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A Radical Journal
of Geography
African Decolonial Theory:
A Conversation
Patricia Daley
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Canada Research Chair in Pluralistic Societies: Epistemic Pluralism and Ecologies of Knowledges,
University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Wangui Kimari
American University, Nairobi, Kenya and
African Centre for Cities, Cape Town, South Africa
Franklin Obeng-Odoom
Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Sylvia Tamale
School of Law, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda
Sybille Bauriedl
Integrative Geographie, Europa-Universit€at, Flensburg, Germany
Sylvia Bawa
Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Inken Carstensen-Egwuom
Integrative Geographie, Europa-Universit€at, Flensburg, Germany
Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin
Department of Gender Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Yousuf Al-Bulushi
Department of Global & International Studies, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California,
USA
Antipode Vol. 58 No. 2 2026 ISSN 0066-4812, e70110
doi: 10.1111/anti.70110
2026 The Author(s). Antipode published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Antipode Foundation Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Stefan Ouma
Department of Geography and Institute of African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth,
Germany, stefan.ouma@uni-bayreuth.de
Abstract:
Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and
anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous
studies, Latin American feminism, and work on settler-colonialism. African reference
points in this literature, however, have been far less common, both in the journal and
more broadly in radical geography. Recognizing that there are several loci of enuncia-
tion for decolonial and anticolonial work, we committed to curating a series of conversa-
tions with and interventions by leading scholars from Africa and its diaspora associated
with these epistemic and political projects. This long-read article, a first for the journal,
brings these conversations and interventions together, highlighting the power of each
as well as the common threads that connect them.
Kiswahili Abstract:
Antipode imekuwa jukwa muhimu la mijadala “decolonial” na
“anticolonial”, na masomo za karibu kama jiographia za weusi, Indigenous studies, ufemi-
nisti wa America Kusini na “settler colonialism”. Hata hivyo, kwa masomo ya jiografia kwa
jumla, hata ndani ya jukwa letu Antipode, maarifa “decolonial” kutoka Africa haijatambu-
lika vile inafaa. Tunatambua kwamba kuna maoni na misimamo tofauti kuhusu swala la
ukoloni kwa bara la Africa, na tumejitolea kuzindua mfululizo wa mazungumzo na makala
kutoka wasomi wakuu kutoka Afrika na ughaibuni wake wenye wamejihusisha na mradi
huu. Kwa mara ya kwanza, makala huu katika jukwa letu inaleta pamoja haya mazungumzo
na makala, ikiinua nguvu za kila moja na ikionyesha maarifa yenye inawaunganisha.
Keywords: decoloniality, Africa, commons, decolonial Marxism, Afro-feminism, defiant
scholarship
Kiswahili Keywords: kupinga ukoloni/“decoloniality”, Afrika, Umaksi “decolonial”,
Ufeministi wa Kiafrica, masomo za upinzani
Introduction
Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial
scholarship, as well as scholarship that breathes that spirit, such as Black geogra-
phies,
Indigenous
studies,
Latin
American
feminism,
and
work
on
settler-
colonialism. African reference points in this literature, however, have been far less
common, both in the journal and in the broader field of radical geography. Rec-
ognizing that there are several loci of enunciation for decolonial and anticolonial
work, we committed to curating a series of conversations and interventions on
our website, AntipodeOnline.org, with scholars from Africa associated with these
epistemic and political projects. This series proved to be a tremendous success,
with wide circulation online, proving the need for more African reference points
in radical geography. We therefore decided to combine the five independent
interventions from our website into a single long-read article to be published here
in the journal itself. This is a first for the journal, but we are convinced that this is
the best way to highlight the power of each of these interventions, as well as the
common threads that connect them.
The scholars we selected—Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni,
Sylvia Tamale, Patricia Daley, and Wangui Kimari (who in the meantime has
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joined the Antipode Editorial Collective from Nairobi, Kenya)—are radical writers
and activists whose work should be engaged in greater depth by radical geogra-
phers. By compiling this collective introduction to their work here, we hope to
foster new intellectual alliances and to address self-reflexive power/knowledge
questions that even decolonial scholarship cannot evade. We also hope that the
interventions assembled here will lead to more submissions to Antipode from
scholars from Africa and the African diaspora.
We start our conversation with the Ghanaian political economist Franklin
Obeng-Odoom. Obeng-Odoom works on questions of urban and rural land, the
commons, resources and extractivism, and uneven development in Africa. He has
made key contributions to the political economy of Africa over the last years,
including Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built
Environment (2016), Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (2020a),
The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty: Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and
Society (2021b), and Global Migration Beyond Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Politi-
cal Economy (2022). He currently works at the University of Helsinki.
The conversation below was led by geographers Sybille Bauriedl and Inken
Carstensen-Egwuom in mid-2021 for an edited German-language book, Geogra-
phien der Kolonialit€at (Geographies of Coloniality), which in the meantime has been
published (Bauriedl and Carstensen-Egwuom 2023).
The next conversation is with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, whom one of our now
Editorial Collective members, Yousuf Al-Bulushi, interviewed on the broader politi-
cal and intellectual context in Africa that informed his coedited volume with Mor-
gan
Ndlovu,
Marxism
and
Decolonization
in
the
21st
Century
(2021).
Ndlovu-Gatsheni has been one of the key voices of decolonial theory from Africa
and has been an extremely prolific scholar with over 100 publications including
more than 20 books to his name. Besides the edited volume scrutinized here, his
other important publications include Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization
and Decolonization (2018); Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa:
Turning Over a New Leaf (2020); and Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism:
Reworlding the World from the Global South (2023).
In the interview, which took place in 2022, Ndlovu-Gatsheni reflects on the
relationship between the two overarching themes explored in the book—Marxism
and decolonization—and the new position he had assumed back then in Bay-
reuth, Germany, where at the time he occupied a professorship in “Epistemol-
ogies of the Global South”. He describes the institutions and movements in South
Africa where contributors to the volume may have developed their Marxist and
decolonial analyses. In the first part, the interview touches on some of the key
African and African diasporic theoretical reference points for the volume, including
Pan-African, Black radical, Afrocentric, nationalist, and Black consciousness tradi-
tions of thought. Finally, we discuss the relevance of land reform, mining, and
feminism to the theoretical and empirical frameworks deployed in the book.
