Do African postcolonial theories need an epistemic decolonial turn?

ABSTRACT

The growing influence of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a result of this influence, numerous articles have been published calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. With the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and its influence on African scholarship, what is the position of African postcolonial theory in these decolonial interventions? With a focus on African postcolonial theory, this article interrogates Ramón Grosfoguel’s call to decolonize postcolonial theory, thereby establishing a critical epistemological dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theory.

KEYWORDS:

• African
• decolonial
• difference
• multiplicities
• postcolonial

Introduction

The global rise of Latin American decolonial thought has animated several African scholars in Africa, especially South Africa. As a consequence of this influence, numerous articles have been published in recent years calling for the decolonization, through the decolonial turn, not only of university curricula but also of the processes of knowledge production. But there has been silence on the impact of decolonial theory on African postcolonial theory. While articulating African decolonial theory, following Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni provides only a brief contrast between postcolonial and decolonial theory, without substantially engaging African postcolonial theory.¹ As decolonial theory takes hold within African scholarship and expands its global reach, what is the dialogical place assigned to postcolonial theory, and African postcolonial theory in particular? This article interrogates Grosfoguel’s call to decolonize postcolonial theory with a focus on African postcolonial theories in order to establish a critical dialogue between decolonial theory and African postcolonial theories.

When scholars think of postcolonial theory, Africa typically appears as a blank slate, the main focus being on India and the United States. This is also apparent in Grosfoguel’s call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and his differentiation of decolonial theory from postcolonial theory in which there is no engagement with African postcolonial theory. I, therefore, venture to ask what it would mean to decolonize postcolonial theory, as urged by Grosfoguel, if African postcolonial theory were to be recognized as postcolonial theory? Can a decolonial theoretical framework, which arose from a specific ‘problem-space’, to use David Scott’s concept,² with specific questions and moral and political stakes, offer the most useful theoretical framework for postcolonial theorists in other contexts, with their different histories and different stakes involved? What epistemological structures elicit the decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory? As one way of responding to Grosfoguel’s decolonial call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory, this article reflects on the epistemological terms of that call by engaging African postcolonial theory.

I begin by introducing the concept of ‘problem-space’, which guides my main argument. Next, I examine Grosfoguel’s call for the decolonization of postcolonial theory and the broader epistemic decolonial turn, which proposes a number of differences between decolonial and postcolonial theories. I then proceed to engage African postcolonial theorists Valentine Y. Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe to reflect on the epistemological basis of decolonial theory as a different theoretical framework from postcolonial theory, as defined by decolonial critics such as Walter D. Mignolo and Grosfoguel. Mudimbe’s work will help me think through the decolonial repudiation of Western epistemologies within which decolonial critics often situate postcolonial theory. Mbembe will guide my thoughts on the possibility of elaborating an alternative to the conception of difference as exclusivity, which I argue undergirds the decolonial rejection of postcolonial theory and postmodernism as Western epistemes.

Problem-space

One of the central concepts framing this article is David Scott’s idea of ‘problem-space’. The importance of this concept lies in its capacity to bring epistemology, ethics and politics together in knowledge claims, and to bring critical awareness to temporal and spatial differences or constellations, as well as their constraints, in view of the questions we raise and the answers we give to those questions. For Scott, problem-spaces are:

conceptual-ideological ensembles, discursive formations, or language games that are generative of objects, and therefore of questions. And these problem-spaces are necessarily historical inasmuch as they alter as their (epistemic-ideological) conditions of existence change. Thus although there may well be a logical complementarity, a cognitive correlativity (in Collingwood’s sense), between question and answer, as the problem-space changes this complex as a whole may come to lack critical purchase.³

Further, the notion of problem-space arises from the view that,

criticism cannot be understood as knowing omnisciently in advance of any cognitive-political contingency or historical conjuncture what demand it has to meet, what its tasks are supposed to be, what target ought to make a claim on its attention, and what questions ought to constitute its apparatus and animate its preoccupations.⁴

On this view, a theoretical claim should take knowledge claims as answers to historical questions that arise within specific historical conjunctures that cannot be known a priori.⁵ Knowledge claims are answers or solutions to historical questions within specific theoretical, socio-political and geographical frameworks. Consequently, one cannot easily dismiss a knowledge claim without properly attending to the question to which the knowledge claim was offered as an answer. Because knowledge claims are answers and solutions, sometimes they are produced to do things, in J.L. Austin’s performative sense,⁶ and also to take political and moral positions, rather than as solutions to cognitive or purely logical problems.⁷ The historicity of problem-spaces from which questions arise cannot be easily dismissed or ignored when interrogating the knowledge claims that arise from these conjunctures. It is precisely because of the historicity of epistemic conjunctures that Scott proposes that criticism should be self-conscious when engaging a historically constituted and ongoing moral argument. This self-conscious practice of criticism entails: gauging the scope and flow of the arguments; determining the stakes in the argument, thereby identifying possible allies and adversaries; and adopting what may count as an interventional stance by realizing the stakes and keeping the arguments relevant to shifting cognitive-political junctures.⁸

In my view, the historical specificity of problem-spaces should not suggest that they are insulated from exchange and influence from elsewhere, particularly in modern colonial and postcolonial contexts, where ideas and practices traverse multiple temporalities and numerous sociopolitical and spatial locations. In other words, the sociopolitical and epistemic conditions that determine problem-spaces are fundamentally relational, especially under colonial and postcolonial global conditions. This relationality, however, should not suggest that we can conflate multiple problem-spaces for the reason that they all arise from colonial or postcolonial conditions and they are all mobilized in the name of decolonization. Different historical and sociopolitical conditions demand particular forms of intervention. The multilocality, multitemporality and multisociality of colonial and postcolonial conditions demand that a self-conscious practice of criticism takes the historical specificity and relationality of problem-spaces seriously. A critical awareness of modes of translation, as ideas and practices traverse different problem-spaces, becomes necessary for interventional criticism.

It is in the spirit of this kind of criticism that I interrogate the decolonial call to decolonize postcolonial theory generally, and African postcolonial theory specifically. My aim is to offer a different translation or approach to realize what Grosfoguel has called a ‘pluriversal as opposed to a universal world’.⁹ To invite or urge other perspectives to take on a decolonial turn – which is what happens in the call to decolonize postcolonial theory – creates the conditions of possibility for universality, not pluriversality.

