adminIt has become an international and human bad habit that every beginning of each “new year” new optimism grips individuals and societies alike as bold and fresh resolutions are made.
Like a true dance in the proverbial circles, individuals and societies are willing to get possessed with renewed euphoria every other year inspite of painful lessons drawn from the routine of past years that have turned out to be the same year repeating itself under a different number. In African politics, Thandika Mkandawire and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni have separately but with equal emphasis treated the theme of “repetition without change,” a routine in African economic and political affairs where the more things seem to change the more they remain the same, or get worse, inspite of the attempts by leaders and populations to invent new African futures.
This has been such a mundane but punitive dance in circles without results to the extent that thinkers and theorists have invested entire careers in search of theories, methods and concepts that can be generated and deployed to navigate the world, especially the Global South from the stalemate of political turmoil, poverty, disease, corruption, and underdevelopment that are worsened by the global financial and ecological crises. Repetition without change in the world economic and political affairs invites thinkers to probe how the world system itself operates, how the world works, or how it has been structured and conditioned to work.
Arrival of the structures
Theologians have for many decades battled with the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination which holds that matters of the world and that of man and woman were ordained in the beginning and the ordination is unchangeable. In other words the world and all its affairs were programmed for a definite and certain course that man and woman cannot alter. For its cruel rigidity, the doctrine of predestination together with the theology of Calvinism was found useful in justifying the enslavement and colonisation of the societies and peoples of the South. It was all God’s design, the enslaved and the colonised were supposed to keep their faith and be grateful for salvation. In secular circles, French theorists of the early 1900s, beginning with the linguists among them, generated the theory of structuralism which somehow though to a lesser extent carried the logic of predestination. In the thinking of the structuralists, the world was structured and organised into firm hierachies and forms that permitted little choice for individuals and societies.
Slavery and colonialism, for instance are social structures that organised the world into enslavers and slaves, colonisers and the colonised. Individual enslavers, colonisers and their slaves and their colonised had little control of what had to happen as part of human and world development.
Both predestination in religion and structuralism in secular theory give little power and choice to human beings and surrender all the control of world affairs and events to destiny and structure. Clearly, the trouble with both predestination and structuralism is that there are always losers and winners, beneficiaries and victims. Those who are in the favour of destiny and structure tend to preserve the status quo while those who suffer and endure destiny and the structure contemplate revolution and seek to overturn the status quo to usher in new utopias.
It was stubborn leftist intellectuals and linguists such as Noami Chomsky who first questioned the authority of the structures, but prominently it became the French theorists again who were to champion post-structuralism, a deconstruction and demolition of structural thinking. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and others achieved worldwide intellectual celebrity status by describing the poverty and intellectual destitution of thinking in structures and destinies. As revolutionary as it was, the trouble with post-structuralism and its infamous brother, postcolonialism is that it was composed of Eurocentric theorists challenging other Eurocentric theorists for turf and for fame, the sentiments of the victims of structures and destinies in the world were not part of the structuralist and post-structuralist debate or quarrel. Of all its noise, the post-structuralist war against structuralism was and still is a boring and fruitless Eurocentric monologue.
The Rise of Agency
In Europe itself and outside in the main, in Latin America, parts of Asia and Africa many dissident intellectuals have arisen to challenge the Eurocentric monologue on how the world works, especially on how the world should work. These thinkers have privileged the theory of agency, which is the thinking that human beings and their societies are not helpless and hapless objects in the hands of destiny and structure but are active subjects that can fight for and achieve their own determination.
Agency thinkers are by nature revolutionaries who believe that however powerful, destiny and the structures are not indefatigable. The belief that destiny and the structure are not indefatigable, however, is not based on blind optimism and revolutionary fantasies, but on an understanding that behind structure and destiny there are people and systems. In other words, structure and destiny are not God ordained but are based on man-made systems and institutions.
The world is not what it is today because of God or any other unchanging force that structured and organised it thus.
Decoloniality as an extended family of theories and philosophies of liberation sees the modern capitalist and Euro-American world system as embedded with coloniality and domination that have structured the world into conquerors and the conquered, and therefore the need for a “shift in the geography of reason,” the need to change the way we have always thought and done things in the world.
Return of the Structures and Decoloniality
Structure and destiny exist. For instance the capitalist economic system and neo-liberal political thinking have been naturalised into a structure and a destiny of the world. Even in the universities of the world, teachers and learners are not allowed to imagine a world that was not capitalist and where neoliberal politics were not the norm. Christianity has also become a religious structure where not being a Christian is seen as irregular or abnormal in the world. The system of patriarchy, the male domination of women has over years become a rigid structure.
That the Euro-American Empire is the prefect of the world that monopolises military might and has a right to hoard weapons of mass destruction is another structure. Europe and America have been structured into freedom fighters in the world, their God-given job is to protect humanity, any community or individuals that challenge that structure are terrorists and enemies of humanity. In a strong way, structure and destiny are still part of our reality in the world and that is why all repetition in economics and politics, all attempts to create a better world lead to the same or worse condition, especially for societies and communities of the South. One of the principal projects of Decoloniality is to generate thinking and activism that seek to debunk structure and destiny thinking and invest agency in the lives and power of the peoples of the South.
As Ramon Grosfoguel has emphasised, in searching for the power and agency to change the structure and destiny of the world, peoples of the South need to avoid both Eurocentric and Third World Fundamentalisms. Extremism of any kind is not liberatory but it tends to produce another form of domination or more. There is no possibility, for instance, that one day we can throw away western modernity and everything that it came with so that we return to a pristine and pure African or Global South past.
There is no paradise to return to. What polities and economies of the South need to embrace is what has been called “border thinking” and “transmodernity,” the creative ability to use our power and agency to select what liberates us and reject what dominates us in the basket of modernity.
The decolonial attitude entails navigating and negotiating western modernity to establish political, economic and cultural positionalities that sustain our humanity and liberty. As 2017 unfolds, Africa will be entangled in more political and economic repetitions without change because of the way the world has been structured and the way certain interests have turned themselves into destinies.
The exciting resolutions of the New Year will turn into the usual disillusionment and next year more resolutions will be made that are destined for the same dustbin of history. Decoloniality seeks to break that chain and introduce, in thought and in deed, meaningful change.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected]
Londile Moyo