In the second part of the interview, Al-Bulushi and Ndlovu-Gatsheni discuss the
influence that the student movement in South Africa had upon the development
of key themes in the book. Ndlovu-Gatsheni elaborates on his dual role as a
African Decolonial Theory
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theoretician of radical forms of Marxism and decolonization in the African con-
text, and his promotion to the role of university administrator responsible for insti-
tutionalizing movement demands in the wake of the student uprisings. They
discuss how this dual role highlights a central theme of the book—the inextricable
relationship between theory and radical forms of praxis—something that too
often eludes adherents of radical traditions of thought who nonetheless confine
their interventions to the academic sphere.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni emphasizes the necessity of rupturing the bounds of compart-
mentalized academic disciplines in order to engage in radical forms of praxis.
Against the Eurocentric narratives of the white-dominated institutions of African
Studies, he offers us a brilliant genealogy of transdisciplinary African traditions of
African Studies. Ndlovu-Gatsheni then links the frameworks developed in the vol-
ume Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century to the work of radical geogra-
phy. The interview closes with a call to simultaneously reinvent and link Marxist
and democratic traditions of theorization and struggle.
As the next conversation between Sylvia Tamale, Sylvia Bawa, and Grace
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin illustrates, African feminists have offered a sustained critique
of colonialism, coloniality, and retrogressive thought for many years. Yet, in cer-
tain parts of the globe, African feminist thinkers are oftentimes forgotten in femi-
nist curricula and reference lists that focus on decolonial and socially just futures.
Sylvia Tamale’s recent book, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism (2020), is a sharp
reminder of the importance of centering African feminist thinkers in scholarly con-
versations about decolonization.
Tamale is a leading African feminist and multidisciplinary scholar. She recently
retired from teaching at and coordinating the Law, Gender and Sexuality Research
Centre based at the School of Law at Makerere University in Uganda. Tamale was
the first female Dean of Law in Uganda and has been a visiting professor at several
universities including Oxford, Pretoria, and Zimbabwe. Tamale combines her aca-
demic scholarship with activism and adopts a critical approach to the law that aims
at enhancing students’ transformative personal growth and agency. She has served
on several national and international boards, including the Global Commission on
HIV and the Law. She is the author of numerous publications. Her recent book under
focus here won the 2022 FTGS Book Prize of the International Studies Association.
Bawa, Adeniyi-Ogunyankin, and Tamale delve into various themes in the latter’s
book that revolve around an audacious decolonization agenda that not only
unshackles Africa from its Euro-colonial tethers, but also showcases the continent’s
hopeful futures. In short, the book strongly opposes the pessimism surrounding
decolonization in Africa; in particular, she rejects the narrative that the decoloniza-
tion project is an exercise in science fiction. Accordingly, Tamale calls for African
liberation, a prerequisite for decolonial African futures. She emphasizes that libera-
tion is only possible if it is informed by a Pan-African feminist and Ubuntu
philosophy/ethic
because
they
effectively
challenge
modern
liberalism—the
life-giving spirit of capitalism—and dehumanization. Our discussions on decoloni-
zation focus on re-storying Africa, African spirituality, Afro-ecofeminism, restorative
justice, legal pluralism, and Wakanda.
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The three preceding conversations are then engaged further by two scholars
writing from overlapping but distinct positionalities, Patricia Daley and Wangui
Kimari. As a Caribbean scholar who has spent much of her research time in Cen-
tral and East Africa, Daley is in an ideal position to re-read the conversations
through a rich transatlantic archive on Black “defiant scholarship”.
Patricia Daley is Professor of the Human Geography of Africa at the University of
Oxford. She is also the Helen Morag Fellow in Geography at Jesus College, Oxford,
where she served as Vice-Principal from 2018 to 2021. She was the University Asses-
sor (2015–2016) and cofounder of the Oxford University Black and Minority Ethnic
Staff Network. She was elected to the University Council in 2021. In addition to aca-
demic fora, she frequently speaks at community events such as the African Libera-
tion Day commemorations. Patricia was a coeditor of the journal Environment and
Planning C: Politics and Space and currently serves as the “Place and Environment”
unit editor for Oxford University Press’s digital project “Racism by Context”. Patri-
cia’s research interests include forced migration and belonging, militarism and
gender-based violence, and the political ecology of conservation in East and Central
Africa. Her latest book, Learning Disobedience: Decolonizing Development Studies
(coauthored with Amber Murrey), was published by Pluto Press in 2023.
In the last intervention, Wangui Kimari, who in the meantime has joined the
Antipode project as its first African (and Africa-based) editor, reflects each of the
other four pieces, including Daley’s intervention. Kimari’s reflexive and embodied
reflections on decoloniality offer us a window into the precise meaning of praxis,
a commitment that is central to radical geography but too often ignored. In so
doing, she parallels Vanessa Agard-Jones (2013), who insists that we always think
across scales by placing bodies at the center of our systemic analyses.
Wangui is a lecturer at American University—Nairobi, and an honorary research
associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. Her
interdisciplinary research work draws on many local histories and interdisciplinary
theoretical approaches to try and think through urban spatial management in Nai-
robi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. Wangui is also editor
of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC), a member of the Beyond Inhabi-
tation Lab, and a co-organizer of the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop.
[1] Decolonize the Commons—Debate! A Conversation
between Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Sybille Bauriedl, and
Inken Carstensen-Egwuom
Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society
Inken Carstensen-
Egwuom
Looking at “Geographies of Coloniality”, as we called it in our
book, we are interested in colonial continuities around spatial
structures of inequality, dispossession, and accumulation in
general and we believe that looking into the colonial legacies of
today’s property regimes is one of the most pertinent issues
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when we aim at understanding those deeply ingrained structures
of inequality.
In your research, you look at social-ecological crises in the
Global South and also highlight issues of social stratification and
social justice—both in urban and rural areas—and so we are very
pleased that you agreed to take time for this interview.
With this background in mind, we really believe that your
most recent book, The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty:
Decolonizing Nature, Economy, and Society (Obeng-Odoom 2021b)
offers a compelling and rich perspective on intellectual debates
and political practices around the critique of private, exclusionary
and unequal property regimes, and that research around the
commons addressing questions of organizing collective ownership
and cooperative ways of regulating access to resources is very
important here. From our perspective, we are especially
interested in your own decolonial approach to this field of
knowledge. As a first question, we would like to ask you if you
could elaborate on your specific understanding of what you call
the commons and your decolonial perspective on it?
Franklin Obeng-
Odoom
I intend this book to be one of a three-part analysis which I consider
to be a contribution to the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson 1983).
So, I have to answer your question from this perspective. I started
this three-part analysis with my book Property, Institutions, and Social
Stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2020a), which seeks to
reexamine inequality and stratification in Africa and between Africa
and the rest of the world. In the book on the commons to which you
refer, I have tried to develop this Black Radical Tradition in
socio-ecological terms. Then in the last part of my three-part
analysis, I hope to demonstrate the power of this tradition in terms
of rethinking global migration (Obeng-Odoom 2022).
