Decolonising the Human

Perspectives from Africa on difference and oppression

Melissa Steyn, William Mpofu, Gbenga S Adejare, Olayinka Akanle, Cary Burnett, Jojolola Fasuyi, Nokuthula Hlabangane, Robert Maseko, Morgan Ndlovu, Pinky Patricia Ndlovu, Sibonokuhle Ndlovu, Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara, Brian Sibanda, Tendayi Sithole, Siphamandla Zo, Melissa Steyn, William Mpofu, Melissa Steyn, William Mpofu

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776146536
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting 'the human' in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions. The 'human' emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human.Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.

1 The Trouble with the Human

William Mpofu, Melissa Steyn

All communities create notions of their place within the array of sentient and non-sentient beings with whom they share their worlds. The principal trouble with the grand construction of the human of Euro-modernity, however, is that it was founded on unhappy circumstances and for tragic purposes. Man, as a performative idea, created inequalities and hierarchies usable for the exclusion and oppression of the other. The status of the human was self-attributed to dominant people powerful enough to name themselves and define others. That which was categorised as non-human became things, reduced to resources, usable and disposable by the unapologetic humans. The attribute human, in other words, is not self-evident or assured. It can be wielded; given and taken away. The threat of its withdrawal from, or permanent denial to, weaker peoples in peripheralised spaces continues to define life within a climate of fear that makes being human a fragile condition and an uncertain reality (Soyinka 2004). These dispensable others and objects of power are found everywhere as black people, women, the poor and homeless, refugees and foreigners, gay, lesbian, queer and trans people, the old and vulnerable, people living with disabilities and other others.

The prevailing constructs of ‘man’ and ‘human’ began with the durable handiwork of (male) European humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who needed convenient and powerful tools for classifying themselves and categorising others (Mignolo 2015, 158). The male Westerner, as the Christian and paradigmatic human, entered into relationships on grossly unequal terms. Conquerors in the shape of patriarchs, empire builders, merchants and missionaries employed different approaches in disciplining the bodies of the conquered through violence, arresting the appetites and desires of the natives with goods and services, and dominating the minds and hearts of the subjects with gospels and hymns. Conquest was designed to make the conquered docile and obedient, subject to exploitation and ownership.

Mahmood Mamdani (2013) elucidates this political principle as ‘define and rule’, where power is able to name and by so doing dominate its subjects as inadequate people with deficits and lacks, whose oppression may therefore not be so morally wrong. Power has distributive privilege and enjoys the resources of classifying and categorising the objects and subjects around itself. Human differences, in that scheme of constructions, classifications and hierarchisations, are not expressions of human diversity, but excuses for the oppression and exploitation of the other. Power, without naming itself, is able to name, define, judge and place others as weaker. It enjoys the privilege of presenting itself in salvationist, protective, developmentalist, democratic and humanitarian terms that hide the domination it exercises and the often deadly consequences of this for those who have lost their equality and full membership of the human category.

The paradox of Western modernity, therefore, is that its grand rhetoric which announces freedom, happiness, progress and development has marched hand in hand with the logic of coloniality. The coloniality of Western modernity has participated in the appropriation of natural resources, exploitation of labour, legal control of ‘undesirables’, imposition of the interests and world view inherent in a capitalist economy, and denial of the full humanity of the disempowered and the impoverished (Mignolo 2015, 164). The condition of the oppressed is not a condition resulting from natural causes. Gendered violence and inequality are not the inevitable consequence of biology. Peripheralised countries are not undeveloped, their people are not powerless and poor; the countries have been underdeveloped, the people impoverished and also disempowered through displacement and dispossession.

The enslavement and colonisation of Africans was based on their removal from the category of the human. Those who were to be enslaved and colonised first had to lose their human equality and be characterised as inferior and incomplete beings. The work of decoloniality in Africa, therefore, becomes a search for completeness through the recovery, restoration and recognition of the equal belonging of black people to the world. Dani Wadada Nabudere (2011, 1) correctly notes that ‘Afrikology’ as a philosophy is the search for human wholeness in a world that has been defined by loss of equality and denial of the full humanity of the conquered and oppressed. The fight for liberation as a form of social justice is also a struggle for the recovery of denied and lost humanity. Our book is positioned within this decolonial struggle.

