Resurrecting the Black Archive through the decolonisation of philosophy in South Africa

ABSTRACT

While acknowledging the impact of colonial imposition and violence, in this paper, I challenge the notions of epistemicide and linguicide in South Africa as claimed by some decolonial scholars. Using the Black Archive by drawing from S.E.K. Mqhayi’s historical accounts, I argue that to claim linguicide and by extension epistemicide, only perpetuates the erasure of profound Indigenous thinkers such as S.E.K. Mqhayi and W.W. Gqoba. My second move is to showcase how the Black Archive can be used to substantively engage the ontologies of Blackness/Indigeneity in the contemporary university. This move resurrects the Black Archive while constituting the decolonial mission; teaching from a pedagogical predisposition that is locally responsive while simultaneously being globally relevant. I submit that this framework works towards epistemic restitution.

KEYWORDS:

• Black Archive
• epistemicide
• linguicide
• Gqoba
• Mqhayi
• curricula

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my brother in scholarship Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for his epistemic humility and graciousness in helping me think through this critique. I am thankful for and highly appreciative of the critical eye and rigorous input, received on this paper, by my dear colleague Professor Kathy Luckett. Finally, I am highly appreciative of the University of Johannesburg’s Philosophy Department for hosting me on the 28^th of August 2019, where I presented the preliminary thinking around this paper. The department has been incredibly proactive to the contemporary challenges of our society – and I would suggest that philosophy in the country could learn a great deal from its approach.

This research is adapted from a broader project entitled ‘Knowledge as Political: The Philosophical Society of Southern Africa and the Geography of Dissent’ that was submitted as a MA Dissertation in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria (2019).

Notes

1. I test how this self-negation and erasure play out as the maintenance of historical realities in Philosophy as discipline, i.e. the continued privileging of knowledge that emanates from the north.

2. My analysis would be misplaced if it did not highlight how the concept ‘epistemicide’ has been treated by decolonialists. Lebakeng et al. (2006, 70) frame it as follows, ‘higher education institutional cultures continue to privilege western symbols, rituals and behaviours imposed as a result of epistemicide’ suggesting that epistemicide is an imposition that sought to displace, undermine and even negate Indigenous ways of knowing. Ramose (2004) maintains that ‘since the epistemicide committed by colonisation on the epistemologies of the indigenous conquered peoples of South Africa, it is the epistemological paradigm of the successors in title to colonisation which continues to dominate the entire field of the construction and the distribution of knowledge in South Africa.’ I understand Ramose (2004) to mean the substantive displacement of Indigenous knowledge, in this framework. I therefore, maintain that the claim of epistemicide – as it is used to underscore the role of colonial violence in occluding the knowledge of Indigeneity – can be misconstrued such that it is read as the complete annihilation of these knowledge systems.

3. The Black Archive is constitutive of works developed by Black/Indigenous artists, literato, musicians and poets who were committed to theorising the Fact (experiential embodiment) of Blackness even as they were excluded from knowledge making institutions, i.e. the University. This theorisation is envisaged as the consideration of the jurisprudential methods of Xhosa cosmology. It is on the basis of this claim that I maintain that the uncritical use of concepts such as epistemicide and linguicide perpetuates rather than draws attention to the problem(s) of epistemic injustice. This perpetuation is seen as the continued denial of the existence of these knowledge systems. Put simply, I fear that decolonial theorists feed into the occlusion of Indigenous thought. Using Kumalo’s (2018a) argument, I demonstrate the uses of the Black Archive in facilitating the imagination of new possibilities in higher education.

4. My reader will note the different formulation from the standard ‘epistemic violence’. Acknowledging the origins of this formulation (see Heleta, 2016; Keet, 2014; Todd, 2016), I am however, suspicious of using the term. Following in the tradition of epistemic justice I am more comfortable with the concept of epistemic harm (see Fricker 2007; Kvanvig 2011; Zagzebski 1996).