Within this tradition, it is not only the “mainstream” body of
research that is the focus of critique, as in some decolonial
approaches, but also the so-called progressive scholarship. In the
book to which you refer (Obeng-Odoom 2021b), I identify two key
colonial approaches: the Conventional Wisdom and the Western Left
Consensus. Both are centered on growth. Both are centered on
capital. Both are based on prioritizing Global North interests and
universalizing Global North approaches. My decolonial approach
stresses global inequalities and stratification, global unequal land
relations, and Global South concerns about the socio-ecological
crises in the world. In the process of writing The Commons in an Age
of Uncertainty, whenever I distinguished my work from existing
theorizing about the commons in these ways, I was referred to what,
for example, Marx said somewhere in a footnote or in his main
texts, but on which he did not dwell. Well, I didn’t say Marx didn’t
do anything about land. But how I think about land, the weight I
have been giving to land, and the limitation I am placing on a
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workerist framework of analysis – these are all quite different. My
formulations are, indeed, more Georgist, drawing far more on
Georgist Political Economy (GPE) than on Marxian political
economy, which is more strongly focused on capital. Yet, Georgists
are not the best on postcolonial analysis, but neither is the
Conventional Wisdom nor the Western Left Consensus. My
decolonial approach to socio-ecological crises engages, but
ultimately tries to transcend, insights from all these approaches. For
example, I try to learn from Southern scholars, not only their
empirical insights, but also their theorizing. I work both into my
questioning of the capital-, growth-, and Global North-centered
approach to the commons. My central point is that I develop a
decolonial approach, which is quite distinct from the Conventional
Wisdom on the commons and I consider that my approach is also
quite distinct from what I call the Western Left Consensus.
Carstensen-
Egwuom
Thank you so much for that! Maybe my next question would kind
of approach that in a bit more detail. You do extensively refer to
what Elinor Ostrom’s research did and she focused on the
potentials of cooperation and the complexity of decision making
when it comes to managing common-pool resources. She also
argued against Hardin’s (1968) position, what might be the
Conventional Wisdom that any common-pool resource would
eventually be overused and destroyed, and against his advocacy
for top-down government intervention or privatization as a
solution. And her case studies that she did with colleagues showed
that humans do have this ability to cooperatively manage and take
care of resources without massive state intervention—if they have
long-term interest, if they invest in monitoring the resource and
also if they are able to make their own rules and develop trust
(Ostrom 1990). For us, this framing of the commons seems to be a
rather optimistic approach for sustainable development and has
also been important for social justice movements. And maybe if
you could tell us what your view on this approach is?
Obeng-Odoom
Ostrom might come across as offering a fundamental critique of
the Conventional Wisdom, but one has to go beyond what people
write and look at how they intend to achieve what they write or
say. I doubt very much that Ostrom has a theory of justice. As I
discuss in Chapter 3 of The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty
(Obeng-Odoom 2021b), Ostrom’s approach to sustainability is
centered on something about polycentricity, something she called,
in this context, “green from the grassroots” (Ostrom 2012). It is
something like this: “Oh, we should all make a contribution”, as if
we all contributed equally in creating and reproducing the crises!
So, in the book I classify Ostrom as part of the Conventional
Wisdom. I cannot see any structural difference between Ostrom’s
and Hardin’s approaches. They are similar, as suggested by Hardin
African Decolonial Theory
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(1998) himself. If you look at Ostrom’s work carefully, in fact, what
she is saying is not entirely that Hardin’s work is fundamentally
flawed; but that Hardin’s approach is not the only way. It is one
way; Ostrom proposed another. To really understand Ostrom’s
alternative, we need to leave, for a moment, Ostrom’s work as a
famous political scientist, later Nobel Prize winner in economics,
and look at her PhD work. Academics tend to be quite incremental
in what they do and, therefore, the history of what they did is
important in understanding what they do today. Ostrom is a
public choice theorist. Like all public choice theorists, she was
skeptical about the state. Public choice theorists seek to develop
alternatives to the state because of assumptions that politicians are
rational individuals seeking to maximize their own utility. So,
Ostrom, too, started her work in this tradition. Unfortunately, she
never really left this tradition. The cloak of global fame and global
respectability appears to have diverted attention from her cynicism
about the state, which she appeared to consider in static terms,
allowing for little or no room for evolution or transformation—
much like the Conventional Wisdom about the state (Klimina
2018). This stasis or static view of the state hides Ostrom’s own
ideological views in plain sight. In The Commons in an Age of
Uncertainty (Obeng-Odoom 2021b: Chapters 3 and 4), I review
much of Ostrom’s work, often concluding, based on the evidence,
that she is usually trying to say something about the power of the
market, something about how inefficient the state is, and how
great self-organization can be. So the virtues of both gated
communities and informal communities are extolled. Regardless of
their contrasting, albeit interlinked realities, for Ostrom, such spatial
inequalities mark the wonders of collective organizing to reject the
failures of the state.
As I show in the book, experiences of people in informal
economies do not bear out these claims. The point that I’m
making is that I consider Ostrom’s work to be within the
Conventional Wisdom, conventional analysis of socio-ecological
crises, conventional solutions, and conventional theorizing. It is not
even near the Western Left Consensus, but as I said, as soon as
Ostrom became famous, progressive thinkers also tried bringing
her closer to their own schools of thought. I think there might be
two reasons for this. Number 1: They don’t systematically study
Ostrom’s work. And number 2: It sounds, from the reading of her
work, like she’s saying “Oh, you know, the commons are not
destined to crises” and, hence, others consider her arguments to
be germane to theirs. As I argue in the book, there is a distinction
between the Conventional Wisdom on the commons and the
Western Left Consensus. That said, there is an increasing
convergence between the Conventional Wisdom and the Western
Left Consensus. To give one example, the Economist magazine
recently published an issue with the lead story “Making Coal
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History” (The Economist 2020). Well, I think that many who
advocate the Western Left Consensus would welcome this position
but, as I argue in the book (Obeng-Odoom 2021b: Chapter 6), I
think from the radical alternative, that I try to develop, this is
inadequate, as is the capital-, worker-centered Western Left
Consensus on “just transition” (for further elaboration, see
Obeng-Odoom 2021a). But many colleagues will be satisfied,
because it says that coal should be left in the ground and that is
the end of the story. Even though, this approach does not address
what Julian Agyeman, the Black socio-ecological theorist, calls “just
sustainabilities” (Agyeman 2008, 2013). In my view, questions
about global ecological reparations need to be addressed as urgent
(Obeng-Odoom 2021a). But, for the Western Left Consensus, once
fossil-based capitalism seems to be buried and fossil fuel is left in
the ground, that should be enough and that, I think, represents
the kind of consensus, you know, not consensus just within the
Western left, but now increasing consensus and convergence
between the Conventional Wisdom and I think the Western Left
Consensus. The radical alternative is of course different; it’s based
on global just sustainabilities, demanding redistribution, and
commoning land. If the two, the Conventional Wisdom, including
Ostrom’s work, and the Western Left Consensus, seem to be in a
tug of war about growth, whether it should be “no growth”,
whether it should be “more (green) growth”, or whether there
should be “degrowth”, the radical alternative is centered on
inequalities and global stratification centered around land. So we
have quite a different way of thinking about the problem and
therefore, what might address the political-economic and
socio-ecological crises of our time.
