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Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
All anti-colonialists worth mentioning are vigorously opposed to the colonial maps and borders that still divide places and peoples of the Global South long after colonialism is supposed to have ended.
In Africa, from Kwame Nkrumah to Thabo Mbeki, and Muammar Gaddaffi to Felix Tshitsekedi, Pan-Africanists vigorously campaign against the tyranny and coloniality of colonial borders that have kept Africa and Africans divided. As, not just an anti-colonialist but a self-respecting decolonist, I want to deposit the argument that not only national and colonial borders that divide countries and peoples are a problem.
I want to insist that nations themselves are a huge colonial problem that must be modified or abolished altogether to allow human beings access to their liberty and full humanity under the sun.
I want to expose the insufficiency of anti-colonialism in just campaigning against colonial borders and not demolishing them.
I posit to erect the rigour of decoloniality in questioning and critiquing nations and nationalism as their operating ideology. I want to dismiss as colonial propaganda the arrogant argument by some smart alecs that undoing colonial borders is not pragmatic.
What these smart alecs should note is that colonialism itself and the colonial borders that came with it was until it was done considered impossible and unrealistic.
True liberation can at extra-ordinary times be about imagining and doing the impossible, I argue.
That national maps and borders, together with their nations, should go is a decolonial struggle of the present and the future. The future world is a post-national world.
That Ticklish Indians Debate
I was busy dusting up my collection in my Situation Room a few days ago when I stumbled upon an old journal paper that was about a fierce debate between two Indian scholars, the Indian-American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and the political scientist, Partha Chatterjee. It was a polite but high voltage exchange between two intellectual veterans and combatants, on the viability of nation-states in the modern world. Partha Chatterjee apologises for nations and believes they still have a future. Nations are innocent, it is nationalists and their tyrants that have given nations and nationalism a bad name, he notes.
My observation is that one cannot defend nations, nation-states and nationalism without defending colonialism that created them in the very first place.
I need not belabour the point here but nations, nation-states and the countries as mapped and bordered territories are all creatures of conquest and artefacts of Empire.
For that reason, I leave the titanic Chatterjee to his colonial misery and follow what argument Appadurai advanced. Chatterjee remains an anti-colonialist that opposes colonialism and its maps, borders and nations, but does not want to dream of abolishing them. That sterile anti-colonialism is as good as colonial and therefore not only irrelevant but inimical.
I walk with Appadurai. “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation” in the Global South. The nation and the state, together with the country as a territory that houses them are artefacts of colonialism and imperialism that were created to allow governability by Empire.
Transnationalism is not even enough. We, for full liberation and re-humanisation, the world over, deserve post-nationalism and post-continentalism.
Human beings of the world have other citizenships and solidarities beyond the national. Christians and Muslims of the world, for instance, are examples of huge populations that recognise their common belonging and destiny beyond borders and nations, beyond races even. There are strong political and social solidarities, stronger than passionate nationalism, that bind many populations of the world together into emotional, spiritual, social and psychological citizenships.
The social media and the world-wide web that accompanies them have created a worldwide society of people that socialise, trade, practice religion and politics in total oblivion and “ignorance” of nations and their nationalities, their maps and borders.
Human society has increasingly crossed and even jumped the tyrannical and colonial borders, in many social, political and economic ways. Increasing migration and even the present refugee crisis in Europe prove that borders, maps and their nations are old fashioned ideological fossils of the long past.
There is no almighty deity of history that climbed down from the high heavens one day and said “let there be borders, countries and nations!” Nations, states and their mapped territories, the countries, are a man-made reality that can be unmade.
We have witnessed in past and recent history that there is no nation-state that ever became fully self-sufficient and independent. Even the mighty China and United States of America need the oil from Venezuela and the wood from Uganda as much as the Ugandans and Namibians covet some resources and opportunities in the West and the East. That alone is natural testimony and defence of a post-nation and post-country world of the future.
Human beings need each other and need to be everywhere and free in the world. As part of his forceful argument for the social contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau canonically noted that: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” Borders, countries and nations are part of the chains, I argue, that limit the natural freedom of human beings. It is an evil system that created borders and boundaries to house nations.
That system later exported and imposed maps, borders, countries and nations on the Global South. Berlin 1884-5 was Africa’s colonial mapping, bordering and nationing.
By other names, countries with their maps and borders are glorified prisons in which nations as people are incarcerated and their freedoms limited, I note. One of the freest and most powerful elements of nature are air and the water.
These elements observe no borders and are not confined by any maps in their natural free movement. So, men and women will be at their freest and most natural state when and only when like the waters and the winds, they can move freely and belong to movement itself, I note.
The identity of human beings should not be nationality but fluidity and mobility in the wide world, without ideological or territorial confinement of any kind.
(To be continued next week)
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Sunnyside, Pretoria in South Africa: [email protected]
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