5. I caution the brazen claim of epistemicide. This cautionary remark highlights how we have not yet exhausted engagements with the Black Archive. I further acknowledge the scholarship of intellectuals working in cognate areas (see Oyèwùmí 1997 and Amadiume, 1987) who have brought Black/Indigenous scholarship into the mainstream, however, I contend that the Black Archive as developed by artists such as Sekoto, Makeba and literato such as Gqoba, Mgqwetho and Mqhayi has received slack uptake by decolonialists in South Africa. In crude terms, the desire to detail the violence of colonialism has distracted decolonial scholars in South Africa from a systematic engagement with the corpus of work developed by scholars, thinkers, musicians, artists and poets that captured and theorised the experiential embodiment of Blackness/Indigeneity amidst the confusion and violence of coloniality. Claiming epistemicide and linguicide continues to distract us, as we become obsessed with whiteness and colonialism as opposed to our own modes of knowing. To this effect, I follow in the trajectory of Fanon, when he says ‘I am no longer uneasy in his [the white man’s] presence. In reality to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but I am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that soon he will have no other solution but to flee’ ([1963]/2004, 10). In this respect my work is not concerned with whiteness – in this very explanation the reader will note how I am being forced to engage with whiteness as a mode of justifying an engagement with Black/Indigenous thought. It is in this respect that I maintain that these claims ‘epistemicide’ and ‘linguicide’ obscure us from doing the real work of decolonisation as we expend our time focusing on whiteness and not our own systems of knowledge.

6. By this I mean what has been termed the resurrection of the Black Archive. See Kumalo, S.H. 2020. ‘Khawuleza – An Instantiation of the Black Archive’. Imbizo. (Kumalo 2020).

7. I once again direct the reader to the lengthy engagement with whiteness as a mode of setting-up my analysis of Black thought. Black traditions and modes of thought, as they have always existed, are obfuscated by the demand that we engage whiteness. For the sake of developing critical decolonial thought, I will be so bold and say – like other decolonialists before me – ‘to hell with whiteness.’

8. My aim in showcasing these facets of Xhosa cosmology is rooted in the concern that the epistemic practices and processes of the Xhosa people are being erased owing to the impositions of the peoples of the west. (Authors translation).

9. It becomes the duty of the Xhosa scholar to carefully think through the implications of this reality. Once our modes of thinking and knowing have been erased, we need to consider what else will be erased with these. (Authors translation.)

10. The praise poet.

11. He whose house was christened with the blood of his enemies.

12. As these names are clan names that tell the histories of the two houses, it would be remiss of me to translate this formulation outside of the context in which it is discussed. I therefore, encourage my reader to glean the translation of this text from Kumalo (2018a).

13. The names of the Scina clan, denote and acknowledge the role of the matrilineal line ancestrally. While I am defined by a patrilineal conception of lineage, the matrilineal line defines my identity as I am formed by historic figures; omaJilajila, omaNdlangisa, oQhudeni, who constitute my ontological foundations.

14. What is required is a new concept that will not consistently invoke whiteness as a mode of trying to deal with and engage the lived realities of Blackness and Indigeneity.

15. I acknowledge that erasure was attempted through the classification of African spirituality as witchcraft. However, these practices continued regardless and constitute parts of identity formation, for some, today.

16. Ubungoma are the traditional medicine practices that continue to be used by Black/Indigenous South Africans to the contemporary day.

17. This is not to suggest that coloniality did not alter orthography in African languages as Noni Jabavu clearly demonstrates this by protesting how she writes particular words in isiXhosa in the introduction to The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life.

18. Only now, after this battle, did Mpande enter the picture. Because of his ill treatment at the hands of his elder brother Dingana, he had decided to leave and seek a place of refuge from his enemies for fear of being murdered one day. Because Mpande brought with him a massed army of soldiers dissatisfied with Dingana’s rule, the Boers greatly rejoiced at this answer to their prayers.