Shift to Landed Property
Carstensen-
Egwuom
Thank you so much. That clarified a lot for me. And then I would
love to shift our discussion to what you mentioned previously, that
your focus is on land. I have the impression that your focus on
land is very much in tune with the seminal text by Eve Tuck and K.
Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” (Tuck and
Yang 2012), where they argue that much of the academic
discussions on decolonization are fraught if they do not seriously
attend to problems of land distribution and the restitution and
reparations of lands that were forcibly taken from Indigenous
peoples through colonization in the Americas. It focuses on the
American context, but in your research, you use examples from
many different regional contexts, especially in Africa. Maybe if you
could explain more on how you see the connections between
colonial processes and the regulation and distribution of landed
property, for example, in an African context?
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Obeng-Odoom
What you describe is intriguing. Decolonization is, indeed, a
concrete vision, not mere rhetoric. Vague notions of progress ring
hollow and are often based on hazy analytical formulations. I
consider my own approach to land to be quite specific and quite
concrete. It is neither neoclassical nor Marxian, as I have said, even
if we can find writers in both traditions who work on land. It is
Georgist, but with features that cannot usually be found among
other Georgist political economists. It is precisely for this reason
that when I say that I am interested in land, in the book, I spend
some time trying to explain, what it is that I am interested in, what
concept of land, what politics of land, and what sort of theoretical
currents percolate my thinking about land (see, e.g.
Obeng-Odoom 2021b:10–15). Some people talk about land
restitution, but as the example of Zimbabwe shows, it can be quite
limited as a remedy for inequalities and social stratification. Setting
aside problems of implementation which could be addressed, as I
argue in Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa
(Obeng-Odoom 2020a), there are fundamental problems with the
physical redistribution of land or plots of land. Problems of
absentee landownership can easily arise, as can the problem of the
private appropriation of socially created rents. So my emphasis on
land is closest to the theorist Henry George (Obeng-Odoom
2020b). In The Commons in An Age of Uncertainty (Obeng-Odoom
2021b: Chapter 3), when I write about rethinking the commons, I
actually set Ostrom’s and George’s conceptions of the commons
side-by-side. So the emphasis in my interest in land, is landed
property, property rights, and economic rent. I’m not thinking
really about physically redistributing land in the Marxian sense. But
I am talking about the socialization of land rent,1 the institution of
just wages, and establishing social protection schemes funded by
land value tax and others, notably, reparations.
This takes me in a rather different direction from what is quite
common in the Western Left Consensus. Again, the way I am
thinking about rent in the book is not to totally remove rent from
society (as per some Marxian Western Left Consensus theorizing),
but to socialize it—the two are not the same. In other words, they
seek socialism or communism when they try to nationalize land,
although, for me, the emphasis could helpfully be on socializing
and sharing rent. Spreading value, progress, and prosperity is more
certain and more ecological this way.
Carstensen-
Egwuom
Okay, yeah, thank you so much.
Sybille Bauriedl
I think this leads us perfectly to our next question. You made clear
your critique of the Western Left Consensus perspective on the
commons. And there is a second debate, that is really important,
we think, in the Left Consensus or in critical development research.
We find numerous studies that have been conducted in West and
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East Africa on the phenomenon of land grabbing in the last
decade. What is new about recent dynamics, according, for
example, to Peluso and Lund (2011:668), is the tilling of land for
“new crops with new labor processes and objectives for the
growers, new actors and subjects, and new legal and practical
instruments for possessing, expropriating, or challenging previous
land controls”. And we are interested in your observation, what do
you think are the central aspects of these dynamics of land use
change?
Obeng-Odoom
Yes, interesting that you mentioned this work. Christian Lund’s
work is fascinating. I reviewed one of his many books for
Geography Research Forum (Obeng-Odoom 2017). From what you
describe, there is much which I share about the literature on land
grabbing. That said, most of the work on land grabbing claimed
that it was “new” without taking into account the history of land
appropriations, specific historical contexts, changing property
rights and relations across space and time, and rent analysis, as I
argued in my contribution to the Review of Black Political Economy
(Obeng-Odoom 2015). For example, I thought the Marxist work
on land grabbing was not undertaking Marxist rent analysis
carefully. Even more fundamentally, Georgist political economy,
the most comprehensive framework for the analysis of land, had
been overlooked. That is why I focused my analysis on clarifying
Marxian rent theory and Georgist political economy. The two lead
to quite different lines, or lanes, of analysis and quite distinct
possible policy options. So the studies on land grabbing generated
a rich body of work, no doubt about that, but I thought such
research could be developed further, analytically. Some of this
deeper analytical work has been done now within the Marxian
tradition by colleagues such as Stefan Ouma (see Ouma 2020),
whose work is outstanding, as I have previously said
(Obeng-Odoom 2020b). I work in the Georgist school of thought
that is distinct from the Marxian school of thought or even from
the Polanyian school of thought.
Land is central to all aspects of my analysis. So, if someone
says that “Oh, but Marx also talked about land” then I say, well
but if you look at the circuit of capital, land and capital are the
same; there is no special place given to land in the circuit of
capital, even if the most creative Marxists find a way around the
problem. If there is a talk of rent, they say, “Oh, rent is one of
the elements in surplus value”. In my own approach, the reverse
is the case: land is pivotal and special. The rest are secondary.
These emphases shine through all three projects I have talked
about: social stratification in Africa (Obeng-Odoom 2020a), the
commons (Obeng-Odoom 2021b), and global migration
(Obeng-Odoom 2022).
