Black ideas matter: An awakening

THE Black Lives Matter social movement haunts the United States of America. Sparked by the unfair and unjust acquittal of George Michael Zimmerman who shot dead one Trayvon Martin on 26 February 2012, the movement vows to force America to own up to systemic racism, racial profiling and police brutality against black people.

Expanding its agenda, in vivid and highly technologised protests, that take full advantage of the globalised social media networks, the Black Lives Matter social movement pesters America and Europe to wake up to their violent wars, military and economic, political and cultural against the Global South. In the court of international public opinion and in the streets of America, the Euro-American establishment is on trial for its crimes against black lives and black humanity. As Black Lives Matter presses on with the case that the Euro-American Empire will never win, the global academy is waking up to an equally vivid spectre of Decoloniality, an extended family of philosophies and theories of liberation privileged by an international collective of scholars from the Global South and the Global North, in a spirited effort to explode the imperial myths and fictions of Eurocentric philosophies and theories that have for centuries been used to justify conquest using rhetoric of the civilising mission and lately globalisation and militarised interventions with humanitarian pretenses.

For centuries, the rhetoric of civilisation, democratisation, development and humanitarianism have been used to conceal the logic of siphoning, extraction and monopolisation of resources and wealth that EuroAmerica has been going on about. A combination of coloniality of power, the uses of force and financial muscle, and coloniality of knowledge, the control of information and knowledge, Euro-America has managed to turn itself into the centre of the world and the source of life in the planet.

From 17 to 19 August 2016, Africa Decolonial Research Network, (ADERN) a broad collective of African researchers in Decoloniality hosted an international conference at the University of South Africa. In attendance were scholars from universities throughout the globe, journalists from multiple media houses and representatives of political parties and liberation movements in the Global South. The keynote addresses were presented by three guests, Puerto Rican philosophers Ramon Grosfoguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and South African decolonial researcher, Pearl Sithole. Benefiting richly from the archive of Argentinean philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel, Ramon Grosfoguel led the debate on the big lie that European philosophers have been circulating from Rene Descartes, the so-called first modern philosopher to Slavoj Zizek, the alleged “most dangerous philosopher in the west” at present. Founding what has been called Cartesian philosophy, Rene Descartes made famous the imperial argument that “I think therefore I am,” the ego cogito. He separated the mind from the body and allocated reason and rationality to the white European and Christian man.

Enlightenment and Renaissance European philosophers preached light, reason and rationality as the awakening and civilisation that Europe was advancing as a gift to humanity throughout the planet. Presently, Decoloniality is unmasking the big lie that behind the pretext of globalising awakening, reason, rationality, light and civilisation EuroAmerica has been spreading deceit, poverty, darkness, violence and misery to the unsuspecting world.

Through artisanal archival research, Enrique Dussel has established that 150 years before Rene Descartes, the Eurocentric aphorism of European power was “I conquer therefore I am,” the ego conquisto. So-called Continental and Analytic European philosophy has been a big lie, a massive mask that has been used to conceal the agenda to conquer, plunder and monopolise the world under different guises and ruses. For scholars, media workers and liberation activists in the Global South, decolonial research and the Decoloniality intellectual movement projects a determined effort to unmask the big lie and explode the myths, to unleash the current that the “European knowledge of the world is not the only knowledge of the world” as Boaventura de Sousa Santos maintains.

It became the true stuff of tragicomedy when Ramon Grosfoguel demonstrated how for generations “five men of five countries” Italy, France, Germany, England and the USA have monopolised the production of what is considered the knowledge in the entire planet, in the hard sciences, humanities and social sciences, to the exclusion of the experiences, histories, thoughts and expressions of peoples and thinkers of the Global South.

In mobilising African thinkers, thinkers from Latin America, Asia and some from Europe and America, the Decoloniality intellectual movement is championing a debunking of Euro-American historiography and the myth that non-Europeans do not think. That black ideas lives and knowledge matter is no longer a dream but a breathing practice.

The Battle for Mindsets and Heartsets For the reason that the Euro-American lie has been so persuasively peddled throughout the planet, through the global academy, the global media and cultural and entertainment industry, so many people, including influential thinkers and leaders of the Global South remain beguiled, have bought and swallowed the lie as if it was gospel. There is no need for Third World fundamentalism, for people of the Global South to fool themselves and rationalise their own failures by blaming them on the big lie, but the big lie needs to be confronted because it is a living force that continues to make Euro-American imperialism a real and pressing problem in the present world.

Academies and media houses of the Global South have a responsibility to secure the mindsets and heartsets, worldviews and emotional landscapes of the populations of the Global South from the poison of the big lie.

The human sciences, social sciences and the hard sciences of the academies of the Global South cannot go on with business as usual in the face of the continuing march of the big lie that continues to keep captive the hearts and minds of the multitude of victims of coloniality of power and coloniality of knowledge that populate the Global South today. Journalists, scholars, activists and other workers in information and ideas in the Global South, also, cannot go on with business as usual as the imaginary of coloniality continues to arrest the minds and hearts of the people in the service of Empire.

In the areas of political leadership and economic development, Africans and Latin Americans need to be hard on themselves and on each other in intolerance of failures and incompetencies. South to South intellectual and political solidarities need to be magnified and the confrontation with the big lies of Europe and America amplified to allow enriching and productive alliances of the marginalised and inferiorised peoples of the Global South whose demand in the world is liberation. From calls to decolonise the university there is now calls to decolonise the media and the church.

A collective of women within the Decoloniality movement is now advancing a decolonisation of feminism, a rejection of Eurocentric understandings of femininity and womanity and a defence of African and Latin American conceptions of being a woman in the world. At long last, in the entire world, the voice is gaining currency and authority that black ideas and black lives matter. Behind the big lie, the truth is being unmasked that the humanities, social sciences and even hard science are not a monopoly of the European and American man but a property of the universe, including the Global South. The colonial ideas, practices and sensibilities that continue their march in the Global South must necessarily come under attack.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa. Mail to: decoloniality2016@gmail.com.