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Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
In describing coloniality as a system of world domination that remains intact after the abolition of slavery and decolonisation of countries, decolonial thinkers have severally noted how the family unit has not been insulated from coloniality.
In conventional historiography, the conquest of the Global South is mainly narrated along the lines of how ancient indigenous kingdoms, principalities and empires were vanquished by invaders and Empire builders from the Global North.
Except for a few white and Eurocentric historians, anthropologists and sociologists, there has been little focus on the African family, for instance, as a highly charged political unit that was on its own conquered and also used to fortify slavish and colonial domination.
One of the strong ways of understanding the enduring impacts of slavery and colonialism as projects of coloniality at a world scale is to listen to the voices of victims and survivors that lived to tell how slavish conquest and colonial domination impacted on them existentially.
It is also important to make the observation that if the family was used by enslavers and colonisers in cementing conquest and domination and in establishing coloniality then the family is usable as a political, spiritual, cultural and economic unit in decoloniality and its liberation projects.
Together with the school, the church and the media, the family unit is another social institution and political entity that became a site of coloniality and which can be made into a platform of decoloniality. What was colonised should be decolonised.
The System of Slavery and the family Unit
Frederick Douglass is one American slave who lived to tell the long tale of how horrendous and “soul-killing” slavery was to the black people that found themselves in American plantations.
According to Frederick Douglass female and male slaves were forced to breed and produce children the way livestock are by farmers. As soon as a baby slave was born it was taken away from its mother and sold to a master that will grow the child into a slave.
Thus Douglass could say: “ I have no accurate knowledge of my age, the larger part of slaves know little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”
Douglass swore that “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting time, harvest time, cherry time, and spring time or fall time.”
As soon as the male slave impregnated the female one the two were separated and soon as the baby slave was born it was taken away from its mother.
Effectively the system of slavery destroyed the family unit. Family union and social solidarity among slaves was not allowed, there were to be no brothers and sisters in the plantation, only slaves.
This was not typical divide and rule, it was proper dehumanisation, like animals in the wilderness slaves were not allowed familial relations. All African Americans today have white surnames because their slave ancestors were not allowed the surnames that they came with from Africa, they were to be called by the surnames of their masters.
That was another slavish technology to destroy the family roots of slaves, to erase memory of their African roots, and make them true slaves. Douglass narrates how education, that is literacy and numeracy, were not allowed to slaves.
The Christian gospel was manipulated; preachers selected those verses from the Bible that emphasised that slaves should obey their masters and not the verses that told of social justice and human liberation. In a strong way, slavery destroyed families and built slaves into herds like those of tamed animals. Slavery was dehumanising and animalising.
Enslavers were aware that the family unit, especially the African family unit and its social and spiritual unity and values was too humanising and too liberating to be allowed among slaves.
The System of Colonialism and the Family Unit
Edward Said is that powerful philosopher who was an Egyptian that became a Palestinian and later became an American.
The forced movement of his family and his personal exile from Palestine made him realise the pains of broken and displaced families in a modern colonial world.
No philosopher in the West, including Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agambeni and Hannah Arendt even, has written in more depth about the experience of exile from family and country as Edward Said has done in his Reflections on Exile essay. Said begins his memoir: Out of Place, with a strong observation that “all families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even language.”
In that correct Saidian view the family unit is a community and a place where all children get their ancestry, parentage, morality, spirituality, culture and identity that make them human beings that are able to enter and live in society.
The family is the first unit and cell of the nation. To destroy families as colonialism did through displacement, forced labour systems in mines, farms and factories is in the first place to destroy nations at their very core.
Families give people history, some founding myths of the clans and the nations, and they also propose certain futures and visions. For that reason, when colonialism disrupted and displaced families it blocked the development of certain futures and national visions.
As soon as natives were turned into citizens of the colonial state and colonial subjects their family identities were in many ways compromised.
In the creation of homelands, Bantustans and native reserves the colonisers used family, clan and blood lines to settle people, yes.
But this was not for the unity of the families and clans, it was for the disunity of the nations and the use of tribalism to divide and rule.
Under colonialism, if the family was not destroyed it was abused for divide and rule purposes. The chiefs that were traditional leaders of clans and nations were turned, by colonialism, into colonial constables who managed their people on behalf of the colonisers.
Much like the system of slavery, the system of colonialism was as the system of coloniality is, toxic to the family. One can argue that slavery and colonialism, and imperialism at large, captured the African family and turned it into a colonial unit.
Decolonising the Family
There is a flourish of literature on decolonising education (the school), decolonising religion (the church) and decolonising information and culture (the media) but very little on decolonising the family as a political, economic, cultural and ideological unit.
It is in the family unit that citizens of society at large are produced and formed. In the family are cultivated moral values, social ethics, political impulses and economic drives that impact on society.
Psychologically, the traumas (injuries and pains) that give people fears (phobias) and shape their loves (philias) which make them the kind of people that they are to be, are mainly found in the family unit. Society is, in a way, what families have made it to be.
If society is an organism, families are organs. There is no economic or political process that seeks to liberate societies and re-humanise communities and still ignore the family as the first garden of liberation and re-humanisation. Decolonial family values should be the first seeds of values of humanity and liberation for every people.
The first impulses and passions of human and national consciousness are produced and directed in the family as a unit that should be made a unit of liberation and not of domination and exploitation.
The family is a sociological, psychological, spiritual, cultural and political institutions that should be centralised in the re-humanisation and liberation of societies.
The way enslavers and colonisers hated and sought to destroy the family unit in Africa, should tell decolonists just how important the family unit is in decoloniality and its liberation project.
-Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Cape Town, South Africa: [email protected]
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