Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

• Editorial: Berghahn Books
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857459527
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

Global imperial designs, which have been in place since conquest by western powers, did not suddenly evaporate after decolonization. Global coloniality as a leitmotif of the empire became the order of the day, with its invisible technologies of subjugation continuing to reproduce Africa's subaltern position, a position characterized by perceived deficits ranging from a lack of civilization, a lack of writing and a lack of history to a lack of development, a lack of human rights and a lack of democracy. The author's sharply critical perspective reveals how this epistemology of alterity has kept Africa ensnared within colonial matrices of power, serving to justify external interventions in African affairs, including the interference with liberation struggles and disregard for African positions. Evaluating the quality of African responses and available options, the author opens up a new horizon that includes cognitive justice and new humanism.

PART 1
GLOBAL IMPERIAL DESIGNS AND EMPIRE

CHAPTER 1

Empire and Global Coloniality

Towards a Decolonial Turn

The history of Africa is, of course, one of cultural oppression on a major scale. Nowhere else was the oppression so comprehensive, so savage. African history was denied or appropriated; African culture belittled; the status and standing of Africans as human beings was called into question.

(Pal Ahluwalia and Paul Nursery-Bray 1997: 2)

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out … I am talking about millions of [women and] men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life – from life, from the dance, from wisdom.

I am talking about millions of [women and] men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkies …

I am talking about natural economies that have been destroyed – harmonious and viable economies – adapted to indigenous population – about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw material.

(Aimé Césaire 1955: 5)

Contemporary Africans have a right to be angry, but they must also probe into the reasons for institutional failure, the roots of which lie in colonial past. They must question the inherited forms of government, economy, and relations between Africa and the West. They must situate the African condition in a global context: a poor continent supports the industrialised West with its labour, raw materials, markets, and service payments on debts, among other mechanisms that transfer wealth abroad. They must situate African politics in the context of colonialism: modern political institutions are derived more from the colonial past than the precolonial … The postcolonial seeks its roots in the colonial, alienated from the precolonial and established local traditions. The modern country was modeled after the ‘colonial country’: black governors merely replaced the white ones … We must also raise the issue of power and autonomy in the global context: to what extent can Africa self-develop? Africa was self-developing before the colonial intrusion. With violence, colonialism created new frontiers, developed new political and economic objectives, and ordered people around. When colonialism was over, Africa began to think about development in colonial, Western terms.

(Toyin Falola 2005: 4)

Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity is a study of global imperial designs, colonial matrices of power and technologies of subjection that produced African subjectivity as that of a being constituted by a catalogue of deficits and a series of ‘lacks’. It is study of both global and African history as an inextricably intertwined narrative of production of both the ‘Cartesian subject’ (superior Western subject) and African subjectivity (inferior African beings). The analysis is situated within the broader unfolding of the current modern world order since the dawn of modernity and the unfolding of colonial encounters in the fifteenth century.

This book is organized into four broad parts, namely ‘Part 1: Global Imperial Designs and Empire’: ‘Part 2: Subject, Subjection and Subjectivity;’ ‘Part 3: Coloniality, Knowledge and Nationalism’; and ‘Part 4: Conclusion’. It is subdivided into nine chapters. The first chapter introduces the concepts of empire, global coloniality, coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being. This chapter’s point of departure is the ideas of empire articulated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that are considered to be so complacent as to create an impression of a magnanimous empire that is decoupled from imperialism. Their approach is influenced by their reading of the empire from above, largely due to their location in Europe and America: at the centre of the empire. They were seduced by the rhetoric of modernity and the hypocrisies and double-standards of the empire, which blinded them to the coloniality subsisting at the base of ‘really existing empire’. This chapter, therefore, shifts the lens of analysis towards reading empire from below and bringing back the geopolitics of knowledge from the margins of modernity and empire, where their dark aspects shaped the emergence of African subjectivity.

