The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
Over the past five years Decoloniality has created some creative discomfort in the South African university.
Creative in that the discomfort leads to changes to the order of things on campus and outside.
There has been a scramble where every university, each faculty, department or centre must be seen to be doing something about decolonisation, transformation, Africanisation, indigenisation and or any other related motion.
Decoloniality encompasses all the above plus more in that its fundamental aspiration is not freedoms but liberation. Some smart Alecs are even talking about democratisation of the university.
The good news is that every university has moved from conversations to policy-making regarding the necessity of decolonisation. From students to the administrators the resolution is that it can no longer be business as usual when resilient coloniality encumbers human, power and knowledge relations in the university.
The bad news is that some universities have taken to what in philosophy is called “benevolent neglect.” This is where an idea can be killed by paying fast and furious attention on it so that it can quickly be exhausted and life goes on as usual. The other bad news is that of charlatans and sophists among academics that just want to use the word “decoloniality” in advancing nativism, villagism, dogmatism and pure bigotry.
These are opportunists that seek to use Decoloniality as a trendy academic label to sound learned and to intimidate unsuspecting audiences that may fall for the name-dropping and charlatanry. The charlatans and the sophists, however, easily fall by the wayside when Decoloniality as “the thing itself” gets to be fleshed out by its philosophers and theorists. Students, especially, tend to ask stubborn questions that quickly separate pretenders from fundamental proponents.
Rigour is one quality that Decoloniality has given new relevance in the South African university. And when rigour gets involved charlatans and sophists do what they know best, which is to evaporate and smoke away like the pure wind that they represent. What remains after the pretenders have evaporated are frank conversations, provocative and uncomfortable, but productive and creative in that they lead to a new order of things in the university. Changing the order of things is a way to liberation, not reforms and other cosmetic changes, no.
The Management and Leadership Studies Discipline
It was in the name of uncomfortable but frank conversations that the School of Management and Leadership Studies at the University of KwaZulu Natal invited yours sincerely to deliver a Keynote Address before their annual international conference.
Schools of Management, Governance and Leadership occupy a pride of place in the university and frequently they enjoy some elitist exceptionalism of note. Because their job is to train and produce managers and leaders for public and private organisations they tend to be bossy in their form and content.
This particular conference brought together Management and Leadership academics from India, Brazil, Australia, the UK, USA and other corners of the world. Hosted by the UKZN was an assortment of Management and Leadership scholars from close and far. Common among the scholars from different geographic and social location is the veneration of the discipline of Management and Leadership.
Academic disciplines tend to turn their practitioners into constables, magistrates and judges who feel duty bound to defend and enforce the regulations of the discipline. For that reason, this conference from 4 to 7 November was peopled by concerned and curious academics that wondered what exactly decoloniality has to do with Management and Leadership studies. These are tough disciplinarians that carry themselves as experts and professionals that produce managers and leaders for other disciplines and professions. From their dress code to their professional and academic jargon, these are the true Pharisees of disciplinarily, love them.
From the Creation Story to Paradise
I have observed before that academic disciplines behave like religions. They have a creation story of their own, a narrative of how things should be done and how life should be lived, and finally they promise a kind of success that is heavenly in nature, utopia of a kind. Disciplines tend to pretend to be self-contained solutions to problems of life and the world.
The discipline of management and leadership is not different. It claims to have originated mainly in the Industrial Revolution in the United States of America, specifically in 1860. American characters such as Henry Towne and Frederick Taylor are frequently named as the people that began to think and act scientifically about Management.
Efficiency, profitability, sustainability and durability of organisations are but some of the promised goods of scientific management.
That is about the rhetoric of Management as a discipline. That is what Management as an academic discipline, a professional religion, claims about itself, its creation story and paradisal utopia. But what is the logic, the real and the unsaid about Management Studies as a science and a profession?
I must state that not just the Americans but all human beings everywhere under the sun have concerned themselves about leadership and organisation of their communities and societies. It is, thus, a colonial myth that serious and deep thinking about leadership began in Europe and in America and was later donated to the rest of the world by kind Empire builders and civilising missionaries. That is a principal falsehood. What we can talk about is a paradigm of Management and leadership that Europe and America invented, and which has become hegemonic in the world, thanks to Euro-American colonialism and expansionism in the Global South.
