The Sunday News
Decoloniality at large with Cetshwayo Mabhena
The success, over centuries; that slavery, colonialism and apartheid have registered besides the colossal theft of resources of colonised territories and enslaved peoples, has been the ability to get victims of slavery, colonialism and apartheid to defend coloniality.
Defending coloniality has not always been vouching for it in words but simply confirming its racist stereotypes in deeds.
The rise and spread of decoloniality, that has been called the decolonial turn by philosophers in the Global South, is encountering attempts by beneficiaries of slavery, colonialism and apartheid to usurp decoloniality and turn it into another reformist and not revolutionary philosophy. Fallism, the anarchist thinking that everything standing should fall, from the statue of Cecil John Rhodes to buildings and black governments in Africa has also been used to give decoloniality a very bad name. The angry white right wing in South Africa has been busy sponsoring black anger and black violence in order to portray the decolonial turn that is gripping the African continent as nihilist Fallism that has no liberatory content or potential.
The student activists who burn trains, lecture theatres and city buildings in the name of decoloniality are supposed to be the ultimate evidence that decoloniality is nothing but primitive Fallism where blacks will thoughtlessly destroy their countries and finally themselves in the name of liberation. Fallism in its thoughtlessness of burning primary schools and libraries in South Africa is supposed to prove to all and sundry that colonialism and apartheid were far better than the self-governance of black people.
In recent months, South Africa has been used by the white right wing to dramatise to the whole world the impression that black people are senseless and suicidal fallists. After rightfully felling the statue of Cecil John Rhodes in the name of decoloniality, university students have been caught in senseless violence that can only be understood as proof that decoloniality itself is senseless.
Besides besmirching the good name of the decolonial turn by sponsoring senseless violence by students, a few but brave white right wing intellectuals have started energetically researching, writing on and about decoloniality, in the process intelligently diluting, toning it down and effectively distorting it, presenting it as another mild form of good old post-colonial theory that is happy to turn the other cheek to coloniality or prove that slavery, colonialism and apartheid were after all good for modern and primitive Africans.
A white right winger celebrates when South Sudan burns under a raging civil war and when Libya fractures beyond repair.
The myth that Africa will come to naught is well serviced when Renamo rises again in Mozambique.
The Colonial Turn
The decolonial turn cannot be fully understood without an understanding of the colonial turn. This is as true as that decoloniality cannot be known for what it is without a clear understanding of coloniality.
Clever right wingers have been working overtime reducing decoloniality to a narrow and recent Latin American philosophy because Anibal Quijano, a Peruvian sociologist coined the word “coloniality” as recently as the year 2000. Well before Anibal Quijano, Kwame Nkrumah described neo-colonialism, and well before Kwame Nkrumah, Cheik Anta Diop wrote of African origins of civilization and the attempt by Europeans and Americans to silence African histories and cultures.
The name coloniality might be recent and Latin American in origin, but the experience of economic, political, cultural and spiritual domination and exploitation belongs to the entire Global South and dates back to the crusades and conquests of the early centuries. Simply, therefore, coloniality refers to the endurance of the effects of slavery, colonialism and apartheid long after the abolition of slavery and the overthrow of colonial and apartheid regimes in the Global South. These effects of imperialism are felt in the economies, polities, cultures, spiritualties and academies of the Global South.
For that reason, many novelists, historians and other intellectuals of the Global South have been decolonial thinkers even if they never uttered or wrote of coloniality or decoloniality. In the 15th century, Guaman Poma spoke of natives of the Andes under the domination of Spain as those people who became Christians before Christ because they respected nature and feared God even if they had never heard his name.
The words, coloniality and decoloniality, are recent inventions but the struggles against and resistance to slavish, colonial and apartheid domination are as old as humanity itself in Africa, Latin America and the totality of the Global South.
The revolutionary teeth and theoretical freshness of decoloniality is that it has learnt its lessons well from the successes and failures of preceding ideologies, theories and philosophies such as nationalism, Marxism, postcolonial theory, post-modernism, negritude, Gurveyism and even Afrocentricity. Coloniality as domination gave birth to decoloniality as its resistance and antithesis.
The decolonial turn simply refers to the intensification of liberatory consciousness and activism in the Global South. Decoloniality is not a theory or a philosophy in fact; it is an extended family of theories and philosophies whose umbrella is one — liberation.
Anibal Quijano gave a name to an existing planetary struggle for liberation against all forms of coloniality and domination. It is a monumental falsehood that decoloniality has its birthday and birth certificate somewhere; it is a planetary consciousness for liberation that was born out of the thought of liberation philosophers in the entire planet.
The Global South, Africa in particular has for so long been peopled by decolonial thinkers even if they did not call their ideas decoloniality. Decoloniality is ranged against the usability of the classification of human beings according to differences of race, tribe, nationality, gender, sexuality and ability of body. It is not a stick for beating up whites but a spirited search for liberation.
Many postcontinental white philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre and presently Boaventura De Soussa Santos at the University of Coimbra and the theologian Gerrie Snyman at the University of South Africa have acquitted themselves well as thinkers in decoloniality. Paulo Freire, a white Latin American, represented a decoloniality that valorised liberation and the humanisation of both the oppressor and the oppressed.
Decoloniality is a humanising and liberating force that, in the wisdom of Frantz Fanon, seeks to set afoot a new humanity and a new world that is not hostages to the same world of yesteryear that thrives in producing new victims every other day.
The attempts by the right wing in South Africa and elsewhere to reduce the decolonial turn to senseless Fallism are part of the ages old attempt by racists and white supremacists to defame the thoughts and agendas of liberation thinkers and activists.
The decolonial turn struggles against and resists racism, xenophobia, tribalism, patriarchy, sexism, ableism, ageism and tyrannies of any form at a planetary scale.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic that is based in South Africa. [email protected]
