Epistemic Freedom in Africa

Deprovincialization and Decolonization

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429960192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Politique d'éducation

Epistemic Freedom in Africa is about the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism. The imperial denial of common humanity to some human beings meant that in turn their knowledges and experiences lost their value, their epistemic virtue. Now, in the twenty-first century, descendants of enslaved, displaced, colonized, and racialized peoples have entered academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter and they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems that are capable of helping humanity to transcend the current epistemic and systemic crises. Together, they are engaging in diverse struggles for cognitive justice, fighting against the epistemic line which haunts the twenty-first century.

The renowned historian and decolonial theorist Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni offers a penetrating and well-argued case for centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, whilst simultaneously making an equally strong argument for globalizing knowledge from Africa so as to attain ecologies of knowledges. This is a dual process of both deprovincializing Africa, and in turn provincializing Europe. The book highlights how the mental universe of Africa was invaded and colonized, the long-standing struggles for 'an African university', and the trajectories of contemporary decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall in South Africa. This landmark work underscores the fact that only once the problem of epistemic freedom has been addressed can Africa achieve political, cultural, economic and other freedoms.

This groundbreaking new book is accessible to students and scholars across Education, History, Philosophy, Ethics, African Studies, Development Studies, Politics, International Relations, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies and the emerging field of Decolonial Studies.

The Open Access versions Chapter 1 and Chapter 9, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429492204 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1
INTRODUCTION

Seek ye epistemic freedom first

Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization is a study of the politics of knowledge in general and specifically of African struggles for epistemic freedom. As a result of the long-term consequences of modernity, enslavement and colonialism, African people have been reproduced as agents in a Eurocentric history. What exist today as conventional ‘philosophy of history’ and academic discourse of history produced within modern universities is still normatively Eurocentric, neo-Enlightenment, neo-Hegelian, neo-Marxist, neo-modernist and Habermasian. In this context thought about historical change is still hostage to resilient linear social-evolutionary notions of ‘transitional’ shifts (Bhambra 2007: 24).

A major consequence of this Eurocentric thinking is that what is today known as ‘African history’ has been ‘subsumed to the ideological parameters and periodization of the general framework, be it colonial, nationalist, or Marxist’ (Bhambra 2007: 25). This point was delivered more emphatically by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007: 27) when he argued: ‘ “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Kenyan,” and so on.’ It was perhaps this reality that provoked the African historian E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo (2002: 14) to pose the question: ‘Can African historians recapture this historical space and reintroduce an African philosophy of history that emphasizes African autonomy?’ Atieno-Odhiambo (2002) pushed for a paradigm shift ‘from African historiographies to an African philosophy of history’. In an earlier publication, Atieno-Odhiambo (1996: 31) eloquently expressed the epistemic quandary haunting the so-called ‘African history’:

Has the time come to question the unitary acceptance of the hegemonic episteme which posits that the discipline of history uniquely belongs to Western civilization? Alternatively, can Africans articulate an African gnosis that stands independently of these western traditions in our study of African history? Need African epistemes be intelligible to the West? Need the study and practice of history be tied to the guild of historical study at the universities? Is there still the lingering possibility than any one of us working within the western mode can have the arterial bypass surgery that may still be the viaduct upstream to the African reservoir of history?

At another level, Amy Allen (2016: 44) correctly critiqued Eurocentric notions of ‘macrohistory’ in these revealing words: ‘If global unity and capacity to make history are themselves historical developments that have emerged relatively recently, then they cannot be made the premises of an understanding of history as a whole.’ Hence the urgent need for epistemic freedom, which restores to African people a central position within human history as independent actors. This epistemological concern is fundamentally decolonial. As a people, Africans were always there in human history. They were never creatures of ‘discovery’. Africans were always present (‘presence Africaine’). Africans were never absent. Africa was never a tabula rasa (Dark Continent). Africans always had their own valid, legitimate and useful knowledge systems and education systems. This is the decolonial tale at the centre of this book. The foundation of this decolonial tale is well articulated by the Wole Soyinka who had this to say about Africa:

The African continent appears to possess one distinction that is largely unremarked. Unlike the Americas or Australasia, for instance, no one actually claims to have ‘discovered’ Africa. Neither the continent as an entity nor indeed any of her later offspring – the modern states – celebrates the equivalent of America’s Columbus Day. This gives it a self-constitutive identity, an unstated autochthony that is denied other continents and subcontinents. [. . .] Africa appears to have been ‘known about’, speculated over, explored both in actuality and fantasy, even mapped – Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Phoenicians, etc., took their turns – but no narrative has come down to us that actually lays personal claim to the discovery of the continent. Ancient ruins, the source of a river, mountain peaks, exotic kingdoms, and sunken pyramids, yes, but not the continent itself – as in the case of the Americas. Hundreds have ventured into, explored, and extensively theorized over the continent, but no one has actually claimed to have discovered her.

