Performing African Studies at El Colegio de México: neoliberal colonialism and the globalectical South

ABSTRACT

By analysing a talk by Ngugi wa Thiong’o at Colmex in Mexico City as an academic performance, and his memoir of the early 1960s at Makerere University in Kampala, I explore different ways of engaging with Africa as subject/object of knowledge, in classic colonialism and neoliberal colonialism, in Latin America and in Africa. In my first case study, analysing the Colmex event as an academic performance means to approach it as a set of naturalised rituals, which turn out to be symptomatic of neoliberal colonialist epistemic outlooks. In my second case study, I analyse Ngugi’s memoir as a set of narrative strategies that critically engage with classic colonial education in Africa. In each case study, I concentrate on the relation between place and perspective, a relation central to Ngugi’s theoretical formulations in Globalectics. The analysis of performative, literary and theoretical instances of the relationship between place and perspective allows me to interrogate the implications of the Colmex African Studies programme as placed in the global South but without a global South perspective. Travelling between continents, epochs and genres, I aim to assess the role of ‘neoliberal colonialism’ for a global South study of Africa today.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• colonialism
• African Studies
• global South epistemologies
• Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Introduction

While the usage of ‘neocolonialism’ in English is widespread, ‘neoliberal colonialism’ is scarce. In Spanish, while not ubiquitous, it is more common. This may index different economies of language, different colonial histories and the impact of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. Still, in both Hispanic and Anglophone scholarly literatures, the term remains incidental, with a couple of exceptions. One of these is the work of Australian governance scholar Elizabeth Strakosch (2015). Her usage of the term is specifically modelled to assess neoliberalism as social policy within wealthy, contemporary, anglophone settler states. In contrast to Strakosch’s exploration of ‘neoliberalism’ as a national, internally emergent and state-led phenomenon, here I am concerned with neoliberalism as an imperialistic enterprise at a global scale, with its genesis in the 1973 CIA-led coup in Chile, which overthrew a democratically elected government to turn the country into a laboratory for Milton Friedman’s economic model and then extended it worldwide (see Klein 2007). Yet Strakosch’s study of how liberalism and colonialism have had a facilitative relationship from the outset and how neoliberalism today helps obfuscate ongoing colonial relations while at the same time prolonging them through their transubstantiation into market values is useful for my own analysis.

Mexican political philosopher José Gandarilla has also dealt with the concept at length. In Colonialismo neoliberal (2018), he deploys neoliberalism as the contemporary modality of colonialism, and the latter as an underlaying long-term structure of power relations. While his understanding of the concept remains mostly tacit throughout the book, over a phone conversation on May 15 he expanded on how his coinage responds to its usefulness as a periodisation marker and the desire to flag out the impact of contemporary economic rationalities on the colonial modulation of social relations, seeking to present epistemological questions in terms of their material anchorages. In his 2018 book, and paraphrasing Jacques Lacan’s famous statement that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ ([1958] 1977, 739), Gandarilla claims that ‘colonialism is structured like a language’ (2018, 92). We can thus infer that, like a language, colonialism is a unified set producing its effects through the combination of elements regulated by the laws of a closed order. Understood as a particular organisational rationality, colonialism is not limited to a specific historical period.

In this article, I use ‘neoliberal colonialism’ to emphasise that the present global political economy is not just an iteration of colonialism (as ‘neocolonialism’ could suggest) nor a simple iteration of liberalism (as in ‘neoliberalism’). It entails iteration but also singularity as the most recent development of historical colonialism, with its own econo-logic bringing about specific forms of relationality at a global scale. The term allows us to approach neoliberalism as a particularly classed and racialised form of social organisation, wrought in a colonial rationality that, like the structuring principles of a language, is not patently visible yet organises that which is.

Centring on the African Studies programme at El Colegio de México (Colmex), in this article I am concerned with the epistemic dimension of global South relations in times of neoliberal colonialism. Contrasting that programme today with the British colonial education imparted at Makerere University in 1960s Uganda, I explore the complicities between classic and neoliberal colonialisms across continents. The travels of Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o are the leitmotif linking up the different contexts. The enmeshment between contemporary modalities of appropriation of surplus value and racialised structures of social organisation that the term ‘neoliberal colonialism’ seeks to lay bare are central to the work of Ngugi too. With reference to Cabral and Fanon, in his book Writers in Politics, he describes national liberation as the historical ‘negation of a negation’ that is to be brought about through the rejection of the foreign domination of productive forces. Thus, ‘the anti-colonial process,’ writes Ngugi, ‘is essentially an economic and political struggle and in essence it is incompatible with imperialism under whatever guise and guardianship’ (1997, 19). Neoliberal colonialism, as a term, refuses to crop out the specificity of the economic modus operandi of the colonial enterprise under its current guise and guardianship.

