Introduction
Professor Nomalanga Mkhize[1] gave this year’s JL Dube memorial lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s College of Humanities. Professor Mkhize’s lecture focused on the current #BlackLivesMatter protests as a starting point to explore the limits of the current wave of decolonial and decolonisation discourse as they apply to the African situation – 60 years since the first country gained independence. In her presentation, Professor Mkhize argued that the current academic trends in decolonisation, while helpful in describing some of the deep structural problems facing South Africa, its universities and society, cannot lead us towards a liberated Africa. She also argued that the current trends are not well located in the long traditions of Black Africa’s education philosophies which are rooted in a strong moral, ethical notion of education without assimilation. She noted that in fact, today’s decolonisation trend is begging for white acceptance and affirmation with its focus on symbolic victories around statues and correcting racist behaviour online. She proposed that African liberatory education should build on the older lineages of building independent Black institutions as advanced by the likes of JL Dube, as well as the organic education of our grandmothers and community. She called the lineages of JL Dube the ‘umbilical’ tradition – that roots us in our own context while pushing us to believe we can outcompete the rest of the world that has dominated us.
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Locating the umbilical cord in Africa: Why the decolonisation debate in Africa must resist North and Latin American Academic trends
On the 25th of May this year (2020), a black American man, George Floyd, died violently at the hands of members of the United States Police force.[2] Floyd’s death sparked huge international outrage in the days and weeks that followed his death. Massive protests, followed by riots, engulfed the streets of some major cities in the US. Protests also occurred in many parts of the world under the banner and slogan of #BlackLivesMatter. The #BlackLivesMatter movement has been around for something of a decade[3] and has been galvanised by both grassroots organisers and activists in the United States, organising against police brutality, as well as growing and steady support from black celebrities with the most notable being a football player named Collin Kaepernick who knelt in protest against police’s killing of black citizens in the United States.[4]
But in these current protests, there was also something else in the air both literally as well as figuratively and that was the corona virus. When the protests broke out, on one hand it was clear that many were shocked by the killing of this black man, but on the other hand, it was clear that there was another current of discontent that at the time may not have been obvious to everybody who was witnessing these protests. What I could sense in these protests was that they were also a reaction to several other factors including the corona virus lockdown and the sense of helplessness and anger that people felt about this thing, this corona virus that was wrecking our lives. These #BlackLivesMatter protests then served to bring people outside of their homes to see other people and to get a sense of community again. There was another undercurrent that I felt. I suspected, and I think correctly so, that within the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the United States, there were left wing white kids who finally saw a platform to enact their ideology, especially given the climate of rising unemployment in the United States, inequality and general social-economic malaise as we watch the United States empire decline.
It seemed to me that even though young black Americans had participated in looting and burning of shops in the initial outrage, but as time went on, many of these young black Americans stopped. And I think there were two reasons why they stopped. The first is because in the black community, black business owners began to point out that they were losing their businesses because of the looting and rioting. The second reason why I think we saw a drop in young black Americans’ participation is that the risk of prolonged protest action for a black American created a situation in which they may face higher odds of being arrested while carrying out political protest and the idea of being arrested as a young black American sent you in a totally different social pipeline than if you are a white left winger. It is this dilemma of walking between protesting and having to retreat from protest that black Americans and like many other black people in the world have to work out for themselves – this problem of how are we to speak back to the colonial residues, the colonial systems that we inherited as well as to still survive to live another day and build a different world. Because of how rapidly this protest gained traction across the world, there were many young people, even in South Africa, who took on this hashtag (it would not be the first time that they take up the hashtag) and yet this slogan became a kind of popular framework for discussing any entrenched problem that black people face and we saw the uptake of this hashtag during the 2015/16 student protests as well.
But there was a problem with the idea of taking up this hashtag in our context. The #BlackLivesMatter framework interestingly and ironically also seems to appeal to well-educated, opinionated international black elite who travel the globe as the general global middle class does. While they were saying #BlackLivesMatter on the internet, very few were willing to discuss the fact that it is in fact mostly the predatory elite classes of Africa that have collapsed African countries and created problems for other black people in African countries. And so, it becomes a shield and a mask to use the #BlackLivesMatter in Africa given the nature of our problems. But the really if we are to be honest, we must ask a question: in our own countries as the black elite, especially the black political elite of which I am a part, are we ourselves not closer to George Floyd’s murderers than closer to George Floyd the victim?
So, this tendency to pick up global political paradigms, born of struggles outside of Africa and use them as part of theorising and formulating our intellectual content of our struggle is nothing new. As Africans, we have consistently faced this challenge of attempting to formulate our struggles in relation to the struggles of others who have been oppressed like us. It was this challenge that African feminists grappled with for decades: how can they articulate material, biological, political and lived realities of African women without succumbing to the conceptual problems caused by Western feminism? Marxism, another paradigm in which African thinkers had to grapple with the conceptual relevance of this condition in terms of dealing with the question of labour in the colonies under imperialism and racialized capitalism. And also there has been similar debates about the relevance of liberal democracy in Africa. Is this liberal democracy really relevant to us? And these ideas, all born in modernity, we take them and debate them and ask are they relevant?
