Global South: The crisis of postcoloniality

THE Global South includes countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa that share a common history of conquest and colonisation. These are countries that have not been beneficiaries but have been in the receiving end of Euro-American imperialism and coloniality. These countries were previously referred to as countries of the Third World. The term Third World has largely been discarded by critical theorists and analysts for the reason that it seeks to reinforce rather than challenge the peripherisation and marginalisation of former colonies.

In the previous decades the so-called Third World was understood to be made out of countries that were going through their postcolonial experience and were enduring postcolonial conditions, politically and economically.Decolonial thinking and the literature that it has produced have dismissed the idea of postcoloniality and the postcolonial theory as imbricated in coloniality.

The term “post-colonial” literary means after colonialism, and therefore is suggestive of the understanding that colonialism has passed together with its effects. As such, post-colonial thought is frequently found making such arguments as that people of the

Global South should be done complaining about colonialism, slavery and imperialism because these epochal events that were temporary have passed. Decolonial thought disputes that colonialism, slavery and imperialism were temporary events that were epochal and insists that these were epical events that have not passed but are still taking place in different guises, systems, and structures of power within the world system.

In the understanding of coloniality, decolonial thought makes the conclusion that the power relations, economic and political, between the conquerors and the conquered remain intact. It is for that reason that some decolonial activists, in the Global South and the Global North, insists that the Euro-American Empire should pay due reparations for the losses of slavery, colonialism and imperialism that the Global South has suffered. As such, the theory and the idea of postcoloniality in the Global South is under challenge and attack, can be said to be in crisis as its truth and power are disputed.
Globalisation and the Global South

The past decades have, in the global media and the academy, witnessed a vogue of the term and the idea of globalisation. Scholars and journalists have all been easily circulating the term, normalising and naturalising it, sometimes without sufficiently fleshing out its multiple meanings. Theodore Levitt, the Harvard School of Business professor is credited with coining the term globalisation. From the Marxist school of thought, Professor David Harvey is recognised as the foremost theorist of Globalisation alongside Immanuel Wallerstein, he of the World-Systems Analysis theory. Not to be left out is Anthony Giddens who can be considered one of the popularisers of the theory and practice of Globalisation. Decolonial theorists have thrown some mud at globalisation and the theorising that comes with it. In decolonial thinking and activism globalisation is imperialism in a tuxedo. The term and the activities that accompany it are considered imperialism and coloniality dressed as global unity and conviviality. Alongside such terms as civilisation and modernisation, globalisation is noted for outwardly pushing the gospel of progress and advancement when in the inside it is advancing conquest, exploitation and oppression of the societies and peoples of the Global South that were forcibly integrated into the world economic and political system as victims rather than equal partners. Globalisation can be understood as part of the West’s drive towards a New World Order after its political and economic interests. This drive has fallen into a crisis that is vividly exemplified in the war in Ukraine where the Russian Federation insists that it cannot accept being surrounded and engulfed by NATO and the military, political and economic monstrosities that it comes with.

In a punchy essay of 1997, titled: “Chiefs and Commoners in the Global Village,” Paul Tiyambe Zeleza decries the inequality of people of the Global South within the global village that globalisation is supposed to have reduced the world into. Zeleza mobilised his critical stamina to expose how the vaunted global village was actually not a village, but a plantation populated by masters and servants, commoners and chiefs. In a way, Zeleza was just taking his place amongst the thinkers of the Global South that were disputing the idea of the Global Village and insisting on the reality of the Global South within the globe. That we are global villagers but not villagers the same is a decolonial statement.

The Global South is not simple. It is a complicated phenomenon in that it is not strictly a geographic reality. As such there are communities and individuals in the Global North that endure Global South social conditions and experiences. Similarly, there are privileged elites in the Global South that enjoy Global North social conditions and experiences. That is why we insist that the Global South is after all Global. It is not in any way provincial. What can be called an entanglement is how the Global North has penetrated the Global South and how the Global South has penetrated the Global North.
The Crisis of Postcolonialism

In the past few weeks, I have interested myself in the literature produced by writers that are invested in postcolonial thinking in the sense that they believe that Africa should be done worrying and talking about colonialism and move on to harvest the benefits of globalisation. Greg Mills in particular is irritated by the way Africans are sold to blaming the colonial past for their economic and political woes. Mills mobilises examples of countries from Latin America and Asia to show how the countries walked away from their colonial pasts and invented themselves as developed modern countries that have embraced globalisation and harvested its benefits.

There are others such as the former White House and World Bank operative, Keynesian economist and public policy analyst, Joseph Stiglitz, who from his professorial position at Columbia University, have critiqued globalisation and the work of the IMF and the World Bank in the Global South. But such Global North critics of Globalisation as Stiglitz also suffer a crisis in that they ultimately believe that the Global South remains poor because it has not properly embraced globalisation. Eurocentric critics of Eurocetricism are exactly those Europeans and their American cousins who understand coloniality and how it affects the Global South but remain blinkered by it in their analysis. They suffer the insider syndrome where they might be opposed to coloniality, but their lives and their work promotes it. They remain entrapped in the myth of the “end of history and the last man” that Francis Fukuyama so enchantingly sold soon after the “end” of the Cold War, if it was an end.

The analysis of globalisation that postcolonial critiques of globalisation can only give suffers a crisis where they can see coloniality but have a limit in understanding its presence and depth. The temptation to believe that colonialism is a thing of the past is a limiting temptation that masks rather than reveals the truth that colonial power and social relations between the Global North and the Global South are a present reality that needs to be confronted from an intellectual and social justice objective. From a decolonial perspective that is clear about coloniality, one can state that the Global South is real, and the Global South matters.

One of the catchiest slogans of the global Marxist movement was: “ workers of the world unite, you have only your chains to lose.” The fault in that beautiful slogan, its weakness and powerlessness, was that workers of the world were not workers the same. Black workers of the Global South were exploited not only as workers but also as blacks and had to fight that extra struggle beyond the struggle of the workers of the world. Similarly, the Global South has more decolonial homework to do beyond embracing and celebrating the ‘sugar-candy mountain’ of globalisation and postcolonialism.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa. Contacts: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>.