adminCetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
In politics and scholarship; just like in economics and sociality, the Europeans and the Americans have become the true children of power and privilege.
It is for that reason that when Western countries got entangled in wars they had the political and historical confidence to call their wars world wars.
In scholarship, when Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler meet in conferences in the West, one a joking psychoanalyst and another self-loving feminist, their pronunciations are reported as what philosophers of the world have said.
If Zizek and Butler were not white western thinkers they would not be give the epistemic power and privilege to be spokespersons of the entire planet.
Without any sense of irony, the West has made itself the world and it has made the world the West. Western peoples have made themselves the standard of the entire human race.
In a word, that is the foundational injustice of coloniality that defines political and historical relations between the Global North and the Global South.
The justice of decoloniality as a philosophy of liberation is the search for a world where politics and economics are not defined in terms of the West versus the rest or in terms the superior North against the inferior South.
Enrique Dussel was right to say that the first task of a decolonial philosopher of liberation is to confront the philosophy of history as rendered from Europe and America, that is to challenge the meaning of life and the world as presented by Western thinkers and politicians who think of and practice politics from a platform of conquest, power and privilege.
Decoloniality seeks another politics and another economics that do not draw their oxygen from conquest and the violence that it came with. With Hamid Dabash and Walter Mignolo, decolonial philosophers of the Global South hold the baptismal truth that non-Europeans and non-Americans also think and boast deep political and economic wisdoms that can serve the world.
Of politics as enmity
From the brightest of Western thinkers and political actors the finest political wisdom seems to be the idea of politics as enmity, and political practice as war. Heraclitus understood war as the oxygen of history and the beginning of all things. That Nazi sympathiser, Carl Schmitt, influentially circulated an idea of politics as the management of friend and enemy relations, and nothing more.
Led by the boastful Friedrich Nietzsche, the nihilists hold it to be true that the world must have permanent wars and temporary peace. War is supposed to be a permanent state of affairs and normalcy while peace should be a rare occurrence and a passing break from war.
In many ways, led by the Euro-American Empire the world is in a permanent state of war, cold here and hot there, but it still is war.
From Adam Smith to Alan Greenspan, the Euro-American Empire has circulated economic thoughts and practices that produce masters and slaves.
From Alexandra the Great to the present Donald Trump, the West has represented political thought and practice that is marked by the idea of conquerors and the conquered. The myths and fictions of democracy, the illusions of human rights and peace have not concealed that the West is about war upon the rest of the world.
The American military industrial complex and the Nato military alliance are demonstrations and perfections of the science of war that underlies the condition of the present world. The world that has produced and preserved the nuclear bomb is a world of enmity and war. Decolonial thinkers and philosophers of liberation seek to give body and soul to ideas of politics, not as enmity, war and domination, but as liberation.
Politics as high friendship
About friendship and politics, the philosophers of the West have said much, yet in that much the selfishness of the Global North remains. Just like in many things, what westerners mean by love, peace and justice is not always what peoples of the South understand love, peace and justice to be.
Aristotle, that defender of slavery and also the canonical theorist of classical Eurocentric political philosophy noted that “love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies” which expresses a deep bond between two people, a bond that cannot exists between conqueror and the conquered in the present world, that kind of bond is for the powerful and the privileged.
Aristotle himself could not imagine love to be extendable to slaves and lower peoples, it was limited love. The Nato military alliance is not a friendship but a club of powerful and privileged countries willing to protect their power and privilege in a hostile world.
Much like religion, politics produces strong beliefs and inspires strong actions in pursuit and actualisation of those beliefs. Strong political friendships produce strong political enmities, those that don’t share in the strong political beliefs become strong enemies of the believers.
Those that did not share in the ideals of the Greeks were called Barbarians, those that did not share in the values of Rome were called Gauls, the Judaists had their gentiles, the Mohammedans or Muslims have their infidels, colonising Christian missionaries had pagans as their other.
All strong beliefs and strong systems, in politics and religion have their victims and enemies.
Even as one of the central wisdoms of Christianity is that enemies must be loved. Christianity, it seems, may not be Christianity if it does not have a clear enemy that it sets out to fight daily.
The idea of politics as high friendship that this article proposes is not just the politics of friends that meet and agree to pursue common ideas and acts.
It is not about Nato allies that join together to defend common interests. This article proposes the high friendship that entails care for the enemy.
The biblical Samaritan did not extend friendship and care to a fellow Samaritan but an abandoned fellow of the tribe of Judah, a tribe that was a blood enemy of the Samaritans. In that sense; when friends meet to fortify and consummate their friendship, in economics and in politics of the world, they have not done anything new.
But when love and care is extended by the Judaist to the gentile, by the Muslim to the infidel, and by the national to the foreigner, something new and novel has taken place.
Decolonial samaritanism is close but even better than what Immanuel Kant described as “trust for the enemy” where even in war the opponents and enemies have minimum standards of trust, the knowledge that it is a war but not a war of extermination and annihilation.
Trust between enemies in politics is high friendship that exists between and amongst those that cannot be friends but agree to preserve each other and the world around them.
Decolonial samaritanism recovers the enemy from enmity and converts him or her to an adversary, one who can be defeated in war but not destroyed.
Politics as enmity and war believes in ideas of not only defeating but also destroying the opponent and in the process the world. What Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni theorises as the problematic idea of a “world without others” is the illusion in politics that friends can come together and destroy all their enemies to create a world full of only friends.
Politics as liberation and high friendship entails the deep spiritual and metaphysical homework of knowing that there is a friend inside one’s most bitter enemy. And that destroying one enemy creates more enemies and does not produce new friends.
In that sense, true victory in world politics is that which is measurable on its care and preservation of the defeated not simply its celebration of victory.
The highest and most important property of victorious politics is it’s vanquished. True political victory and friendship cannot be tested from the fraternity of friends but the solidarity with enemies.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria: [email protected]
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