Below, I first address the Latin American context in which the study of Africa at Colmex is inscribed, to then focus on the specific scene of a talk Ngugi gave there in 2017. I analyse the lecture as an academic performance, that is, a set of rituals that are symptomatic of naturalised ways and contents in the valorisation of knowledge – particularly, knowledge about Africa. The next section turns to Ngugi’s Globalectics (2012a). Through the notion of globalectics, Ngugi defetishises specific places of enunciation as guarantee of critical outlooks. The distinction between site of enunciation and perspective of enunciation will allow me, in closing, to reassess the dialectics between both at Ngugi’s Colmex lecture and in the Colmex African Studies programme more generally. But before the conclusions, I introduce a second case study in a section dedicated to the handling of narrative perspective in Ngugi’s (2016) account of his education at Makerere in Birth of a Dreamweaver. I focus on how the memoir as both testimony and artifice informs us of ways of (mis)situating Africa as place and perspective of knowing. I introduce this second case study to facilitate comparative analysis between a Latin American and an African academic institution, and between a classic colonial and a neoliberal colonial deployment of knowledge. Examining assumptions about Africa as place and perspective of knowing through oral, literary and theoretical instantiations of academic practice allows me to address the critical perspectival potential concerning Africa from elsewhere in the global South in the era of neoliberal colonialism.

Colmex in the Latin American context

Colmex, in Mexico City, is something between a cluster of social science research centres and an exclusive university, with a 14 per cent admittance rate and a 1 professor per 2.5 student ratio (Colmex 2017). While publicly funded, 95 per cent of students come from private schools, a telling index of how elites in Mexico reproduce through the inheritance of social capital (see Hernández 2020). The programmes are mostly all graduate. Only three out of seventeen are undergraduate – in politics, public administration and international relations – and they traditionally school those that are to become high-ranking actors in Mexican politics, including the diplomatic corps. The institution was founded in 1940 by exiles from the Spanish Civil War. But while being set up by intellectuals expatriated for their progressive ways and financed with public money, it has grown to become a profoundly conservative institution with ethnically biased hierarchical structures – common in the context of Mexico’s colonial legacy – and a longstanding gender bias, which gained visibility with the sexual harassment accusations that broke out in 2018 and were covered by the national press, including an open letter published in Nexos on November 22.

In Mexican institutions of higher education generally, there is an age-old inequity in the socio-institutional valuation of scholars according to their countries of birth and education. The hiring of global North academics is often a question of prestige rather than quality and rarely serves the function of training a greater percentage of future national faculty. Yet this colonisation of higher education institutions exists on par with a vociferous nationalist rhetoric and does not override the deep-seated operation of strongly raced, classed and gendered local cliques that haul positions of power in the country’s elite circles of academic production.

At Colmex, despite its steeped neoliberal turn in the 1990s, there has been less circulation of academic staff than elsewhere. At the African Studies section of the Centre for Asian and African Studies (CEAA), which organised Ngugi’s visit, there have only been three new hires for tenured research positions since its creation in 1964, two American and one Mexican. None of the professors ever hired, whether foreign or not, tenured or not, have been diasporic Afro-descendants. Most strikingly, no continental African scholar has ever been granted tenure as a CEAA researcher, despite the existence of viable candidates whose work was exploited for many years – in one case, for decades – before being denied tenure and terminated. Moreover, the African hires at CEAA while fulfilling other functions, have been primarily under the figure of ‘Language Instructor’, problematically close to the figure of native informant. Nonetheless, a new tenured position was instated three years ago: ‘Professor of Asian and African Languages’, significantly more advantageous and prestigious than ‘Language Instructor’. Through it, an African scholar has been, for the first time at CEAA, permanently hired. Even so, the position is of lesser status than that of the rest of the tenured faculty and does not match the aforementioned scholar’s research trajectory.

The above takes on a new dimension when considering CEAA’s unique place in the context of African Studies in Latin America, with students across the subcontinent migrating to enrol. CEAA is one among three pioneering African Studies institutes in Latin America. It offers an MA and a – currently suspended – PhD in African Studies. It is the only institute in the subcontinent offering programmes exclusively in African Studies. Until 2005, it was the only one to offer programmes significantly including African Studies at all. The Centre for African and Middle Eastern Studies (CEAMO) in Cuba, funded in 1979, only agglomerates externally affiliated scholars and does not offer any educational programme (much like the University Programme in Asian and African Studies [PUEEA] of the National Autonomous University of Mexico [UNAM], funded in 2017). In contrast to CEAA’s exclusive concern with the African continent, CEAMO’s focus is on intercontinental relations and the impact of Africa and the Middle East on Cuban culture. The third pioneering African Studies institute in Latin America is the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies (CEAO), founded in Brazil in 1959. CEAO is closer to Cuban CEAMO than Mexican CEAA, in both structure and focus.

In 2005, the CEAO, which like CEAMO did not have its own educational programme, opened the Multidisciplinary Postgraduate Programme in Ethnic and African Studies (POSAFRO). POSAFRO includes MA and PhD studies and is centrally concerned with African heritage in Brazil. Academic exchange with Lusophone Africa, with a steady flow of students and visiting professors, is an important part of the project. So is the study of Afro-Brazilian culture, history and socio-political realities, offering courses such as ‘Iconography and Images of the African Diaspora’ and ‘Colour and Race in Contemporary Brazil’. There is a strong consciousness of the epistemological and political implications of the institute’s Southern location, with courses such as ‘Transatlantic Circulation of Ideas of Race’ and ‘Ethics and Politics in Thought from the Global South’.

