African Intellectuals: Founders, Guerillas, Assets, Suspects
Decolonial research and thinking that is presently gaining currency in the world, achieving the status of a spectre itself, refutes that Europe ever had a monopoly of thought and knowing
A HUGE part of the fallacies of colonialism and coloniality itself is that intellectuals are originally European, white and are rare individuals with exceptional gifts.
If they are not prophets the fallacy suggests, they are mystics or lonesome university professors who produce strange theories and eccentric concepts.
This image of the thinker and the intellectual as a rare being and a social recluse has played a huge part in the classification and colonisation of knowledge. In that Eurocentric myth of the intellectual as an eccentric, Africans are dismissed and expelled from the thinking universe, they are supposed to be consumers and not producers of knowledge.
Eurocentricism declares that Africans and all the peoples of the Global South, in fact, are not citizens with roles and responsibilities but are subjects and recipients of thought in the global economy of the minds.
Decolonial research and thinking that is presently gaining currency in the world, achieving the status of a spectre itself, refutes that Europe ever had a monopoly of thought and knowing. Even Europeans themselves are in increasing ways being forced to admit that there are “epistemologies of the South” and even “theory from the South” in the world as Boaventura de Soussa Santos has insisted and Jean and John Comaroff have vividly elaborated.
In actuality, there are not only “epistemologies of the South” and “theory from the South” but a whole universe of ontologies and logics of the South, rhetorics of the South, ethics and aesthetics of the South, phenomenoligies of the South, Metaphysics of the South and theologies of the South even.
It was with breath-taking confidence that two European scholars Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz in 1999 wrote that “Africa works” as a continent but that it uses “disorder as a political instrument” and that chaos, catastrophe and extended expressions of disaster, pain and suffering, defines the continent of the perpetually smiling natives, who smile even as they kill and die.
Alone, this time, in 1999, Patrick Chabal published his “Africa: the politics of suffering and smilling” suggesting that Africans are comfortable and a lot at home in misery and hell. But in 2012, before his death, Patrick Chabal published a book about “the end of conceit” where he painfully repented on his prejudice and malice against Africa.
He pleaded with fellow European scholars to revise and repent on the age old mistakes on Africa. Sadly, there are some among African scholars who still relish in dusting up and reproducing old European conceits against Africa and the Global South. Some among us still believe that intellectuals and thinkers are those who publish books, who appear in scientific journals and accredited volumes. I class African intellectuals under the categories of founders, guerillas, the assets and the suspects.
When European enslavers, merchants and Empire builders, through conquest and adventures made their forays into Africa they found civilisation. Africa had its Empires that had politicians, healers, hunters and spirit mediums. The exploitation of and relationship with nature was that of balance and symbiosis. Only later did settler capitalism turn nature into a natural resource, exploitable to limits until the ecological crisis of the present where climate change and the possibility of human extinction has become urgent.
One can laugh in watching National Geographic channels where Europeans who have depleted their forests and wildlife make labour to teach Africans how to preserve their own. African ancestors, contrary to the Eurocentric fallacy, had sciences and arts of understanding and living in the world. Knowledge was not measured in literacy and numeracy, but in the wisdom to relate to the other beings and the planet.
Of the founding fathers of African liberation from colonialism, the case of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya, from 1963 to 1978, is as exemplary as it is interesting. In British Kenya this youth worked as a houseboy and a cook for a white settler family, with his wages he paid school fees. They baptised him John Peter, but he still stole to the bushes to achieve a Kikuyu circumcision.
He called himself Johnstone Kamau and mastered the arts of carpentry. Using his colonially-given literacy he took to journalism, guerilla journalism. For the eyes of the Europeans he behaved like a tame Christian native, the noble savage itself. For their ears he cited verses and idolised European civility, quoting Shakespeare and singing lullabies.
In 1934, good behaviour and his guerilla antics got him to the University College of London, at the prestigious London School of Economics.
His supervisor, one Branislaw Malinowski testified that here was a good and tame native who had learnt well from the Europeans. When he returned to Kenya in 1946, he became Jomo Kenyatta, the Burning Spear, he organised the Mau Mau Society whose spirit overthrew British rule.
Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah and others are the many guerilla African founding fathers of liberation that used a mixture of traditional wisdom and colonial education to overthrow colonialism. African liberators were not only guerillas with guns, just like the founders were not simple natives with spears, but with minds, who navigated and tip-toed their way through colonialism to liberation that is still a work in progress.
They stumbled here and fell there, but credit is due to them for navigating adversity with such dexterity of minds.
Inspired by the ancestral example of the founders and the spirit of the guerillas Africa has had journalists, school teachers, evangelists, artistes and other shreds of intellectuals who have never been fooled by what Frantz Fanon called “the European game.” These men and women may not have carried academic titles or entered universities even, but they have read themselves, thought themselves and conversed themselves with other Africans into epical intellectuals. While many learned Africans allowed themselves to be “native informants” who write about Africa and Africans for the pleasure of European audiences many organic and native African intellectuals remained resolute.
Others became enemies of the state in their homelands as they critiqued authoritarian regimes; others lost their jobs as they refused to endorse coloniality and neo-liberal policies. Others were assassinated and eliminated because they threatened the prospects and futures of coloniality in the Global South. Besides the professional intellectuals Africa has a wealth of organic and native intellectuals who have kept their eyes and minds set on liberation, contesting the fallacies of foreign advisors and experts, creating a, though uncelebrated, robust African liberatory archive. The present multitudes of angry and impatient youths, university students and other futurists are descendants of the founders, and the guerillas in African intellectualism. Decolonial thought, Decoloniality, the family of philosophies and theories of liberation that is causing an insurrection in the world is not new but it is also a heritage of centuries of liberatory thought from the peoples of the Global South. In true guerilla intellectualism, Decoloniality has learnt from Eurocentricism itself, it has gained lessons from indigenous knowledge systems and gathered wisdom from the failed experiments at liberation in the Global South, and it is presently haunting the world for liberation.
As much as the founders, guerillas and assets of the African intellect have their descendants in the current fighters; the Eurocentrics, explorers and colonial historiographers have their descendants too. They come from Britain and America as concerned journalists and from Japan as research experts with research interest in Africa, but they have imperial and colonial interests. It is for that reason that decolonial thinkers valorise those thinkers who have a life interest in Africa and the Global South, not colonial curiosity. To understand the presence of suspects amongst African intellectuals one needs to take a survey of the booming best sellers that are being published by black South Africans presently. There are titles such as The Death of Our Society by Prince Mashele, We have now begun our Descents by Justice Malala. These are well written books that project an African pessimism that trumps that of the colonists themselves. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Joseph Conrad and others do not get even near the venom that some Africans will spew about Africa and Africans. Decoloniality as a planetary liberatory family of ideas has homework to do, not to apologise for African failures, these must be confronted, but to insist that Africa has people who also think, and yes, who can liberate the planet.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic who is based in South Africa. decoloniality2016@gmail.com