Kupe: Studying how the world works

AFRICAN media scholar, academic institution builder and administrator Tawana Kupe and international relations guru Gilbert Khadiagala are spear-heading a provocative initiative in the study of the world from African perspectives, at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

This novel intellectual initiative is decolonial in that for a long time now Africa and Africans have been studied by the world and never the reverse.

For centuries now Africans and their world have been reduced to objects and subjects of study and investigation by scholars and journalists from the Euro-American world.

Curious minds from the West, from theologians, anthropologists and historians to journalists and travel writers have trooped into Africa to observe and write on the lives and the world of Africans.

Western conquerors, empire builders, merchants and missionaries have always been interested in knowing the African and understanding his world and its many meanings. In the present, western states and nations have entire institutes and centres whose specialty and preoccupation is to compile data and knowledge of what exactly is happening in every African state and nation.

Western diplomatic missions are not in Africa only to build international relations and interstate friendships but also to purely spy on Africa in the interests of the West and its states.

In a way, to know and understand the African has been a powerful way of dominating and also marginalising him as the knowable other in world affairs.

For that reason, a big part of decolonising the world, decolonising knowledge and also liberating Africa is the critical effort by Africans in studying and understanding the Global North and mastering how the world works so as to know how to navigate and negotiate life and existence in a world where the Euro-American Empire has made itself a government of the planet.

In engineering and launching the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the university of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa, mobilising other centres and organising different scholars from different institutions and disciplines in South Africa and beyond, Kupe and Khadiagala are in many ways opening new decolonial vistas for African critical understandings of how the world works.

Historical and political misunderstandings between the Global North and the Global South, unequal power relations and the long history of colonialism and imperialism have created economic, political and cultural gaps and tensions that make the world not only an unstable but also a truly dangerous place of conflicts and hostilities.

Scholarly and intellectual research and debate between and among scholars of the South and the North can go a long way in helping politicians and policy makers of both hemispheres to make educated, and empowered decisions in governing the world.

How to Study Empire? The United States as a nation and also a society has since 1945 become the centre and the face of the New World Order, and an engine of the EuroAmerican World System. To critically study the United States of America from African epistemic locations and perspectives is to importantly, liberation.

A “graduate” said Kupe “who understands himself and his location but does not understand the world context is an uneducated graduate,” true knowledge is that which is rich both in the local and the global.

Decolonial initiative and invention As a critical scholar and also a university administrator Kupe has been very close to struggles for transformation and decolonisation in the university in Africa. Kupe has journeyed from being a lecturer in media studies to a Dean of Students, Head of School of Literature and Language, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities to his present position as the Vice-Principal of the University that is presently the acting vicechancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand.

Combining academic responsibilities and administrative duties in the university puts one in the hot seat of agitations, anxieties and struggles that accompany present university work and life.

Intellectually, Kupe’s contributions to research and publications have been in the areas of Media, Development, Democratisation and Globalisation, which are academic areas that are central in cultural and political studies.

Khadiagala who directs the new centre is a widely published International Relations scholar and lecturer that has previously headed the Department of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand.

What Kupe and Khadiagala are doing from the University of the Witwatersrand provides an answer to the question of how exactly a university in Africa can set afoot mechanisms for the decolonisation of higher education and the university.

The idea of bringing together scholars from the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities in pursuit of common goals in research and the invention of new relations between the North and the South is more than simple scholarly collaboration but it is also political solidarity.

The interest that has been taken by international embassies, non-governmental organisations, public organisations and private companies in the new centre signals a refreshed decolonial interface between the university as a knowledge producer with larger society as a knowledge end user.

The decolonial university of the future and the Afro-futurist university is one that will not be the usual ivory tower but an institution that has its feet firmly planted in the societies and communities that benefit from the knowledge that it produces.

The university that simply produces elite experts and professionals who are ignorant of how the real world works is truly, it appears, a university of the colonial and imperial past in the Global South.

The decolonial and Afrofuturist university will be a centre for the liberation and rehumanisation of the peoples and communities of the Global South in the present world. Relevance to time and to place is the principal quality of a decolonial and Afrofuturist university.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Johannesburg, South Africa: Decoloniality2016@gmail.com. RECENT events in our political space have invoked the debate of whether nationalism is questioning itself. The recent emergence of ethnicism within some political spaces demands a revisit to the variables and discourses of nationhood.

A colleague in the past week asked me if we are in the age of Zezuru and Karanga exceptionalism, as well as Ndebele nationalism. My humble response was that this has always been there, what we see today is a magnified phenomenon.

This intellectual question prompted me to dig into my little library where Kohn, Smith, Gatsheni Ndlovu, Credo Mutwa, Ndabaningi Sithole become handy in explaining some of the intricacies postindependence politics has to deal with.

Everyone in Zimbabwe now exclaims that they belong to a nation, which slowly is other than Zimbabwe, by calling themselves by other names.

One would ask, is the nation identifiable through objective criteria and if so, what distinguishes it from other social groupings? Is it instead a social contract that is constantly re-negotiated through daily plebiscite and which thus expresses the will of individuals?

Is it true that nations are expressions of age-old feelings of belonging, rooted in language, ethnicity, or territory, or are instead modem constructs, inventions or imaginations?

These contrasting views of the nation have been reflected in the daily literature on nationalism and have developed into what I can call meditating nationalism-prayed-onbelonging.

A deeper look into what is happening informs me that the implications of the debate as to whether nations are a modem construction or the emanation of a perennial ethnicity are not merely academic.

One of the most frequent ways nationalists attempt to discredit their “opponent’s” claims to nationhood, and hence to political sovereignty or independence, is by challenging their historical foundations and this has been a prominent strategy within the Ndebele monarchy conflict, ShonaNdebele tutelage as well as pre and postcolonial scholarship.

Indeed, and somewhat inexplicably, there has been a tendency to equate antiquity with authenticity.

The genuineness of one’s claim to independent nation-statehood will thus tend to be measured with respect to its historicity. Thus, in the same way that opposing groups contest the validity of each other’s historical claims to nationhood, theorists of nationalism debate the historical reality or authenticity of nations.

One group I revisited were the premordialists. In their lessons, they insist that nations have existed since time immemorial.

They are accredited with the “sleeping beauty” thesis according to which each nation that has not yet manifested itself is only awaiting for the appropriate leader, or circumstance, to re-awaken.

This can be argued to have been one