Читать книгу Decolonising the Human - Группа авторов - Страница 9

Huntington and Fukuyama are two spokespersons of empire, that is, of the present world system led by the Euro-North American regime: one celebrating illusory peace based on the neoliberal triumphalism of the West, and the other implicitly advocating for a war of civilisations based on the rapacious expansionism of empire. The two also exemplify the uses and abuses of knowledge in defence of the violence that has become an organising idea of the present world system. In the world academy that includes the Westernised university in Africa and Asia, privileged academics and intellectuals use their professorial and expert authority to defend and promote empire. It is in that, and other ways, that empire has co-opted, usurped and colonised knowledge and the academy.

Knowledge, in the shape of science and philosophy, has been constructed and mobilised to lend respectability, acceptability and normality to war, social inequalities and dehumanisation of the lesser other. The colonisation of the Global South and the enslavement of black people were scientifically planned and defended. Celebrated Western rationality and enlightenment became complicit in the irrational and dark oppression of black people, whose humanity was carefully doubted and opportunistically dismissed. It was with some of the finest scientific and philosophical erudition that Carl von Clausewitz published a treatise in 1812 on ‘principles of war’ that characterised violence and war as midwives of history, as the other form of politics that should be the rule rather than the exception (Von Clausewitz [1812] 1942). It was, too, with some political and intellectual triumphalism that, on the eve of American independence in 1776, Adam Smith presented his thesis holding that through the exploitation of the labour of the defeated, the wealth of nations would be created (Smith [1776] 2001). The wealth and prosperity of nations that Smith described were to be based on the colonisation and enslavement of others.

Biological sciences were deployed in overdrive in attempts to provide a scientific justification for the perceived inferiority and animal nature of black people (Magubane 2007). Trusted scientists of empire such as Charles Darwin ([1859] 2011), who investigated the ‘origin of species’, had their works used to deduce that some human beings were naturally unfit, and therefore less human, in a world whose logic of life was the survival of the fittest. Theology, too, was mobilised to project the enslaved and the colonised as people without souls who must be grateful to their conquerors for bringing them closer to God. Science and religion were married, and deployed together in separating human beings into those who were normatively human and those who were expelled from the privileged human family.

The production of knowledge that circulated ideas about the lesser humanity of the colonised and enslaved was accompanied by epistemicides, the systematic destruction of the sciences, philosophies and histories of the conquered (Grosfoguel 2013). That the colonised and the enslaved were humans who had sciences, religions and histories of their own was a truth that empire could not and cannot live with. It is for this reason that Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2014), in his forceful philosophical plea for ‘justice against epistemicide’ in the world, advances an argument that the Western understanding of life, the human and the world is not the only understanding. Santos pleads for the fight for social justice in the world to be necessarily accompanied by the struggle for ‘cognitive justice’ (Santos 2014: 42). One may add hermeneutic justice, such that other interpretations of the human, life and the world besides the Western one can also be taken seriously. The first freedom, in the observation of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018), is epistemic freedom, which is the freedom of people to think and to know who they are and where they are, without fear and encumbrance of the Eurocentric standard. Without the guilt of being second-comers or even visitors to thought and knowledge, he argues, marginal peoples should dare to invent and recover life and the world from the abyss of hegemonic constructions.

The question ‘can non-Europeans think?’ is asked satirically by Iranian scholar Hamid Dabashi (2015). The question is asked because of the prevalent assumption in Western thought that non-Europeans are naturally not gifted with thought and rationality. In effectively and violently imposing its model of power, the Euro-North American empire became a pretender to universalism, and used force and persuasion to make its culture a world culture (Mazrui 2001). In the attempt to homogenise global culture and to hegemonise its power and control of the world, the patriarchal West crushed human diversity and narrowed the world according to its imaginary.

Enslaved and colonised peoples have been rendered through a distorted mirror, forcing them to see and understand themselves in a way that gives their conquest and domination some sense, if not justification: ‘In this way, we continue being what we are not. And as a result we can never identify our true problems, much less resolve them, except in a partial and distorted way’ (Quijano 2000, 556). The victims of empire are given a false and distorted sense of themselves and their condition. The experiences of coloniality and domination are mirrored and reflected in falsified and misleading terms that favour the coloniser. The reflected image ‘occupies an important place in dialectics exalting the coloniser and humbling the colonised. Further it is economically fruitful’ (Memmi 1974, 123). This is government through stereotyping. Images of the oppressed are produced that justify their oppression and present it as salvation. In more and more emphatic ways, the oppressed are given understandings of themselves as deserving of their dehumanisation. Du Bois ([1859] 1969) captured well the way in which the oppressed are refused their positionality as people who have a problem, and are fraudulently treated as people who are a problem. Oppression and domination are presented as a consequence, rather than a cause, of the dehumanisation of the marginalised and inferiorised other.

Critical humanists, among them decolonial thinkers, critical diversity scholars and activists of both the Global South and the Global North in search of the liberation of the human from coloniality, are increasingly unmasking and resisting the coloniality of knowledge that stereotypes and simplifies the oppressed. Achebe (1989, 40), as noted above, is one of the African novelists who have written in critical ways that lament how African thinkers and writers have reproduced coloniality by looking, thinking and writing on Africa and African peoples in frames and terms that are defined in the Eurocentric paradigm of knowledge. Achebe exhorts African thinkers and writers, including himself, to resist the Eurocentric colonial sensibility. In other words, the march of the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge in the Global South should not, Achebe argues, go unchallenged. The project of critical diversity literacy (Steyn 2015), specifically, and decoloniality more generally, should not only be to unmask and describe the coloniality of power and the coloniality of knowledge, but also to cultivate among the oppressed and dominated a critical consciousness and resistance to colonial ways of understanding the human and its condition. Power, and the multiple privileges that it produces and protects, should, in intellectual and social justice terms, be rendered vulnerable and open. To Dabashis' satirical question ‘can non-Europeans think?’ Mignolo (2015) replies, ‘yes we can!’, insisting that non-Europeans and all other inferiorised, marginalised and oppressed peoples of the world can think and produce knowledge, among the full range of human attributes. That there is no one model of the human, and that others, all marginalised people, are humans too, and have the capacity to know, is a truth to be defended. Coloniality of knowledge must be met with decoloniality of thinking and knowing. Being human, rational and knowledgeable should be liberated from being hostage to the Eurocentric world view, and established as a quality of all people, with all our differences. One of the baptismal statements of the decolonial moment is that all people are produced by, and come from, legitimate histories and knowledges.