Africa: Against

Chief among the justifications that the western colonisers gave for the conquest and domination of Africans is that Africans were barbarians and not complete human beings. As the barbarians that they were alleged to be, Africans needed to be civilised and given Christianity as their one and only way to redemption and salvation. The exploitation and siphoning of African natural resources and the theft of the labour of Africans, were covered up as the necessary pain and price that Africans had to pay in order to gain civilisation and be admitted into modernity. The missionaries and the Empire builders argued vehemently and at times convincingly that as barbarians, Africans needed to be conquered and dominated as a way of protecting them from each other. Left alone, the colonisers argued, African barbarians and tribes would finish each other off in barbaric and brutish wars. 

It is a tragedy that there are some Africans that have bought into this colonial mythologisation of Africa and Africans. Frequently one encounters an African who takes seriously that if Africa was not colonised Africans would still be living in caves, wearing animal skins and spearing each other over food, land, women, political power and other resources and opportunities. However, the history of Europe itself proves that a people can naturally modernise and develop themselves without having to be conquered and getting modernity imposed on them. More importantly, for my present article, is that the history of the West, Euro-America, actually proves that some in the west are actually “barbaric and evil”. One can add that the economic system of capitalism that drove colonialism and slavery in Africa and the entire Global South is actually an evil system that is based on the exploitation of one by another and monopolisation of resources by a few at the expense of the many. Before one ponders that cruelty, barbarism and evil of the wars that the West is using to keep its global dominance, one can examine the evil of western thought that has driven western conduct and political actions in the world. 

The barbarism of Western philosophy

When Rene Descartes exclaimed that: “I think therefore I am,” (cogito ergo sum) he was not speaking for all philosophers under the sun, but for himself as a western man. He spoke as a soldier, a Catholic Christian, a white man, a western man, a man, and a conqueror.  The Ergo Cogito, as Descartes’s statement is called was primarily a slogan of conquest that represented a western man boasting that he thinks and therefore is human as opposed to animals and barbarians that have neither reason nor rationality. There has always been a western and racist assumption that other people that are not western do not think. The colonial idea of civilising and modernising the African was based on the racist myth that Africans were thoughtless barbarians. It makes me bleed every time I witness young African students of philosophy chanting the ergo cogito believing that they are celebrating philosophy when they are actually echoing the philosophical barbarism and racism of the western man and the conqueror. 

I may not exactly blame young African philosophers for their mistaken celebration of the coloniality of western philosophy. I grew up celebrating Jurgen Habermas for his philosophical concepts of communication, the “speech acts” and the “public sphere” in particular. I woke up from some slumber a few days ago when the 94-year-old German philosopher came out to defend what is appearing to be Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. This reminded many of us of the way another German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, actually supported the Nazis and Nazism, and the Holocaust. Habermas’s apparent Zionism has irritated philosophers of the Global South who expected a lot from a philosopher that has lived a long life of reflection and free expression. 

The same disappointment was experienced and expressed when Slavoj Zizek, instead of opposing the war in Ukraine like any other practitioner of wisdom, a philosopher, argued that a “strong NATO” was needed to wage a bigger war than the one that is being fought already. The actions and statements of Zizek and Habermas, living western philosophers, can only remind us that the conquerors that dominated the Global South were drunk with statements of western philosophers that encouraged colonialism and slavery. The titanic Wilhem Georg Hegel, another German wise man, declared that Africa had no history or any humanity to talk about. There should be no surprise therefore, that the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 that cut Africa up into many western colonies, took place in the West. Many colonial and racist ideas, we know by now, were cultivated and irritated there. Closer to home, in Namibia, the genocide of the Herero people will not be easily forgotten, especially how German colonial administrators justified and defended the mass-killings. 

The recently departed philosopher of liberation, Enrique Dussel, made the observation that from Heraclitus through Karl Von Clausewitz right up to Henry Kissinger, western thought and philosophy have been about justifying war and defending evil. Behind the bombs, bullets and other munitions, including chemical weapons and poisons, that the West has thrown at the Global South there have been some philosophy and philosophers behind. Just how western thinkers have thought the world into war, in the past and in the present, boggles the mind.  

Africa: Against war

The past week has seen the multiplication of wars in the world. No one in the thinking world can claim to have foreseen that Iran would throw bombs into Pakistan. As we watched the spectacle of the USA leading some European powers in “punishing” the militants that are protesting the punishment of Arabs in Gaza, in Yemen, we woke up to an exchange of bombs across the borders of Iran and Pakistan. This happened when more bombs were exploding in Syria and in Lebanon. We know by now that war is actually the barbarism that happens when diplomacy has failed. We know that bombs and bullets are the option when communication has failed. It is a misfortune which can be observed that whenever the West leads, war becomes common sense and peace uncommon. Friedrich Nietzsche might have been speaking for the West when he said the world needs long wars and short peace. It becomes more important therefore, for countries of the Global South to be vigilant and against war to avoid being divided and ruled and to have proxy wars imposed on them. 

λ Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of South Africa, Pretoria. Contacts: [email protected].