state of nature and survived on the generosity of each other in moral and natural law. If there was no competition for resources, land, food and even intimate rights of the sexual economy, and power, human beings prevalently lived in peace and had no need to harm each other. Natural law, Locke observed, was not enough as man was naturally contentious, avaricious and sold to cruelty and evil.
So there was need for the society of man to surrender their rights and power to the responsibility of a powerful and sovereign entity that can keep the evil and cruelty of man under check, using both rewards and punishments. That is how the liberal constitutional state was conceptualised and marketed as a solution to the problem of evil, cruelty and “survival of the fittest” principles of the state of nature and rule of natural and moral law. The welfare of people could not be left to the morality and generosity of one man to another, a state was needed to be the guarantor of both freedoms and punishments, to deal with human rights and human wrongs.
In the essay, “Second Treatise of Government” Locke fleshed out the constitutional state and government in depth and detail. The state was to have power but not total power, the people could appeal. Resources had to be shared and preserved for all, as in the natural state all human beings were created equal and free. The divine right of kings and other rulers who pretended to rule by God’s wisdom was a fallacy and had to be abolished, that is how the state became secular and not theocratic anymore. Democracy was needed, and it needed the force of law to discipline human beings that were naturally driven by the desire for happiness and fear of misery. Human beings were dangerous animals that were propelled by fears, desires and passions that needed to be controlled through sticks and carrots. Powerful men and rulers could be controlled through their love for fame, prestige and reputations. It was considered punishment to shame a powerful man and expose that he is immoral or unworthy of his name and reputation.
The Birth and Logic of Inequality
John Locke was not a nobody but a man of substance. He was born of a rich family and tradition, received fine education that allowed him to graduate from Oxford as both a medical doctor and also a philosopher. He became a personal doctor and also economic and political advisor to the First Earl of Shaftesbury, not a small position by any measure. Locke had shareholdings in such prestigious business concerns as the Council of Trade and Plantations, Bahama Adventures and yes, the Royal Africa Company. The fine philosopher of liberalism and contract, constitutional government was profiting from slavery and imperialism. He, philosophically became an advocate for private property and property rights. The poor, in his mind could benefit from being bought, employed and even enslaved by the rich, the philosopher of freedom came to understand the commodification of one man by another.
The life, time and thought of John Locke shows how money and power corrupted the state. Up to today, those that have big money aspire for political power to protect their money and property and those that want big money seek political power and control of the state in order to use it as an avenue to money. Constitutions, in the states, are used to control and moderate power but they do not check privilege. The rich and powerful can buy the law and bribe the state, using their privilege. The democracy and liberalism that Locke and other philosophers conceptualised can live well with inequality, colonialism and imperialism. In the wisdom of Locke, for instance, only those people that had property and big money were supposed to vote, not everybody. That was the birth of the evil relationship between democracy and capitalism, an unholy marriage that is still getting stronger today.
In many ways, democracy and liberal economics are for the benefit of the rich and powerful. Those who have the privilege to bully the law and bribe the state enjoy democracy and are insulated from the punishments of the state. The poor and powerless live under what Locke himself called a “state of war” where daily existence is punishment. The powerful can surround themselves with soldiers, flatterers and informers to secure them and polish their egos to shine. They can control and own information resources that build images and manage reputations of themselves that are in actuality fake, make devils look like angels.
In summation, behind the music and the rhetoric of liberalism there is a logic of domination and oppression. Democracy and its cousin liberalism, in economics and politics, are inventions of oppressors. Ideas and thoughts of oppressors and prophets of domination like Locke have been uncritically taken and applied in the Global South as the wisdom of saviours and messiahs, when they are postulations of vampires. One of the capital responsibilities of decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation is to uncover what the prophets of Empire thought, why and how they thought about it, and then fashion ways of navigating the Global South out of the entrapment in coloniality.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is founder member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He writes from Manzini in Swaziland: [email protected].