The decolonial turn

According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘just as there has been a linguistic and a pragmatic turn, among other such turns in theory and philosophy, there has also been a decolonial turn with distinct features’.¹⁰ The decolonial turn has been in existence in modes of thought and praxis that have rejected and attempted to subvert modern Western racial colonialism. The decolonial turn has unique ‘forms of skepticism and epistemic attitudes’ from which decolonizing questions and answers are provided.¹¹ The main goal of the decolonial turn is the ‘decolonization of knowledge, power, and being, including institutions such as the university’.¹² Further, Maldonado-Torres points out that the decolonial turn does not mean a single theoretical school but rather, encompasses different theoretical schools that take coloniality as central to the problem of Western modernity and ‘decolonization or decoloniality as a necessary task that remains unfinished’.¹³ Consequently, those theoretical schools that do not attempt to subvert Western modern racial colonialism and its continued life-forms in coloniality, by way particularly of decolonial ‘forms of skepticism and epistemic attitudes’, do not form part of the decolonial turn.

In his article ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms’,¹⁴ which was later republished as ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality’,¹⁵ Grosfoguel argues that postcolonial studies should be decolonized through the epistemic decolonial turn. Grosfoguel makes a distinction between postcolonial theory and decolonial theory. Following Mignolo,¹⁶ Grosfoguel begins by giving two different understandings of subalternity: one which takes ‘subalternity as a postmodern critique (which represents a Eurocentric critique of eurocentrism)’; the other being ‘subalternity as a decolonial critique (which represents a critique of eurocentrism from subalternized and silenced knowledges)’.¹⁷ I will come back to reflect on the epistemological rift that undergirds Grosfoguel’s contrast between postmodern critique and decolonial critique. What is important for now is that, from Grosfoguel’s point of view, the former understanding of subalternity operates in area studies and postcolonial theory and the latter in decolonial theory.

For Grosfoguel, in postcolonial theory, theory remains in the Global North while its objects are located in the Global South. Accordingly, postcolonial theory fails to produce knowledge with and from subaltern perspectives. It produces knowledge about the subaltern, and about Eurocentrism, from a Eurocentric perspective. Again following Mignolo,¹⁸ Grosfoguel points out that postcolonial theorists privilege such Western scholars as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Antonio Gramsci. But in his view, ‘by privileging western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, they betray their goal to produce subaltern studies’;¹⁹ moreover, they ‘constrained and limited the radicality of their critique to eurocentrism’.²⁰ To be sure, Grosfoguel starts his critique by focusing on Latin American and Indian Subaltern Studies scholars, but he extends it to postcolonial theory more generally.²¹

Grosfoguel explains that the need to decolonize postcolonial theory is not motivated by essentialist, fundamentalist or anti-European sentiments. Rather, it is motivated by what he calls ‘border thinking’ as a ‘critical response to both hegemonic and marginal fundamentalisms’.²² Here, postcolonial theory seems to be accused of hegemonic fundamentalism for privileging Western scholars in its theoretical orientation. And for Grosfoguel, ‘what all fundamentalisms share (including the eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality’.²³ To move away from hegemonic epistemic fundamentalism, which seems to afflict postcolonial theory, Grosfoguel proposes the decolonization of postcolonial theory through the epistemic ‘decolonial turn’, which entails three things:

1) that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon); 2) that a truly universal decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as opposed to a universal world; 3) that decolonization of knowledge would require [us] to take seriously the epistemic perspectives/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternised racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.²⁴

Besides the search for ‘a broader canon’, which I think already sets the tone of the proposal by re-inscribing the institutional boundaries of the Western academy (where knowledges are indeed organized into canons), the second point contains an ambiguity between a desire for a ‘truly universal decolonial perspective’ and a ‘pluriversal’ world. The third point indicates the imperative of taking seriously the epistemic, moral and political stakes related to those who are marginalized in Western modernity, those from the Global South.

Grosfoguel’s three points constitute a project of epistemic decolonization through the decolonial turn. Central to this is the notion of coloniality, as coined by Aníbal Quijano,²⁵ and further developed by, among others, Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres and Grosfoguel himself. Maldonado-Torres defines coloniality as follows:

Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such [a] nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and every day.²⁶

In short, coloniality is those continuing colonial power relations continue to shape different spheres of modern life after the end of administrative colonialism. Conceptually, ‘coloniality allow[s] us to understand the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations, produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’.²⁷ To decolonize through the decolonial turn in the post-colonial present is to subvert the long-standing colonial matrix of power after the end of colonial administration.²⁸ The notion of coloniality has been used to theorize how different aspects of human life have been entangled in the matrix of colonial power, in particular, in relation to the different subdisciplines of Western philosophy. Hence we have notions such as the coloniality of power (moral and political philosophy),²⁹ the coloniality of being (metaphysics and ontology),³⁰ and the coloniality of knowledge (epistemology).³¹

If there is a need to decolonize postcolonial theory, it should be the case that either postcolonial theory lacks a conceptualization of the insights expressed by the concepts of coloniality and decoloniality or that it does not aim at the three points Grosfoguel raises that define decolonization as understood by various decolonial theorists. But to what extent is this reasoning valid, especially with regards to African postcolonial theory? This is a pertinent question because the call for a decolonial turn has a particular influence in Africa today, especially in South Africa, where the notions of coloniality and decoloniality have been received among scholars with a great sense of novelty and urgency. There are numerous published papers advancing decolonization through decolonial theory, and some South African scholars, such as Leonhard Praeg,³² M. John Lamola,³³ Nokuthula Hlabangane,³⁴ William Jethro Mpofu,³⁵ Morgen Ndlovu³⁶ and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni,³⁷ have taken up the concepts of coloniality and decoloniality as pertinent imports from Latin America.