The World Interstate System
I am not in a hurry to remind all of us that the word “manage” originates from the Latin “manus” which emanates from the art of training and disciplining horses, and getting them to follow orders. The habit of treating those that are managed and led as kinds of horses to be disciplined and exploited must not be lost in the genealogy of the word “manage.” I argue that the first organisation that came to be managed at large is the world interstate system that was born out of Conquest. The World-System is an organisation that creates and maintains World Orders. Conquered territories had to be managed and administered, disciplined and controlled. I trace management, therefore back to conquest and Empire building.
Conquest and Empire building came to have an economic system called capitalism that holds emphasis on productivity and profitability. Productivity and profitability are connected to accumulation and monopoly. Combined together, Conquest and its economic regime of capitalism produced a knowledge system that Samir Amin called Eurocentricism. A racist and colonial regime of knowledge that claims that all things big and good, great and excellent came from Europe and later America.
So here it goes; the gist of my argument is that the exalted academic discipline of Management and Leadership Studies carries its birthmark from the epochal event of Conquest. It bears and it has not cut its umbilical cord that ties it to capitalism and its profit motive. Eurocentricism remains its sensibility and identity. That is exactly why the canonical scholars on Management that are given epistemic privilege in your curricular and syllabi are European and American theorists and philosophers. I therefore dispute the argument that decoloniality has nothing on Management and Leadership Studies. Decoloniality has a grievance with this and other disciplines. Like any other discipline this is a discipline to be decolonised so that it can be re-tooled, re-methodologised and re-theorised for liberation this time, not its original paradigm of conquest, domination and control, and exploitation.
All academic disciplines are artefacts of Empire and power. They are children of time and expediency.
Their job is exactly that, to discipline, control and in the case of Management and Leadership Studies to facilitate exploitation of one by the powerful other. Every discipline has its deep and dark underside. The underside of Management Studies is the ideology of Managerialism, that tyrannical art and science of normalising and naturalising management as the source of all truth and all right.
Margaret Thatcher took Managerialism to its colonial and tyrannical heights with her slogan: “There is No Alternative.” Eurocentric Management was styled and natured to brook no alternative. The decolonial fact is that there are alternatives; not one, there can be leadership styles that are free of the spirit of conquest, capitalism and Eurocentricism. I must deposit it here that, the term Management, because of its genealogy in Conquest has lost its innocence, and that is if it had innocence in the very first place. Management has become a dirty word that is associated with the creation of hierarchies and production of victims. Managerialism has infected and affected other disciplines. It has been found in the Economicism of Economics, the Politicism of Politics and the tyranny of corporatism. To manage is a facility of power and privilege.
The Post-colonial and the Post-modern
Management and Leadership are taught everywhere inside and outside the university. Even motivational speakers, pop-prophets and designer-preachers teach leadership and management. There are dissident scholars of Management and Leadership Studies that have questioned the discipline and critiqued for its limits, its conservatism and even eliticism and arrogance. They have blamed it for not being perfect and efficient; not for being wrong.
Poor and bad management is blamed on failure to apply the wisdom and the rules of Management and Leadership Studies; not that the discipline has wrong and colonial genealogies and provenances. Post-colonial and Post-modern theorists of Management and Leadership have punctured holes on the discipline but they have not been able to overturn it because they critique the discipline from within. They are Euro-centric critiques of Eurocentricism and so are they limited. You cannot possibly and successfully decolonise a discipline using colonial logic and sensibility.
Decoloniality in its Undisciplinarity thinks and speaks from outside conquest, outside capitalism and outside Eurocentric reasoning and therefore stands a tall chance to provide an alternative. There are Alternatives is the decolonial answer to Thatcherism and its Eurocentric, colonial and racist Managerialism.
We cannot, I state, be post-modern because colonial questions about modernity and its civilising mission still have not been answered. We cannot be post-colonial because colonialism is not in the past but its violences are in the present, in the here and the now of our times and places.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa. This article is a shortened and heavily simplified version of a Keynote Address given at the School of Management and Leadership Studies Conference at UKZN. [email protected].
