A multitude of decolonial metropoles – what navigation for commonality and unity?

Abstract

This paper offers both a personal view of what decolonisation means, and the ingredients required to take the project forward. It cannot be a slogan without methodology and mindfulness of methodological nuances in different cultures and languages, that is, it cannot be a metropolitan discipline. It cannot be a hollow call against a generalised ­contamination. The paper then reviews other contributions to this ­volume and suggests their value in accomplishing progress towards the decolonial.

Keywords:

• Decolonial
• problematic
• metropole
• language
• solidarity
• ontology

For Lily Ling – who would have argued back, but who fought so hard.

One

This essay is a sympathetic provocation. It is sympathetic because the decolonial movement is a step in the right direction. There have been enough hegemonic ‘universalisms’ from finally narrow histories already. It is a provocation because the thinking within the decolonial movement has yet to problematise itself – and much of the preliminary thought is sloganising with (borrowed) vocabulary. (How can you define an epistemology for Africa without a commonality over 2000 languages and 55 modern states, without recourse to the commonality that derives from a history with colonialism, its thought, and its rendition of most of those 2000 languages into written form, with the grammatical inflections – no matter how much guarded against – of those who made a script of language and its thought?)

This is not to say the decolonial project is impossible. It is to say it is difficult. And it is to say that a slogan answers nothing – although it can indicate an agenda. In this essay I propose, with provocation, an agenda. I say this as a Chinese person derived from a China that has had its own huge decolonial project (curiously directed now towards the economic colonisation of the rest of the world), but as a diasporic Chinese who is at pains to decolonise himself from the new Confucian absolutism that sweeps President Xi’s bold new China. But the decolonial project will be different from region to region, country to country. Africa is not like China. There is no new absolutism that is universal or even hegemonic. It is the multiplicity of the decolonial that proposes a grand central problematique – and I have borrowed the French term because English is inadequate, and instantly I can only write in English with an import from the French. So, the second grand question is: ‘With what ­methodology might the decolonial be rendered?’

Two

If we were to take almost arbitrarily a once and sometimes fashionable vocabulary that became ‘universal’, in a manner of speaking, within the global left, we might say that the search for the decolonial is to lose the status of the merely peripheral or semi-peripheral; to lose the status of a colonised edge to someone else’s metropolitan centre. It is a search for an alternative metropole, an equality among metropoles at least in the sense of the construction of philosophy, the autochthonous ethic. It is not just a self-conception but the terms of that self-conception. Those terms are, of course, a political project, they are what render a certain form of global justice; but they are, above all, a project of thought – in the crudest of terms, to deny and defy the white man’s concept of civilisation with one’s own.

But what is one’s own? Shaka Zulu conquered much of Southern Africa. China claims Tibet. Bemba nobles had slaves. Does each new metropole have its own peripheries in its own histories and, in the case of China, modern imaginations? And how does each new metropole speak to other metropoles, new and old? What is the core common concept of the global? When the celebrated Kenyan novelist and essayist, and perennial nominee for the Nobel Literature Prize, Ngugi wa Thiong’o declared that language was a means of both colonisation and decolonisation and that, to make a stand for decolonising the mind, he would henceforth write only in Kikuyu,¹ did he mean he would write only for himself and other Kikuyu? He clearly didn’t mean that, as he sought sporadically to demonstrate that Kikuyu was as sophisticated as any Western metropolitan language – the implication being that the West should be minded to learn Kikuyu as much as Kikuyu people were encouraged to learn English. But then, why Kikuyu? Why not Luo or Swahili? There is no globalisation of Kikuyu as there is of English, although there is a fair regionalisation of Swahili. One of his case examples, however, of the sophisticated metropolitan capacity of Kikuyu was a master’s thesis in science, written in Kikuyu and accepted by the prestigious Cornell University in New York State.² Yet on reading the thesis, as I did, anyone would be struck by the number of English loan words that had to be deployed to convey the scientific capacity of Kikuyu. In short, any claim to be metropolitan on one’s own terms becomes necessarily, to one extent or another, an exercise in hybridity. The decolonial must grapple with and communicate with, and show off knowledge to, a very large world. Swahili is a case in point: with its Arabic historical associations, does it decolonise itself to a form of antique Arabic, a kind of Indian Ocean colonisation that was not Western?

