The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
The human habits of thinking and knowing are not fairly distributed or recognised across the planet. In our world, ideas and thoughts are not received and respected on their merit, on that they are good or bad, but so much importance is placed on which bodies and places the ideas have come from.
Scholars call this the biopolitics and geopolitics of knowledge; and it is high voltage politics. Part of the large explanation to how Europe continues to underdevelop and to rule Africa rests solely on how Europe has fraudulently sought to monopolise the human habits of thinking and knowing. According to the Eurocentric logic, a black person who thinks well and displays a facility in handling ideas, and is doing so from Africa, either has been taught well by his European teachers or is a pretender who is trying to be funny in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Authentic Africans are supposed, in the Eurocentric mindset, to be a sentimental, emotional and sensual people whose proximity to any form of knowledge is defined in their superstition and magical character. Europeans are supposed to be, in the thinking of Eurocentrics, a people with knowledge and reasoning and in Africa we are beings with only experiences and strange stories to tell. We are perpetually supposed to remain objects while Europeans everywhere are subjects, and complete citizens of the planet.
The Crime of thinking in Black
It is Lewis Ricardo Gordon, an Afro-American philosopher who in 2015 told an audience at the Black House Kollective in Soweto that “one of the trickiest crimes in this world is to be caught black, and be caught thinking.”
When Gordon, a proud Rastafarian said this I was reminded of the plight of an unfortunate law student at the University of Rhodesia whose story must haunt every sensitive African. This young legal mind wrote a brilliant essay in response to an assignment question. It was such a rigorous essay, an illuminating interrogation of the subject of the laws. In a word it was a criminally intelligent exposition on jurisprudence. Naturally, his lecturer, a Professor Christie instituted a thorough investigation of a case of plagiarism. It was commonsensical to him that this young and black aspiring lawyer had shoplifted the essay from another person; probably a white student of law or it was a paraphrasing from the ancient Athenian classics.
When all evidence emerged that the black aspiring lawyer was in all ways the owner of his work, after all tests had been carried out, Professor Christie took a long penetrating look at him and concluded at once that “Yes, you have Egyptian features !!” Since the brilliant ideas belonged to the black boy, the black boy himself did not fully belong to the black race, he had blood from elsewhere where whiteness could be traceable. The matter was concluded in that the boy was not authentically black, hence his brilliance.
Earlier in the generations, the very ruins of Zimbabwe in Masvingo, the testimony of ancient black architecture and civilisation had come under a similar investigation. European historians and archeologist were refusing that black natives could have built structures of such magnificence. Some Phoenicians or Mohammedans in transit should have built the monuments as their temporary shelter, not some barbarians, who lived in caves.
When indisputable evidence emerged that indeed it is a black civilisation that built the monumental ancient towns, a brilliant British historian of the 1930s Gertrude Caton Thompson came up with a durable solution to the puzzle, true to the word, the blacks built these structures, she argued, but in truth the structures are not as magnificent as has been argued, the magnificence is either in the imagination of the observers or elements of nature, the rain, wind and other forces of the universe have since beautified what was otherwise basic stone and mud figurines by ancient black barbarians, done deal.
It became a scandal in 1959, when a Belgian theologian based in the Congo, Placide Tempels wrote an entire book informing the whole world that after all the black people, and the Bantu had philosophy. This was rare courage and generosity for a white man to admit that those that were called barbarians were capable of deep thinking and had productive energies of the mind. The only problem is that Placide Tempels had not finished his story. True to his colonial nature and Eurocentric mind, he went on to say, with a straight face that the Bantu themselves did not know that they had philosophy, so competent Europeans should, in the name of God and civilisation come forward and teach the Bantu about philosophy and show them that after all they had their own philosophy.
Behind what appeared like generosity, Tempels had for the unsuspecting native a much longer knife. A Congolese philosopher, Valentin Mudimbe gave a name to this colonial habit, epistemic ethnocentrism, the mistaken thinking that all what Africans know the European taught them, all that Europeans did not teach them is not knowledge; it must be superstition or black magic.
African criminals of thought
In the spring of 1974, Chinua Achebe was a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts in the United States. He was walking down campus with a spring in his step and a whistle in the mouth when a concerned white fellow lecturer asked him what he was studying at the university. On insisting that he was in fact a lecturer the white colleague got even more concerned and asked after the subject that the Nigerian taught. On hearing that it was “ African Literature” the fellow was perplexed, he made it known to Achebe that it was strange that anyone under the sun ever imagined that Africa could have a history, late alone a literature to talk or to teach about.
Up to his death, on the 21st of March in 2013 Achebe lived to prove in black and in white that Africa did not only have history and literature but that it also had human beings, strong and weak, and beautiful philosophy. For obvious reasons, the Eurocentrics could not give him a Nobel for thought and literature, but the piece of land where Achebe is buried today in the village of Ogidi in Nigeria is a shrine of African erudition.
The Eurocentricism of this world does not only punish the criminals of thought who challenge it, but it also pays those who polish the Eurocentric ego. Wole Soyinka, another great Nigerian and African was given the Nobel Prize for Literature and thought. For all his criticism of apartheid, racism and colonialism Soyinka also composed the best insults to the Negritude movement, a black pride movement fronted by Aime Cesaire of Martinique and Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal. In Soyinka’s Nobel wisdom Negros should not peak Negritude because tigers don’t speak Tigritude! That was Nobel music to the Eurocentrists.
A great Indian novelist and thinker, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul also got the Nobel honour, not before he called his own people, the Indians, a filthy lot who urinated and defecated everywhere they stood and sat. A few millions there for insulting one’s mother. The African criminals of this world are the many Achebes who continue to refuse to insult their mothers, but to insist that the African lives; he has a past, a present and a future in the thinking world.
And that Cartoon
Works of the imagination and art, in graphics and in literature have a way of distinguishing themselves, and it is mostly in scandal and stretching the limits, saying and describing things in shocking ways. Celebrated Zimbabwean literary genius Dambudzo Marechera, wrote to shock and to scandalise in criminal ways such as describing his own mother as, to put it mildly, “a hard worker in love making…” Some readers enjoy Marechera’s self insulting humour, I doubt if so may would enjoy if Marechera described other people’s mothers as industrious in the bedroom. The best satire and imaginative mockery, and probably the most intelligent and politically safe is the one that puts the artist himself forward for ridicule, not the one that points the finger out at others.
This one is easily taken for, not freedom of speech or the press, but bigotry, hates speech. A Charlie Hebdo is so easy where bleeding stereotypes are fed even from the best intentions. What is really artistic about art is knowing how to go too far and not way too far.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria: [email protected]