In 2015/16, students dropped the term transformation in South Africa in favour of the term decolonisation. This they did to try and bring out a more radical and more confrontational paradigm in dealing with the problems of knowledge production in universities and also the structural problems of inequality. Now the concept of decolonisation obviously is not new. Apart from the political decolonisation of our Pan-African struggle, there has, of course, been the question of decolonising our knowledge mostly popularised by Ngugi waThiong’o, in his famous book Decolonising the mind (1986).
Alongside this decolonisation debate emerged a new term, a term I was unfamiliar with – decoloniality or what is called Decolonial Studies – which seems to have taken hold of the intellectual imagination of our students, intellectuals, academics and it promises to seek a way to deal with the problems of the South African higher education as resistance to transformation in South African higher education. But let me be clear, when this term emerged, I know that it was not just myself but many others who asked: what is this new term? Decolonial? Is it the same as decolonisation? How shall we understand this term? Once a term arrives on the academic arena, we have to grapple with it and figure out what it means for us. We have seen the flourishing of decolonialities of all kinds, everything, from decolonial feminism to decolonial Mandela. Decoloniality rose rapidly as a favoured paradigm for addressing the questions of the curriculum, of knowledge decolonisation. But then some of us were asking what is particularly decolonial about Mandela? Can we have a decolonial Sisulu? Can we have a decolonial Ruth Mompati? Is there a decolonial Nomalanga? What makes this decolonial feminism different from say, the African feminism that had already rejected Western feminism. We have seen funding grants, professorships, all kinds of resources being thrown at this decolonial approach. It appears to really promise the path towards really unpacking the problem of colonial inheritance in South African knowledge.
With our students demanding this decolonial approach, wanting us to supervise them in this decolonial approach, I could not because I was still asking what is it and how is it done? What is the method? I could not make head or tail of this paradigm. What is this conceptual paradigm or is it merely a description of activism? Now for the parents who are in this room, I am going to say to you, it is very clear to us, when you send your child to go to university to do a degree and they are doing humanities, you must ask what they are going to study because you are paying money. So I had to kind of begin to return somewhat to source and look around to see where this decolonial paradigm emerged from and it became quite clear to me that it had been popularised largely from Latin America where the most pre-eminent scholar of the paradigm is Walter Mignolo and I then looked at what Mignolo is attempting to tell us about this decoloniality that is promising to be a paradigm in the South African context.
For Mignolo it is clear that decoloniality is a response to a prior totalised condition of oppression that is known as coloniality. Decoloniality, he argues, is born out of responses to the promises of modernity and realities of coloniality. With colonialism and coloniality came resistance and refusal. So decoloniality is the refusal of the colonial world, the modernity of the European Enlightenment that brought us this capitalism that renders us as subjects marginal to our own economies and histories. He argues that in the ongoing colonial process and condition, decoloniality is a form of struggle and survival, epistemic existence based on practise and response, most especially, by colonised and racialized subjects who are against the colonial matrix of power in all its dimensions and for the possibilities of another way of thinking. It implies the recognition and undoing of hierarchical structures of race, gender, hetero-patriarchy, class that continue to control the spirituality of our lives. Decoloniality, Mignolo argues, is not actually a new paradigm. It is a mode of critical thought, a way, an option, a standpoint, an analytic, a project, a practice, a praxis. Decoloniality, he tells us, has a history, a story, her story; it is a practise of more than 500 years. It began in the Americas where we see of course the decimation of local peoples and this fireball of European modernity vanquishing so many of our indigenous people across the world. Mignolo does argue the decolonial paths have one thing in common – the colonial wound.
With students clamouring to take space in this paradigm, I notice a palpable silence from many senior black scholars whom I deeply respect. I will not name them. They were not buying into this concept. They did not openly debate it but they did not buy into it, if you spoke to them. They were not buying into this paradigm on several grounds and they are not entirely linked to the question of academia. But they are linked to the question of being an African today and our aspirations for our freedom.
The first problem that senior, especially African historians and African sociologists have with this concept of decoloniality is this response to this totalising coloniality that figures our whole spiritual life. Decoloniality as a paradigm gives us all the words, all the English words, to describe our grievance but it cannot spell out a method of how to resolve it. Second, as Mignolo says, decoloniality is actually more of a practise of dissenting. So, it is a positioning against coloniality. It is much more about the way you stand against knowledge structures, than the way you position your mind to combatively attend to the residues of colonialism. Of course, in real life, this readiness and combativeness, waiting to fight the coloniality wherever you see it becomes a practice of focusing on coloniality itself. Put differently, you keep focussing on whiteness and its manifestations, whether it’s a Clicks advert or it’s a question of land dispossession, all these things now become your problem.
