Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 13

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Patricia Pinky Ndlovu

The medieval European world knew the Blackman chiefly as a legend or occasional curiosity, but still as fellow man – an Othello, a Prester John, or an Antar. The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in the West Indies and America … and we face today throughout the dominant world [the belief] that colour is a mark of inferiority.

– W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro

Modern hierarchies of race appear to have emerged in the contradictions between humanisms' aspirations to universality and the needs of modern colonial regimes to manage work, reproduction, and social organization of the colonized; the intimacies of four continents formed the political unconscious of modern racial classification.

– Lisa Lowe, ‘The Intimacies of Four Continents’

Wole Soyinkas' widely cited injunction against Négritude, ‘a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it pounces’ (Ischinger 1974, 23), suffers miserably from ahistoricity. If the tigers' essence or being as a tiger was questioned and renamed derogatively as an ant or something similar, it would definitely be forced to proclaim its tigritude (its essence or being) as part of its resistance and defensive self-constitution. At the very centre of ‘doing human’ is the politics of self-constitution and self-definition, particularly for a people whose humanity has been denied or degraded. Soyinka misses this point in his quick critique of Négritude, which emerged within a context of French colonialism, called ‘assimilation’, that was very aggressive towards and destructive of African culture, and indeed attacked the colonised peoples' essence, their being. At least he later corrected himself, and admitted that his earlier critique of Négritude had been mistaken. In May 2016, he delivered a lecture entitled ‘Repositioning Négritude: The Dialogue Resumes’ at the Department of Arts and Culture Africa Month Colloquia in South Africa, where he reappraised Négritude as an embodiment of relevant humanism. He posited that ‘it is possible that the last service of Négritude to humanity will be to assist us in redefining humanity’ (Soyinka 2016, 3). He concluded that ‘Négritude therefore suffers from no negative baggage and should thus be unafraid to pronounce upon what others shy from’ (2016, 4).

This chapter underscores the legitimacy and logics of all the African or black initiatives aimed at decolonial self-definition and self-reconstitution, such as Négritude, Ethiopianism, Garveyism, the Harlem Renaissance, African Personality, the Black Consciousness Movement, Afrocentricity, Pan-Africanism, the African Renaissance, Decoloniality and many others. These are discourses and initiatives of self-definition and self-reconstitution produced by people resisting and fighting racism, enslavement, colonialism and neocolonialism. Inevitably, these discourses will be problematic, limited and imperfect, as they have emerged from the battlefield of history and human struggles. The ambivalences, ambiguities and even contradictions of these discourses and initiatives are well covered in Kwame Anthony Appiahs' In My Fathers' House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). However, their inevitable ambivalences and imperfections do not justify the dismissal of African struggles for self-definition and self-reconstitution, otherwise known as self-determination. At the core of these discourses and initiatives has been the problem of dismemberment and dehumanisation.

Blackness emerges within the history of racism, enslavement and colonisation as a badge of sub-humanity and inferiority. Two concepts – dismemberment and re-membering – enable this chapter to empathetically make sense of the technologies of invention of ‘blackness’ as a marker of sub-human, if not deficient, identity, as well as to appreciate African and black peoples' struggles for self-reconstitution and resistance to dehumanising Eurocentrism. In Critique of Black Reason (2017), Achille Mbembe posits and examines the thesis of a modern, troubled world that was ‘becoming black’. Blackness, in Mbembes' analysis, is a product of the racism that reduced human bodies and living beings ‘to matters of appearance, skin and colour’ (Mbembe 2017, 2). This is how he puts it:

Across early capitalism, the term ‘Black’ referred only to the condition imposed on peoples of African origin (different forms of depredation, dispossession of all power of self-determination, and, most of all, dispossession of the future and of time, the two matrices of the possible). Now, for the first time in human history, the term ‘Black’ has been generalized. The new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalised as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the Becoming Black of the world. (2017, 5–6)