The second chapter provides details of the operations of global imperial designs and colonial matrices of power as well as showing how these have provoked the rise of pan-Africanism as a counter-hegemonic discourse responding to the experiences of slavery, racism, colonialism and apartheid. The emphasis in this chapter is on technologies of subjectivation and how they have worked to dilute pan-Africanism. The third chapter engages with discourses of development by treating them as part of global imperial technologies of subjectivation that resulted in the view that Africa in particular and the Global South in general was inhabited by human beings who were defined by catalogues of deficits and series of lacks, lacking history, lacking writing, lacking souls, lacking civilization, lacking responsibility, lacking development, lacking human rights and lacking democracy. The chapter also grapples with how the discourse of development, which began as part of the technologies of subjectivation, has been accepted by Africans and their governments as key to their realization of freedom and fulfillment of the absent centre of ontology, without much success.

The fourth chapter brings into dialogue the Western literature produced by such scholars as Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Chantal Mouffe and Enersto Laclau on the ‘Cartesian subject’ with the African literature produced by scholars and activists such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Kenneth Kaunda, Achille Mbembe, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and others on the ticklish issues of the subject, subjection and subjectivity. The chapter’s central argument is that discourses of subjection and development intersect tendentiously and inextricably in Africa to produce a particular African subjectivity defined by lacks and deficits. While the Western subject, here defined as the ‘Cartesian subject’, felt the void and doubted its being until René Descartes tried to fill it through the notion of ‘cogito’, the African subject is defined and told by the Western subject that it is lacking and deficient. These discourses unfolded during the colonial encounters as the ‘Cartesian subject’ pushed forward to master the world and other subjects, and through this process the ‘Cartesian subject’ claimed to be the only ‘full’ subject devoid of lacks. African scholarly productions since the time of colonial encounters have been preoccupied with refutations of discourses and epistemologies of alterity that have given birth to various notions of Africanity, ranging from Ethiopianism to African Renaissance.

The fifth and sixth chapters address the equally ticklish conundrums of the subject, subjection and subjectivity in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Here empirical data is deployed to explain the evolution of complex identitarian processes such as Bantucization, Anglicization, Afrikanerization and Africanization, in the case of South Africa, and how these culminated in the present-day notions of a ‘rainbow nation’ as a form of resolution of the politics of radical differences, which were imposed by imperialism, colonialism and apartheid. For Zimbabwe, the focus is on what is termed ‘nationality of power’, which captures how a nationalist political formation (ZANU-PF) has tried to create a national identity imbued with the spirit of patriotism from a people of different ethnic backgrounds. What is emphasized is how the nationalist movement, and the postcolonial state, evolved technologies of subjectivation that were underpinned by deployment of violence similar to those of the colonial state in its attempt to create national subjects. The ideology of Chimurenga, and the strategy of Gukurahundi, became the leitmotifs of ZANU-PF’s technologies of subjectivation.

The seventh chapter is on the coloniality of knowledge and how it impinged on cultures of higher education in Africa, focusing first on Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence in 1957 and the first to attempt the decolonization of knowledge and the transformation of higher education. The second focus is on South Africa, which is currently struggling to transform institutions of higher education to reflect their location in Africa, in terms of their African values and missions. The eighth chapter is on the pertinent theme of the African national project and the national questions that are crying out for re-consideration during the current crisis of modernity symbolized by the global financial crisis. Chapter Nine is the conclusion, pulling together the central arguments of the book to reflect on the global crisis and its impact on African imaginations of post-imperial and postcolonial futures.

