The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
“Those who do not understand ancestors,” said Lewis Ricardo Gordon “are the same people that will not understand descendants.” To know ancestors and appreciate descendants is to be alive to the truth that the world comes from somewhere and has to go somewhere.
It is fundamentally important that the living people of today appreciate that one day they will be ancestors who have a debt to their descendants and in that way the world will be preserved as a gift from the ancestors that should be passed on to some deserving descendants of the future. At once, each and every person is both an ancestor and a descendant.
It is a tragedy, in the view of Lewis Gordon, that at present world leadership is in the hands of psychopaths that live and lead as if they did not know ancestors and have no appreciation of descendants. The world is full of so much hate and is in such a state of disrepair and decay because a tiny minority of people have mistaken themselves for representatives of the entirety of the species of human beings, they are determined to think, eat and live on behalf of the rest of the living beings under the sun, that is the crime of white supremacy, Eurocentricism and coloniality at large.
The evil strategy of those that wanted to master and rule the universe was to make people, in the first place, into a race. After that, the Empire builders wanted to deny that other people are human beings in the very first place. That is what is called racism, believing in the humanness of one group of people so much that one begins to believe that other people different from his and her own are not human beings but animals.
Hating and the willingness to injure and kill other people is not an accident or is it surprising in a world where powerful people’s minds and hearts are driven by seductive fallacies and toxic passions. Selective love and respect, misogyny, misguided radicalism and fundamentalism are the seductive fallacies of today’s world.
White people, especially, as beneficiaries of the world system that are powerful and privileged should for their own good be in the forefront of confronting racial power, privilege and licence. Fighting racism and demolishing social and political inequalities should not be seen as the unique struggle of black people. Men should fight sexism and misogyny while all able bodied people should take as their business the struggle for the humanisation and liberation of people living with old age, bodily and mental disabilities.
An Africana existential
philosopher at Wits
From 5 to 7 of December this year, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WICDS) at the University of the Witwatersrand held an international conference on: Troubling Seasons of Hate, a theme that reacts to the return of large-scale hate and violence in the present world system. The Wits Centre that prioritises decolonial research in diversity studies and critical diversity literacy in particular invited Lewis R Gordon as one of the five keynote speakers and he came.
It was an encounter of a kind as many attendants had only seen Gordon’s books and essays and not met the philosopher in body. Gordon’s latest book, What Fanon Said: An introduction to his life and thought; is a classic of existentialism and phenomenology that are based on the philosophical and political message of Frantz Fanon. Born in 1962, teaching philosophy at the University of Connecticut in the United States and a visiting Professor at Rhodes University in South Africa, Lewis R Gordon and his philosophical work are an item of adoration and critical following by decolonial scholars throughout the world.
On this eventful occasion Gordon joined scholars from all parts of the world in examining the challenge of hate and contempt at a world scale. He is a generous and humble philosopher that does the undone, even as a titanic intellectual celebrity of world score, he sat throughout the conference, before and after his presentation, listening and engaging with the presentations of other scholars that included novice students and toddlers in the intellectual province. Witnessing Lewis R. Gordon at work and in delivery makes the philosophical argument that humility is another form of pride or pride in the other direction make sense. Here was a monumental philosopher literally dramatising the vocation of a public intellectual who is at home in the heights of philosophy and the depths of reason, even playing and teasing with first year students and other professors alike.
For all his humility, Gordon is the father of Africana Existentia Philosophy, a mixture of the phenomenology of Jean Paul Sartre, the sociology of EWB Dubois and the existentialism of Frantz Fanon. Gordon’s philosophical vocation is rooted on the troubling and troubled burden of exploring the condition of black people in Africa and in the diaspora under a white and racist world system. It is no exaggeration that Gordon has not only studied Fanon, Dubois, Sartre and Aime Cesaire but he has also expanded the work of the great philosophers and amplified their philosophy while relating some of their old ideas to the contemporary world. Gordon has in many ways resurrected Frantz Fanon and Dubois especially.
Against disciplinary decadence
Within the canon and archive of decoloniality, Lewis R Gordon has contributed an impressive quantity and quality of concepts, ideas and insights.
Among the number of his famous and influential concepts, Gordon’s concept of disciplinary decadence has been found illuminating and empowering.
The idea that in the Eurocentric world academy philosophers see only philosophy, historians look at the world only historically, while sociologists study people in sociological terms and the like, is understood and expressed by Gordon as limiting decadence of academic disciplines.
Scholars should be able to study books and understand the world not only in multidisciplinary ways but also in undisciplinary approaches that permit the discovery of new dimensions and meanings to life. “Shifting the geography of reason,” that is changing the landscapes of our minds and the terms of our thinking has been Gordon’s contribution to the decolonisation of the mind and of knowledge itself.
The terms and methods of knowledge production and study that have been provided by Empire and its education systems must, in the understanding of Gordon, be treated and used with suspicion and a decolonial attitude, and where possible discarded. Gordon has rightly been called “the philosopher of the human” for the importance that he gives to human beings and their condition in the world, especially the conquered, dominated and exploited peoples of the Global South that are subjugated by coloniality.
Human beings, wherever they are, should take responsibility for their thoughts and emotions, and do nothing to promote those ideas and passions that lead to hate and war. Before human beings can conquer the oppressor that oppresses them, they should eradicate the oppressor inside them, in each one of us there is a hater and oppressor that must be overcome, Gordon opined.
Speaking at the same conference, the Vice-Principal of Wits and media theorist, Professor Tawana Kupe noted that at the same time the Rwandan genocide was unfolding Nelson Mandela was being freed from long imprisonment and democracy beckoning in South Africa. Acts of hate and genocide are always there to counter or reverse human progress and development, evil is sure to keep competing with good in the world. “Hate,” Kupe elaborated, “does not manufacture itself, it is constructed and promoted by human beings,” and human beings have to deal with it.
Cheap non-racialism, Gordon added, will not help, pretending that there is no hate and prejudice in the world is to be hateful and prejudiced, human beings should acknowledge and deal with racism and other forms of hate and contempt. Philosophy as practiced and lived by Lewis R Gordon and other decolonial thinkers is indeed not just the love of wisdom but also the courage of wisdom and the wisdom to love in a hateful world. In a world where ancestors and descendants are valued, the past and the future are treasured, hate and violence should be those passions and practices that are shameful and unwanted.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected].