To be sure, some postcolonial theorists who have engaged decolonial theory in Africa have done so with a spirit of intellectual camaraderie. This is the case, for example, in the work of one of the most influential African postcolonial theorists, Achille Mbembe. In a recent publication on the decolonization of knowledge and universities, Mbembe situates decolonial theory alongside postcolonial and feminist theories in the same decolonization framework as projects that have helped us expand our imagination of coloniality. He writes:

Properly understood (and in spite of its obvious limitations), the ‘decolonial’ ‘decolonisation’ project (just like postcolonial theory and feminist theory) has aimed at expanding our conceptual, methodological and theoretical imaginary. In most instances, it has resisted unified accounts of the human. Downplaying regimes of knowledge that have constituted the human or even the world as one, or have framed humanity as an undifferentiated whole, it has instead sought to map and interrogate the social, cultural and historical differences and uneven power relations that divide the Anthropos.³⁸

Mbembe argues that the aim of resisting a single source of knowledge about the world and the Anthropos, as an epistemic project articulated by decolonial theory, is to create social worlds that ‘are multiple, fractured and contested’. He, therefore, sees ‘the necessity to embrace multivocality and translation as a way not to perpetuate the knowledge/power asymmetries that currently fracture global humanity’. Mbembe, however, does not uncritically engage decolonial theory and practice in Africa. He points out:

Unfortunately, in the ‘decolonial’ ‘decolonisation’ project (just as in some strands of feminist and postcolonial theories), multiplicity has been theorised as ‘difference’. Difference itself has been understood as that which separates and cuts off one cultural or historical entity from another. A decolonial act, in this perspective, is taken to be an act of disconnection and separation (a gesture by which one is cut, or one cuts oneself from the rest).³⁹

By no means should this suggest that Mbembe, as a postcolonial theorist, does not see the epistemological value of decolonial theory, or that his criticism translates into a call for decolonial theory to take a ‘postcolonial epistemic turn’. On the contrary, he reminds us that we should look at the uniqueness of decolonial theory in the same way we look at postcolonial and feminist theories: that is, as a different but important theoretical orientation that adds new forms of knowing and knowledge to the African postcolony in its contemporary entanglements with and across the entire planet.

Mbembe is not the only African scholar to question critically some of the conceptual tenets of decolonial theory and the insights it brings to the history of scholarship in Africa. Mogobe Ramose examines the conceptual underpinnings and history of the notions of coloniality and decoloniality in relation to African scholarship to argue against the uncritical import of concepts from Latin America (or elsewhere) that carry insights already endogenous to African intellectual history, albeit under different names and arguments or problem-spaces.⁴⁰ Further, Ramose questions the place of African scholarship in decolonial theory especially given that decolonial theory lends itself to global reach and relevance, and he finds Grosfoguel’s work wanting in this respect.⁴¹ The issue here is that, as ideas travel, we must reflect on how we position them in interventional dialogue with already existing problem-spaces to realize the most cognitive-political yield. Along similar lines, I am interested in the presence of African postcolonial theory in decolonial critical interrogations of postcolonial theory at large, including calls for its decolonization: can a decolonial theoretical framework that arose from a specific problem-space, with specific questions and different moral and political stakes, offer the greatest yield as theoretical framework to postcolonial theorists in other contexts, given their own specific histories and the stakes involved?

African postcolonial theories

As intimated earlier, the basic critique formulated against postcolonial theory by some decolonial scholars is that it is premised on postmodernism and poststructuralism, which are Western theoretical frameworks. Postcolonial theory is thus considered to lack radicality and to sustain Western epistemic coloniality. Certainly, the claim of both Mignolo and Grosfoguel that postcolonial theory has a postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical patrimony is not mistaken. African postcolonial theory shares this postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical patrimony with postcolonial theory in general. However, despite its orientation in postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical frameworks, I argue that African postcolonial theory upsets some of the fences erected by decolonial theory in the latter’s attempts to distinguish itself from postcolonial theory. But before I elaborate, it is important to point out the constitutive absence of African postcolonial theory in accounts of the broader postcolonial field, as formulated by postcolonial theorists and even some African scholars themselves.

According to the influential African historian Paul Zeleza, ‘postcolonial theory emerged in the Anglo-American academy in the mid-1980s in the wake of the rise of post-structuralism and postmodernism’.⁴² Like many postcolonial theorists, Zeleza names Edward W. Said, Gayatri C. Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha as central figures in the emergence of postcolonial theory, while naming Said’s Orientalism as the founding text of postcolonial theory.

Yet the standard account of the emergence of postcolonial theory, via poststructuralism and postmodernism in the Anglo-American academy in the 1980s, misses some concurrent developments by African scholars. Africa has its own founding figure and text, even though Zeleza does not explicitly name these. The figure is Valentine Y. Mudimbe, and his text The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, was published in 1988 (with some chapters published as early as 1985).⁴³ Mudimbe’s analysis of the construction and representation of the idea of Africa by both the colonizers and the colonized is examined within a poststructuralist and postmodern framework, in very much the same way as Said examines the idea of the Orient. Yet despite this similarity between Said and Mudimbe, Zeleza does not name Mudimbe as a postcolonial theorist. It is Ali Mazrui who, acutely, identifies the intellectual affinities between Said’s and Mudimbe’s major works, when he writes that:

V.Y. Mudimbe is, in certain aspects, a thinker in the same tradition as Edward Said. Both of them illustrate that the best time for interpreting colonialism is in the postcolonial era. … Another characteristic that Edward Said and V.Y. Mudimbe share is that they are both whistle-blowers against ideologies of Otherness – which Mudimbe sometimes calls ‘alterity’ and Said made famous as ‘Orientalism’. Both writers address the phenomenon of ‘the Other’ in Western consciousness and Western empire.⁴⁴

More than this, and in response to discourses of African authenticity, Mudimbe shows how the African self has been invented not only by the West but, most importantly, by Africans themselves. It is important to point out that both Said and Mudimbe do not only expose the ideology of otherness central to European self-consciousness, but they do explore epistemic and theoretical configurations that produce and sustain this ideology of otherness. In addition, Said and Mudimbe share a Foucauldian discourse analysis and genealogical approach in their uncovering of the European epistemic orders and ideologies of otherness that produced (and still produce) Orientals and Africans. One of the central points (though contested) holding postcolonial theories together in their diversity and internal contestations is their reception and work with poststructuralism and postmodernism.