In contrast, African Studies at CEAA in Mexico erases its own location. None of the Asian and African Studies curricula comprise Latin American realities, perspectives nor comparative possibilities; not even decolonial thought is included. Students specialise in one of the following six Areas: Africa, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China or Japan. Under the sign of expertise and mimicking a traditional colonial approach to the study of the colonies, the Africa programme places great emphasis on Area history and language acquisition, with the core curricula structured almost exclusively around these courses: History of Africa I – V and Swahili I – V. Until recently, conversation skills were disregarded, and the single ‘Area Language’ was taught primarily to translate written documents, while history was taught as mere factual content, with textbooks from the 1980s at the latest. While history and language are the core subjects of the programme, its general framework is more akin to the colonialist approach of anthropology prior to the self-reflexive turn of the discipline. The Colmex pedagogic model values memorisation over critical thought, clear power hierarchies and a highly competitive relationality among students. The area programmes in general – and the Africa one particularly – are modelled after major institutes in Europe as they existed before the postcolonial turn of the 1970s. Because of the faculty teaching optional seminars in the South Asia Studies area, postcolonial approaches are occasionally available to students reaching out from the African Studies programme, yet that area itself is limited to more orthodox anthropological and historiographical disciplinary outlooks, with occasional courses in politics and economics and, more recently with the new hires, literature and philosophy as well, although mostly from an ethnographic perspective.

Ngugi’s Colmex talk

17 November 2017: From a microphone up on the podium, someone hushes the bustling audience at the Colmex Aula Magna. Ngugi wa Thiong’o is about to speak. Nothing else could have brought me back to this institution thirteen years after graduating from the African Studies MA. Dissident alumni refer to Colmex as ‘The Panopticon’ for its layered and circular architecture but, especially, for the self-vigilance and internalisation of power structures that so often takes place there.

Ngugi’s visit is part of the African Studies programme’s newfound interest in literature. Given that in 2017 Ngugi was expected to win the Nobel, Colmex is invested in him. The event is pompously celebrated, with a panel including the institution’s Secretary General, who remains mostly silent throughout the event, as does the academic who has translated Ngugi’s literature into Spanish, also in the panel. Conversely, the third and final senior white male to integrate the panel is very vocal, to the point of speaking more than Ngugi himself. As CEAA’s representative and the only native English speaker, he takes upon himself the task of translating Ngugi’s talk, translation which frequently turns into interpretation and sometimes into commentary. His participation is wrought under the sign of specialisation.

The rhetoric of expertise that is Colmex’s hallmark takes me back to my days as a student there and the contrast I experienced when spending the summer of 2003 at CEAO in Brazil. The reception of Achille Mbembe at CEAO then seems by contrast strikingly unaffected. I look around at the current students in the Colmex auditorium and wonder how they feel about being translated to from a language they know so well – as a requirement for admission. Does the translation give pause for reflection, opportunity to go deeper into the words resounding from a different perspective, or does it displace emphasis to the reasons behind the disparities in both deliveries? I wonder the degree to which the audience, mostly students and alumni, participates in the mis-en-scène of the general pomp and circumstance. On what side of the fourth wall are each of us, in thought, action and the distance between them?

Ngugi’s discourse and deportment are in a more informal register than those of his co-panellists. The visiting speaker seems unperturbed by the undercurrent powerplay. He appears genuinely cheerful, nudging his peers and joking, as if in a different play from most in the auditorium. He also manages to change the script as he positions himself horizontally vis a vis the audience and conveys, with the particular sensibility of his intellect and demeanour, the primacy of lived experience for theory and literature. Ngugi centres on his experience writing Devil on the Cross ([1980] 1982), and, during the Q&A, goes into extended discussion on the body as site of knowledge.

Titled ‘Conversatory with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, the event is not so much a conversation as a lecture a due voci by Ngugi and the CEAA representative. They offer a general panorama of multilingual educational colonial contexts in Africa, Ngugi’s experience at Kamirithu, his time in prison, the ideas set forth in Decolonising the Mind ([1986] 1994) and, to a lesser extent, Globalectics (2012a). But Devil on the Cross gets the spotlight, with the panellists reading excerpts out loud and commenting. That focus makes sense as the talk takes place when Ngugi is working on the fourth instalment of his series of memoirs: Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir (2018), a re-elaboration of Detained: A Writer’s Prison Dairy (1981a), which narrates his experience writing Devil on the Cross during political imprisonment.

The tenor of the event – hardly imaginable at a major global North university, where a more knowledgeable audience would be assumed – is introductory. More a survey of Ngugi’s trajectory than an original contribution, it is at a distance from the Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory (at Ngugi’s home institution, UC-Irvine), which gave birth to Globalectics, or the Sir Douglas Robb Lectures (University of Auckland), which elicited Decolonising the Mind. The fact that those universities are cast as places from which to think but Colmex as a place in which to inform about that thought, is correlated with the material conditions of possibility that institutes differently grant Ngugi. As he himself comments, universities today ‘have become the modern patrons for the artist’ ([1986] 1994, ix). That patronage varies according to the priorities of each institute in determining the distribution of resources, but also to the unequal amounts of funding available in institutes of the global North and South.

