The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
It may not be enough to lament how Area Studies and its coloniality of knowledge still haunts our departments of African studies in the African University. It is profitable to go further to examine the toxic ideologies and discriminations that Area Studies has given birth to in the university and its epistemological projects.
To start with, the first problem of Area Studies is its geographic fundamentalism. As the name Area Studies suggests, geographic areas and places are important to Area Studies. Ideas and thinking itself are fixated on places and geographic locations.
This geographism or arearism of knowledge is colonial in that knowledge maps and knowledge borders, exactly as in the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, are created and used to exclude and include other places and peoples in the thinking economy of the world. Ramon Grosfoguel never tires of reminding the decolonial community of the world that “men of five countries” in the world have been given the monopoly of thought to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Italy, France, England, the USA and Germany are considered centres of thought and thinking in the entire planet.
Men from these five countries have, in the Eurocentric canon, been given valorisation and celebration as pioneers of philosophies and generators of theory. It is, of course an outlandish colonial and racist myth that any one that is geographically located outside the borders of these five countries has no capability to think like or more that the men of those privileged areas and countries.
The myth becomes even more outlandish, colonial and racist given that most philosophies and theories that are celebrated as western are in actuality wisdoms and knowledges that were looted from ancient Africa by travelling philosophers and other historical and intellectual tourists. African ideas, knowledges and philosophies were siphoned from the continent, couched in western languages and given western names and are now being exported back to the continent as novel wisdom from the west and discoveries from the fathers of knowledge in the Euro-America area. In this short article I seek to name and shame the kinds of ideologies and practices that Area Studies has birthed in the University.
The geography and biography of knowledge
There is a big pretence in Area Studies that knowledge comes from certain areas and not others.
Eurocentricism as a toxic ideology that centres knowledge and everything in Europe is a vestige of Area Studies and seeks to associate elevated thinking with Europeans. Area Studies criminally gives knowledge a geographic territory. The stereotype circulates that while Europeans have knowledges Africans have superstitions, and that while Europeans generate theories Africans only provide experience.
It is also imagined, in Eurocentric circles, that Europeans are rational while Africans are simply emotional and instinctual. Not only that, but knowledge is given biography. There are certain people with certain bodies that are associated with giving birth to ideas. White bodies from the West, Area Studies pretends, are the generator sand producers of knowledge.
The rest of the bodies in the world are consumers of knowledge that is produced in the West.
Decolonially sensing and knowing, all people everywhere in the world and with their different types of bodies are capable of generating knowledge. It is a colonial and racist mythology that the geography and biography of knowledge are centred in the West. The ability to sense, think and know is the property of all human beings beyond geographies and biographies.
Epistemic racism
Philosophers love the habit of scaring others by deploying such words as epistemology instead of employing the simple phrase, theory of knowledge production, validity and use. So by epistemic racism I simply refer to how the production of valid and usable knowledge is considered a monopoly of one race.
To isolate the production of valid and usable knowledge to white Europeans, which is a habit given birth by Area Studies, is to participate in epistemic racism.
It is epistemically racist to entertain the toxic idea that people with dark skins are not refined thinkers or they cannot produce valid and usable knowledge. In the westernised university in Africa, especially in South African universities I have heard stories of how, especially first year students are saddened when a black lecturer enters the lecture room on their first day at varsity.
Ululations and the clapping of hands take place when a white lecturer emerges. All that is part of epistemic racism that associates thinking and elevated knowledge with the white skin, when thinking and elevated knowledge are much wider and deeper than complexion.
Epistemic apartheid
In 2010, Reiland Rabaka wrote a whole book: Against Epistemic Apartheid: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology. Yes, apartheid is not only isolated to dividing and separating people according to their cultures and homelands. People are separated and discriminated on the basis of what they should know and what they should not know. Bantu Education in South Africa was part of the epistemic apartheid where the white supremacists wanted to keep some knowledges away from black people.
It is important for universities in Africa to ensure that their curricular, syllabi and even reading lists do not dispense epistemic apartheid by keeping away certain knowledges from students. Area Studies itself appears to me like an apartheid ideology in that it emphasises places, homelands, borders and maps in epistemology.
Epistemic apartheid does not always happen in vulgar and obvious ways. For instance, asking students of sociology or history to do research and conduct feedback only in their home areas might appear convenient but it reinforces the apartheid idea that people come from some area and they should live and work only in that area.
Even the patronising idea that certain people should be protected from certain knowledges and theories is not only censorship but also epistemic apartheid. Epistemic apartheid does not only discriminate people according to knowledge but also encourages villagism, where people, come to think and know about only their villages and homelands, which is parochial and limiting.
Epistemic sexism
There is a colonial tendency in Area Studies and its Eurocentric canon to associate knowledge and superior thinking with people of the male gender. Women in the westernised university are considered and treated as visitors to thought and not citizens of the knowledge economy. It is much harder for people of the female gender to distinguish themselves as leading scholars and generators of theory.
Those women that, against all odds, are able to distinguish themselves as thinkers are celebrated but not in an innocent and liberating manner. They are given awards and continuously praised as if it is a miracle to be a woman and successful scholar at the same time. Leading female scholars are exoticised and regarded as wonders of the world when it should not be amazing at all that women also think.
University students also tend not to take female scholars as seriously as they regard male ones. Men, especially white men, enjoy epistemic power and privilege in the university. Knowledge, as part of decolonising it, should be de-gendered and de-sexualised.
Epistemic xenophobia
When intellectual combat rages and scholars get down into bare-knuckled encounters cowards are known to resort to biography and geography. Who is this scholar? Where were they born? And what is their nationality? What right to they have to write and speak about this country when they have their own country to worry about. That is good old epistemic xenophobia that is related to epistemic racism.
The myth here is that Nigerians should only think and write about Nigeria and leave Kenya to the Kenyans. Epistemic xenophobia is related to nativism, tribalism and autochthony. Epistemic xenophobia is also parochial and limiting. To manipulate Martin Luther King Junior, scholars must be evaluated and judged on the content of their ideas and not their nationality and places of birth and origins.
Epistemic ableism and ageism
There is a discriminatory tendency not to take seriously the thinking of people that live with certain disabilities and inabilities of body or mind. As a result, thoughts and ideas of disabled people are minimised and ignored from mainstream thinking in the university and outside. Able-bodied people even give themselves the power and the right to study, think, speak and write on disability issues and matters as experts. As is it patronising for men to speak for women it is patronising for ableists to talk down and speak on behalf of the disabled.
The elderly may also be considered old fashioned people with rusty ideas while the young may be treated as immature with infantile thoughts. There is a connection that is made of people’s ages and their ideas, a connection that discriminates. Epistemic ableism and ageism are also toxic children of Area studies that seek to expel other people and marginalise them from the knowledge economy simply on the basis of who they are and how young or old they are.
Clearly knowledge is a resource. As such it is scarce and is not distributed fairly and equally.
Opportunities to think and intellect are not given to everyone in a symmetrical and just way. True to the cliché that knowledge is power, knowledge becomes contested and conflictual like political and economic power. One of these days I will think and write about epistemic capitalism, just how commoditisation of education and knowledge is colonial.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Johannesburg, South Africa: [email protected].