The case of the Iranian constitution has always intrigued me. A theocratic constitution for a theocratic state that is in some form of constant war with the superpower of the West, it is nevertheless studded throughout with ‘exceptional clauses’: constitutional clauses that allow a state to function in a modern way that God had not envisaged.³ It is not a fully theocratic document and raises a question to do with the depth, extent and conditions for negotiated parameters to hybridity. What, then, is ‘pure’? If Swahili cannot be disassociated from Arabic influences, and if a country like Zambia steadfastly cannot (and will not) decolonise itself from Christianity, and if vast areas of Africa cannot (and will not) decolonise themselves from Islam, and if there are no written records before Christianity and Islam, and oral histories have no central repositories with curatorial standards,⁴ where is the point of reliability and the point of achieved authenticity in the decolonial project? In the spirit of these ingredients in a problematisation, I propose in the next section five specific avenues that require exploration.

Three

In proposing my questions, I want to make it quite clear that I understand and support the impulse to decolonise. It is a world of great oppression. The sense of self of entire people was taken away. It is right that people should seek equal authenticity. It is also right that the decolonial movement should essentially supplant the restricted postcolonial one – with its own politically conscious (but metropolitan politically correct) roots in the study of literature in English or English translation. Entire postcolonial studies on Ngugi examined only his English-language novels. It is precisely to avoid the essential laziness of this kind of post­colonial studies that I make my problematic points.

1. To what do we decolonise? What and where is the point of reliable history to which we trace back? Does it provide a sense of self that is operational in a complex and largely wicked world? Or is the point actually to create a new sense of self, drawing from attractive elements of known history, and thus provide a kind of moral armament to guide oneself and one’s nation in this complex and wicked world?

2. Does a renewal of authentic history, or the creation of a new ‘history’ based on elements of the authentic, deny the sense of universalism? And, if it does, what are the methodological ground rules among the many new ‘histories’ and senses of self that allow us to compose at least an agreeable and functional and, above all, moral ­commonality? Who defines the agreeable, the functional and the moral? Or does all this imply the effort to emerge somehow as the new hegemon who imposes a new ‘Enlightenment’?

3. Where does this leave oneself as another? This is the term used by the French thinker Paul Ricoeur. In his vast corpus, at least two if not three parallel great bodies of work, he seemed finally to be saying that we all share the same interiority, ie humanity is evidence of a grand unified psyche – both a grand malady and a grand generosity, both driven by huge unconscious and subconscious impulses.⁵ Essentially, the question is not just ‘What is the place of language and linguistics in all of this?’ but ‘What is the role of psycho-­linguistics in all of this?’ In the case of Africa, is there a linguistically based ­psycho-analytic philosophy to parallel and perhaps equal or exceed the French schools? Given the huge diversity of Africa, can it propose convincingly ‘oneself as another’, ie an intimate humanity?

4. What about the question of ontology and its ‘incoherent’ animation? For a great deal of the twentieth century – certainly since the Second World War – and into the twenty-first century, Western philosophy has been preoccupied by debates on the primacy of either ontology or epistemology. In the case of Africa, the simple question (with complex dimensions) is ‘Which or whose epistemology?’ Zulu, Luo, Hausa, Bemba, Amharic? Meaning varies, even if ever so slightly, from language to language. The use of English or French as an official language is simply to prevent linguistic confusion. (And to allow an immediate negotiating position with the hegemonic metropole.) But, if that is both simple (and vexed) enough, what about ontology? What about belief systems that are religious and spiritual and are not rationally explicable except on the foundation of faith and cultural affiliation as a starting point? What is the coherent link between such an ontology and any epistemology, especially a foreign one – even if it is an African one? Related to the formality of an epistemology, ie the rules of logic, are the rules of jurisprudence, ie the formal rules of law. Does adherence to the ‘felt’ presence of the spirit Sandawana in Shona spiritual culture, alongside other spirits of the land and its produce, justify the unconstitutional seizure of land – no matter whether or not it is ‘justified’ in the historical balances of acquisition and dispossession? Essentially, in the ‘new’ philosophies of the new decolonial metropoles, what is the mix between formal and informal thought, lived experience and expressed logic, nostalgia and reality, past imagination and present reality, custom and law, individual and community, communities and nation, nation and state, politics and constitution, state constitution and international treaties? And is there always in reserve a supervening core principle to which all others, no matter how formalised, are subject if not subjugated? In the work of Khusraw and other thinkers of the Islamic ‘Enlightenment’, God was the necessary central principle, and all other thoughts were, however sophisticated, part of contingent principle.⁶ In this period, what the West calls the Dark Ages of its own medieval period, the debate in Islamic philosophy was between the sense of absolute and contingent on the one hand, and what it called ‘the thought of Alexander’ on the other, ie Greek thought that considered itself capable of defining or circumscribing the absolute, or even – through its logic – supplanting the edicts of what had been the absolute. Are there viable and powerful impulses that suggest the historical conditioning of ontology conditions all formality, all epistemology? There are huge requirements of debate that must be satisfied to demonstrate this. Is a common condition of ‘blackness’ sufficient to sustain this? The US Black Panthers, when in exile in African countries, were never able to cease being American. Their understanding of Africa was a white American’s in its overall sense of seeing Africa as otherness.⁷ What are the foundations of ontology and its relationship to epistemology?