However, the tone and content of the Colmex talk can be understood beyond the unevenness of global North and South locations. After all, the speaker is simply focusing on his current work which happens to be the reedition of a prior book in turn based on his experience of writing yet another book. Already in 2013, Aaron Bady criticised what he deemed repetitive self-referentiality in Ngugi’s later work, referring to his second memoir instalment, In the House of the Interpreter (2012b). He described it as part of a boom of memoirs by renowned male African writers, now possibly ‘old men discovering they have little new to say?’. Yet Bady also credited Ngugi wa Thiong’o with recuperating in that book his identity as James Ngugi. Rather than denying his early colonially aligned identity, Bady holds, Ngugi critically incorporates it as constitutive of his current identity and his capacity to instrumentalise that system of ideological oppression in his own interest.

At the Colmex auditorium, Ngugi sets into play that multiple level of consciousness signalled by Bady. It is manifest in his capacity to swiftly change between modes, contents and tones of address. Distinguishing him from the rest of the participants is also his emphasis on the importance of the body as the primal field of knowledge, a theoretical premise he maintains in the way he links up past personal experience, his writing and performative engagement with the audience. As he explains issues, Ngugi constantly seeks parallelisms with what might be the audience’s own life experiences, and recurs to jokes, double entendres and other forms of linguistic play. Rather than simply playing out the role assigned to him in this conventionalised academic ritual, he seems to be improvising, exploring different ways of communicating from a large repertoire. While others seem scripted, he seems to be alive, reacting to his audience, thinking on the ground, in his body.

However, rather than a more ‘real’ performance, Ngugi’s performance should be understood as operating on a different set of bodily, aesthetic and discursive conventions. What is at stake is not the degree of artifice but the different and specific modes of theatricality that correlate to different conceptions of what knowledge is and how it relates to one’s situatedness. To think it through with Theodor Adorno ([1966] 1983, 146–48), we may say Ngugi’s performance is not a question of greater authenticity but of his capacity to negate the negation of ‘expert knowledge’ and incorporate, to his advantage, the limits of his own knowing. This act further resonates with his own conception of liberation as a historically positive ‘negation of a negation’, as mentioned earlier in reference to Writers and Politics (1997, 19). Being aware of the limits of knowing is a positioning that warrants that Ngugi’s is, in Spivakian terms, a critical rather than a dogmatic theory of knowledge (Spivak 1993, 25). Whether emphasising the relation between knowledge and language or between knowledge and the body, throughout the talk Ngugi recognises such limits as provided by the sociohistorical specificity of our place in the world. It seems as if he is actively mindful of what he has long since postulated, that: ‘education is a means of knowing about ourselves … after we have examined ourselves, we radiate outwards and discover peoples and worlds around us’ ([1968] 1995, 441).

Yet, despite Ngugi’s commitment to the bodily situatedness of knowing, the event’s structural intention – while not necessarily its effect – is to foreground the speaker as pedagogical content rather than pedagogical perspective. This is set up with the ceremony’s baroque formalities and the attendance of a high-ranking bureaucrat marking Ngugi’s importance as placeholder. Experts translate Ngugi for us – into Spanish, but also into what they deem the audience’s lifeworlds. While we cannot discard the possibility that the Africanist expert took on the role of translator as an act of deference, in the context of Ngugi’s trajectory-long valorisation of translation as the ‘language of languages’ (2023), the fact remains that the translations of both him and the other translator on the panel tend to obliterate the complex implications of Ngugi’s enunciations in favour of the enunciated content. Thus, the event is a metonymic instantiation of what we discussed in the previous section: the naturalised – as scientific and as universal – colonialist viewpoint from which Africa as mere content is taught at CEAA.

Perspectival multiplication in Globalectics and its disavowal at CEAA

The metonymic instantiation of CEAA’s logic of African content versus Euro-American viewpoint is ironic when contrasted with Ngugi’s discourse. Rather than thematise Africa, Ngugi recovers African places of enunciation as linguistically and perspectivally embedded. In Globalectics, he complexifies the dichotomic opposition between Africa and Europe through the multiplication of referents. There, as in his earlier work, Ngugi deploys perspective as critical to the reclamation of place, but now extends it to global South locations beyond Africa and, ultimately, refers to critical engagement with any site worldwide (2012a, 87). That relationality is instantiated in languages, hence, the lectical – even dialectical – aspect of the kind of globality proposed by Ngugi through the concept of ‘globalectics’ (23). He invokes that aspect again when proposing that texts – indeed, any readable cultural object – ‘may contain that which makes us look again, critically, at our own baggage’ (93). Revisiting Edward Said’s notion of worldliness as being in and of the world, Ngugi seeks to release worldliness by reading texts globalectically:

Globalectics, derived from the shape of the globe, is the mutual containment of the hereness and thereness in time and space, where time and space are also in each other … Reading globalectically is a way of approaching any text from whatever times and places to allow its content and themes form a free conversation with other text of one’s own time and place. (94)

Globalectics establishes critical distance as a grounding of the different locations produced by the act of reading. The global dimension emerges when historicising all instances involved and – counterintuitively – it is precisely that anchorage which releases the object’s worldliness.