If the emergence of postcolonial theory is defined in terms of its ‘genealogies [which] refer to the theoretical and historical origins of postcolonialism as a theoretical construct’,⁴⁵ and if postcolonialism seeks to map the enduring power of colonialism and modern colonial conquest,⁴⁶ then Mudimbe should be regarded as the first postcolonial theorist in Africa, and one of the founders of postcolonial theory in general. The failure to take Mudimbe seriously as one of the central figures in the emergence of postcolonial theory not only attests to postcolonial theory’s focus on India and the Global North but, as we shall see, the propensity of some decolonial scholars not to consider African postcolonial theory in their critique of postcolonial theory at all.

If decolonial theorists were to engage African postcolonial theory, they would learn that Mudimbe’s work unsettles how decolonial theorists have marked off the identity of their school of thought from postcolonial and postmodern theories. Let me begin by demystifying the myth that decolonial theory studies a much longer history of colonialism than postcolonial theory, which I see as partly a consequence of marginalizing African postcolonial theory. Following Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres and Grosofguel, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, for instance, writes:

Postcolonial theory and decolonial theory also differ in terms of where they begin their critique of modernity/coloniality. Decolonial theorists begin their critique as far back as 500 years covering the Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Postcolonial theorists begin their critique with the British colonization of India in the 19^th century, in the process ignoring some 300 years of the unfolding of modernity/coloniality.⁴⁷

However, according to Mudimbe the postcolonial theorist, modern Western racial colonization begins with the politics surrounding the papal bulls of 1452 (Dum Diversas) and 1454 (Romanus Pontifex), which instructed and legitimized the Portuguese emperor’s bids, and later the Spanish emperor’s, to conquer non-Christians, including Black Africans, and subjugate their persons to perpetual servitude/slavery.⁴⁸ Allow me to quote at length:

From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, missionaries were, through all the ‘new worlds’, part of the political process of creating and extending the right of European sovereignty over ‘newly discovered’ lands (Keller, Lissitzyn, and Mann, 1938). In doing so, they obeyed the ‘sacred instructions’ of Pope Alexander VI in his bull Inter Caetera (1493): to overthrow paganism and establish the Christian faith in all barbarous nations. The bulls of Nicholas V – Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) – had indeed already given the kings of Portugal the right to dispossess and eternally enslave Mahometans, pagans, and black peoples in general (Deschamps, 1971). Dum Diversas clearly stipulates this right to invade, conquer, expel, and fight (invadendi, conquirendi, expugnandi, debellandi) Muslims, pagans, and other enemies of Christ (saracenos ac paganos, aliosque Christi inimicos) wherever they may be.⁴⁹

Mudimbe’s position on the rise of modern Western colonialism is even engaged and used by Sylvia Wynter (who is regarded by others as a decolonial thinker)⁵⁰ in her probing and insightful essay ‘1492: A “New World” View’,⁵¹ to support her decolonial intervention. The critique of postcolonial theory that it takes the nineteenth century as the beginning of Western modern colonization does not hold especially when we consider some prominent African postcolonial theorists such as Mudimbe and Mbembe.⁵² Some of the decolonial thinkers who make this claim appear to have had no time to engage African postcolonial theory, hence they reduce postcolonial theory to the work of Indian scholars and postcolonial scholars of India, whose work of course legitimately focuses on the history of British colonialism in India.⁵³ To be sure, what is at stake here is not only timing but also the major dynamic changes in epistemic, political, economic and cultural orientations in the shift from the dominance of the Catholic paradigm to the Protestant paradigm and then the secular paradigm, which Mudimbe’s work insightfully identifies in Africa. Of course, these shifts in Europe affected and continue to affect different colonial spaces in different ways, and not all colonial spaces were subject to all of these paradigms. As a result, anti-colonial and postcolonial intellectuals have responded to the influence of these paradigms differently, depending on how they were affected and according to the problem-spaces from which they raised their questions.

Coming to one of the central questions in The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe makes a salient epistemic intervention by asking: when we talk and think of Africa, from which epistemological orders do we think? And this question can be extended to some decolonial theories where they claim to speak or represent Indigenous knowledges and subaltern experiences and histories. Further, when some decolonial theorists think of the ‘colonial difference’, when they reject Western epistemologies, or when Grosfoguel establishes a distinction between ‘subalternity as a postmodern critique’ and ‘subalternity as a decolonial critique’, from what epistemological order(s) do they think? In his interrogation on the question of Africa, Mudimbe argues:

The fact of the matter is that, until now, Western interpreters as well as African analysts have been using categories and conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order. Even in the most explicitly ‘Afrocentric’ descriptions, models of analysis explicitly or implicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, refer to the same order.⁵⁴

Here Mudimbe contends that the Western colonial epistemic order has been the governing conceptual system by which conceptions of Africa, and what is considered African, have been shaped by both African intellectuals and their colonizers. Besides underscoring what decolonial theorists call the coloniality of knowledge – which is to say that knowledge claims that are considered legitimate even by the colonized and ex-colonized about themselves are produced from within Western epistemic orders – Mudimbe’s work also points to something more. His insights further invite us to think critically about our epistemic orientations when we think and produce the West’s racialized and subalternized others, and when theorists claim to speak on their behalf or from the subaltern’s particular epistemic order. To arrive at this insight, Mudimbe used poststructuralist and postmodern theoretical frameworks by way of Foucauldian discourse analysis and genealogy, which decolonial theorists find not radical enough for the project of decolonization. Mudimbe proceeds to probe further:

Does this mean that African Weltanschauungen and African traditional systems of thought are unthinkable and cannot be made explicit within the framework of their own rationality? My own claim is that thus far the ways in which they have been evaluated and the means used to explain them relate to theories and methods whose constraints, rules, and systems of operation suppose a non-African epistemological locus. From this viewpoint the claim of some African philosophers such as O. Bimwenyi (1981a) and E. Eboussi-Boulaga (1981) that they represent an epistemological hiatus should be taken seriously.⁵⁵

This quote goes against the claim that postcolonial theory does not engage with the knowledge that has been produced with and from subaltern experiences. Mudimbe helps us identify a difference between producing knowledge about African knowledges on the basis of Western epistemological orders and African knowledges produced from within African Indigenous epistemic orders. Mudimbe argues that between the former and the latter there is an epistemological rift, yet he does not argue that it is unbridgeable. The gap is often collapsed by Westernized African intellectuals who fill Western epistemological orders with African content only to mask or erase Indigenous epistemic orders. This epistemic veiling or erasure does not have obvious teleological or political consequences. A discussion of this matter exceeds the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that such epistemic veiling or erasure might help transform and ameliorate the living conditions of the general population in response to changing sociopolitical, moral, political and economic junctures; or it may not.