Third, because it is a dissenting posture against whiteness, it effectively imagines blackness or Africanness as being in a constant conversation with whiteness. It cannot ignore whiteness. Fourth, because it focusses on the undoing of coloniality, it spends less time imagining the alternative and does not give us a good methodology for the alternative. Fifth, and most importantly for this talk, it lacks an umbilical sense and what do I mean by umbilical sense? It lacks roots in an African intellectual tradition of questioning that comes from the many spaces from which we have been derived as intellectuals and Africans from grandmothers, to professors to teachers and whoever else.
I am arguing that this thing I am calling umbilical sense is the innate knowledge, something yasenkabeni, that nobody really has to say explicitly to you but it is an intuitive sense about how to go about the world. Now I know that decolonial scholars, now that I have accused them of many things are going to accuse me back, but I am just going to keep going because I am provoking. I am going to argue that in fact the decolonial paradigm as it has existed in South Africa in particular for the past five or so years has produced absolutely nothing of value to Africans and I challenge you to show me any decolonially derived text that explicitly calls itself decolonial that has shown us a coherent alternative way of being or existence that divests us from the traces of Eurocentrism. And do not go and fetch some African philosophy from 1980 and say here is decoloniality, because in 1980 they did not call it decolonial.
John Dube as the umbilical cord
I am now going to put forward what I think is the real problem in South African knowledge production and I want to argue that in general it is the problem that the likes of John Dube and many activist converts understood through their deep rooted African sensibilities as well as their European Christianity.
I am going to argue that the core problem of South African education is the absence of a credible, comprehensive and totalising narrative of black African history in South Africa. By this I am arguing that the problem of knowledge production in South Africa derives from the absence of a foundational history of our pre-colonial story from before the arrival of whites. This problem is a problem that many African countries face at the onset of independence. In the mid to late 1960s, the departments of history in the universities in Africa became key sites of knowledge decolonisation much more so than any other humanities department. History departments were tasked with decolonisation. Why history departments? Because it is in history that the foundational story of the new nation-state was born. Indeed of course there were many debates about how to approach this but what was important is that at African universities, African historians invested heavily in researching, reconstructing what one may call a national history that stretches thousands of years back into the pre-modern era. Many first generation African historians were usually white professors (Ranger, etc.). But very quickly they trained black African historians who were tasked with writing these long histories and put those black Africans in history departments. Today if you go to most history departments across the continent, they are staffed by black Africans. These histories that they wrote were able to reconstruct very rigorous and meticulous histories of especially beginning in what Christopher Ehret (1998) calls the ‘African Classical Age.’ The African classical age is the same period as the Medieval period in Europe up to the Renaissance period. The likes of Terence Ranger and others constructed histories of these nations that could tell complex stories of these societies going back as far as 1 5000 years. They have done this brilliantly in Zimbabwe; just the history of the Shona stretching from 900 AD, and not stretching in a superficial sense giving the dynastic histories. On the basis of these histories, African universities developed their own disciplines. History departments provided the empirical basis for the story and then everybody else now has the basis upon which to philosophise, do literary scholarship, theorise in sociology etc. In other words, the decolonisation of knowledge in most African countries was thus entirely anchored in a strong and cohesive understanding of historical developments of those societies.
This means that they placed African history and the reconstruction of that history at the centre of their decolonisation projects. This kind of building is the type of building that the likes of John Dube and other educated Africans did for us. They did this task of writing African history. And they did this because they looked around them and said we must build institutions. The kinds of institutions they built, Ohlange Institute, the media, such as Ilanga which is still around today, African literatures and classics and they did this guided by their umbilical sense even if they were Christian converts. Even as Christian converts, they could see the shortcomings of colonial knowledge. That is why it is beautiful that John Dube was then given the name Umafukuzela. The implication is clear here, the task of the educated African person is not to sit, it is to build – ukufukuza. I want to argue that ukufukuza being indefatigable in building up African ideas is the central method and framework of conceptual building that Africanists (including the Black Consciousness movement) use in building.
