No people should turn back on ancestors in name of ‘progress’

Modernity and traditional ways need to co-exist but on Africa’s evolutionary terms

VAMPIRIC predatory western European colonialism that destroyed the lives of the hundreds of millions of indigenous people on continents around the world, including in Europe, followed by a violent anti-Earth, antilife capitalism that was foisted on the vast majority of peoples, ecologies, and environments, lingers on 530 years later from the genocidal Columbian invasion of the Americas and Africa, accompanied by chattel and sexual slavery, including of 9 year-old girls, persistent in this pathological world today.

The saddest and most depressing part in South Africa is the manner in which Steve Biko has been suppressed and marginalised in school textbooks, political, social, educational, and media circles.

He is dismissed as “outdated” and “irrelevant” to the South African nation and continent because he was a “narrow” Black Consciousness traditionalist.

The empty and nauseating rhetoric from South Africa’s ruling class politicians and their allies serves as a reminder of how South Africa has devolved and moved away from one of the most important and cardinal teaching principles of Biko: that Africa will bestow a human face on the world. Indigenous, supposedly simplistic, “non-westernised” and Earth-caring Africa, which today is being irreparably trampled in the dust of capitalism, neo-colonialism, militarism, sexism and patriarchy, and selfish greed, sown by colonialist-capitalist roots from more than five centuries ago.

What Biko reminded us in his distinguished, eloquent, and supposedly naïve manner of teaching and practice, is that no people should turn their backs on their ancestors in the name of “progress” and “civilisation”. Biko understood culture is historical and thus modernity and traditional ways of speaking, living, sharing, and caring need to co-exist, but on Africa’s evolutionary terms, not Europe’s!

One classic example of the failure to understand and accept the truth of Biko’s instructive teaching is in the area of education, along with the economy (socialist), and land and wealth redistribution, with no privileges for any particular group or class.

Capitalism and colonialism have always thrived because of the co-optation, co-operation, and collaborating of the fringe oppressed group that is willing to maintain subordinate and enslaved status under the tutelage of the dictates of the oppressor group.

In a brilliant academic paper presented at a student conference in Cape Town in 1971, the content of which needs to be detailed extensively for its relevance here, Biko lucidly explained:

“National consciousness and its spread in South Africa has to work against a number of factors. First there are the traditional complexes, then the emptiness of the native’s past, and lastly the question of black-white dependency. The traditional inferior-superior black-white complexes are deliberate creations of colonialism. Through the work of missionaries and the style of work adopted, the blacks were made to feel that the white man was some kind of god whose word could not be doubted.

As Fanon puts it: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and the native’s brain of all form and content, by a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”

At the end of it all, the blacks have nothing to lean on, nothing to cheer them up at the present moment and very much to be afraid of in the future.”

The only manner that such entrenched capitalist oppression, colonialism, racism, and classism can be uprooted is through a positive but firm abolition of the capitalist system, and within this structure, a radical decolonisation and resistance to capitalism, to restore learning for life as indigenous peoples and cultures have practised from time immemorial.

It is only then that educational transformation can materialise; anything else is chimerical and a façade of learning. Indigenous decentralised socialism, with the family and community collectively involved in the learning and growth of young people, often the majority of most societies in the world, is the most viable alternative to the capitalist onslaught against the impoverished in South Africa/Azania and globally.

In the final analysis, decentralised communities and structures within which indigenous people have lived from time immemorial is the key to decolonisation, where ancestral languages are taught by mothers and parents, and the entire community is involved in both individual and community education, rooted in particular family lineages.

For learning to be effective and constructive, not rote and routine, but dynamic, alive, and meaningful, all children must necessarily be taught in their respective mother tongues as a scientific principle, with family gatherings, initiation rites and ceremonies from birth through adolescence, marriage, reaching elder status, and passing back into the spirit world being the conduits for inculcating a deep cultural root in the learner.

Decolonisation education is always fully engaged with the natural world in its endless diversity and kaleidoscope of life, never looking down on this beautiful world but fully respecting and learning from Her/Them, weaving the learner into this amazing tapestry called … Life!

Capitalism, industrialism, militarism, racism, elitist and classist arrogance, sexism and patriarchy, and the lying ideology of “economic success” in the 21st century, have no place in education or society in the US empire, South Africa, or anywhere in the world today, not with the life-death dealing imbalance facing us all.

The lesson that we must accept in this age of supposed “modernity” is that the oil, “natural gas”, and the platinum, gold, diamonds, and precious metal mines will not save us. Only the Earth can and will. Choose Life!

Biko was murdered because he chose life.

Kunnie is an international educational activist, researcher, and author who has travelled the world and advocates for the land and cultural and language rights especially of the world’s indigenous people.