Over the length of the book, Mudimbe engages with both white male racist thinkers and African Westernized intellectuals, such as Wilmot Blyden,⁵⁶ Walter Rodney⁵⁷ and Kwame Nkrumah⁵⁸ (who have been retroactively identified as decolonial thinkers by Ndlovu-Gatsheni)⁵⁹ to show these intellectuals’ dependence on Western epistemological orders in their contestation of the violence of Western modernity by way of the invention of Africa. Blyden, for example, in his book Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, first published in 1887,⁶⁰ is one of the first to have insisted on building African societies on African values and knowledge systems, which were viewed through the constraints of the Western episteme and the power relations entailed therein. His ideas influenced anti-colonial thinkers such as Nkrumah to formulate the notion of ‘African personality’, and Léopold Senghor to develop his notion of ‘Négritude’. And it was Nkrumah in 1964 who coined the word neocolonialism to capture the colonial power matrix that survived political independence in Africa,⁶¹ formulating the insight that decolonial thinkers have come to call coloniality.

Fanon too, even earlier, had elaborated, and in more detail, the continuation of colonial power relations in Africa after independence in the Wretched of the Earth.⁶² And to be sure, Nkrumah and other African anti-colonialists understood that decolonization did not mean only political sovereignty, contrary to what Ndlovu-Gatsheni would suggest in his differentiation of decoloniality from the ‘myth of African decolonisation’.⁶³ To some African anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkers, such as Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, decolonization also meant re-centring African cultural and education systems around African epistemologies and values.⁶⁴ But Mudimbe’s intervention shows that this conception of African epistemologies and values was constrained by Western frameworks, which resulted in the emergence of the African ‘evolue’, to use Fanon’s word, and the African subalterns. This is not to say that had African intellectuals thought their emancipation through Indigenous epistemological orders decolonization would have been guaranteed. To the contrary, my reading leads me to question the claims that Westernized African intellectuals speak from or on behalf of subalternized perspectives and that they may produce Indigenous epistemologies divorced from Western epistemological orders and their constraints.

In exposing the Eurocentric framework in different inventions of Africa by both the colonized and the colonizers, as well as the ex-colonized and the ex-colonizers, Mudimbe invokes the possibility of different or Indigenous epistemic orders. However, this call for a different epistemic order is not alien to his postmodern and poststructuralist theoretical framework. As suggested earlier, it is exactly his engagement with poststructuralism that allows him to entertain the possibility of an African order of knowledge or rationality that he finds absent in the thinking of Western-trained anti-colonial and postcolonial African intellectuals. Precisely because of his orientation within the Western episteme, it appears to me that Mudimbe sees it as impossible for him, like many other intellectuals he discusses in his work, as Western-oriented and -trained intellectuals, to produce Indigenous African knowledges within the terms of their own rationalities. Epistemologically, therefore, there is a rupture between African knowledges that were produced within Indigenous African epistemic orders and power relations before the colonial encounter and those knowledges about Africa produced by intellectuals trained in Western epistemic orders after the colonial encounter.

In fact, those scholars celebrated as decolonial thinkers by decolonial scholars, as in the case of postcolonial theorists, think from Western epistemological orders and are similarly constrained. Fanon, Aime Césaire, Wynter, Nkrumah, Dussel, Blyden, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and even Mignolo himself, all think from Western epistemological orders, even when their work vehemently and brilliantly contests the violence of Western racial modernity from the problem-space of their own racialized experiences and histories. Certainly, new knowledges emerge from reflecting on their particular histories from within Western epistemological orders. And the knowledge that these intellectuals produce cannot be reduced to Eurocentric theories simply because they are produced from within Western conceptual systems. Thinking from within Western epistemological orders is a condition, I submit, that decolonial theorists share with postcolonial theorists.

The tenacity of difference

African postcolonial theory muddies the decolonial investment in the idea of radical difference from the West. I argue that a critical engagement with some insights from African postcolonial theories reveals that decolonial theory, as propounded by Mignolo and Grosfoguel, among others, has a troubling conception of difference that manifests in its rejection of postmodernism and postcolonial theory. The dominant Western conception of difference appears to abide tenaciously in the decolonial conception of difference, even when proponents of decoloniality try so hard to abandon the Western episteme. I shall start this reflection by offering a particular understanding of Western epistemological orders.

In Mudimbe’s argument, our understanding of Western epistemological orders should not be reduced to the Foucauldian theory that informs his method of analysis. It rather refers to ‘theories and methods whose constraints, rules, and systems of operation’, as well as the institutions that produce them (schools, colleges and universities), contour modes of thinking.⁶⁵ Resonating with Mudimbe’s view of African intellectuals and the epistemological conditions that constitute them, the African philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes that:

Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Africa.⁶⁶

Although Appiah formulated these arguments in the context of his early critique of postcolonial theory and cultural production, to which he attributed a key role in the reproduction of marketable ideas of cultural purity and Afrocentrism, African postcolonial theory at its best takes this critique as its point of departure. Thus, what matters here is that, despite their different takes on postcoloniality as a theoretical or cultural project, Appiah and Mudimbe similarly help us formulate a critical question about the conditions of epistemological possibility. Post-colonial intellectuals are trained in Western tastes and styles, their thinking and categories of thinking mediate or link the peripheries to the centres of Western epistemologies and their means of production. Besides arguing the impossibility of reproducing Indigenous knowledges from pre-colonial Indigenous epistemic orders as proposed by some intellectuals trained in the West, Mudimbe’s and Appiah’s interventions raise another challenge that decolonial theory may have to consider in its claim to sever itself from Western epistemological orders. If decolonial scholars are themselves Western-trained post-colonial intellectuals, is it possible for them to sever themselves from Western epistemological orders and the institutions within which they have been trained to think and produce knowledge? Without suggesting any form of purity, this question is salient because it is central to the decolonial critique of postcolonial theory’s dependency on Western epistemologies. And it is also vital in the conception of the difference that supposedly sets decolonial theory apart from postcolonial and postmodern theories, as proposed by some decolonial theorists.

