The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
African intellectuals of the 1970s complained bitterly about the problem of “intellectual dependency” on the West and on western knowledge.
In their correct understanding, African intellectuals critiqued how scholars and politicians in the continent depended on Western scholars for ideas and knowledge itself. Euro-American scholars invented academic disciplines and designed the theories and ideologies that African scholars swallowed hook, line and sinker, and sang back to the West for approval. That intellectual and political status of dependency irked the African intelligentsia.
Using political economy analysis, some African Marxist and Nationalist scholars noted how in the same way the natural resources of Africans were siphoned as raw materials to be processed in the West and sold back to the continent as finished goods, raw information was harvested from Africa by Western researchers and their African assistants, processed in European universities, and brought back as processed knowledge in the media and the academy in Africa.
In that colonial way, African scholars were reduced from being credible and legitimate intellectuals to “native informants” who gathered information and data and surrendered it to Europeans that produced theories and ideas and became the real manufacturers and suppliers of knowledge about Africa and Africans.
As a result, in the global media and academy anything to do with Africa and Africans was represented as inferior and backward.
Ironically, the African dependency theorists and political economy analysts, even the best amongst them, relied on Euro-American scholars for theory and analytical tools. Dependency theory is traceable to the desk of Andre Gunder Frank, a German-American sociologist and economic historian.
Political economy analysis has its genealogies and provenances in such philosophers as Adam Smith himself, a prophet of capitalism and Eurocentricism. Even those of our scholarly and intellectual greats who complained about intellectual dependency seemed to be intellectually dependent on Western intellectuals.
The Afrocentrists among African scholars complain about the hegemony of Eurocentricism in the African academy and media landscape. It is an injustice that theories, disciplines and representation in the academy and the media in Africa are centred on European perspectives and interests, they argue.
Colonising Europeans and imperial Americans conducted “epistemicides,” that is the genocidal killings, erasures, distortions and silencings of African languages, histories and knowledges, and erected their own as the Knowledge for all humanity.
In other words, what the dependency theorists, political economy analysts and Afrocentrists have been complaining about is how the West imposed its knowledge and culture on non-western societies of the world through colonialism and imperialism.
There is a criminal way in which the West has pretended to have the only valid knowledge while other communities of the world have superstitions. Euro-America claims to have history while Asia, Latin America and Africa only have tradition.
The colonisations of knowledge and cultural imperialism have been topical issues for decades now in the academy and can be called long-standing problems of the Third World. In this article I elect to nuance Coloniality of Knowledge, which is a problem of the Global South.
In nuancing the Coloniality of Knowledge I abandon analytical tools of the Third World such as dependency theory, political economy analysis and Afrocentricism.
Instead I employ decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation in the Global South. Decoloniality has awoken from the long hangover of Coloniality and is able to see beyond the limited vision of earlier analytical tools.
Coloniality of Knowledge
This article thinks with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Sandew Hira, decolonial theorists that have delved into the political and philosophical problematic of Coloniality of Knowledge, among other topics. In his latest book on “epistemic freedom” that has been published by Routledge, Gatsheni argues that ahead of the political kingdom that Kwame Nkrumah cried about and the economic kingdom that some African politicians and scholars are presently valorising, the challenge of “epistemic” freedom is key to liberation in the Global South.
Using his wide and deep understanding of political history and philosophy Gatsheni demonstrates how political and economic liberation cannot be achieved without a priori of knowledge and knowledge freedom in the Global South, otherwise how can we decolonise with ignorance or liberate ourselves with colonised knowledge, is the argument.
Sandew Hira critiques Western epistemology and knowledge production for falsifying truth and being negligent of morality. Western epistemology is unethical.
Hira observes and argues that “in Western science professors are the authority of knowledge production. In decolonial critique we argue that if you are a professor that does not mean that you are a scientist, you can be an ideologue of colonialism presenting nonsense as science.”
While Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues for the freedom to knowledge and the freedom of knowledge in the Global South, Sandew Hira challenges the fake authority of western knowledge and knowledge production.
How did knowledge become unfree and how did Eurocentricism achieve its mythical and fake authority in the academy, are the questions.
Coloniality of Knowledge refers to how colonisers and imperialists gave themselves fake authority of knowing and knowledge; and denied the colonised knowledge freedom and freedom to knowledge.
