Chronicle EditorCetshwayo Mabhena
At a world scale there are two major regimes of thought in reaction to conquest and its aftermaths. By conquest I refer to the events and processes, combined, in which Europe and America violently achieved hegemony over the rest of the world, beginning in 1492 to date.
One regime of thought is that conquest was an even that passed and those that were conquered should move on and stop blaming slavery, colonialism and imperialism for their problems.
The other regime of thought notes that conquest became a world system that produced a world order and therefore is still not only with us but is unfolding each day. What decolonial philosophers and theorists call “coloniality” is actually that durability and endurance of conquest where the abolition of slavery and political independence of the colonies did not actually undo conquest and its stubborn effects. We cannot, therefore, very easily understand coloniality and practice decoloniality properly if we do not understand what fundamentally conquest was as the cataclysmic manner in which the West eclipsed the rest in the globe.
Conquest as world system
From the so called discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 to the rounding up of the Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama in 1497 conquest became an enveloping of the world by Europe and then effectively from 1945 onwards, by the United States of America, with apartheid South Africa becoming an enclave of Empire in Africa. Conquest, with its enslaving and colonising project, became an invasion of territories, subjugation of peoples, destruction of knowledges and histories, erasure of other spiritualities and sensibilities.
Conquest, with its events and processes, became a vivid site of the production of identities, chief among these identities being the conflictual identities of Conqueror and the Conquered, coloniser and the colonised respectively. Europe became an Empire, Capitalism a world economic system and white supremacy an organising idea of the world. Racial logic and classification of people by skin colour, nationality and ethnicity became powerfully usable in distributing power and the political and economic privileges that go with it.
Conquest was in a fundamental way a practice of evil and barbarism. Aime Cesaire famously charged the West with evil and barbarism for putting profit and power ahead of humanity and humanness. Cesaire pointed it out that western powers and peoples were horrified by the Holocaust and mass murder of Jews in Germany but not at all perturbed by their own genocides of conquest in Africa, Latin America and some parts of Asia.
Empire builders, colonisers and imperialists of the world in the West were not horrified by mass murder but by the fact that Hitler practised it in Europe on white people. That is the hypocrisy of conquerors and of conquest itself. The conqueror does not want on himself the evil that he levies on others. If one listens to Donald Trump and other right wing extremists of the West, it becomes clear that westerners live in fear of being enslaved and colonised. The ongoing rise of China as an
Empire scares the West to hell.
The idea of not only being dominated by another power and being replaced as masters of the universe is equal to death for states and nations that have carried themselves like the police and prefects of the world. The bully of the planet is happy to eclipse others but terrified of being eclipsed.
The logic and the rhetoric of conquest
For profit and for power, the logic of Empire was to conquer, dominate, oppress and exploit the defeated. That was the aim, the objective and cause of the enslavement and colonisation of the rest by the West. This brutal logic was not always expressed but it was covered up with embellishments and persuasive rhetoric.
Power does not enjoy naming itself nor does it frequently engage in celebrating its privileges. Empire has crafted, portrayed, performed and circulated an image of itself as a deliverer and saviour of the world.
Like a few other conquerors, imperialists, empire builders and colonisers once in a while Cecil John Rhodes did express the cold and dry logic of the Conquest of the Rest by the West. Talking to his countrymen and countrywomen, Rhodes emphasised that: “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies.
The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”
That was the unwashed logic of conquest and reason of Empire. That is still the oxygen of coloniality today. Empire went out of the West to the Rest of the World to plunder, pillage and siphon resources.
What was supposed to be a meeting, a dialogue and exchange of world civilisations became a clash.
Philosophers and historians have noted that the prosperity of the West came to be based on the impoverishment of the rest. It has been noted how every brick of western civilisation came to be cemented with the sweat of the slaves and blood of the colonised. Colonialism did not only dehumanise the colonised but also the coloniser that practised barbarism and evil for profit and for power.
It takes a stretch of thinking dangerously to unmask the logic of Empire that is forcefully and also beautifully covered with persuasive rhetoric. The conquerors, imperialists, colonialists and enslavers called themselves and carried themselves as missionaries, merchants, modernisers, developers, human rights warriors and democratisers that were on a grand civilising mission.
The project of conquering other people and their lands that Cecil John Rhodes exposed was covered up as the grand “white man’s burden” of civilising, modernising and liberating the darker world. Conquest, in all its brutality and barbarism, was dressed up in messianic robes and presented as deliverance.
The conquered were persuaded and also forced to be grateful for the railway lines, the roads, buildings, education and religion that the colonisers brought to their dark world. It was the colonisers’ dream that colonialism would be celebrated by the colonised. But, in historical actuality, conquest was resisted, liberation struggles were fought and decolonisation was occasioned. Tragically, decolonisation was not to be the end of imperialism and did not undo conquest, coloniality was still afoot.
Coloniality survived decolonisation
We must confront the historical paradox. The anti-colonialism of liberation movements of the South did not exactly become decoloniality. Decolonisation did not become liberation that liberated and re-humanised the oppressed and their oppressors, the conquered and their conquerors.
Easily those anti-colonialists that fought colonialism frequently became new colonisers after the fall of administrative colonialism. In Latin America, Asia and Africa, new heads of states, black Prime Ministers and Presidents became the new rhetoric of conquest.
They were there to dramatise independence that did not really exist. Their presence in governments and holding of political power concealed rather than revealed that the world was still a modern colonial world. That coloniality was intact was hidden. That Empire was an actuality was concealed. That conqueror and conquered identities were still alive was silenced.
That the systems of power, the institutions, political cultures and knowledges set in place in conquest were even more powerful was made invisible. Melodious national anthems and colourful flags of independent countries were not going to conceal forever that coloniality was still a rude reality. In Latin America especially, some despots used the excuse of the continuity of coloniality to perpetrate tyranny and perpetuate oppression of their own people.
Pretending to be fighting imperialism they gave themselves the power to dominate and oppress their own people. In short they become new colonisers that conquered and oppressed their own people while chanting anti-colonial and anti-imperialists slogans.
Decoloniality at large
Decoloniality is based on the realisation and consciousness that political decolonisation did not undo conquest. That decolonisation and political independence did not lead to liberation. As a philosophy it is not just the love of wisdom, which is a luxury, but it is the wisdom of love in times and places of the world where conquest abolished love and naturalised hate.
Decoloniality is an insurrection of conquered bodies, colonised places, silenced knowledges, forbidden spiritualities, marginalised genders, criminalised sensibilities and subjugated possibilities of the Global South. It is a philosophy and practice against fundamentalisms of the North and of the South; it is against imperialism and tyranny, and a search for that world where conquest and its enduring effects are abolished.
– Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected]
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