Radhakrishnan highlights Ngugi’s critical repositioning of the relationship between perspective and place in his notion of globality, which operates against the allegedly ‘value-neutral and ideologically empty seductions of mainstream capitalist, west-centric, market-driven, status quo globality’ (2021, 363). On the contrary, Ngugi’s work unravels:

how on the basis of a given location, not in its denial or concealment, each of us produces a critical account of her accountability to the world, to globality: how we attempt with rigorous self-reflexivity ‘to imagine with precision’ … where we are, where others are, where the world is and should be, and how by creating certain patterns of relational co-existence we keep alive the globalectic process in the name of a perennial openness not to be claimed as the truth of any one perspective. (361; italics in the original)

Conclusively, the relation between place and perspective is key to Ngugi’s work. His emphasis on the linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical locations of perspective destabilises Euro-America’s claim to the Universal. The consistent attention to other global South sites of enunciation on a par with African ones in Globalectics marks an expansion of perspective in Ngugi’s trajectory.¹ While the Euro-America versus Africa dichotomy may structurally reify its single categories, the multiplication of referents in Globalectics significantly grounds, complexifies and historicises the question.

At Colmex, the CEAA programme centres on the Europe versus Africa relation, supressing other referents and appropriating the perspective of the former. The blind replica of Africa as content and Euro-Universals as viewpoint functions as a perfected form of ideological subjugation when enacted elsewhere in the global South. Key in this ideological manoeuvre is the disavowal of the third place involved in the equation. In obliterating the location from which the model is replicated, the provinciality of Euro-Universals is blurred even more since now the model is at a further remove from its place of constitution and direct profit. Through the model for studying Africa at CEAA, students are taught to understand Africa as the place of the object, Euro-America as the place of the subject, and their own place as a nonplace. The model is clear as to Africa’s inferiority, while Latin-America’s inferiority is conveyed only through implication: by the fact of its parallel colonial history, its parallel present imperialist subjection, and its erasure as perspectival locus.

In the CEAA curricula described earlier, Latin-America as place of enunciation is erased. Students are placed in a limbo where the alternative between identifying with a fetishised Africa or a Eurocentric viewpoint leads to the formation of false consciousness. When, as thinking subjects, students are given the option of identifying either with the intelligent (Euro-American) authorial voice or the othered (African) enunciated object in texts, the choice seems clear. Aspirationalism is structurally encouraged while Latin-America’s foreclosed access to the site of enunciation is denied. The model also prevents the building of a common front from the global South. Alienation – of one’s own place and of its relation to potential global peers – is performed through the Eurocentric model for studying Africa when irreflexively – while not disinterestedly – translated onto Latin America.

Ngugi’s talk, in its discursive and performative commitment to the body as the primal field of knowledge, in its self-reflexivity, and even in what, with Bady, we may think of as an iterative self-referentiality, calls the audience’s attention to the involvement of the self in the study of the other, whether that ‘other’ is defined in terms of power relations, ontologically or geo-culturally. For its strong autobiographical sensibility when discussing the question of knowledge, Ngugi’s talk not only negates the negation of expert knowledge through a globalectical exposure of the situatedness and relationality of any truth claim. It also operates as a moment of interruption in CEAA’s self-blind false identification.

Furthermore, CEAA’s emulation of colonialist anthropological outlooks on Africa, while situated in Latin America in neoliberal times, produces a dislocation interesting to think through in view of that other dislocation brought about by British colonialist education in East Africa at the brink of independence. The latter is the theme of Ngugi’s (2016) last published book before the CEAA talk, Birth of a Dreamweaver. In that memoir, he narrates his experience as a student at Makerere (1959–1964), where he undergoes BA studies focused on European Humanism, English Literature, and Drama, and where lessons are taught as if the place of that teaching had no knowledge of its own to offer. To compare and contrast Colmex and Makerere at the different times Ngugi inhabited them may help us reconsider the South-South connection globalectically, for it does not suffice to think about another location in the global South if neither the place we think from nor the place we think about are allowed to seep into the perspectival plane.

1960s Makerere and Enlightened truth as a violating enablement

In the prologue to Birth of a Dreamweaver, Ngugi writes: ‘I entered Makerere University College in July 1959, subject of a British Crown Colony, and left in March 1964, citizen of an independent African state. Between subject and citizen, a writer was born’. The writer thus establishes the parallelism between his literary coming of age and the birth of formally independent African states in a period of great hope and transformation in the culture and politics of East Africa.

As the book illustrates, Makerere was home to the bustling intellectual scene and vibrant literary worlds of the early 1960s. In 1962, the first conference of English-language African writers was held there, hosting Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka and African-American writer Langston Hughes (127–130). Held once a week, formal dinners at Makerere hosted Paris-based Nigerian intellectual Abiola Irele, Kenyan governor Sir Patrick Renison and former Ugandan governor Sir Andrew Cohen (46–47). The University’s principal at the time ‘describes Makerere as a Charging Cross, with a constant flow of visitors, from governors and secretaries of state to world leaders like Indira Gandhi of India and Golda Meir of Israel’ (55–56). At the heart of the momentum of change in the region at the time, ‘Makerere attracted not only the scholar, politician, and musician. There was the adventurer also’, with Friedrich and Susan Vogel among the latter (56).