However, in an earlier publication Mbembe (2001) was very critical of what he referred to as ‘African modes of self-writing’, which he associated with the politics of Afro-radicalism, nativism and narcissism of minor difference. The truth of the matter is that African modes of self-writing are part of the politics of and struggles for self-reconstitution. These modes of writing emerged within an anti-black white world. It was the anti-black white world that provoked Aimé Césaire to pose what he termed three ‘tormenting questions’: ‘Who am I? Who are we? What are we in this white world?’ (Césaire quoted in Thiam 2014, 2). This is how the complex theme of black subjectivity came to haunt history and philosophy. The question of ‘blackism on a world scale’ is at the very centre of what Lewis R. Gordon (2000, 2008) terms ‘Africana philosophy’ and ‘Africana existential thought’. According to Gordon,

Africana philosophy is a species of thought, which involves theoretical questions raised by critical engagements with ideas in Africana cultures and their hybrid, mixed, or creolized forms worldwide. Since there was no reason for the people of the African continent to have considered themselves African until that identity was imposed upon them through conquest and colonization in the modern era (the 16th Century onwards), this area of thought also refers to the unique set of questions raised by the emergence of ‘Africans’ and their diaspora here designated by the term ‘Africana’. Such concerns include the convergence of most Africans with the racial term ‘black’ and its many connotations. Africana philosophy refers to the philosophical dimensions of this area of thought. (Gordon 2008, 1)

Somehow it is these legitimate concerns that Mbembe (2001, 6–7) seems to ridicule, caricature and dismiss as informed by three tragic acts (slavery, colonialism and apartheid), ‘three spectres and their masks (race, geography, and tradition)’, and ‘three rituals so constantly repeated as to become inaudible’ – refutation of Western definitions of Africa, denunciation of what the West has done and continues to do to Africa, and disqualification of the Wests' claims to monopoly of what it means to be human. This critique sounds like an apologia for what Euro-North American-centric modernity, enslavement and colonialism have done to Africa. With the coming of resurgent and insurgent decolonisation and decoloniality, spearheaded by student and youth movements under such banners as Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, the quest for African self-writing is once more being forcefully inserted into the public arena. However, in his return to the same subject of ‘blackness’ in Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe is somewhat more measured in his analysis of African struggles for self-reconstitution through self-writing, though still critical of what he terms ‘black reason’: ‘Black reason consists of a collection of voices, pronouncements, discourses, forms of knowledge, commentary, and nonsense, whose object is things or people of “African origin”. It is affirmed as their name and their truth (their attributes and qualities, their destiny and its significance as an empirical portion of the world) ... From the beginning, its primary activity was fantasizing’ (Mbembe 2017, 27).

The reality is that the resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century, as a planetary movement, has brought into the public arena what one of the authors of the present chapter (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018b) terms ‘epistemic freedom’ (the right to think, write, communicate, theorise, view the world and produce knowledge from an African locus of enunciation). The current resurgent and insurgent demands for decolonisation point to the structural, systemic and institutional reality of coloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a, 2013b; Quijano 2000). Grace Khunou and her colleagues, in Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience (2019), capture the personal accounts given by black academics of their lived experiences at South African universities in the context of the ongoing resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of higher education. The questions of black subjectivity and the paradigm of difference emerge poignantly as haunting products of apartheid colonialism, as well as making a strong case for African self-writing as a decolonial move.

In the rich decolonial scholarship, the planetary issue of ‘blackness’, just like that of ‘whiteness’, is approached as a sociogenic question rather than as an ontogenic question – that is, rooted in the paradigm of difference constitutive of an invented modern Euro-North American-centric world system whose ever shifting global orders are mediated by the paradigm of difference. Sociogenesis here names the racial materiality of Euromodernity which enabled the social classification of the human population and its racial hierarchisation. This is a different rendition from that offered by Mbembe (2001, 8), in which the problem of blackness on a world scale is viewed as propelled by ‘constant repetition, a set of pious dogmas and empty dreams’. As a concept, ‘blackism’ enables a sociodiagnostic approach to both technologies of dehumanisation (dismemberment) and struggles for rehumanisation (re-membering). It speaks to an invented problematic human condition, and embodies the complex politics of invention of ‘personhood’ within the context of Euro-North American-centric bourgeois modernity. Since the time of colonial encounters, blackness has emerged and unfolded as an identitarian phenomenon and a form of consciousness (as can be seen in black power movements and black consciousness movements).