5. What about the decolonisation of others? Does a decolonial movement in one ­location have an obligation to understand a decolonial movement elsewhere? What are the tools for this, that require a stepping out of one’s own decoloniality? Is, in short, the West a common enemy? What, in thought – thought deep enough to be complexly empathetic – is the inescapable requirement of solidarity? Whenever I am in China, and all my visits are made reluctantly to interact with reasonably high authority (reluctant because I disapprove of much of what the Chinese government does both at home and abroad), I always point out critically the sometimes immense contradictions in the relations between Africa and China. The immense disparity in economic throw-weight is one thing, but the arrogant and often racist behaviour of private businesspeople is visibly awful. And yet, when I talk to African interlocuters about the Chinese ‘century of humiliation’, when China was imperialised and subjugated by both the West and its Asian ally, Japan,⁸ my audiences usually have no idea what I am talking about, or if some have a general outline of an idea, no details at all. It is as if Africa were the only part of earth that was colonised and should decolonise in itself for itself, without cognition of a global phenomenon of colonial conquest and long exploitation. India? And, if we sympathise, even knowledgeably empathise, with China, what about China’s own ‘colonial’ or proto-colonial claims over Tibet and other areas? Does recognition of one struggle against oppression countenance the oppression by a freed people of another? Of course not. The suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust cannot countenance Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. This case in itself raises the complexity of what is just and, if not just, allowable in the drive to decolonise what, finally, must be generalised entities. If Zambia decolonises, does it allow the Lozi people to decolonise within Zambia? Does it stop before all 72 ethnic groups have declared themselves unique and, if not separate, separable? If there is a huge fragmentation of the nation-states of Africa, how does Africa stand up to the global quasi-imperialisms of the new configurations of international power?

Work to take us forward

In my own writings I have for many years championed the cause of commonality above any assumed sense of universality – if for no other reason than that the ‘universal’ is more likely to be hegemonically imposed, whereas what is agreed to be common is more likely agreed because it is negotiated.⁹ But this requires a certain equality around the negotiation table. It is here that the work of the recently-late Lily Ling is exemplary and important. With her close colleagues she tried to introduce into the International Studies Association an approach called ‘worlding’, meaning an international relations that saw its subject in equal parts, each with a story to tell that could both deconstruct and reinforce the stories of others. It was precisely anti-universal.¹⁰ Although I greatly supported and endorsed this, I was also wary of emerging tendencies to offer a purified rendition of ‘story’ – a sense of an essence, an ideal essence of a culture – whereas I am convinced every single culture on earth is contested, is messy.¹¹ In China once, hosted in luxurious surroundings, my status mistaken for ministerial, I nevertheless revelled in my glass-walled wet-room (gigantic power shower) with its giant waterproof plasma screen. Every morning there was an ­historical action soap of the time of a divided China, when the ‘civilised and sober’ north set about bringing its sobriety and civilisation to the luxuriant and decadent south. On the eve of the final battle, the northern generals are sober and studying their maps, and their soldiers are sleeping in their battle ranks, ready as soon as they awake to fight; the camera pans to the southern encampment, where the commanding general is enjoying several concubines and many flasks of wine; in the morning he mounts his horse backwards, and his soldiers are also somewhat the worse for wear. Of course, the northerners win – but I am of southern descent. I think there is a place for being drunk and disorderly. I think it is a necessary part of civilisation. The joke among my peers is that northerners are straight and boring, yet northern language at least now seeks to represent a purified essence of the Chinese character within its Chinese culture.

