Meditations of Ramon Grosfoguel

AWAY from the vivid engagements of the Annual Decolonial Summer School at the University of South Africa (Unisa), a group of curious researchers at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WICDS) invited Ramon Grosfoguel for a question and answer session. The broad theme of the question and answer encounter was predictably: “What does it mean to decolonise a westernised university in the Global South?”

Being one of the canonical theorists and writers in the global decoloniality network and based in the Berkeley Campus of the University of California, the Puerto Rican sociologist attracted a crowd of philosophers and other types of scholars to one of the lecture rooms of the University of the Witwatersrand. Prominent South African writers such as Fred Khumalo were part of the throng.

Leading Critical Diversity scholar Melissa Steyn kick-started the conversation with an introduction of Ramon Grosfoguel as equally an intellectual and a revolutionary activist that has become a go-to theorist on decolonial issues in the world. Student activists from the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements, groups that were both inspired by the decoloniality canon were visibly present.

As has become the tradition with the Department of Science and Technology, and National Research Foundation lectures of the SARCHI Chair that the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies holds regularly, the conversation was as heated as it was enriching. The probing questions and comments gave Ramon Grosfoguel an opportunity to meditate on Decoloniality and liberation. Trouble with the World System Ramon Grosfoguel put it to his interlocutors that decolonisation failed in Latin America and Africa because the liberation movements erroneously believed that economic, political, cultural and social problems that were caused by colonisation could be solved in isolation from each other.

The long history of colonisation of the Global South produced a world system that is made out of an entanglement of hierarchies of power and oppression that remain intact after political independence of the colonies. As a result, Grosfoguel noted, the political organisations, cultural movements and social groups that fought for the independence of the colonies tragically reproduced the thinking and the structures of power that were behind colonisation in the first place, leading to a colonial dance in the circles where there is so much struggling for decolonisation and no delivery of the goods of liberation. The nation state that defines all countries of the world is a fiction and a fallacy, the identity of the present world is defined by a world system that has engulfed the entire planet and it is for that reason that those who imagine liberation should think and act in world systemic and planetary terms, understand how the world has been structured and how it works before they engage with it to set afoot a new world order. The Problem of Knowledge and Knowing Grosfoguel argued that Decoloniality is compelled to be a thought “in damage control” that seeks to make visible what Eurocentricism continuously keeps hiding. Eurocentric thinkers turned Christianity, a liberatory religion and spirituality into Christiandom that is a political ideology of conquest and domination, while also busy pretending that the westernised university produced objective and neutral knowledge.

As a rationality and as part of the spirit of the modern colonial world system, Eurocentricism always hides who is speaking and from where they are speaking.

Toxic western knowledge is fed to the entire planet as neutral wisdom when it is a provincial and selfish Euro-American gospel. A dewesternised and decolonised university in the Global South would be one where Eurocentric knowledge is but one of the knowledges in the ecology of knowledges that are in conversation, and not the centre of the conversation.

Importantly, Grosfoguel described Eurocentricism as a fundamentalism and warned that those who advance Afrocentricism should be careful not to counter Eurocentric fundamentalism with Third World Fundamentalism that expresses itself in racism, tribalism, xenophobia, nativism and so on. Decoloniality confronts external and colonial structures of power and oppression in the same way that it challenges internal structures. A big part of the oppressive system hides prejudices and structures of domination inside the hearts and minds of those who claim to fight oppression.

Part of the success of Coloniality is the way it dresses itself up as Decoloniality and liberation. Because of the problem of Coloniality in the world system, Grosfoguel noted that no knowledge is objective and neutral, decolonial thinkers must be alert to the racialised, gendered, classified and situated nature of knowledge. In other words all knowledges and thinking come from certain bodies, geographies, political and economic locations.

All knowledge reveals and hides somethings; no knowledge is innocent of certain interests and agendas. Claims of objective and neutral knowledge and truth are fallacious and mythical. The Problem of Bad Faith Critics of Decoloniality, mainly bruised postcolonial theorists, and some political economy academics deliberately shy away from the canonical literature of Decoloniality. In bad faith critics of Decoloniality avoid engaging with true decolonial theorists and engage with misrepresentations of Decoloniality that are projected by some of its students and enthusiasts. Critiques of Decoloniality that are based on what it is not should be treated as products of bad faith that they are and not be allowed to discredit the thought and the movement that advances it.

Extremist activists who destroy property and use non-revolutionary violence are wrong to do so and their misconduct should not be allowed to overshadow the justice of the cause of decolonising and dewestenising the university in the Global South. No political and intellectual movement is pure and for that reason, the Decoloniality movement should not be judged on its bad representatives but its genuine intellectuals and activists. Depressing Egoism Academic conferences have become depressing in the westernised universities of the Global South. Now and again academics with big egos meet to discuss the problem of academic disciplines and not the problems of human beings in the world. Decolonial thinkers should engage with the human condition in the world and not the problems of theories and methods of academic research. That does not give decolonial thinkers the excuse to suspend intellectual rigour, decolonial thought itself originated from the rigorous meditations of philosophers of the Global South pondering the problem of inferiority and marginality in the modern colonial world system.

The genocides and epistemicides of conquest that sought to erase the bodies and knowledges of the peoples of the Global South forced their philosophers, the wise men and women, to think deeply about their conditions and experience in the present world. For that reason, as a philosophy, Decoloniality did not arise from luxury, power and privilege but it is an invention compelled by misery and domination. It is for that reason that decolonial thinkers should guard against duplicating, reproducing, imitating and extrapolating tendencies of colonial philosophers and theories. Away from the egoism of Eurocentric thinkers, decolonial thinkers are humble philosophers that contemplate the future of the world from the underside and the darker side of the current world order. Critical Diversity and Knowledge The world is made out of difference and differences. People can never be found to be the same in political thinking, culture, religious faith, age, gender and sexuality, ability of body and in many other ways. Oppression and domination in the world tend to exploit and use difference and differences for purposes of othering and inferiorising one people by another. Power and privilege tend to be unfairly distributed along the lines of difference and differences.

Critical Diversity Literacy, the theory that Melissa Steyn and the centre that she leads privilege is a theory that seeks a critical consciousness of the usability of difference in oppression and domination and to negotiate liberation in a world defined by hierarchies of oppression. Ramon Grosfoguel’s contribution was that the university should seek “epistemic diversity” where critical knowledges of different peoples of the world including those of “the wretched of the earth,” the poor, disabled, women, minorities, indigenous populations and other marginalised communities should also be part of the world conversation and search for life meaning.

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