Global coloniality, which today speaks to the existence of colonial situations and colonial power relations in the present epoch where direct colonial administrations have been dismantled as cogs of the modern capitalist world-system, is as old as modernity itself (Grosfoguel 2007: 219). The concept of global coloniality is useful in teasing out and revealing the mythology of a decolonized African world as well as unraveling the rhetoric of modernity. This book unmasks what has been obscured by celebrations of juridical freedom and reveals continuities between the colonial past and current racialized and hierarchical, modern and global world order. As noted by Ramón Grosfoguel (2011), at the apex of this global coloniality is the U.S.A., NATO, the Pentagon, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) that ensure that Africa and other peripheral zones remained under colonial situation long after the end of direct colonial administration. About the state of this modern world order, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri noted that:

It is widely recognized that the notion of international order that European modernity continually proposed and reproposed, at least since the Peace of Westphalia, is now in crisis. It has in fact always been in crisis, and this crisis has been one of the motors that have continuously pushed towards Empire. Perhaps this notion of international order and its crisis should be dated from the time of the Napoleonic Wars … or perhaps the origin should be located in the Congress of Vienna and the establishment of the Holy Alliance. In any case, there can be no doubt that by the time of the First World War and the birth of the League of Nations, a notion of international order along with its crisis had been definitively established. The birth of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War merely reinitiated, consolidated, and extended this developing juridical order that was first European but progressively became completely global. The United Nations, in effect, can be regarded as the culmination of the entire constitutive process, a culmination that both reveals the limitations of the notion of international order and points beyond it toward a new notion of global order. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 4, emphasis is in the original)

While Hardt and Negri are correct on the issue of a crisis-ridden world order, their attempts to locate its genealogy in major European events and peace settlements dealing with European conflicts ignore the importance of such processes as ‘voyages of discovery’ and mercantilism that resulted in the so-called ‘discovery’ of the New World in 1492 and the slave trade that culminated in the trans-Atlantic commercial circuit as epochal in the genealogy of the modern world order that survived on the logic of violence, politics of alterity and epistemicides. This reality is easily missed if the genealogy of the modern world order is analysed from the centre of the empire. What is not emphasized in Hardt and Negri’s analysis is the importance of coloniality as the dark side of modernity, which has always been concealed by the rhetoric of modernity.

Global coloniality becomes most visible if one shifts geography of reason and geopolitics of knowledge from the centre of the empire into its borders. Despite its long contact with Europe and America, Africa remains peripheral and powerless in the face of global imperial designs. If looked at from the centre of empire, the modern capitalist system would be understood partially as produced by inter-imperial competition among European empires primarily over shorter routes to the East, which accidentally resulted in the discovery of the Americas and the Cape Colony (Grosfoguel 2007: 215). This rendition of the birth of the modern world capitalist system would cast it as a primarily economic system, driven by the logic of making profits and accumulation of capital on a world scale. This view was well expressed by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels when they wrote that:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In the place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependency of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual, production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (Marx and Engels 1848: 6)

Marx and Engels were of course analysing the unfolding of Euro-American capitalist and hegemonic power from their location in Europe. Consequently, their Marxist-political economy perspective of the empire tells half the story which results in privileging of class analysis and structural transformations (Grosfoguel 2007: 215). What is often glossed over in African studies is how Karl Marx articulated a very Eurocentric view of global history in his analysis of colonial encounters. While critical of how Western powers violently invaded and colonized other parts of the world, he still believed that imperialism and colonialism had a double mission: to bring these societies into the ambit of Western modernity through destruction of precolonial social formations while at the same time creating a foundation for their modernization (Hardt and Negri 2000: 120). Like all European thinkers, Marx believed that non-Western societies could progress only through becoming like Western societies.

This Eurocentrism of Marx made his Marxist theory tell a partial narrative of the formation of the modern world order. To complete the story, there is a need to shift the locus of enunciation from the centre of the empire to the zones of ‘colonial difference’: zones of indigenous peoples and colonized subjects who experienced the dark side of modernity. Looked at from this locus of enunciation, it becomes clear that what was unleashed by modernity was not only ‘an economic system of capital and labour for the production of commodities to be sold for profit in the world market’ (Grosfoguel 2007: 215). What becomes clear is that what were bequeathed were an ‘entangled package’ and ‘entangled power structure’ underpinned by racial, sexual, ideological, epistemic, cultural, religious, aesthetic, military, and patriarchal dimensions that Anibal Quijano (2007) described as a ‘colonial matrix of power’.