The philosophical dilemma of the human in the Global South

‘Where and when exactly did the rain begin to beat us?’ is a philosophical question that is posed by Chinua Achebe (1989, 43) in his meditation on the African political and social condition. Achebe is one of the African thinkers who have demanded a return to historical sources and political genealogies and provenances in search of the time and place in which Africans lost their equality within the human family. Achebe ponders the ‘hopes and impediments’ that have defined attempts at understanding between the North and the South, and amongst people positioned differently within intersecting power relations.

Achebes' demand to know what happened to the common humanity of human beings reminds us of the unstable link between the human and the humane. How some humans use power to monopolise being human and expel others from the human family remains a haunting philosophical dilemma of inhumanity that has a long historical trajectory in the South and in the North. Socrates, a questioning mind, left the fourth century BCE with the haunting question of why everyone on earth seemed to believe in humanity ‘but not in the existence of humans’ (Plato 2010, 24). He was perplexed by the fact that everywhere, from religious pulpits to political podiums, beautiful things were being said about the love of humanity, and yet the majority of human beings were being oppressed everywhere. Multitudes were being thingified right in the centre of Athens, the city state celebrated as the cradle of reason and democracy, much as coloniality was born and bred right at the centre of what has been celebrated as liberty and progress.

In the same vein as Achebe (1989) pondering the beginnings of the dehumanisation of Africans, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1755] 2004, 1) in the eighteenth century agonised over the ‘origins of inequality’ among human beings, to the extent that he wished humans could have remained at the level of animals that show respect for life and mercy for the weak among themselves. Yearning for the ways of the animal kingdom was Rousseaus' way of condemning the evil done by humans to other humans. To compare the human to the animal, and to favour the animal, becomes an expression of the deepest philosophical indictment of the evil perpetrated by humans. Human success in the arts and the sciences, Rousseau opined, only served to conceal the truth that humans were worse than beasts in their cruel and evil practices.

Friedrich Nietzsche ([1906] 1968, 1) called ‘the will to power’ an insatiable and unreasonable appetite for profit, power and domination. Oppression begins with an appetite and a passion. What allows war to be celebrated as necessary and natural (Machiavelli [1532] 2009) is the desire to, by any means necessary, conquer and dominate the other. The era of the Enlightenment itself, storied as the death of God and the birth of reason that would liberate humans and brighten the world with progress, became an era of the false promise. Steve Martinot (2011), for instance, notes that the epoch of the same Enlightenment that set alight development and advancement in the West darkened the South with human suffering, disasters and pain. The year in which the conquest of the Americas was consolidated, 1492, when modernity is supposed to have begun to infiltrate the Global South, when the idea of the nation state was born, is the year that Enrique Dussel (1996, 1) describes as the beginning of ‘the invention’ and also ‘eclipse’ of the ‘inferior’ other by the conquering and ‘superior’ big Other on the planet. The conquered peoples of the New World were judged to have no souls and no religion, and they therefore became legitimate subjects of conquest, domination, enslavement and expulsion from their lands, from the world and from life itself. God and religion became political capital, a resource that was used to include some and exclude others from the human family. People were divided into the categories of the godly and the godless, and thus were they separated, and the weaker amongst them condemned.

The always already gendered (Kitch 2009; Oyěwùmí 1997; Trinh 1989) classification of human beings according to race began, and was spread as an accompaniment of modernity and coloniality to the regions of Latin America, Asia and Africa (Quijano 2000). From slavery in the Americas through colonialism in Africa to apartheid in South Africa, ‘race’ was used in political systems where darker-skinned people across the globe found themselves dehumanised (Magubane 2007). Defiantly defending ‘the souls of black folk’ in reaction to the gravity of the removal of black slaves from the human family on American plantations, and the enduring domination and marginalisation of African Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois ([1859] 1969, xi) identified ‘the problem of the Twentieth Century’ as ‘the problem of the colour line’, where humanity was tragically torn asunder between the black- and the white-skinned peoples. Some philosophers have noted that the ‘social contract’ governing and organising the present world system is in fact a ‘racial contract’ (Mills 1997, 1–3). According to Charles Mills, white supremacy is ‘the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today’, where ‘racism is itself a political system, a particular power structure of informal or formal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties’ (1997, 3). In other words, racism is the powerful but largely concealed governing system and logic of the present Euro-North American world system. Racist maps, borders, fences and boundaries that were constructed in the course of conquest still exist physically and metaphysically, governing imaginaries and political practices. Upsurges of xenophobia and attacks on refugees, immigrants, women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or questioning (LGBTIQ+) people are connected to colonial demarcations of who is human and who is not. The contract that governs the world is not the social contract of the bond, implicit in the all-encompassing expression ‘we the people’, that is imagined to have moved humans from their state of nature to become members of civil society and subjects of modern government. It is, instead, the bond of the humans who count and matter, the humans of consequence: ‘we the white people’, in Millss' telling observation (1997, 30).