While an instrument of colonial epistemic subjugation, Makerere is simultaneously an instrument of personal and collective liberation. The racist structures and contents of the education Ngugi undergoes coexist with a sense of a new world in the making, of the possibility of political and cultural emancipation just within hand’s reach:

by the very fact of its position on a hill literally and metaphorically, the college could not avoid the effects of the political winds blowing across the continent. Makerere was like a vane registering the direction and intensity of the wind. (67)

Yet, beyond registering the winds, the students also blew them. The Makerere Student’s Guild, founded by Malawian poet David Rubadiri, operated as ‘a democracy in an otherwise absolutist colonial system’ (65), with members from Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda alternating presidencies. This common project of students from across East Africa organised the first Pan-African Students’ Conference with Tom Mboya as main speaker (68–69).

Ngugi describes how two old Makerereans, Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote, assumed the presidencies of Tanzania and Uganda respectively: ‘For those of us on the Hill at the time, Wordsworth better sums up the moment: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”’ (72). Nyerere’s and Obote’s overturning of British cultural indoctrination into a utopian drive towards independence fills the students currently at Makerere with meaning and purpose. Ngugi expresses the sentiment through a poet of the Western canon. Indeed, the quote is taken from ‘The French Revolution as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement’ – an exquisite way to designate Enlightened Progress as inspiration for liberating promises. Being part of the historical momentum is also expressed in Ngugi’s feeling that in the 1962 conference ‘we were also united by a vision of a different future for Africa’, while a review of it in The Guardian, states that ‘fate had entrusted them with the task of interpreting a continent to the world’ (129, 130). A different Africa was to be built and, in so doing, the continent’s place in the semiotic landscape of the world had to be reimagined.

Another symbol of the ambiguity of Enlightened values is the train bringing Ngugi to Makerere. What better metaphor for dreams of Progress than a train? The protagonist knows that the train that ‘landed me in the city of my dreams’ is a ‘product of British imperial dreams’ (22) and that by taking a ride on ‘this very railway that had opened this rich and varied land to the white settlement’ (19), ‘I was benefiting from a history that had come to negate my history’ (20). Yet the road to Progress with Truth at the far end opens-up real possibilities for personal and collective utopias. Schooling becomes an instrument for realising the promise of what seemed previously impossible. Indexing a profound duality, it is what Spivak calls a violating enablement (1993, 49).

On arrival at the campus, Ngugi is informed he should take an oath beginning ‘I promise to seek the truth’, which, once pledged, ‘continued vibrating in the mind: seek the truth’ (25). He then considers the contrast between this notion of truth and that taught at his high school:

At Alliance the word truth was always in the air. But there it was more like a preexisting entity; all we had to do was accept it … This one to which we had just committed ourselves felt different, a process, closer to what later I would read in Aristotle … (25)

The narrator, moving back and forth between the point of view of the young student and of the mature writer looking back, reflects on how he experienced the procedural understanding of truth as a liberation from the colonial episteme. Even though, as he clarifies, he might not have seen things the same way had he known then how intellectuals in European history had been assassinated for holding truths different to the powers that be, ‘[f]or now, it was exhilarating, as if after living in a land of one truth, a colonial truth, I had affirmed the right to ask questions and contribute to a common pool of knowledge’ (26). Thus, Ngugi points to how, in those years of new beginnings for himself and East Africa, the notion of Western Progress taught at Makerere by European faculty was appropriable for personal and collective struggles of liberation.

Towards the end of the story, Ngugi, the character – at that point a well published journalist – is able to voice the implications of the contradictions of his education. In an article he ‘posed questions about the Makerere graduate, “a man who has been brought up in an educational system wholly colonial, with all its prejudices and intellectual slant in favour of the West”’ (214). Earlier, he had published another article on the American bombarding raid of a North Vietnamese torpedo boat where: ‘Quite clearly [he] had taken the American claims as true’ (216). When discovering they were untrue, Ngugi remembers his friend’s words about how ‘working in a newspaper means operating within its broad consensus about the world’ (216). He himself is not exempt of the contradictions of the Makerere graduate, contradictions involving a provisional blindness tilted in favour of the British colony and of Western capitalist imperialism more generally.

Yet Ngugi is loyal to the search for truth not only because it enables him as colonial subject and writer, but also because the commandment exceeds the Enlightened episteme, being likewise a dictum of his maternal education. Truth is a recurring motif in the two previous instalments of his memoir, often in association to the teachings of his mother. Here too, his mother is at the source of his pursuit of truth. The dream of ‘school and knowledge’, as he recognises, ‘had been hers before it became mine’ and it was she who sent Ngugi to school, despite her scarce means (203). The commitment to pursue truth is shaped by the university oath as much as an old teaching of his mother’s:

I took the vow seriously, and it affected my attitude to books and classes. I would judge myself not by the grade I got but by the bar I would set for myself. Nothing drastic about this; it was a restatement of my mother’s question: Is that the best? But now I had taken a vow to pursue the ideal, to track down truth wherever it might lead me on the road to the best. (31–32)

The alignment of Enlightenment and maternal truths opens the path towards personal and collective utopias of liberation which, while never fully reached, enable the quest. In stark contrast to the Enlightened yet liberating notion of truth staged at Makerere in the early 1960s by Ngugi, in the 2017 event at Colmex, the rhetoric unravelled by the institution that hosts him is not that of the truth seeker but of the truth holder; the whole event – as much as the African Studies programme that organises it – is structured around ethnographic ‘expertise’ as central value. CEAA claims to hold the truth of the other. And that truth of the African other, as opposed to the claim of ‘seeking the truth’, is portrayed as univocal and independent of the specialist holding that truth.