I sense that, if we read postmodernism more generally, rather than restricting it to Foucault, Derrida and Jacques Lacan, as some decolonial theorists do, then we might identify a striking epistemological structural similarity between postmodernism in its production of difference and the way decolonial theory produces its difference from postcolonial and postmodern theories. In identifying this structural similarity, the plausible conclusion is that either decolonial theory knowingly or unknowingly inhabits the postmodern epistemological order that it repudiates or decolonial theory unknowingly or knowingly produces the same epistemological order as postmodernism. And in both cases, at the level of the conception and production of difference and the politics of knowledge, decolonial theory consequently aligns with the modern production of difference that it vehemently wishes to reject.

It is in reading postmodernity in general terms – that is, identifying some general conditions of possibility of knowledge and knowledge production – that we can examine differently whether decolonial and postcolonial theorists think outside the postmodern epistemological order. In his reading of postmodernity, Appiah proposes the following:

Postmodernism can be seen, then, as a retheorization of the proliferation of distinctions that reflects the underlying dynamic of cultural modernity, the need to clear oneself a space. Modernism saw the economization of the world as the triumph of reason; postmodernism rejects that claim, allowing in the realm of theory the same proliferation of distinctions that modernity had begun.⁶⁷

From Appiah’s reflection, we can identify at least two major epistemic structures that constitute the conception and production of difference in the postmodern epistemological order and at least one consequence arising from them that are relevant to my argument. Firstly, postmodernism is epistemically characterized by a logical stricture (a criticism of modernity and at the same time a constraint) to proliferate distinctions. postmodernism has an epistemological grid for producing numerous differences as one of its conditions of possibility. Unlike the modern epistemological order, which openly structured knowledge to find a single point of enunciation and a single truth, the postmodern epistemological order is structured so as to produce many points of enunciation, in other words, multiple identities. Secondly, the epistemic structure constituting the logic of proliferation of distinctions operates in a market space where the ‘clearing of space’ (the dismissal of the truth value of other points of enunciation as a condition for the emergence of one’s own difference) becomes an intrinsic feature in the proliferation of distinctions and the consequent rejection of the relatively equal worth of differences. What these epistemological strictures condition is the continuation of modernity’s exclusive truth claims and identity by way of masquerading exclusivity in the proliferation of the loci of enunciation. In this reading of some features of postmodernism, it is not surprising that both decolonial and postcolonial theories have pointed out that despite their recognition of differences, the work of scholars such as Jean-François Lyotard, Foucault, Immanuel Levinas, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gorgio Agamben have retained the assumption that truth is an exclusive product of the white male subject.

If we look at the epistemological moves that some decolonial theorists employ or inhabit to produce decolonial theory’s difference from postcolonial and postmodern theories, we can identify a similar epistemological structure of proliferation of distinctions and the ‘clearing of space’ to enunciate its distinction, with the consequent monopolization of the ‘true’ conception of decolonization or liberation. Circumscribed by the logical stricture to proliferate distinctions, decolonial theorists such as Mignolo and Grosfoguel have constantly emphasized that decolonial theory aims for a pluriversality of epistemologies and modes of being human. Yet inhabiting the epistemic constraint of ‘clearing of space’, these decolonial theorists dismiss or undervalue the distinctions that constitute postcolonial and postmodern theories, positioning their theory as a comprehensive theoretical solution to the problems that both postcolonial and postmodern theories raise and answer. The ‘clearing of space’ happens by way of calling for the decolonization of postcolonial theories through the decolonial turn, pointing out the incapacity of postmodern theories to go beyond their Eurocentric limits, even when postmodern theories are interrogated and transformed by postcolonial theories as they attend to the questions postcolonial theorists seek to answer. While being characteristic of postmodernism, what I read in this move by decolonial theorists is the struggle to go beyond the conception of difference as lack or absence, which defined modernity as it shaped our worlds.

My critique of decolonial theory should not be read as undermining the decolonial call to take seriously knowledges and experience produced from the margins of Western modernity. In so far as I concur with the imperative to take seriously the knowledges and experiences of the margins (without conflating the postcolonial elites – such as the intellectuals – with the subaltern), I do not think that the decolonial turn is necessary, as a guide, to use Mignolo’s word, for postcolonial and postmodern theories in either local and global projects of decolonization. The decolonial turn draws its relative value from its problem-space, which coexists with different problem-spaces constituted by our present post-colonial conditions. To be sure, decolonial theory is emphatic regarding the incapacity of postcolonial and postmodern theories to gain insight into the histories of subjects constituted by coloniality. But underlying this claim is a resuscitation of the notion of difference as exclusivity and self-transparency. This is the case, for instance, in Mignolo’s conception of the ‘colonial difference’ and Grosfoguel’s distinction between ‘subalternity as a postmodern critique’ and ‘subalternity as a decolonial critique’, which seem to construct an unbridgeable epistemological and political wall between subjects and theories located on different sides of modernity/coloniality.

Mogobe Ramose has recently questioned and exposed the epistemological and ontological foundations/implications of Mignolo’s conception of the ‘colonial difference’. Ramose explains that ‘Mignolo’s apparent radical epistemology steeped in “colonial difference”, leads to the edge where a distinction must be drawn between “alterity” and “exteriority”’, and this means that ‘Mignolo denies the possibility that one can adopt a perspective other than one’s own – from one’s roots – in investigating reality, in particular, human relations’.⁶⁸ Mignolo’s and Grosfoguel’s ‘decolonial difference’ denies postcolonial theory and postmodern theory the capacity to derive insights from the theories and histories at the margins of modernity, a province that seems to be reserved for the decolonial outlook. This seemingly unbridgeable epistemic gap can be explained by the conception of difference as exclusivity between the two sides of the ‘colonial difference’. The radical epistemological difference that decolonial theory constructs between decolonial theory and postmodern theory (and consequently postcolonial theory), despite decolonial theory’s demand that we must take seriously knowledges and histories produced in the margins of modernity, produces difference as exclusivity. Accordingly, in proliferating distinctions while dismissing the truth-value of other differences in producing their own difference, decolonial theory thinks from or reconstitutes some of the epistemic strictures of the postmodern epistemological order, and reproduces a modern conception of difference. In this way, I am left wondering about the extent to which decolonial theory, in its conception of difference, is a conscript of the postmodern epistemological order that it emphatically rejects. And it is only by asking such questions that decolonial theory may engage with African postcolonial theory and postcolonial theory more generally in more productive ways than the present sweeping dismissals.