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Bauriedl
I think this is a very great point, because we have a lot of
geography students and also postgraduates who want to start a
dissertation and I think for them it’s easier to get access to
inequality, when they focus on people who were displaced. So,
this is mostly a focus not on land but on the people, who were
displaced. And we are very interested in your understanding of
land and when you speak about land, you address various
elements of nature as we understand it: the environment below
the surface of the earth (such as minerals) and the nature that
existed on the surface of the earth (including soil, vegetation,
and water). Do you think “land grabbing” is not the right term
to address all these elements? And how do you think we can
consider the exploitation and property rights of these different
elements of land together?
Obeng-Odoom
Yes, let’s talk about rights and rents from these socio-ecological
relations. But first one small clarification about whether land
grabbing is the right term. I think it’s the right term, it could be
used; it’s the approach that I was talking about. On the one hand,
if the approach leads to an analysis of land that excludes property
rights, then much insight is lost. If the approach to land grabbing
overlooks rent analysis, again, much analytical power is lost. On
the other hand, an approach to land that emphasizes the centrality
of land for nature, economy, and society clearly leads to a much
more comprehensive framework for analysis. So, if graduate
students are interested in the exploitation of labor and the
expropriation of land, they can, indeed, work within the Black
Radical Tradition, drawing on Georgist political economy,
institutional political economy, and stratification economics all at
once. That way, to say that the question of land is central to our
understanding of the world is not to diminish the importance of
capital and labor, or the stratification by race, color, class, caste,
and gender, indeed by many other identities underpinning
stratification. We can engage, but transcend, the historical focus on
individuals, capital, and class this way. Graduate students can—
indeed should—be critical of the approach I have been describing,
too. Consider Georgist political economy. It can be quiet on the
question of stratification and minimalist on the issue of reparations,
but I consider myself a reparationist. Henry George had just a few
things to say about reparations and some Georgist political
economists sometimes cringe at the mention of reparations,
because they think, to address socio-ecological crises, it’s sufficient
to pay labor what it is due without taxing away wages, socialize
rent, and use the resulting revenue for social and ecological
purposes. “Economic insanity” could be addressed this way (for a
more systematic review, see Obeng-Odoom 2021d). But I suggest
that if you look at the historical wrongs, the weight of the
historical problems that Black people and others across the world
have endured and which continue to shape their realities to this
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day, well, there needs to be a place for, you know, for reparations
in the story. That could still be incorporated in the analysis. For
African-Americans, it is usually done by reference to “forty acres
and a mule” (see Darity and Mullen 2020). For Africans,
socio-ecological reparations could be worked into the analysis of
social change by considering, as an example, oil cities, as I try to
do in the case of Port Harcourt in Nigeria (Obeng-Odoom 2021a).
Urban Political Economy
Bauriedl
So, as you mentioned, you think, not the size, but the value of
land is crucial to bear in mind and in our opinion. Is this true for
rural areas as well as for cities? So far, postcolonial development
studies on dispossession and displacement have focused almost
entirely on rural areas and the countryside. What do you think,
how do these land conflicts (in Africa) differ conceptually from land
issues in urban areas? For instance, in cities and suburban areas,
land rights and land demarcation lines are more clearly defined
and land ownership is more personalized. So, is there in your
opinion a conceptual differentiation needed for urban and rural
areas?
Obeng-Odoom
This is precisely the reason why rent is so crucial in urban settings.
Perhaps this is the most important distinction between the urban
and the rural: urban land rent. Even though the “urban” and the
“rural”, indeed the “region”, and the world are interconnected all
the time because urban land undergoes certain processes that are
not typically the experience of rural areas, cities can be special.
Along with the economies of agglomeration that urban economists
and economic geographers like to analyze, and the growing urban
poverty, inequalities, and socio-spatial stratification, cities need to
be taken very seriously. How urban land accumulates rent, how
such rent is appropriated, and in what ways the resulting
rent-related and other inequalities produce and reproduce urban
problems are central axes of conflict and contradictions for urban
political-economic analysis. Not only are landlords even more
powerful but absentee landlords build cities from afar. With little
interest, attachment, or care to the local, the neocolonial landlord
class who are neither resident nor attached to particular cities own
and control such cities, often marginalizing the voice of those who
actually work and produce in those cities. That is also the reason
why in the analysis of the commons, as a potential way to resolve
these conflicts, it is crucially important to take urban land seriously.
But as I said, a sharp distinction between the city and the country
is unhelpful. Often, urban landlords also control land in the
country, which, in turn, supplies food and finance to the city. In
examining oil cities in Africa, for instance, all the scales of analysis
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are needed to understand oil, transnational corporations, labor,
cities, regions, Africa, and the world (Obeng-Odoom 2014). Land
matters in all contexts. The size matters, but perhaps the rent,
rights, and value matter even more. They can all be interlinked, of
course, in shaping the ownership and control of cities.
Bauriedl
When we speak about land, we always have to add water, too.
Obeng-Odoom
Absolutely, absolutely! And minerals—in general the earth—along
with the rights that come with nature, as I argue in my book
(Obeng-Odoom 2021b:10–15). In other words, land is something
—indeed the intersection of rights therein—that, in simplistic
terms, is not created by labor or capital. Similarly, the right to land
and the rights in land are fortuitous, even though these rights and
interests in land have been so much shaped by other
socio-ecological and political-economic relations. That conception
is very powerful because as soon as we conceptualize land that
way, then the fundamental problems of all traditions which
suggest that the enslaver, by providing some kind of capital,
becomes automatically entitled to land ownership and control
become evident. From this perspective, the Lockean theory, that “if
slavers are able to provide some capital and put the land to more
profitable uses they have won the right to land” becomes
questionable. Similarly, from the way that I conceptualize land in
the book, land is not capital as in the conventional sense and land
is not one thing, but rights and interests. It is, for many people,
identity, another name for nature or spirit. Land is power.
Development and Its Alternatives
Bauriedl
I would like to refer to a debate that is really strong in Germany, at
government level. The idea, that Africa is a continent of “chances”,
of “opportunities”. In summer 2017, during the presidency of the
G20 Summit, the German government published the so-called
“Cornerstones of a Marshall Plan with Africa” (BMZ 2017). They
don’t call it a plan “for” but “with” Africa, and imagine a very
positive future of collaboration with Africa as a rich continent with
vast agricultural and land resources. The goal of this plan is a new
partnership for development, peace and a better future and a
relationship between Europe and Africa “at eye level”. The plan
refers to the growth-oriented development strategy of the African
Union. This is very obviously a plan to establish the whole
continent as a free trade area without barriers for European
investments. Do you see any opportunities for a radical
transformation of this kind of neoliberal idea of modernization?
With reference to the debate on decolonial development studies
(Escobar 2015; Ziai 2012), do you think we need an alternative
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idea of development or do we need development as a strategy at
all?