Lily published several works, often essentially of stories, that spoke of different cultural formations of epistemology, ontology and, as a separated quality (not many people seem to have appreciated this in her work) of morals. They were all based on legends from Chinese history. She made the methodology of fable into a statement on knowledge.¹² I thought her work was wonderful and lament her early death, and thus, this essay is dedicated to her. But one’s story by itself is not enough. I myself once thought so – at least as an antidote to a hegemonic story – but now I consider there must be something more.

On my visits to Ethiopia over a quarter century, amidst literally furious change, the ­common feature resides in the backstreet stalls selling paintings of the great battle of Adwa in which the Ethiopian army defeated the Italians who wished to colonise the country. Both sides are equipped with modern rifles and cannons – although the Ethiopian cavalry is mounted and carries traditional blades. Both sides have Red Cross medical tents. But the saints and angels and St George ride in the heavens with the Ethiopians – and they, like the Ethiopian army, are dark-skinned. The dark-skinned Christians (with the oldest liturgy in the Christian world and conventions that date back to when Constantine invented the Catholic Church) out-fight and are more blessed by God than the white Christians.

When your story can out-tell the same story as the colonial powers, using the same values and tropes in your own narrative, your story conquers. The value of the story is not in its rendition of a culture and its values and methodologies of thought. It is in how these things face outwards to the world and meet it on equal if not superior terms.

The Ethiopians are fortunate with their own Christian history and ancient written language (Gee’z, the language of the church, playing a role not unlike Latin in medieval Europe), and with a Christian imagination in which nobody, Jesus included, is white. It is precisely this methodology that Ngugi himself employed in his Petals of Blood, in which the marginalised of post-independence Kenya march towards Nairobi – like a beast slouching towards Bethlehem – to protest corruption and injustice.¹³ I think it is his greatest book, arranged like verses from the poetry of W. B. Yeats – the beast slouching towards Bethlehem being precisely a line from Yeats. Ngugi used a poet from the Irish liberation struggle against the British and made his work the driving epigrams of the narrative divisions within his own greatest novel which, simultaneously, is noted for the stories of cultural value deriving from Kenyan spirituality that are told in the long march to Nairobi. In short, I am saying that the enunciatory story of value and meaning cannot be an enclosure and a device of separation. It is one of engagement and, preferably, of overcoming.

Although, finally, there is also the key attribute of an empathy that is a recognition of existential equality. This is what white colonialism tried to refuse. On the eve of Zimbabwean independence in 1980, the elections having been held but the results not yet announced,¹⁴ the British colonels commanding the Commonwealth Monitoring Force (the ­peacekeepers), in the same salient for which I held responsibility for the international observation of the election, decided to throw a reconciliation party for the combatants. Halfway through the evening I witnessed a black guerrilla officer walk up to a white Rhodesian officer. He said:

You… you! You were the one in the helicopter that swung down to finish the attack against us! You were about to turn your machine guns around in my direction, then we saw each other’s eyes and you did not fire!

The white officer replied:

You … you! You were the black fighter whom I had swept down to attack. I was sure you could raise your AK-47 to fire into my cockpit faster than I could turn my machine guns around, then we saw each other’s eyes and you did not fire!

Before my amazed eyes and the startled eyes of the British colonels, the two collapsed into a tearful embrace. ‘You… you! God stopped us from firing then so that we might embrace today’. The colonels started crying too and beckoned me to join them outside the room. They didn’t want to be seen crying in public, but they too were overcome. I tell this story, a true story, to say that the story of value is the story of existential recognition of the human condition. It has these ingredients:

1. It is deontological. It speaks of a readiness to die for a value. The values might be different but the purpose of sacrifice is the same.

2. It proposes the possibility of absorbing the other in oneself. It speaks for itself but is finally open to a great empathy.