In South Africa, we have never seen a parallel emergence of black historians and we have never seen a comprehensive account of black African history that encompasses all the various black South Africans to create the story of Black Africa prior to the white man in this country. The reason this did not happen is obviously because we had this long period of colonisation in South Africa that only ended in 1994 and the white historians in university departments who did the work of history were largely focused on things like Marxist history, social history and in the 1990s heritage and memory studies. With the exception, of course, of some universities like University of Zululand which tried to do Zulu history and secondly in the 1990s UKZN was where the method of rigorous African centred history using oral traditions was flourishing. I hope it’s still flourishing. So I would argue that in fact the problem in South Africa why we see this proliferation of the decolonial paradigm is because historians have not done their work. Historians have largely not been able to reconstruct what I would broadly call a national history of black Africans in this country. There are reasons for that; nobody wants to write a comprehensive history of Black Africans because they are going to be accused of being nativist. The rest of Africa has done it by the way. Far too much of pre-colonial South African history resides in the realm of archaeology so you don’t get the rich stories that you see with Zimbabwe where they can start in 900AD and start dealing with the Mambo dynasties. No in South Africa it is going to be archaeology. We have to recover those histories if we are going to provide a solid basis.
One of the problems of our pre-colonial history, either being archaeology or being the history of when whites arrived in the 1400s, is that we have completely erased the history of the Khoi khoi and San clans of this nation and have not reconstructed their histories. So I am going to argue that the work of African historians, in fact the work of every African academic is to be an African historian who takes on this methodology using two methods: one is the rigorous historiographical method of locating history, and two, the method of following your umbilical instinct. The late Fatima Meer, commenting on John Dube said, “He respected Christianity and took all that was good from it. But he never forgot that he came from an African tradition and there was a great richness about that tradition. It was a moral tradition and a very human tradition and he discovered that in fact in many respects African tradition was more ethical than the Christian one that he had come into contact with.”
I want to argue that ukufukuzela is this Africanist approach and is rooted in umbilical sense of where to find our knowledge. This Africanist tradition and its umbilical cord lie there buried in our histories, our mythologies, our languages in the ways in which our grandmothers and grandfathers and communities have brought us up. A few years ago, Tshepo Madlingozi[5] did a response to Thembeka Ngcukaitobi’s The land is ours (2018) in which he asked questions about whether African converts could really be said to have been anti-colonial. I would argue that is not the question. In fact, I am going to tell us now and assert that we cannot escape that we are modern subjects even us today. To ask a question of John Dube whether or not he is decolonial is to ask a question of yourself as an educated decolonial African if you are in any sense African. This is shown brilliantly in Archibald Campbell Jordan’s novel Ingqumbo yeminyanya (1940) in which he basically sets up a complex and brutal clash between modernity for Africans and tradition and what is brilliant about what Jordan does is he does not allow you off the hook, you are educated or you are not the educated, the result is chaos. In this book, the wise man almost represents this strong ghost of the past that keeps coming to challenge and make your life difficult as you the modern are trying your best to do your traditions but it doesn’t let you go. It’s a mess this thing. But I think there are some scholars who are showing us today as we have seen from the long tradition of African writings through John Dube, Ntuli, Jordan and others. We are seeing the transference of the tradition that says we know how to fukuza. It’s our umbilical sense
And so in closing, I am going to name some of a few besides the few senior African scholars who have passed this on to us. Today I see a generation that is grappling with this issue of how do we locate our work in our grandmothers, in our communities and also in challenging Marxism in living with the clash and not trying to pretend that none of us are tainted by this coloniality. The first is the work of Dr Koleka Shange who is doing work on umntwana kaGogo and there she locates herself in the lineages almost physically having been brought up by these women and looking at the archives and meticulously going back and finding pictures trying to understand umntwana kagogo.
The other is Dr Tozama April whose work in recovering Charlotte Maxeke and going to the archives to reconstruct this Maxeke. Makhosazana Xaba similarly in recovering the biography of Noli Jabangu having to find bits and pieces of this woman’s life. Today people go about theorising about Jabangu thanks to her. The painstaking work of Babalo waMagoqana sitting with the old people understanding how they understand themselves as vernacular librarians and vernacular intellectuals. The work of Athabile Masola on Nonsisi Ngweto, a black woman commentator from the 1930s. Lastly Siphokazi Magadla has researched on the work of women combatants writing the stories of black women who have been tortured
In conclusion, the task of universities is to teach ukufukuza but to teach them ukufukuza as the meticulous and rigorous kind of scholarship that is going to be guided by our umbilical sense in the path that the likes of John Dube paved for us.
[1] Professor Nomalanga Mkhize is a Historian and Head of Department of History and Political Studies at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth. Her family roots are in Willowfountain, Pietermaritzburg and eMbonisweni in White River. She spent parts of her childhood in Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Her research interests are in 19th century Xhosa writers and their record of precolonial African histories, legends and mythologies. She is also a member of the National Research Foundation (NRF) Board. Outside of academia she writes children’s books.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/31/us/george-floyd-investigation.html
[3] https://www.adl.org/education/educator-resources/lesson-plans/black-lives-matter-from-hashtag-to-movement
[4] https://theundefeated.com/features/how-colin-kaepernick-became-a-cause-for-activists-civil-rights-groups/