Obeng-Odoom
Going back to the taxonomy I use in the book, the Conventional
Wisdom, the Western Left Consensus, the radical alternative, I think
even though I have not read nor referenced this plan, from how
you describe it, it seems to me that it falls directly within the
Conventional Wisdom.
Bauriedl
Of course.
Obeng-Odoom
In this Conventional Wisdom, Africa is also conceptualized as
open pasture. And in order to transform Africa or to develop
Africa, we go back to Hardin’s framework (Hardin 1968). From
this conventional standpoint, it is necessary to have transnational
corporations or state corporations, acting as transnational
corporations, to parcel out Africa, an open pasture. In the Hardin
frame, analysts typically consider the city, or the nation. But in
my book (Obeng-Odoom 2021b), I think about the “tragedy of
the commons” in global terms, too. Therein lies the
contradictions in the German plan you are talking about. From
what you say, the logic seems to be that the future is this
frontier, this new land with opportunities and it is the business
and the responsibility of maybe more enlightened Europeans,
European interests to get into a kind of partnership. And here,
we not only need to remember our earlier conversation about
Ostrom and Hardin, but also remember the notion of “good”
governance. In practice, when systematically studied
(Obeng-Odoom 2013), this view really means neoliberalism or
libertarianism on the right and anything in between. Previous
attempts at colonizing the commons have been similarly framed.
“Protectorates”, “collaborators”, and “co-producers” are some of
the jarring jargon that are used as a veil for these processes. It’s
just surprising, how this keeps coming back. For me as an author
that shows me that the taxonomy I develop in The Commons in
an Age of Uncertainty (Obeng-Odoom 2021b) is quite useful,
quite a helpful framework. This plan—“Cornerstones of a
Marshall Plan with Africa” (BMZ 2017)—which you describe is
not even within the Western Left Consensus, which seeks to
challenge these forms of organizations and these processes and
initiatives to transform Africa.
In short, as with the Conventional Wisdom that I discuss in
the book, I don’t see any prospects for serious transformation.
This way of thinking could, indeed, worsen in my opinion the
socio-ecological crises, which in The Commons in an Age of
Uncertainty, are centered on global inequalities and global
stratification. So, to the extent that this kind of free trade
regime increases or reproduces these forms of inequalities, we
are back to where we began, perhaps even in a worse
situation.
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That does not mean that the alternative African Continental
Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is in any sense a panacea. As I recently
argued (Obeng-Odoom 2020c), although clearly an improvement
over classical, neoclassical, and Marxist models of trade in the
sense that it advocates Pan Africanism as an antidote to the
problems of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism, it is still
quite limited. AfCFTA does not stretch to the Black world outside
Africa. AfCFTA does not have any serious mechanisms for
demanding, producing, and institutionalizing redistribution, and
AfCFTA actually encourages the private appropriation of socially
created rents. Only when trade commonizes nature, economy,
and society, by commoning rents, liberating labor, and
demanding reparations, can we truly decolonize global trade.
Teaching Decoloniality
Bauriedl
Thank
you
for
this
clarification.
In
the
beginning
of
our
conversation you said that you would like to refer to the topic of
teaching, so maybe you want to add something to this point?
Obeng-Odoom
Indeed. The aim of my three-part analysis on social stratification in
Africa, on socio-ecological crises, and on global migration was to
demonstrate the power and alternatives offered by the Black
Radical Tradition (Robinson 1983). I would also like to reflect on
the underlying pedagogical questions, how I have approached and
addressed them, in the future. So, you know, as a teacher I have to
think through these three positions in my own pedagogy. Doing
so could be helpful in further elaborating the limits of both the
Conventional Wisdom and the Western Left Consensus, and further
strengthen radical alternatives of just sustainabilities developed by
the Black intellectual Julian Agyeman (2008, 2013). Clearly, the
Western Left Consensus position of degrowth does not
systematically take into account all these other layers that I have
raised: the tension, or the intersection maybe, between gender,
race, and class. A just transition is needed, no doubt, but as
colleagues from South Africa have shown (Marais et al. 2021), just
transition, for Africa and for the Global South generally, is not just
about compensating workers or greening work. In any case, you
see, that the “worker” in “just transition” discourses is the
exception in many cities and regions in the world. Many people
are not workers, classically defined via wage relations. Informal
laboring is not I think fully appreciated; neither is color, race, caste,
nor gender, sexual orientation, abilities or disabilities (or other
identities and their “intersections”) are appreciated fully, not in
research, and certainly not in teaching. There has been some
progress, or at least awareness since Black scholars raised these
matters (Carbado et al. 2013; Crenshaw 1989), but the realization
of the vision is far from complete. On the one hand, these matters
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are not taught nor learned (Conventional Wisdom). On the other
hand, they’re being presented as proselytizing, not teaching, or
presented as teaching but only as marginal (because “capital” or
“capitalism” or “resistance” or “revolution” is more important)
and, even then, as the say so of some Western texts, Western
writers, or male Western writers only (= Western Left Consensus).
In my view (Obeng-Odoom 2020d), critical teaching is not about
preaching, nor is active learning about accepting sermons, whether
of the Conventional Wisdom or of the Western Left Consensus. As
a teacher, even when justice, whether social or spatial, economic
or ecological, is central to my pedagogy, I actively encourage
critical thinking and questioning of every position raised and
discussed in the classroom. We must go beyond pedagogical
monism and beyond pedagogical pluralism as well. To decolonize
the classroom and the university, we need to take global
pedagogical citizenship more seriously. We need a just transition,
but that change cannot be just that: we need a just change, both
in research and in teaching.
Bauriedl
Franklin, thank you so much for your thoughts to the debate on,
how we call it, “Geographies of Coloniality”.
[2] Marxism and Decolonization: The View from Africa
—A Conversation between Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and
Yousuf Al-Bulushi
Yousuf Al-Bulushi
Your chair position at Bayreuth University in Germany is in
Epistemologies of the Global South. Can you describe how this
particular position came about? What does the title mean, in your
mind? And how does it relate to the project of the book we’re
discussing today, Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century?
Sabelo Ndlovu-
Gatsheni
My position here is professor in Epistemologies of the Global
South, with an emphasis on Africa. It emerged within a context in
which the University of Bayreuth, which is well known for its
African Studies program, was leveraging its positionality at a time
of resurgence and insurgence of decolonization in the 21st century.