(Soyinka 2012: 27)

Soyinka challenged the colonial paradigm of ‘discovery’ and highlighted Africa’s primordial existence. This means that Africa has a long history that pre-dated its encounter with Europe. It also means that such a primordial entity had and has its own rich knowledge that kept it alive. What is explored in this book is not only how Africa in particular and the rest of the Global South in general became victims of genocides, epistemicides, linguicide and cultural imperialism, but also the trajectories of struggles for epistemic freedom that were provoked and ensued. Thus, conceptually speaking, the book delves deeper into such concepts as ‘the epistemic line’ as the problem of the twenty-first century; the perennial problem of ‘silences’ of African voices and problematic African archives enabled by the ‘Europeanization’ of the world on the one hand and the subalternization of Africa on the other hand; and the imperative of ‘rethinking thinking’ during the current age of epistemic and systemic crisis.

The epistemic line

If the ‘colour line’ was indeed the major problem of the twentieth century as articulated by William E. B. Du Bois (1903), then that of the twenty-first century is the ‘epistemic line’. The ‘epistemic line’ cascades from the ‘colour line’ because denial of humanity automatically disqualified one from epistemic virtue. The epistemic line is sustained by what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) termed ‘abyssal thinking’ – an imperial reason that reduced some human beings to a subhuman category with no knowledge. This means that the epistemic line is simultaneously the ontological line.

Thus the triple processes of provincializing Europe, deprovincializing Africa and epistemological decolonization which frame this book constitute a drive for a restorative epistemic agenda and process that simultaneously addresses ontological and epistemological issues haunting Africa. The definitive entry of descendants of the enslaved, displaced, colonized and racialized peoples into the existing academies across the world, proclaiming loudly that they are human beings, their lives matter, and that they were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems, enabled the resurgence of long-standing struggles for epistemic freedom. Thus epistemic freedom speaks to cognitive justice. Epistemic freedom is fundamentally about the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism. Samir Amin (2009) depicted Eurocentrism as one of the great ideological deformation of our time. Epistemic justice is about liberation of reason itself from coloniality.

Africa is one of those epistemic sites that experienced not only colonial genocides but also ‘theft of history’ (see Goody 2006), epistemicides (killing of indigenous people’s knowledges) and linguicides (killing of indigenous people’s languages) (see Ngugi wa Thiong’o 2009a; Ngugi wa Thiong’o 2009b). Therefore, African people’s epistemic struggles are both old and new. They are old in the sense that they emerged at the very time of colonial encounters. They are new in the sense that they are re-emerging within a context of a deep present global systemic and epistemic crisis. What is projected here is epistemological decolonization as a double task of ‘provincializing Europe’ and ‘deprovincializing Africa’. The processes of ‘provincializing’ and ‘deprovincializing’ are inextricably linked as they speak to how what appears on a global scale as European thought could be claimed as human heritage rather than a thought from one geographical centre. ‘Provincializing’ is a process of ‘moving the centre’ to borrow a concept from Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1993). ‘Moving the centre’ is understood in a double-sense:

I am concerned with moving the centre in two senses at least. One is the need to move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world. The assumed location of the centre of the universe in the West is what goes by the term Eurocentrism [. . .] The second sense is even more important [. . .]. Within nearly all nations today the centre is located in the dominant social stratum, a male bourgeois minority. [. . .] Moving the centre in the two senses– between nations and within nations – will contribute to the freeing of the world of cultures from the restrictive walls of nationalism, class, race and gender.

(Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1993: xvi–xvii).

In this sense, ‘provincializing Europe’ is meant to confront the problem of overrepresentation of European thought in knowledge, social theory and education, which resulted in what the European historian John M. Headly (2008) celebrated as ‘the Europeanization of the World’. To ‘provincialize Europe’ is fundamentally to ‘de-Europeanize’ the world. De-Europeanization of the world entails what Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) depicted as ‘deimperialization’. Chen (2010: vii) defined deimperialization as movement that demanded (ex)-imperial powers to genuinely reflect on ‘their imperial histories and the harmful impacts those have had on the world’. This is a fundamental decolonial demand of which political decolonization of the twentieth century failed to deliver. The process of ‘de-Europeanizing’ is here rendered as ‘deprovincializing Africa’ – an intellectual and academic process of centring of Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world while at the same time globalizing knowledge from Africa. Such a move constitutes epistemic freedom as that essential prerequisite for political, cultural, economic and other freedoms.