For that reason, Gatsheni can argue that while the problem of the Twentieth Century was, true to E W B Dubois, the problem of the colour line; that of the Twenty First Century is a problem of the “epistemic line,” that is, domination and hegemony through the coloniality of knowledge. Every form of domination manipulates what the dominated know and how they know it.
How Does Coloniality of Knowledge Work?
Not all authors as academics enjoy authority in the academy and the media.
Western philosophers and other intellectuals have given themselves intellectual authority through the myth that they and only they produce valid knowledge, when as Hira argues, they are just colonial and racist ideologues.
Ideologues do not just circulate truth but produce falsehoods to conceal truth, in the decolonial allegations of Hira.
Western epistemology, that is knowledge and knowledge production, concentrates on the truth and falsehood of ideas.
It uses its fake authority to decide what is true and what is false, but abandons the duty to reflect on what is right or wrong, in that way it abandons ethics.
Eurocentric scholars become uncomfortable when ethics and the morality of knowledge are discussed because they have over generations used knowledge to commit such immoral crimes as colonialism and imperialism.
Language is manipulated and terminology twisted in coloniality of knowledge. Hira gives a good example of this.
The “illegal occupation of the lands of native Americans” was linguistically and terminologically presented as the “discovery of the Americas.” Colonialism was presented as a civilising mission and imperialism as modernisation of the Third World.
Coloniality of knowledge distorts facts or simply ignores them. Many Eurocentric history books make claims that certain places and lands of the Global South were “discovered” by explorers and missionaries when those places had people who lived in them and knew them for centuries before colonialism and imperialism.
Distortion, silencing and erasure are other strategies of coloniality of knowledge. Theories and ideologies are like spectacles. They can make big things small and small things big. They can even make invisible things visible and some visible things invisible.
Coloniality of knowledge uses theories and ideologies that distort, silence and erase some truths about peoples and places of the Global South. The way people and places are studied is important because some ways of studying, like spectacles, conceal rather than reveal truths, exaggerate some lies and invent some myths.
Using the concocted authority and “epistemic privilege” of Eurocentricism, coloniality of knowledge claims objectivity for Euro-American ideas.
In that way Western myths and lies are, as Hira argues, presented as scientific knowledge. After the false claim of objectivity of western knowledge coloniality of knowledge makes false claims of universality. What is true in America for instance is presented as the truth for all humanity in the world. American political and economic interests are frequently presented as human and world interests.
That is what decolonial scholars have called the absolutism of western knowledge which allows it to be imposed on everyone under the sun as universal wisdom.
The presentation of western opinions and myths as true, objective, universal and scientific knowledge is a key aspect of coloniality of knowledge.
From antiquity western thinkers and their thoughts have been given the authority of scientificity. One is not educated if he or she has not mastered Euro-American authorities in whatever discipline. To be educated, otherwise, is to be Europeanised or Americanised, not mentally liberated.
Epistemic Freedom
Decoloniality challenges the coloniality of knowledge first by unmasking the fake authority and “epistemic privilege” that western knowledge has been given.
All human beings, as Valentin Mudimbe argues, are born into valid knowledges and communities, to know is a human not just a white and western quality. The truth and falsehood of ideas are not the only measure of what is acceptable knowledge, ethic also count.
The moral rightness or wrongness of ideas is an important matter in decolonial ethics. Before they claim objectivity and scientificity, all thinkers and their ideas should clarify their subjectivity and limitations.
All truths and falsehoods, otherwise, are located somewhere in place and in time, they cannot be simple universal and human wisdom.
All knowledge is a kind of construction and a story that cannot be the one and only truth for all people and all places everywhere.
The power not only to know but also to understand the politics behind knowing and knowledge is what Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni nuances as epistemic freedom. Knowledge is not innocent; it is flavoured or poisoned by power relations, economic and political inequalities.
It is not enough to just know, it matters how that which is known gets to be known.
Methods and methodologies of knowledge production are politically charged.
It is in decoloniality of knowledge that Frantz Fanon ended his classic; Black Skin White Masks, with the sentence: “Oh my body make me always a man who questions!”
A big part of decolonial knowledge and epistemic freedom is asking questions and challenging the fake authority of hegemonic ideas.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a founding member of Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN). He Writes from Esselin Street, Sunnyside, Pretoria: [email protected]