Conclusions

The relationship between the narrator’s and the protagonist’s perspectives in Birth of a Dreamweaver unravels the continuities and discontinuities between points of view from classic colonialist and neoliberal colonialist contexts. Each perspective is inscribed in a different historical period and, from that contextuality, positions itself in relation to the events in the memoir. While being himself at a distance, Ngugi, the narrator, recuperates the character’s investment in the Truths of Progress, as offered by his Enlightened Western education. The utopia of Enlightened knowledge propels the action forward. For Ngugi, the character, education is a form of liberation for individuals and communities. Since the narrator complexifies but does not override this vision, we are allowed to profoundly question Enlightened educational values while still appreciating their utility. Through the discrepant figures of protagonist and narrator, Ngugi, the author, dramatically unfolds the perspectival game which in Globalectics he declares foundational to a construction of knowledge based on the complexity and variability of truth.

Such double consciousness, often signalled as a key marker of the postcolonial subject (Spivak 1993; Radhakrishnan 2021) is suppressed in CEAA’s curricular and performative understanding of what it is to study Africa from Latin America today. At CEAA, the notion of the expert prevails, a conception of knowledge structured around the truth of the other. Under the sign of the specialist – in a pre-Fabian (1983) anthropological model – the truth of the other is singular and independent of the onlooker. CEAA’s model mimics Europe’s epistemological place as a supra-historical, universal site of enunciation. It does not relate to the African other as peer, as customary in global South epistemologies.

Place alone is insufficient guarantee of a global South epistemology. In the context of neoliberal colonialism, there are direct and structural mediations that determine the misidentification operating between perspective and place of knowing, with implicit and manifest modes of triangulation with the global North. To illustrate, I return to that Colmex auditorium on 17 November 2017. There, Ngugi speaks of language as intrinsic to powerplay, of theatricality as a form of language, and of the implications of translations and mistranslations for neoliberal colonialism at large, all questions applicable to the event itself. A comment by Ngugi’s English-Spanish translator on the panel is particularly symptomatic. He declares:

After having been translating very complex things back then, philosophical ones – I was translating Bachelard then – this novel [Matigari] fell in my hands, and I thought ‘such simple language, like children’s language’ … And I was wondering why … until … I started understanding … it was obviously a novel fully intended to have universal access amongst a population with a very low cultural level. (CEAA 2017, min. 69)

In this conception of ‘high’ versus ‘low’ culture, the translator points to an African ‘them’ as ignorant, placing himself along with an ‘us’ of scholars and audience on the other side. Yet, simultaneously, the audience has been treated condescendingly throughout the event. Thus, an undercurrent equivalence between audiences across the Atlantic persists. Colonialism, as a racial and economic hierarchy claiming cultural superiority, structures the relations of panellists with audience and of panellists with Ngugi’s African readers, while a neoliberal principle: culture as an exchangeable, expropriable scarcity value determines the modality of that relating.

The ideological impact of CEAA’s imported model of knowing hinges on the play between direct and indirect addressees. The ‘Africa’ studied is imagined as already there, not instantiated through the colonialist mapping by means of which it is accessed.² That interpellation also allows for the instantiation of the Latin-American subject as object, yet without a recognition of this onto-geopolitical positioning as produced by the triangulated setup. As we have seen, in its manifest objectification of Africa, the CEAA model surreptitiously deploys the Latin-American student as a falsely identified object, as a subject with a displaced locus of self-recognition. The Latin-American in training is, indeed, the direct (even when unnamed) addressee in the performance of this teaching model and, in the reiteration of that structure, false consciousness is generated. It is a false consciousness beneficial to the foreclosure of a global class consciousness and to the preservation of the status quo.

Engaging Marxian tropology a bit further, we may say that CEAA’s emulation of a colonial African Studies model occurs first as tragedy in Europe, then as farse in Latin America (Marx [1852] 1999). In Europe, the model operates as a dichotomic structure traditionally reinforcing the coloniser/colonised, knower/known, subject/object, universal/particular and self/other oppositions. Yet these binary sets of signifiers designating Europe and Africa respectively can only translate catachrestically. At CEAA, Latin America, which is silenced and never explicitly mentioned as belonging to either side of the binary sets, is reduced as signified to a farcical search for its always deferred signifier in the binary.

Furthermore, as Walter Mignolo argues, the privileged element in a binary opposition has the advantage of functioning at two levels: as one of the particulars in the opposition and as the universal place of enunciation (2002, 935). The introduction of a third element reinforces the primacy of the ‘universal’ side of the binary by converting the side of the ‘particular’ into a plural and thus reinforcing the privileged aspect of the ‘universal’. Since the third element unbalances the binary, it also gives a greater sense of mobility, with the third element uncomfortably fitted in the slot of the ‘particular’ yet constantly seeking access to the ‘universal’ side of the equation.