However, in the first epigraph to this chapter, W.E.B. Du Bois articulates two senses of blackness (Du Bois 2001, 6). The first is that of legendary curiosity among medieval Europeans about blackness as a state of being. That curiosity was not yet contaminated by the poison of race. The second is the sense of dismemberment, infantilisation, inferiorisation and enslavement that was constitutive of the unfolding of Euro-North American modernity. What emerges poignantly from this context is blackism on a world scale, as the outcome of ‘coloniality of being’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007). Coloniality of being names ‘a certain skepticism regarding the humanity of the enslaved and colonised sub-others’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 256). At the very centre of this coloniality of being are technologies such as dismemberment, dehumanisation and inferiorisation of some human species by other human species. Pigmentation is effectively used to render the lives of those deemed to be black as the dispensable other. This is why Mbembe (2017, 47) posits that ‘the history of slavery and colonialism constituted the term “Black” as the name “of the slave: man-of-metal, man-merchandise, man-money”’.

Thus, the concept of dismemberment, which contributes to the framing of this chapter, speaks to how those who were ‘othered’ as black people were pushed out of the human family, and underscores the very denial of their humanity (their thingification) (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). Dismemberment is part of the unfolding and expansion of Euro-North American-centric modernity, which in practice involved submission of the modern world to European memory (Mudimbe 1994, xii). Exploration, surveying, ‘discovering’, mapping, conquest, colonisation, naming, dispossession and claims of ownership of everything in the modern world formed the core of dismemberment. Thus we posit that blackism on a world scale emerged at a time when the continents were being invented, not only through cartography but through the spread of the capitalist economic system across the human world, and through the nascent unfolding of a global division of labour.

C.L.R. James (1982) highlights the political economy within which blackness emerged. To him, the unfolding of modernity from the eighteenth century onwards not only resulted in the creation of slave societies like San Domingo (Haiti), but also established an exploitative set of connections whereby Europe, Africa and the Americas were linked through nexuses of mercantile and capitalist accumulation of wealth by Europe, laying the foundations of globalisation. For instance, the proceeds of slavery in the Americas contributed immensely to the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie in Europe, as well as to the emergence of a new Euromodern civilisation underpinned by the capitalist world economy. The drive for cheap labour in this economy meant that even the abolition of the slave trade had to be succeeded by another exploitative economic arrangement that was equally slave-like in the conditions it imposed on working people. This reality explains the rise of the indentured labour system of recruiting and exploiting labour − this time bringing the labour of Indians and Chinese to the exploitative economy that arose on the basis of African slave labour. Mbembe is therefore correct in arguing that ‘the transnationalization of the Black condition was therefore a constitutive moment for modernity, with the Atlantic serving as its incubator. The Black condition incorporated a range of contrasting states and statuses: those sold through the transatlantic slave trade, convict labourers, subsistence slaves (whose lives were spent as domestics), feudal slaves, house slaves, those who were emancipated, and those who were born slaves’ (Mbembe 2017, 15).

When we take into account the resistance that coalesced around the identity of blackness, we can therefore confidently refer to the dynamics of blackism on a world scale in the second sense of ‘re-membering’. Re-membering encapsulates the consistent attempts of black people at counter-self-creation, self-definition, recovery, restoration of their denied humanity, but also systematic self-re-writing of themselves back into human history. These struggles and initiatives embraced the cultural-cum-intellectual-cum-political-cum-identitarian formations that included Garveyism, Ethiopianism and many other such movements (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018a, 2018b). Thus, those who were designated as black people were essentially thrown into the deep end of a problematic liminal state of being that was perpetually transitional in nature – caught between denied humanity and the seductive promise of eventually attaining ontological density so as to return to the human family. It was perhaps this state of limbo that provoked W.E.B. Du Bois ([1903] 2008) to write about ‘the souls of black folk’ and Lewis R. Gordon to push for ‘existentia Africana’ thought (2008).