Epistemic freedom is different from academic freedom. Academic freedom speaks to institutional autonomy of universities and rights to express diverse ideas including those critical of authorities and political leaders. Epistemic freedom is much broader and deeper. It speaks to cognitive justice; it draws our attention to the content of what it is that we are free to express and on whose terms. Cognitive justice as defined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) is premised on recognition of diverse ways of knowing by which human beings across the globe make sense of their existence. Epistemic freedom is about democratizing ‘knowledge’ from its current rendition in the singular into its plural known as ‘knowledges’. It is also ranged against overrepresentation of Eurocentric thought in knowledge, social theory and education. Epistemic freedom is foundational in the broader decolonization struggle because it enables the emergence of the necessary critical decolonial consciousness.

In Africa, decolonization has generally been understood to have begun with ‘political decolonization’ predicated on seeking the ‘political kingdom first’. However, the current struggles for epistemic freedom have provoked a need for rethinking of the decolonial trajectories. While it is true that political, economic, cultural and epistemological aspects of decolonization were and are always inextricably intertwined, we have to be cognisant of the fact that the ‘sequencing’ arose from a practical strategic logic of struggles against colonialism, which privileged attainment of political sovereignty first. In the co-constitution of political, economic, cultural and epistemological decolonization, epistemic freedom should form the base because it deals with the fundamental issues of critical consciousness building, which are essential pre-requisites for both political and economic freedom. This point was highlighted by E. Mveng (1983: 141): ‘if political sovereignty is necessary, the scientific sovereignty is perhaps more important in present-day Africa’. Mveng (1983: 141) elaborated that ‘The West agrees with us today that the way to Truth passes by numerous paths, other than Aristolean Thomistic logic or Hegelian dialectics. But social and human sciences themselves must be decolonized’. Paulin J. Hountondji (1996: 107) also emphasized the need for epistemic freedom when he argued that:

We must be ambitious for Africa and for ourselves; we must be careful not to nip in the bud the unparalleled promise of our history or to prune it prematurely. We must on the contrary open it up, liberate it [. . .]. Beyond all facile solutions, beyond all myths, we must have courage to make a fresh start.

Hountondji (2002: 103) went on to articulate some of the key aspect of the African struggles for epistemic freedom:

The struggle against intellectual extraversion presupposes the creation, in Africa, of an autonomous space for reflection and theoretical discussion that is indissolubly philosophical and scientific. Only such a space can enhance an effective participation of African peoples – and not just some individuals of African origin – in the debates about them. That will be the condition for intellectual freedom.

But in the search for epistemic freedom, knowledge cannot be reduced to ‘philosophical’ and ‘scientific’ forms only. Recognition of various forms of knowledge and knowing is called for in decolonization. Hountondji (2002: 104) elaborated that the task of epistemic freedom is ‘that of organizing in Africa an autonomous debate that will no longer be a far-flung appendix to European debates, but which will directly pit African philosophers against one another’. To Hountondji (2002: 139), the base for sustainable epistemic freedom lies in formulation of ‘original set of questions’ and he elaborated on this point this way:

The creation of an autonomous body of thought had to begin with the effort to formulate original set of questions, not out of a search for novelty for its own sake, but out of a concern for authenticity, of a desire to be oneself by freely asking questions that one spontaneously asks oneself and by trying to raise them to a higher level of formulation, rather than by passively accepting the questions that others ask themselves or ask us from their own preoccupations.

What is also necessary for the success of epistemic freedom according to Hountondji (2002: 139) is the ‘change of audience’ by African researchers ‘to consider his or her African public as his or her prime target’. All these moves speak to the necessary processes of deprovincializing Africa and ‘provincializing Europe’. Suffice to say deprovincializing Africa addresses marginality and peripherality of Africa in the knowledge and education domain through recentring it. Chakrabarty, who introduced and popularized the concept of ‘provincializing Europe’, seemed to be concerned about how the ‘Restern world’ could claim what has been known as European ideas and thought. This is indeed another important way of subverting and confronting the problem of Eurocentrism as an enabler of Western epistemic hegemony. Chakrabarty (2000: xiv) highlighted how ‘universalistic thought was always and already modified by particular histories’.

While this is indeed a valid intervention, there is still the need to stretch the concept of ‘provincializing Europe’ into a decolonial perspective where it has to directly address the problem of ‘coloniality of knowledge’ which took the form of ‘invasion of the mental universe’ of the colonized world (see Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986; Quijano 2007). This analysis takes us to the concept of epistemological decolonization, which is meant to deal with problems and consequences of ...