19. To write the term as (post)-colonial – in parenthesis with a dash between the post and colonial – is done deliberately. This follows in the decolonial tradition that contends that the current world in which we live continues to be defined by modernity which is synonymous with coloniality as argued by Mignolo (2009), Tlostanova and Mignolo (2009), and Grosfoguel (2013).

20. I wish to put forward a contentious proposition; the transformation and transmutations that we witness in history are as a result of collusion between Indigeneity and coloniality (a point aptly detailed by the scholarship of Mda 2000; as well as uMqhayi 1917).

21. This fellow was the son of Senzangakhona – Shaka and Dingaan are his older brothers; as he comes from a minor house of less significance, it was inconceivable that he could rule the kingdom of Zulu and Malandela.

22. After some time the whites promised Cetshwayo and the Zulu that after his father’s death he would succeed as King KwaZulu; things began to calm down then because this fellow had been hunting the fellow who was to succeed his father. In 1872 Mpande died. He died with the Zulu nation united after the disruption of war after war – but he had achieved this dispensation by handing over his own nation.

23. But he had achieved this dispensation by handing over his own nation.

24. While I may not deal with the debates that define the differences between conceptual understandings of ethics from an Afro-communitarian versus a Euro-North American conception of ethics (a debate championed by scholars working in the tradition of Afro-communitarian conceptions of personhood – see Chemhuru 2018; Matolino 2014; Masaka 2018; Molefe 2015), this debate influences, albeit implicitly, the challenge that I level against Fricker’s (2007) conception of epistemic justice; specifically as it relates to our context. To qualify my reasoning, there are two components that facilitate my challenge. The first is in surfacing the differences between Afro-communitarian thought which differs from Euro-western thinking. My critique surfaces that while Fricker (2007) is dealing with a ‘shared ethical intuition’ that rests on a communitarian conception of an epistemic tradition, virtue epistemology undermines communitarian thinking as virtue ethics is premised on an individualistic cultivation of virtues. Second, my critique suggests that even within a community i.e. among decolonial philosophers – whom we would assume is predicated on a shared ethical intuition, there continues to be a lack of this characteristic owing to the claim of epistemicide.

25. This awareness comes from Abner Nyamende and AC Jordan being academics at the University of Cape Town; a claim that is substantiated by how scholars – even in other liberal English Universities, i.e. Wits University – continue to be ignorant of their work. This is best noted in the recent collection by Edwin Etieyibo (2018: 10) wherein he claims, ‘[conceptually], a lot of controversies surround it [decolonisation], as to what it means or what it doesn’t mean.’ This assertion blatantly ignores the scholarship of AC Jordan, Abner Nyamende or WB Vilakazi – not to mention Mazisi Kunene, who have each treated the question of conceptual decolonisation in South Africa.

26. In line with intersectional Black Feminist scholarship, the Black/Indigenous body to which I am making reference does not occlude womxn. If anything, I encourage the reader to consider how the structural forms of power intersect to bear down on the experiential embodiment of Black womxn. An analysis to this effect is conducted by Patricia Hill-Collins (2000) in her seminal treatise Black Feminist Thought.

27. Even though I am not an expert of comparative jurisprudence, I do hold the view that the laws that govern Xhosa society are not that different from the laws that govern enlightened societies. (Author’s translation.)

28. Given the scope and space I would problematise even this notion of second order questions, however, I will leave that project for another analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siseko H Kumalo

Siseko H Kumalo holds a Master of Arts (Cum Laude) in Political Philosophy from the University of Pretoria. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Decolonising Disciplines, a journal dedicated to decolonising disciplinary knowledge across faculties in higher education. His research focuses on epistemic justice, pedagogies of mutual (in)fallibility, feminist and queer theory, violence, education for sustainable development and higher education transformation. Siseko serves on the Literary Association of South Africa’s Executive Committee and is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2017).