Sufferings and calamities that humans have encountered in the world have not come along expected and linear paths. The religious and racially defined human inequalities that eventually became political and economic inequalities led to a worldwide human struggle for power and domination. What Hannah Arendt (1968) called ‘the origins of totalitarianism’ privileged domination and hegemony in absolutist terms. Violent and absolutist forms of power and the appetite for domination produced both the Nazism that led to the Holocaust – the mass persecution and slaughter of Jews and others in Hitlers' Germany – and the Zionism that has seen Israel develop policies of apartheid enacted against Palestinians. The victims of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, within a few decades of the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, had morphed into the oppressors and managers of the debility (Puar 2017) of the Arabs and Muslims in Palestine, in a historical and political paradox that Mamdani (2001) has described as the scenario in which victims of power and domination systematically become oppressors and killers of others. There are, it seems, no permanent oppressors and permanent oppressed. Frantz Fanon (1963) noted how the ambition of the oppressed, the colonised and dominated may become the spirited drive to be an oppressor and a coloniser. Liberation movements of the Global South, after the decolonisation of their countries, became the new colonisers and oppressors of the people. The difference between a Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and an Ian Smith in Rhodesia became a difference of skin colour only, because of the way in which the supposed liberator reproduced the uses of power of the coloniser. At its most successful and powerful, coloniality, as an assault on the human, reproduces itself through the victims and turns them into its practitioners, defenders and multipliers.

The crooked, unstable and uncertain line of persecution of the human can be concealed even under the many representations and discourses of decolonisation, the struggle for human rights and liberation. Much in the same ways that slavery, colonialism, apartheid and imperialism came enveloped in promises of civilisation, modernisation, development and democratisation, forms of human domination, violence and oppression may be dressed in the languages of human rights, decolonisation and liberation. The very vocabularies and grammars of the fight for human rights may conceal assaults and negations of human rights. Those that have claimed God and championship of the human have betrayed humanity to the extent that Carl Schmitt (1996, 3), himself a Nazi ideologue, could warn that ‘whoever speaks for the human wants to cheat’, by using a grand narrative and ideal to conceal criminal tendencies such as the love of power and tyranny. Many years after Schmitt wrote in 1932, the observation can be made that inside the very institutions and organisations that claim to represent the human and human rights, human beings are negated and violated. In spite of the bold Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (UN 1948), the human itself has not been universalised, and rights and freedoms have not been equally distributed. The historical paradox is that this declaration took place at a time when the rights of the colonised and of those who were to live under apartheid in Africa were still being trampled upon by these same champions of the rights of Man. This has compelled Walter Mignolo (2009, 7) to ask the question ‘who speaks for the human in human rights?’ Speaking from what is often constructed as the worlds' most mature democracy, the USA, Donald Trump frequently scares the world with expressions of bigotry towards and hate for those who have been produced as foreigners, refugees, migrants and blacks from Africa, a continent of countries that he has referred to as ‘shitholes’. The metaphor of shit signifies how the weakened are easily made abject, contemptible, waste matter.

White supremacism and heteropatriachy have contributed to a scramble for belonging to the human race that has excluded people on more grounds of difference than skin colour alone. Giorgio Agamben (2005, 26) describes a powerful ‘anthropological machine’ by means of which those in powerful and dominant social and political positions process, give and take humanness from others. It is a hierarchising social technology that distributes humanness by classifying and declassifying people according to markers such as race, culture, sexuality, religion, age, ability of body and even geographic l...