In 2019, they won funding for what is called the “Africa Multiple
Cluster of Excellence”.2 And that funding really emerges within a
context in which there is a resurgence of decolonization, in which
the question of decolonizing knowledge becomes a prominent
feature. This chair was meant to bring in epistemologies of the
South to catalyze the thinking, the epistemologies, the
methodologies, as well as the reflections on doing “African
Studies” differently. One issue that was very clear in this is that we
need to do African Studies with Africans, rather than making them
objects of study. The second issue is that doing African Studies
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without considering the epistemologies from Africa, from the
global South, will still be problematic. Now, how this relates to the
issues with which we’re dealing in the book: one of the trends
cutting across the book is the Black Radical Tradition, which has
always embraced the Marxist tradition. At the center of
epistemologies of the global South is also the Black Radical
Tradition allied with what Cedric Robinson termed Black Marxism.
But the book was conceived while I was still in South Africa, not
when I was here, at the University of Bayreuth.
Al-Bulushi
In North America, despite our long history of red baiting and anti-
communism, there are a few places where scholars and activists
can still go to learn about Marxism and decoloniality from more
than just one or two anomalous thinkers. This is perhaps a product
of what Michael Watts refers to in his essay on the successes and
failures of 1968 as the long march through the institutions (2001).
In the case of your volume, many—although not all—of the
contributors, are at South African institutions. I wonder if you can
speak to the specific context of Marxism in South Africa—where
are the contributors to the volume learning their Marxism? Are
they members or past members of organizations like the South
African Communist Party (SACP) or the National Union of
Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)? Are they learning Marxism
in SACP or NUMSA political education sessions? Are they learning
Marxism in their formal education at specific universities where
Marxism has somewhat of a foothold? Or are they principally
autodidacts, forced to learn Marxism on their own for lack of
access to an institutionalized presence of Marxism? After answering
that I’d like you to answer the same question for decoloniality—
where are your contributors first learning about decoloniality?
What kind of institutional presence does it have in South Africa?
Have they participated in organizations like the Economic Freedom
Fighters or the Rhodes Must Fall movement that may have
generated an interest in theories of decolonization? I think I read
somewhere that there was an important decolonial theory working
group that may have also influenced the development of this
volume.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Yes, as I mentioned, the book was conceived while I was working
in South Africa; even the co-editor Professor Morgan Ndlovu is still
in South Africa. So, the location determined the number of South
African contributors, and also, with a project like this, you always
rely on networks. The networks which I had were mainly in South
Africa. The very idea of theorizing both Marxism and
decolonization simultaneously emerged within the context in
which there was a feeling among others that this push for
decoloniality is displacing, so to speak, Marxism, or with others, of
course, doing a quick critique of Marxism, putting forward such
views (of Marxism) as a Eurocentric idea. So, I thought, instead of
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falling into those quick dismissals, it would be important for us to
have a project in which we really bring people to think deeply
about the two movements. From where I was standing, the key
concern of the book was that I never saw an antagonism between
Marxism and decolonization. If anything, I saw complementarity
between the two. But coming back to your question directly, the
uniqueness of South Africa: I think the first uniqueness of South
Africa, is really the colonial uniqueness in the sense that, it was
supposed to be a little Europe existing at the southern tip of the
African continent. It really emerged perhaps concurrently with the
movement to colonize Latin America. If you think about the
so-called “voyages” of Vasco da Gama or Bartholomeu Dias, who
were contemporaries, they were actually happening simultaneously
with Columbus going to the Americas. So, it’s a unique space from
which to think about the depth of colonialism in the South African
region, with South Africa really becoming a staging post, into
Zimbabwe, into Malawi, into others from 1652 onward. So, that’s
one thing, that I thought would be important as a starting point to
understand the question of coloniality. Second, it also has the
deepest, if I can say racial capitalist realities, including links with
the issues of enslavement. So, all the dirty aspects of coloniality,
modernity, you’ll see them in South Africa. Of course, maybe they
did not fully succeed in the project of extermination. But there
were massive killings of the indigenous people, and it is also about
their displacement. The second aspect is that South Africa becomes
a convergence zone of intellectual traditions. Garveyism,
Ghandiism, you’ll see them in South Africa. You’re able to see Black
Power and Black Consciousness as strong traditions in South Africa.
You will also see liberalism, white liberalism as well as liberal African
nationalist traditions. But you can also see the radical Pan-Africanist
tradition in the mold of the Pan-African Congress under Robert
Mangaliso Sobukwe (Shoki 2021), which really brings in the notion
of “Africa for Africans”, the Garveyist idea. And then you also have
very deep and rich traditions of Marxist thinking, embodied, of
course, by the South African Communist Party and the New Unity
Movement, among others. You can then see in this deep Marxist
tradition, people like Moses Kotane going to the Soviet Union long
ago. You will see people like Joe Slovo, emerging as key Marxist
thinkers. People like Chris Hani. You’ll find that there is a Chris
Hani Institute in South Africa. You’ll also find a place called Mzala
Nxumalo Centre in Durban, which tries to revive Mzala’s tradition
which was also a deeply Marxist tradition. These are recent centers
that were built. The other aspect in South Africa which is very
interesting, related to the Marxist tradition is the emergence of the
labor unions. When we think about institutions, we also think
about the University of the Western Cape for instance, which was
also a leftist-dominated institution that produced a lot of leftist
thinkers. The University of Durban–Westville was another one. So
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there is really a very rich tradition. It’s a very complex intellectual
space to operate in. And that tradition is not dead. But those leftist
traditions were always in contact with strong Africanist traditions.
When Mbeki came to power after Mandela, he came with the idea
of an African Renaissance, which goes back to the time of Kwame
Nkrumah and others. This tradition also has its own institutions.
When I joined UNISA, I found there was an Institute for African
Renaissance Studies at the University of South Africa. So, in South
Africa, you find almost every tradition in the same space.
And of course, the long anticolonial and anti-apartheid struggles
themselves became schools in which many people were educated
and radicalized. But as you were saying, they were also auto-
didacts. As a result of the disappointment of the transition from
apartheid to democracy, the youth were in search of answers to
the question: “Why is the situation like that?”, why certain changes
never took place, and a lot of them then decided to force
themselves to look for revolutionary thought, which can help them
to explain the situation in South Africa. So, indeed, there are
people who are learning on their own by going back to these
traditions. But you will also find that the other important aspect of
the South African situation is the strong civil society movements,
which are also grounded in leftist, and also Africanist traditions,
such as Abahlali baseMjondolo (Al-Bulushi 2024), the shack
dwellers movement, the anti-privatization movements
(Bakker 2007), which are also schools in their own right. They
make sure their constituencies are equipped ideologically to think
differently. It won’t be surprising in such a situation to find such
movements as the Economic Freedom Fighters, who are combining
both the nationalist, the Marxist, and Fanonian type of thinking,
while also bringing Biko into the mix. I must say also, the youth
and students in South Africa are also influenced by particular
thinkers, such as Bernard Magubane, who was also a leftist thinker,
and pan-Africanist intellectuals like Archie Mafeje, who also
belonged to the New Unity Movement, and Steve Biko is alive
today more than he was during his time I think.