From thinking difference to perceiving simultaneous multiplicities

One of the main questions African postcolonial theorists such as Mudimbe, Appiah and Mbembe seem to grapple with is how to avoid the continuous reproduction of otherness constituted and instituted by racial colonialism. Appiah succinctly captures the condition of the postcolonial African intellectual when he writes that:

Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals – a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism – we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows.⁶⁹

According to this pointed reading of the epistemic and institutional location of the African post-colonial intellectual, its structural function is to produce racialized difference. Yet one of the ways to avoid inhabiting the position of manufacturer of racialized difference is to acknowledge our positions as conscripts of Western epistemological orders. And it seems to me that African postcolonial theorists, and some decolonial intellectuals, can inventively think decolonization in relation to other problem-spaces by shifting from thinking difference to thinking multiplicity, and allowing an ethical politics of relationality⁷⁰ in the production of knowledge. Mbembe proposes a distinction between difference and what he calls simultaneous multiplicities.⁷¹ For Mbembe, in the dominant conception of difference, ‘to differ from something or somebody is not simply not to be like (in the sense of being non-identical or being-other); it is also not to be at all (nonbeing)’.⁷² Difference in this rendition is the exclusionary binary conception of presence and absence, being and non-being, as expressed in dominant Western philosophy and in the construction of the West’s self-image in relation to its others.⁷³ In this understanding of difference, to be different is to possess or lack something that the other, in contrast, lacks or possesses. A relevant example is how some decolonial theorists define radicality and intellectual engagement from the margins of modernity, among other things, as what decolonial theory possesses and postcolonial theory lacks. Difference in this conception is constituted by opposing binaries.

Simultaneous multiplicities, on the other hand, suggest that human reality, or what Mbembe calls ‘time as lived’, is not made up of exclusionary binaries or difference.⁷⁴ Rather, human reality is made of the simultaneous existence of presence and absence, being and non-being, inertia and flux, singularity and generality, certainty and uncertainty, all at the same time and in the same thing. Besides the simultaneity of presence and absence, human reality is also rooted in multiplicities of reversals, continuities, trajectories, the meandering of forces and rationalities that are intimately entangled in ordered and unpredictable ways.⁷⁵ To be different or non-identical in this regard is not to possess what the other does not have. Instead, it is to stand in a particular relation with the simultaneity of being and non-being, inertia and the flux of things, certainties and uncertainties that are constituted by and constitutive of the human realities we live.

Taking this lesson from Mbembe, we can think alternatively about the conditions that constitute the difference between decolonial theory and postcolonial theory as proposed by some decolonial theorists. ‘Radicality’ and engaged knowledges from the ‘margins’, which are offered by decolonial theorists as a guarantee for overcoming the violence of coloniality, in fact do not offer any guarantee of liberation or decolonization because they are simultaneously constituted by potential success and failure, which depend, in turn, on multiple forces that are known and unknown. And Mignolo’s ‘colonial difference’, which as I have argued earlier derives from or constitutes difference in its identification of the difference between locations of racialized and (de)humanized subjects of modernity, can be also framed differently. From the point of view of simultaneous multiplicity, there is no epistemic exclusivity between subjects located on different sides of the ‘colonial difference’. The latter too is concomitantly constituted by the possibility of translocational insight and its impossibility, depending on multiple forces. Contesting the radical ontological and epistemic implication of Mignolo’s ‘colonial difference’, Ramose proposes that

the immediacy and directness of experience is mediated by expressibility, which is the possibility condition [condition of possibility] for dialogue. In the dialogical encounter, it is possible to assume the point of view of the ‘other’ in the quest to understand and change reality.⁷⁶

Accordingly, both postcolonial and decolonial theorists, who both think from within Western epistemological orders in spite of decolonial claims to the contrary, can have insights emerging from the margins of Western modernity without this being the exclusive capacity of decolonial theory and without claims to be speaking on behalf of the subaltern or to reproduce Indigenous orders of knowledge. In my view, dialogue is only possible if there are two already constituted points of view that do not lead to the collapse of one viewpoint into another, either by total subsumption of another’s point of view or the abandoning of one’s own in order to possess the other’s. Dialogue leads to the transformation of the points of view involved. Of course, taking into account that dialogical processes of transformation are moderated by institutional, historical, epistemic, cultural, socio-economic and political power relations.

Rather than decolonial theory possessing what postcolonial theory lacks, and as well as their respective questions emerging from different problem-spaces, their difference may be understood as revealing different aspects of the configurations of the simultaneous multiplicities from which the different theorists think. Of course, each theory conceals other sides or aspects of the reality they try to reveal and construct, and the very emergence of theories is made possible by multiple forces of capacitation and limitation that are simultaneously local and global. That is why both decolonial and postcolonial theories concomitantly reveal to us the locality and globality of the enduring power of modern racial colonialism. Their singularities need not be articulated by way of a postmodern epistemological stricture that proliferates distinctions only to engage in a ‘clearing of space’ for the construction of difference.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Anya Topolski, Katrine Smiet, Jamila M.H. Mascat and the blind reviewers for their critical feedback. Special thanks to Gianmaria Colpani for thinking with me all the way in the development of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josias Tembo

Josias Tembo is Ph.D. researcher in political philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He has a master’s degree in philosophy on African identity from the University of Pretoria and he interested in postcolonial theory and critical philosophy of race, African philosophy and political philosophy. He published ‘Mbembe at the Lekgotla of Foucault’s Self-Styling and African Identity’ in Phronimon 19, and, with co-author S. Gerber, published the chapter ‘Towards a Postcolonial Universal Ontology’, in The Othering of the Other: Philosophical Perspectives on the African Context of Difference (Springer). He is currently editing a special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy, The Race–Religion Constellation: Entanglements in African Political Communities.