3. It is centred on mercy as the human attribute that rescues human life from the human condition of grief.

4. And it carries spiritual value into a messy material world in which, differently to be sure, something that is higher intrudes into our condition of struggle.

When we struggle for the decolonial condition, I feel it should be a condition that ­encompasses these things, these commonalities. From these, all negotiations towards a human equality are possible.

The accomplishment of this volume

It is for these reasons that I applaud the contributions and efforts of the articles in this volume. To commence any decolonisation one must first recognise and problematise the nature and structure of the colonial project. This project has affected various areas and sectors differently, and may yet have key (and different) attributes that are renegotiable and even able to be restructured. This is what many of the authors here strive to do. The effort in doing so is, of course, to avoid the construction of binaries, of absolute oppositions that cannot speak to each other despite seeking to live within the same world system. Dictating terms to the world system is, of course, key. The world system is not itself stable in terms of who sets the terms. The advent of China as a superpower, for instance, means a world system very different from the days when Europe commenced its colonisation of Africa. So the idea of ‘speaking back’ – indeed, of ‘taking back’ – cannot be realised from hardened, static shells. It is, as it were, a reclamation and redevelopment on horseback. The decolonial movement is mobile.

The two articles in this collection that deal with China reflect this well. Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel recalls an early moment in the liberation struggle in South Africa when China was an inspiration. Of course, this has also been the case with liberation groups, right or wrong, in Nepal, India and Latin America. In Africa, it was China that aided and abetted the finally successful liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. There is more, therefore, to the Sino–African nexus than today’s trade and investment problems.¹⁵ Moreover, there are increasingly numerous examples of African governments not just ‘speaking back’ but negotiating back to China. Angola is a prime example of this, despite or because of China’s backing the ‘wrong’ liberation movement in that country. Psychological advantage swung to Angola, but that had to be backed up by negotiating skill.¹⁶ The same might be said of China’s support to Khartoum in the period where Sudan resisted for almost half a century the independence of South Sudan, and how, in the transition to independence and immediately after independence, Juba dictated terms to China for its future engagement.¹⁷ So, in this issue, the article by Alpha Lisimba and Swati Parashar on China and Rwanda, although still showing symptoms of a centre–periphery relationship, nevertheless contains indications of a possible genuine inter-dependence. It makes Chinese engagement with Africa a case to watch.

But almost every sector of endeavour bears watching in international relationships that can be far more prone to a centre–periphery dynamic than often meets the eye. Awareness and diagnosis are essential to any negotiating back. Thus, Lisa Akesson analyses the ­metropolitan attitudes of Portuguese migrants coming to work in Mozambique, almost by default assuming an air of ‘correct’ knowledge drawn from their metropole. Mohamed Sesay, looking at Sierra Leone and Liberia, looks at the rule of law that, nevertheless, prosecutes norms that may or may not be useful but which are metropolitan – ie the lack of an autochthonous jurisprudence means that law, however transparent, lacks embedded support and understanding. Kassim Mwanika, Elias State, Peter Atekyereza and Torun Osterberg show how, in Uganda, ‘modern’ sugarcane production has changed a previous owner–producer dynamic into a form of capital-intensive agricultural Fordism that services foreign demand. Also in Uganda, but branching into Kenya, Johannes Theo Aalders studies how modern transport and rail corridors disrupt not only traditional transport routes but ways of remembering the past as well. An ‘authentic history’ is submerged and finally deleted by a certain ease of modernity. The articles by Roland Ndille Ntongwe and by Michael Schulz and Ezechiel Sentama look at colonial education imprints on self-conception in Cameroon and Rwanda, respectively. Is one’s ‘self’ an educated view of self drawn from another’s conception of what your self is? In the case of Rwanda, of course, the terrible embedding of a local world-view constructed in binaries and oppositions was no small contributor to the great genocide.

And, on the issue of violence and conflict, war and peace, there have long been questions about what is now called ‘liberal peacebuilding’. What and whose values are enshrined in ‘peace’, particularly a peace that is policed? In Uganda, as Paul Omach observes, metropolitan peacekeeping norms might settle, for a time, the conflict between the state and the Acholi, but without taking into account Acholi cultural norms, no resolution of underlying conflict will be possible.

