The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
The world has a Southern problem. Peoples and places of the Global South are a problem of the present world system and its world orders.
The Southern problem is found in every country and affects every living person. Southernity and Southerness are the other names for “the wretched of the earth,” those peoples and places that have become victims of modernity and the coloniality that goes with it.
What Walter Mignolo called the “darker side of western modernity” is the same problem that much earlier on Enrique Dussel called the “underside of western modernity.” “Dark” and “under” is where the oppressed and marginalised people of the South find themselves. The conquest of the Global South by the Global North, which was the domination of the Rest by the West, has four principal pillars of control.
The control of authority entailed that the enslaved and colonised peoples did not have political power and influence over their own lives and territories. The control of economies meant that the land and other resources of the defeated became the property of the conquerors.
The control of gender and sexuality occasioned that the defeated were forced into the western mode of family and society of Christianity and Roman Dutch Law. The control of knowledge and subjectivity created a situation where the conquered had their histories, languages and knowledges erased and silenced as superstitions and myths while the histories, languages and knowledges of the conquerors were erected as natural and normal. These four principal pillars of control of the Rest by the West and of the South by the North have been called the “colonial power matrix” by decolonial theorists.
The colonial power matrix refers to the many handed and multi-fingered grip of the Octopus with which the Global South is held by Empire. Coloniality refers to that reality where many decades after slavery and colonialism ended, those places and peoples that were colonised remain under the vice-like grip of the Octopus. Coloniality defines our Southerness and Southernity.
The South is the problem of the world as much as the world is a problem of the South. It is in that way that economic and political problems of the South, problems that have produced many social symptoms, can only be understood in terms of the world-system; not in nativist and other narrow terms. Some intellectuals and political leaders of the Global South have sacrificed their happiness and lives challenging the Octopus of coloniality. Other intellectuals and political leaders have chosen the easy path of seeking accommodation with Empire and imitating the conquerors by practicing corruption, tyranny and domination of their own people.
Corruption, political patronage and tin-pot despotism that are found in most countries of the Global South are actually part of colonialit, even if they are practiced by intellectuals and leaders born and bred in the Global South. Yes, there are now black and brown colonisers that are found in power in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Frantz Fanon’s crowning and canonical observation was that, in Africa, after political independence from colonialism some freedom fighters and liberation war leaders were to become new colonisers. That is the true witchcraft of Empire that can turn those that fought it into its accessories and servants; it can turn freedom fighters into those monsters that truly fight the freedom of their own people.
Life is “dark” and really “under” for peoples of Asia, Latin America and Africa that are not connected to powerful politicians and businesspeople that can use state power to access money and other resources.
Oxygen itself is hoarded and monopolised by connected people that control money and life in the Global South, at the expense of nations and countries. For the marginalised people, the true “wretched of the earth,” colonialism and slavery are still a reality and not a thing of the past. For these people, liberation struggles are still going on as the dream of liberation quickly turned into a nightmare of new colonialism by new colonisers.
Epistemologies of the South
What exactly might be the solution to this “darkness” and “underness” that most people of the Global South find themselves in? What will rescue populations of the South from the poverty, diseases and ignorance that coloniality has sentenced them to?
This is the question that Boaventura de Soussa Santos confronted at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1 to 3 October. This is the question that haunted the Wits Centre for Diversity Annual International Conference in which Santos was the key keynote speaker. In dialogue with Professor Siphamandla Zondi of the University of Pretoria, Professor Zethu Cakata of the University of South Africa, and myself, Santos advocated epistemologies of the South as what will save the Global South and the Global North from nihilism.
It is centuries of western knowledge and western power in the world that have brought all of us into this crisis, economically and politically. The West, which is the Global North, has created economic and political problems for which it has no answers. The world has a systemic crisis, a true Southern problem.
The present Southern problem of the world is bigger than what Antonio Gramsci described as “some aspects of the Southern question” in 1926. Those knowledges and languages of the people of Africa, Latin America and Asia that the West sought to destroy are the knowledges and languages in which solutions to world problems are hidden. It is in the religions, wisdoms and histories of the conquered of the world that the solutions to “climate change,” to “terrorism,” to “poverty and inequality” are concealed.
The solution to tyranny and despotism is hidden in the wisdom of the poor and the powerless, not in the vaunting of powerful politicians and big businessmen. A lot of weakness, fragility and poverty are hidden behind the claims and boasts of powerful politicians and influential tycoons, I argue.
For instance, in spite of all impressions and appearances, western power and western knowledge combined are unable to save the world. The west has, for centuries, ruled the world through monologues. The West has been talking down to the world, giving instructions and commanding on political and economic directions to be taken.
From the civilising mission, the modernisation crusade, globalisation and now the Fourth Industrial Revolution that Santos called “digital colonialism” the West has been leading the rest into the down, dark and under. And now the whole world has fallen into a pit, down, under and dark. We cannot, especially in the Global South, trust the same Global North to take us out of the pit.
Santos, like all other thinkers in Decoloniality, dismissed the idea that colonialism ended. He insisted that actually the Global South is being recolonised in systemic and structural ways. Colonialism began with certain imaginations, thoughts, ideas and practices in the West. Missionaries, Empire builders and Merchants from the West were fired by certain knowledges and they spoke in certain languages and ideologies. Those that are going to undo conquest; that is, those who are going to decolonise and liberate the world; must be fired and driven by other ideas, imaginations, passions and languages:
The Epistemologies of the South. It is thanks to epistemologies of the North and the West that we are in this dark pit; only epistemologies of the South will get us and Empire itself out of this condition of darkness and underness. To fight tyranny, corruption, domination, oppression and exploitation anywhere in the Global South is to truly practice decoloniality. True to the slogan of the World Social Forum in which Santos is captain and champion: Another world is possible.
Tragic Optimism
One of the valued aphorisms of Amilcar Cabral in Decoloniality, especially the Philosophy of Liberation category is: Tell no Lies, Claim no Easy Victories. The statement was uttered in the “Party Directive” of 1965. The statement was a true epistemology of the south in its own intellectual stamina and political gravitas. Epistemologies of the South as claimed and advanced by Santos and others do not, and must not tell lies and claim easy victories. It is going to be tough for the Global South to climb from dark and under of the pit to the surface of the world.
To fight imperialism, oppose tyranny, negate corruption and confront evil in the world is going to be a vocation not a profession. Imperialism fights back, tyranny kills and corruption defends itself through force and fraud. Colonisers, the old and the new, claim to be the solution to all our problems but we know otherwise; we know that there is darkness and underness at the beginning and at the end of the tunnel.
That is exactly why Santos concluded our dialogue with the remark that decolonists and philosophers of liberation of the world must all be “tragic optimists.” We must be true to the fact that our countries, nations and the world are in a tragic condition, in darkness and underness, and we must still believe and fight to ensure that liberation wins over imperialism, despotism, corruption and all evil forces and persons.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: [email protected]
