Towards the Decolonisation of African Studies

ONE of the capital misfortunes of the continent of Africa is that its natural gifts almost always get used against it.

Her bounty of natural resources and wealth of human resources have historically been used as an excuse to enslave Africans and colonise the continent. Africa is truly the tree that bears fruits and that gets pelted with stones as hungry humans seek to harvest the goodies.

For instance, the historical truth that Africa is actually the cradle of human kind is presently being used by some Western scholars to advance the offensive argument that Africa was not colonised by European invaders as it is the home of all human beings, otherwise the settlers, the argument goes, were just prodigal sons returning home to the cradle of their own humanity as well.

As a result, those African intellectuals and academics that seek to make serious meaning out of studying Africa need to navigate and negotiate a multiplicity of stumbling blocks and Eurocentric traps in their research and intellection.

The way Africans in Africa study Africa needs to be decolonised and liberated from its Eurocentric and colonial trappings. Eurocentric scholars, mainly the Africanists, those white Europeans and Americans who have a research interest in Africa as a subject have been notorious for anthropologising Africa, studying the continent as an exotic and very strange place.

Some Afro-pessimists, those black African scholars that have caught the Eurocentric intellectual flue and believe that nothing good but only disasters and calamities can come from Africa have also been notorious in their description of Africa as a location of evil. In a bad mood, one day, Julius Nyerere is said to have publicly expressed that most probably the devil’s headquarters are in Africa as nothing good seems to become of the continent.

One important attitude towards the decolonisation of African studies among the scholars in the present African academy is to acknowledge that earlier generations of African intellectuals have been trying to decolonise African studies, otherwise we are really not re-inventing the wheel of African studies, in decoloniality we are only coming up with new concepts and fresh insights of liberation. For instance, the very title of this column is an adaptation from a 1980 book by Chinweizu, Jemie and Madubuike, Towards the Decolonisation of African Literature. For generations, from Cheik Anta Diop in the 1940s, inspired African scholars have been trying to decolonise the study of Africa and Africans and to restore dignity in the history and humanity of Africa. In South Africa, specifically, there is a number of cadres in the students movement who are tempted to believe that they are pioneers of a unique struggle when they are just sharpening an old war against Empire. To deny decoloniality its long history in the Global South is as opportunistic as the charlatanry and chicanery of colonial subjects that use the name of decoloniality to defend coloniality in form of nativism, tribalism, racism and other forms of chauvunisms and political fundamentalism in Africa.

In South Africa and elsewhere, the charlatanry and chicanery has been so unethical to the extent of intellectual crime. For instance, a pretender to decoloniality assuming the public is ignorant just drops names of well-known decolonial thinkers; in their names he expresses a strange idea that the mentioned decolonial scholars have nothing to do with and are most likely to be ashamed of.

That results in the ideologisation of decoloniality and its abuses in the service of coloniality and fundamentalism, when it is a philosophy of liberation. In the attempt to decolonise African studies and the studies of the Global South, decolonial thinkers put emphasis on indisciphine, disrespect for Eurocentric disciplines of knowledge, which is accompanied by rigour and robust intellection.

The opportunistic habit of dropping the term “decoloniality” to impress gullible students and readers while the trouble is not taken by writers to understand decolonial concepts is pretentious and serves to fulfil the colonial stereotype of black ignorance. The truism that decoloniality is a philosophy and a philosophy of liberation entails hard reading and reflection in the philosophy and the subject of liberation not opportunistic phrasemongering and plagiarism for purposes of cheap propaganda. A CODESRIA Encounter at TIMALI. On 19 September 2017, Godwin Murunga, a prominent Kenyan scholar and present Secretary General of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) held a seminar with students, researchers and lecturers at the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TIMALI). Old time Pan-Africanists, Marxists and nationalists from all over the continent, among them students and theorists in decoloniality had a continental intellectual encounter. CODESRIA was founded in 1973 and has continued to lead in the province of African studies in form of research and writing on Africa and Africans. Giants of African studies, Ali Mazrui, Archie Mafeje, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Ibbo Mandaza, and Mahmood Mamdani are all scholars that have had a lot to do with CODESRIA at different times in the present and past decades.

Some of the most volcanic debates on Africa, land reform, the one party state, feminism, development and democratisation have been debated and written on in CODESRIA. Some students asked if the donors that fund CODESRIA, who happen to be Western, do not water down the decolonisation agenda in the area of African studies. Others demanded to know why CODESRIA takes too long to publish submitted manuscripts, leading to delays by young scholars in producing books and journal papers. The old crop of scholars that presently people CODESRIA were asked to shake up their sentimentalism about African liberation movements and their own scholarship and begin again to critically engage with the African question without being defensive and apologetic.

In the face of the spectre of decoloniality, some old CODESRIA scholars have found themselves threatened and challenged by young critical scholars that are prepared to critique Marxist and nationalist ideologies, exposing the complicity of the grand-narratives in coloniality. The old timers expressed their discomfort and vulnerability in the face of young scholars that use new vocabularies and are impatient to reduce to mud what were the nuggets of the scholarship of the earlier decades.

Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the founder of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) noted that decolonists truly stand on the shoulders of African giants of the earlier decades but they do not do so uncritically. Otherwise what Gatsheni was dispelling is a tendency by old scholars to demand monumentalisation and worship when the true intellectual habit is to be critical. Young scholars should not be turned into blind disciples of old scholars as that religiasation of the intellectual vocation tends to kill critical consciousness by turning the academy into a shrine of worship for even some rusty thinkers. Professor Siphamandla Zondi, the Head of Political Studies at the University of Pretoria challenged CODESRIA to create debate platforms so that contentious issues in African studies can be fearlessly debated. Murunga welcomed the challenge and promised to revive the CODESRIA Bulletin, a magazine that housed some of the fiercest intellectual exchanges in Africa, the Mazrui versus Mafeje and Soyinka versus Mazrui debates were largely in the CODESRIA Bulletin, elephantine debates on whose site the African grass still refuses to grow, decades on. There was a concern from some attendants that South African scholars and some students participate by their absence in African studies, perhaps because of the apartheid legacy of South African exceptionalism or the background of Bantu Education that colonially and in a racist way, was deliberately engineered to colonise and disadvantage South African minds. Decolonising African Studies Decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation has an interest in conducting the Cabralian intellectual voyage of “returning to the source” to benefit from African history, traditions and philosophy, but not in a nativist and purist way of imagining a pristine paradise of the pre-colonial Africa.

For that reason, decoloniality takes seriously the World Systems Theory that was championed by Immanuel Wallerstein, as it allows Africans to think of the world from Africa and of Africa from the world. Young African scholars have an opportunity to both critique and recognise the ideas, thoughts and ideologies of earlier African giants without being Afro-pessimist or being disciplined disciples.

To decolonise African studies is not essentially to demonise earlier African scholars or to fundamentally reject thoughts from Europe and America (third world fundamentalism) but to give African sense and sensibility to world knowledge.

Decoloniality pays due attention to the geopolitics, body-politics and theo-politics of knowledge, not just changing the geography but also the biography of reason, ensuring that we think from Africa about the whole world and that we think of the whole world while our minds are rooted in Africa.

For that good reason, decoloniality cannot be a political craze, a stick with which to beat supposed and imagined enemies, it cannot be an intellectual trend either, a fashionable language that is used by opportunists to intimidate the uncircumcised and conceal their blindness to how exactly the world works.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail. com.