adminRichard Runyararo Mahomva
The post-colonial dispensation has been narrowly defined in terms of periodic breakaways of the third-world from colonial bandage. Consequently, post-colonialism as a field of study has largely focused on political-economy power transfers.
Less focus has been channelled towards repositioning the being and knowledge towards post-colonial imaginations. As such, we imagine our being and intellect from the confines of linear pronouncements of the coloniser.
This is what has made the organic African scholar to be an isolated figure in this age of Western modernity. The exile of the African scholar from the knowledge centre (Eurocentricity) emerges from the quest to solicit Africa’s place in the Western epistemic purview outlining being and the politics of knowing in Africa.
By and large, philosophy can be conspicuously referred to as a collage of humanity, science and economic disciplines concerned with making explicit the nature and significance of normative and scientific beliefs and scrutinising the unambiguous of thoughts, impressions, beliefs and feelings by means of coherent argument concerning their presuppositions, implications, and intravenous relationships; in particular, the rational investigation of the nature and construction of reality (metaphysics), the resources and limits of knowledge (epistemology), the principles and import of moral judgment (ethics), and the relationship between language and reality (semantics).
The primacy of philosophy is attributed to Greece and Latin nativism (philosophia) modestly defined as “the love for wisdom”. This suggests that the ancestries of philosophy must not be limited to the Greek and the Latin experience. Instead, it is essentially prudent to escalate our comprehension of the roots of philosophy beyond the Latin and Greece arrogation of this God-given human discipline.
Rather, we need to understand that “love of wisdom” is an integral part of humanity beyond its fencing around the personalities of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and the rest. Philosophy is human, it forms the basis of each human society’s world-view and that particular community’s contact with other worlds.
However, the lenses of Eurocentric critical thought have narrowed our understanding of philosophy to be an intellectual heritage which directs humanity towards submission to one perspective of the world imposing its legitimacy to other parts of the world — supposedly imagined as beneficiaries of Eurocentricity’s benevolence to civilise the periphery.
The demise of political-thought in Africa
There is a common dread in demystifying the retrogressive aspects of Eurocentricity. This stems from the sacredness of Eurocentric hegemony and its immunity to being contested. This impunity has been further imported into our modern African institutions of thought.
From a more Zimbabwean context which is interlinked with my political science background, this deficit can be noted in the modules of political theory, political philosophy and ideology taught in our universities.
There are attributes of deformation in our curriculum as it scarcely values recent thinkers like Nkrumah, Nyerere, Mbeki, Mugabe and Kaunda to mention but a few.
Philosophy in the classes of political science is under an intense life-support system of the so-called “modern” Western philosophers like John Locke (1632-1704), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), René Descartes (1596-1650), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and David Hume (1711-1776). This form of intellectual destitution is not unique to Zimbabwe, but it is uniform across the continent as substantiated by the recent unrest in South-African universities where students are yearning for the unchaining of the systems of learning from coloniality.
However, it will be mischievous if I do not mention Karl Marx (1818-1883) whose works influenced other thinkers like Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and Chancellor Williams to be at the fore of mobilising the under-developed world against its enemies and plunderers.
Frank, Rodney and Williams — now among the leading dependence theorists have significantly contributed in articulating the condition of being of the globally marginalised, mainly the members of the African race. These have exploited Marxism by contextualising it with the entire Global-South crisis — built on Western dismemberment, capitalist cruelty. Hence rendering us to perpetual subjugation by the empire.
This particular extension of Marxism into the psyche of grappling with the condition of coloniality further manifests itself in contesting the fixation of the zone of none-being which was an invention of imperialism through slavery and colonialism in the writings of Fanon and Cabral. It is from this background that the project of African Conscientism was nursed by the intellect of Kwame Nkrumah and his predecessors like Marcus Garvey.
This explains that the confrontation of Global-North and Global-South civilisations — even before the “North-South” chasm produced an inevitable clash of cultures and ontological projections characterised by epistemic wars summarised by Marxists as the struggle to preserve historical materialism of the oppressed of the world.
This body of Marxist knowledge found its path into the continent and other parts of the third-world as a fight against the West’s ideological capitalism.
Even presently, decolonial scholarship is continuing the path of the much wanted revolutionary thinking to awaken Africa. However, all these efforts to challenge the bigotry of Eurocentric episteme have continued to be suppressed and marginalised in favour of Western philosophy.
All sectors of thought are victims — if not culprits of the classical veneration of Eurocentric imagined hierarchies of knowledge.
Thomas Hobbes and Eurocentric realism
While there is recent reference to Hans Morgenthou (1904-1980) as a new vanguard of the realist theory in International Relations (IR) studies, realism has continued to be traditionally attributed to Thomas Hobbes (1558-1679) who is regarded as one of the patriarchs of the realist theory.
Thomas Hobbes (1651) in his publication, The Leviathan, argues that human beings are by creation selfish, brutish and nasty. Human beings are physical objects, sophisticated machines all of whose functions and activities can be described and explained in realist terms.
Therefore, from a Leviathan perspective every aspect of life is political — who gets what, when and how? (Harold Laswell 1936). As such, everyday represents a fresh awakening to a war of capturing and consolidating power (Machiavelli 1532).
It is from this perspective that one can make sense of the problems Eurocentricity has caused to the world and shaping how all thought is constructed in favour of Eurocentric dominance. Now the past and the current state of neo-colonialism proved that Eurocentricity is there to flirt and adulterate with other wisdoms of the world in order to weaken them.
Ubuntu/Hunhu
This philosophy is fluently descriptive of the African world-view on humanity. Ubuntu/Hunhu also offers an encamping effect on what defines African people’s spirituality faculties and their interface with other civilisations. Above, all this philosophy places the human-being at the centre of political and economic development and makes material to be subject to humanity contrary to the perspectives of Eurocentricity which subject humanity to the will of politics and capital.
This concept has also been appropriated in the halls of the academia in the fields of Afrikology, decoloniality, Afrocentricism and other Global-South epistemic phenomenon. Ubuntu/Hunhu is empirically founded on a set of unwritten code of ethics that govern the interconnectedness of the individual with other individuals as well as their environment.
This is underpinned by the foundational principle of Ubuntu/Hunhu — I am because we are. This code of social interdependence naturally produces values of consent and creates established self-conscious guidelines of separating the good from the bad.
This means that beyond the modern institutions of law we borrowed from colonialism, Africans had templates of social governance.
This further proves that Ubuntu/Hunhu is a philosophical expression engrossed in the preservation of humanity and life. Moreover, Ubuntu/Hunhu’s emphasis on social cohesion places African reason beyond the limited scope of the euphoria of liberalism and Western capitalism.
At the centre of these Western philosophies is a traceable encounter with narcissism. Unlike, the idea of Ubuntu/Hunhu and its collective identity building character, narcissism prioritises self-importance and detaches societal interest from the individual. This should show our continued dependence to misnamed modernities framed in Eurocentric terms forms the basis of Africa’s engrossment in the Rene Descartes dictum: “I think, therefore I am”.
Richard Mahomva is an independent researcher and a literature aficionado interested in architecture of governance in Africa and political theory. Feedback: [email protected]
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