The entry point of this book is that imperialism, empire and global coloniality constitute an inseparable triad within global imperial designs in place since the dawn of colonial encounters. The book is, therefore, not about the ‘phantasmagoric empire’ depicted in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s influential book Empire (2000). The phantasmagoric empire is one which is assumed to be benign, ethical, and is said to be an empire without colonies that emerged at the end of imperialism. This supposedly benign empire is said to operate through the UN with the purpose of bringing order to the world (Hardt and Negri 2000: xi–xvii). But the reality is that such an empire exists only as a ‘poetic and metaphysical construction’ born out of neo-liberal mystifications of its substance and form (Boron 2005: 58).

The most depoliticized term used to describe this phantasmagoric empire is ‘globalization’ which is often simplistically articulated as ‘uniformization’ of the world (Robertson 1992: 8). Zillah Eisenstein (2004: 183) correctly noted that if globalization is traced back to the time of the slave trade onwards, it unfolded as a ‘systematic patriarchal structuring of racialised, sexualized, global exploitation’. This is not meant to totally dismiss globalization’s other character of ‘inexorable integration of markets, nation states and technologies’ (Friedman 2000: 7). What is beyond doubt is that capital is moving very fast across boundaries while labour and technology are not. ‘Hyper globalists’ like Niall Ferguson, who in his Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003) emphasized how ‘Anglo-globalization’ contributed to furthering the spread of liberal capitalism and opening up global markets, forgot to analyse global coloniality lurking within globalization, which is reproducing cultural oppression, economic exploitation, racial exclusions and inequalities.

This book is about ‘real existing empire’ rather than the ‘phantasmagoric’ one. The ‘real existing empire’ is underpinned by imperialism and remains vicious in its scramble for natural resources and markets. As noted by Barbara Bush (2006: 4) the existence of empires stretches back two thousand years and even before to embrace the Old Babylonian, Greek, Russian, Achaemenid, Byzantine, Roman, Ottoman Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, English and French Empires. The period after 1945 witnessed the rise of the Soviet and American empires. Today, the Chinese Empire is on the rise. The reality about empires is that they have ‘waxed and waned, merged and dissolved for thousands of years, without such empires, there would be no “modern world”’ (Bush 2006: 4). The ‘really existing empire’ is about power, territorial expansion, material resources, subordinating spaces and people, and securing hegemony. It was best described by Atilio B. Boron when he said:

Today’s imperialism is not the same as the one that existed thirty years ago; it has changed, and in some ways the change has been very important, but it has not changed into its opposite, as neo-liberal mystification suggests, giving rise to a ‘global’ economy in which we are all ‘interdependent’. It still exists, and it still oppresses people and nations and creates pain, destruction and death. In spite of the changes, it still keeps its identity and structure, and it still plays the same historical role in the logic of the global accumulation of capital. Its mutations, its volatile and dangerous combinations of persistence and innovation, require the construction of a new framework that will allow us to capture its present nature. (Boron 2005: 3)

This ‘really existing empire’ just like ‘the walls of Jericho’, which ‘did not collapse because of the sound of Joshua and the priests’ trumpets’, has not faded away because of the condemnations, fantasies of philosophers, and neo-liberal mystifications (Boron 2005: 4). The ‘really existing empire’ continues to operate through criminalization of social protest, militarization of international politics, and aggressive search for strategic resources. But Hardt and Negri (2000) seem to have fallen into the trap of empire’s democracy and human rights rhetoric to the extent of justifying the new ‘wars of pillage and territorial occupation’ that befell countries like Iraq and Libya as ‘altruistic operations of nation-building and the export of democracy’ (Boron 2005: 21).

At the heart of the ‘really existing empire’ is a modern world order that is best described as racialized, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, hierarchical, asymmetrical, imperial, hetero-normative, hegemonic, Christian-centric, neo-liberal and Euro-American-centric (Mignolo 1995; Mignolo 2000; Mignolo 2005a; Quijano 2000a; Grosfoguel 2007; Grosfoguel 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012a). Within this em...