The CEAA model’s triangulated mode of address becomes visible in that Aula Magna where Ngugi, framed by a translator, a para-translator and an institutional representative, is speaking. Since it is a talk, the structure of interpellation can be appreciated as a performative, with the (false) identifications of speakers, audience, institution and a reported Africa played out. According to the performance of the hosting institution, the panel is constituted by unmarked, universal experts and by the geo-racially marked Ngugi; he offers surplus value as an exotic commodity, besides his promise of universal value as a Nobel laureate candidate. Performatively too, the audience is designated as the place of a non-expert yet unmarked receptive mass. The institution that structures the event through its architecture, its timing protocols and its conception of knowledge plays itself out as the neutral, authorised and authorising place of the event.

In this article, I have travelled between continents, epochs and quasi-academic genres: from lecture performance to theory ‘proper’, to memoir of academic experience. While in Birth of a Dreamweaver Ngugi deploys the classic colonialist education at Makerere as both repressive and enabling of Africans as subjects of enunciation, the African Studies Programme at Colmex reduces Africa to enunciated object. It does so according to a neoliberal colonialist agenda which reproduces classic colonial models of studying the ex-colonies, while at the same time benefiting from the exchange value that subjects and discourses understood as signs of alterity offer in contemporary academia (see Appiah 1991 on the marketing of difference, and Aroch-Fugellie 2018 on scholarly citation as exchange value). That agenda is naturalised through the institution’s elitist power structures, racist hiring policies, dogmatic and top-down as opposed to critical and constructive knowledge-acquisition practices, as well as a curriculum that reproduces the colonialist approach of anthropology prior to the self-reflexive turn of the discipline. The event hosting Ngugi’s lecture rehearses many of these traits and operations while centrally staging the key constitutive contradiction of the CEAA pedagogical model: the erasure of Latin America. Erasing Latin America responds to the aspiration of accessing the Euro-Universal subject position and goes hand-in-hand with the erasure of African epistemic outlooks.

In Globalectics, the distinction between place of enunciation and perspective of enunciation speaks to Colmex as site of enunciation being insufficient to guarantee a critical global South outlook. The rift between place and perspective at CEAA indexes how ‘neoliberal colonialism’ is a necessary historical condition of possibility for a global South study of Africa today. Rather than give semiotic closure to an idealised notion of the global South, here I have sought to examine the real conditions of classed, racialised and ideologised modes of organisation of knowledge about Africa in classic colonialist Makerere and in neoliberal colonialist Colmex. Just as colonial education for Ngugi in Uganda had an ambivalent potential, at CEAA in Mexico today, knowledge production is not only about the global South, it is also strongly wrought in a colonial rationality and a neoliberal commodification of thought. As suggested in the introduction with reference to Gandarilla, neoliberal colonialism is not patently visible yet organises that which is. Hence, any global South epistemological endeavour must remain ‘vigilant’, to use Spivak’s (1993) vocabulary, of its appropriability. Geographical location and content focus of a programme are insufficient guarantee of a transformative outlook. Global South locations must be incorporated as a form of perspectival multiplication that reaches equilibrium by never being at rest.

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa Campus, Mexico City.

Notes on contributors

Paulina Aroch-Fugellie

Paulina Aroch-Fugellie engages in the critique of ideology from a global South perspective, especially from Africa and Latin America. Her work is informed by contemporary critical theories from the global South, the dialectics of the Frankfurt School and the ‘travelling concepts’ methodology in which she was trained at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (The Netherlands). She combines the tools of cultural and discourse analysis, psychoanalytic theory, political economy, theatre and performance studies, postcolonial and decolonial critique. Her three main lines of inquiry are: (1) ‘Global South Critical Theories’, including her 2019 book Shylock and African Socialism: Julius Nyerere's Postcolonial Shakespeare; (2) ‘The Body as Site of Emancipation’, with work in progress in which she interrogates the production of the contemporary politicised body combining theatrical methods, critical theories and the Latin American tradition of critical pedagogy; and (3) ‘Commodification of Contemporary Thought’, including her 2015 book Unrealised Promises: The Subject of Postcolonial Discourse and the New International Division of Labour. She is a former Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (USA), now tenured at the Humanities Department, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Cuajimalpa Campus in Mexico City, and funded as CONAHCYT National Researcher II (Mexico).

Notes

1 This is not to say that Ngugi had not drawn earlier on a multiplicity of referents at a global scale – his engagement with Caribbean intellectuals in Homecoming ([1972] 1981b) and in his discourse at large or with the Irish experience in Something Torn and New (2009) are cases in point. However, referent multiplication as methodological basis in Globalectics does mark a shift in his approach beyond the more classically Africanist and even beyond the pan-Africanist ways of operating of works such as ‘On the Abolition of the English Department’ ([1968] 1995; also printed in Homecoming) or the essays collected in Decolonising the Mind ([1986] 1994).

2 On discursive scenarios that create the realities they map, with emphasis on the role of direct and indirect addressees, see Radhakrishnan’s discussion of Nehru’s inaugural speech on the brink of Indian independence (2023, 351–352).