And what peacekeeping writes large, the plethora of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) throughout Africa writes repeatedly in discrete and smaller units. Whose concept of development for the community? Whose concept therefore of the community? Is community something defined as a vehicle for an NGO’s special approach to development? Yimovie Sakue-Collins looks at the well-meaning but by now industrial phenomenon that has encamped across the African continent.

There are huge success stories, however, of communities asserting their own identities, even across colonial borders. Edem Adotey looks at how the Ghana–Togo border has been reimagined and reframed by citizens on either side. By their own agencies and their own negotiations, the border as a colonial state division is transgressed and organic forms of community, regardless of ‘nationality’, can be established.

Akinbode Fasakin forcefully argues that ‘coloniality’ retains much power, particularly in metropolitan discourses, in terms of its distinction between a ‘superior’ approach to development and an ‘inferior’ and largely incompetent African effort at development. Fasakin, working from the Nigerian example, rebuts this and questions both Western impositions in development finance and the Western thought that accompanies it.

This is where, as ever, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s stirring piece has resonance. The era has now come where Africa not only speaks of a decolonial project but defines its own sense of the decolonial. The fighting back of the self begins with the definition of self without imposition.

My point was very much that this cannot be static in a world that as a whole is fluid, and far from fluent within its fluidity. The world stammers. What does Africa carry into the world that, in fact, helps the world to correct its own stuttering? What values does a decolonised Africa impart to other continents? I have suggested, above, my own set of four cardinal virtues of value. I have tried to tell stories of how I arrived at this set of four. Others will have their own stories and conclusions. But, as I tried to argue, the point of ‘arrival’ has to be via the asking of rigorous questions. Chief of these is ‘To what do we decolonise?’ Is there ­something primal? Was this ‘primal’ something that developed in isolation, purely, without contamination from a local ‘other’? Or is the project of decolonisation one that propels Africa to take its place in a changing, interacting world – but never again on someone else’s terms?

For myself – as the son of refugees from war-torn China, who grew up destitute in my early years in New Zealand, who was befriended by Maori activists and who wrote the first New Zealand newspaper headlines in Maori language, who came to the United Kingdom to understand this thing called ‘European culture’, who found himself in Africa helping ­countries emerge from war, who is asked to help represent Africa in negotiations with China, but whom the Chinese take to be Japanese in appearance and demeanour, and who has held posts in Palestinian universities, I am not at all sure what it is that I should decolonise to. My soul is a wanderer.

The establishment of equal terms that give value and power to self-conception, embracing the world on the basis of equality and not as the object of subjugation: Is this what we should aim to decolonise towards?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Chan

Stephen Chan is Professor of world politics at SOAS University of London, where he was also Foundation Dean of Law and Social Sciences. He was previously the only Chinese Dean of Humanities in any European university. A former international civil servant, he entered academic life late but has since won the 2010 ISA accolade ‘Eminent scholar in Global Development’ and held named and ­honorary titles in four continents. He continues to work extensively in Africa and the Middle East, and has been part of high-level African negotiating delegations to Beijing. He was made OBE for ‘services to Africa and higher education’. Professor Chan has published 35 academic books, five volumes of poetry and three novels. His latest book is Spear to the West: Thought and Recruitment in Violent Jihadism (London: Hurst, 2019).

Notes

1 Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind.

2 Helland, “Writing in Gikuyu.”

3 Schirazi, Constitution of Iran.

4 Furniss, Orality: The Power of the Spoken Word.

5 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another.

6 Khusraw, Knowledge and Liberation.

7 Mokhtefi, Algiers, Third World Capital.

8 Mitter, China’s War with Japan 1937–1945.

9 Chan, End of Certainty: Towards a New Internationalism.

10 eg Agathangelou and Ling, Transforming World Politics; and Ling, Postcolonial International Relations.

11 Chan, Plural International Relations in a Divided World.

12 Ling, Imagining World Politics.

13 Thiong’o, Petals of Blood.

14 See my memoir: Chan, Commonwealth Observer Group in Zimbabwe.

15 For my views on this, see Chan, Morality of China in Africa.

16 Corkin, Uncovering African Agency.

17 Madut, “South Sudan’s Engagement with China.”