Notes

1 Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, History Compass, 13(10), 2015, pp 485–496.

2 David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

3 Scott, Refashioning Futures, p 8.

4 Scott, Refashioning Futures, pp 4–5.

5 R G Collingwood, An Autobiography, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

6 J L Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

7 Scott, Refashioning Futures, pp 6–8.

8 Scott, Refashioning Futures, p 7.

9 Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms’, Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 2007, p 212.

10 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn: Post-Continental Interventions in Theory, Philosophy, and Critique – An Introduction’, Transmodernity, 1(2), 2011, p 1.

11 Maldonado-Torres, ‘Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn’, p 1.

12 Maldonado-Torres, ‘Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn’, p 1.

13 Maldonado-Torres, ‘Thinking Through the Decolonial Turn’, p 2.

14 Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’.

15 Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality’, Transmodernity, 1(1), 2011.

16 Walter D Mignolo, ‘Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality’, Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 2007, pp 454–455.

17 Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, p 211.

18 Walter D Mignolo, ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking’, Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 2007, pp 163–165.

19 Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, p 211.

20 Mignolo, ‘Introduction’, p 212.

21 Mignolo, ‘Introduction’, p 212.

22 Mignolo, ‘Introduction’, p 212.

23 Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies’.

24 Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, p 212.

25 Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America’, International Sociology, 15(2), 2000, pp 215–232.

26 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’, Cultural Studies, 21(2), 2007, p 243.

27 Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’, p 219.

28 I use ‘post-colonial’ with a hyphen in this paper to mean the time after the end of administrative colonialism, in contradistinction to ‘postcolonial’ as a theoretical framework.

29 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power’.

30 Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’.

31 Grosfoguel, ‘The Epistemic Decolonial Turn’; Walter D Mignolo, ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101(1), 2002, pp 57–96.

32 Leonhard Praeg, Philosophy on the Border: Decoloniality and the Shudder of the Origin, Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2019.

33 M John Lamola, ‘African Postmodernism: Its Moment, Nature and Content’, International Journal of African Renaissance Studies, 12(2), 2017, pp 110–123.

34 Nokuthula Hlabangane, ‘Can a Methodology Subvert the Logic of Its Principal? Decolonial Meditations’, Perspectives on Science, 26(6), 2018, pp 658–693; Nokuthula Hlabangane, ‘Of Witch Doctors, Traditional Weapons and Traditional Medicine: Decolonial Meditations on the Role of the Media After the Marikana Massacre, South Africa’, African Identities, 16(3), 2018, pp 234–259.

35 William Jethro Mpofu, ‘Coloniality in the Scramble for African Knowledge: A Decolonial Political Perspective’, Africanus, 43(2), 2013, pp 105–117.

36 Morgen Ndlovu, ‘Coloniality of Knowledge and the Challenge of Creating African Futures’, Ufahamu, 40(2), 2018, pp 95–112; Morgen Ndlovu, Performing Indigeneity: Spectacles of Culture and Identity in Coloniality, London: Pluto Press, 2019.

37 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’.

38 Achille Mbembe, ‘Future Knowledges and Their Implications for the Decolonisation Project’, in Jonathan D Jansen (ed), Decolonisation in Universities: The Politics of Knowledge, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019, p 242.

39 Mbembe, ‘Future Knowledges’, p 242.

40 Mogobe Ramose, ‘Critique of Ramón Grosfoguel’s “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn”’, Alternations, 27(1), 2020, pp 269–305.

41 Ramose, ‘Critique of Ramón Grosfoguel’.

42 Paul Zeleza, ‘The Troubled Encounter Between Postcolonialism and African History’, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 17(2), 2006, p 92.

43 Mudimbe published the Invention of Africa in the Anglo-American academy, where he has been working since 1979.

44 Ali A Mazrui, ‘The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond’, Research in African Literatures, 36(3), 2005, pp 68–69.

45 Zeleza, ‘The Troubled Encounter’, p 92.

46 Zeleza, ‘The Troubled Encounter’, p 99.

47 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, p 491.

48 Valentin Y Mudimbe, ‘Romanus Pontifex (1454) and the Expansion of Europe’, in Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (eds), Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp 58–65.

49 Valentin Y Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988, p 145. For Mudimbe’s references in this quote, see: Arthur S Keller, Oliver J Lissitzyn, and Frederick J Mann, Creation of Rights of Sovereignty Through Symbolic Acts, 1400–1800, New York: Columbia University Press, 1938; Hubert Deschamps, Histoire de la traite des noirs de l’antiquité à nos jours, Paris: Fayard, 1971.

50 Mignolo, ‘Delinking’; Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies’; Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 42(4), 2014, pp 691–711.

51 Sylvia Wynter, ‘1492: A New World View’, in Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (eds), Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp 11, 13.

52 Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017.

53 Of course, we should also not forget that the Portuguese began to colonize parts of India from the early sixteenth century (1510).

54 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p x.

55 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. For Mudimbe’s references in this quote, see: F Eboussi Boulaga, Christianisme sans fétiche: Révélation et domination, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981; Oscar Bimwenyi-Kweshi, Discours théologique négro-africain, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1981.

56 Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, London: W.B. Whittingham & Co., 1888.

57 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.

58 Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965; Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965.

59 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, p 487.

60 Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race.

61 Nkrumah, Consciencism; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, p 487.

62 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press, 1961.

63 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decoloniality as the Future of Africa’, pp 486–487.

64 Ramose, ‘Critique of Ramón Grosfoguel’, p 301.

65 Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p x.

66 Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, Critical Inquiry 17(2), 1991, p 348.

67 Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, p 346.

68 Ramose, ‘Critique of Ramón Grosfoguel’, p 284.

69 Appiah, ‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?’, p 356.

70 Anya Topolski, Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015.

71 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001, p 146.

72 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p 4.

73 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, pp 4–5.

74 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p 8.

75 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, pp 9–10.

76 Ramose, ‘Critique of Ramón Grosfoguel’, p 285.