So in that context, it was easy to see decoloniality in such a rich
space. But more specifically, I have been in South Africa for over a
decade or so, and when I joined the University of South Africa, I
also then entered into a space which was not very familiar to me:
it was still white at the top, Black at the bottom. And I quickly also
said: “But how do I contribute to changing the situation which I
found?” And then, I formed the Africa Decolonial Research
Network in 2011. And that Africa Decolonial Research Network
became really the site for decoloniality. And the University of South
Africa became also a site for nurturing the decolonial spirit. I was
also reading the literatures of the Latin American modernity/
coloniality group. And one of our members, Morgan Ndlovu
(coeditor of this book), in 2011, attended the Cultural Studies
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Association of Australasia annual conference where Ramon
Grosfoguel was the keynote speaker. It was in that encounter that
when they began to speak, Morgan informed Ramon that “In
South Africa we formed the Africa Decolonial Research Network”,
Ramon just jumped in and said: “This is exciting news. Yaa! This is
exactly what we wanted. There is decoloniality in Africa!” And that
member came with a message to me from Ramon to say they have
an international Summer School on Decolonizing Knowledge and
Power in Barcelona and our network was invited. And in 2012,
seven of us went there, and that’s how we then combined our
forces. And in 2014, we began a version of the Barcelona School at
the University of South Africa. It attracted a lot of young people
from across the institutions in South Africa, including those who
were from the social movements. So when Rhodes Must Fall and
Fees Must Fall then broke out in 2015–2016, we were just hiding
the fact that perhaps the decolonial school might actually be the
one who influenced this, because now the government was
worried. But indeed, it [the decolonial school] contributed a lot to
making people rethink their condition and it gives them the
vocabulary to name some of the issues which they didn’t have a
name for. But I think this story won’t be complete without
emphasizing that South Africa is in Africa. Let me put it that way.
So, because of that, the existence of strong Pan-Africanist and
decolonization traditions on the continent must also be taken into
account. Nkrumah is a hero in South Africa. Lumumba is a hero in
South Africa. Amılcar Cabral is a hero in South Africa. Frantz Fanon
is a hero in South Africa. So, there is also a tapping into the long
existing, strong Pan-Africanist traditions in the decoloniality
movement. Of course, with the contradictions, such as
xenophobia. And also, we cannot ignore the fact that there are
also institutions on the continent, such as the Council for the
Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA),
which has continuously produced Africa-centered and political
economic thinking.
Al-Bulushi
The book certainly draws extensively on African and Caribbean
anticolonial traditions of thought, particularly on the work of
Cesaire, Nkrumah, Senghor, Cabral, as you just mentioned, and
others. How has the reception of these thinkers changed over
time? And what new light do the contributors to this volume shed
on their work for radical theory today?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
I think one of the issues when we were doing the decolonial work,
one of the agenda items was to try to expose ourselves, the youth,
and the students to the literatures which we were deprived of. You
know, these literatures which are not in the curricula. So, we
began a project of recovery, of Black radical thinking. And
immediately, as we exposed ourselves, the youth, and the students
to some of the literature, we began to understand the world
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differently, and the politics of knowledge became clear to us. Some
of the leading scholars like MolefiAsante, for instance, and the
Afrocentricity School, have a very strong following in South Africa.
So, a lot of the members of ADERN (the Africa Decolonial Research
Network) see value in both decoloniality, Afrocentricity and Black
Marxism. Then there are others who, when they discovered Cheikh
Anta Diop, also thought, here is an answer to our problem. The
works of these scholars, thinkers, and activists have always been
available but not in the curriculum and formal education.
The same can be said about Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism
(Al-Bulushi 2022; Robinson 1983). A lot of the scholars actually
began to read that book now rather than when it was first
published in 1983. And they think: “Oh, wow, we didn’t know
there was somebody who explained racial capitalism in this way!”
So, it is an interesting time, in which the reading is “going back”
to the Black Radical Tradition. And if you view this from the Latin
American decoloniality, these figures are from the border; they’re
not the central figures in academia. And now, all the young
academics and next-generation scholars who are training for
Masters and PhDs, and those who have teaching responsibilities,
they are now rewriting the curriculum and bringing in these
thinkers. Your question was about whether there is a changing
meaning to all this. There is indeed a changing meaning of it. The
way the younger scholars are taking it up and applying it to
current challenges and problems. This is like new old literature to
many of us who were not exposed to it before. And therefore, this
is a literature which can propel us into understanding the present
and into the future. So, we use it not only for academic,
intellectual enrichment, but also for activist purposes. And this also
comes within a context in which we are tired of the neoliberal
traditions and the issues of democracy and human rights as a
solution to African problems of social and economic as well as
cognitive justice, and many are really disillusioned with that type of
thinking. So, they think there must be other thinking which can
actually liberate them, other than the issues of democracy and
human rights preached from the global North. Not that they are
saying democracy is wrong or human rights is wrong—but they
want it to be radicalized.
So what they were lacking was the language to name the
challenges which they are facing. So, concepts like neocolonialism,
coined by Kwame Nkrumah in 1965, are important concepts. A
concept like racial capitalism—which you can see throughout the
chapters in this book—they find really has explanatory power when
applied to the situation in South Africa. Concepts like
decolonization of the mind, from Ng~ug~ı wa Thiong’o and Ibekwe
Chinweizu. There was a time when Ng~ug~ı wa Thiong’o was not
very popular. But he has recently come to South Africa three times
if I am not mistaken. Really, the walls and lecture theatres were full.
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Because it’s also like a discovery: “Oh, Ngugi is alive!” And his
works have come back as new literature. This is what is interesting
to me. And even including myself, I reread all these literatures after
I had the PhD. And I found that they taught me a lot of things,
which I could not have known if I had not done that. So, I think
what happens is that it radicalizes and propels us into action. If
you see the Rhodes Must Fall and the Fees Must Fall movement,
Biko’s idea of Black Consciousness was very central. Fanon’s ideas
on violence and decolonization were also very central.
Intersectionality thought featured too. There was a debate—how
do we handle the issue of violence in activist politics, and others
were justifying violence by saying “Fanon said, decolonisation is
always a violent movement”.
Al-Bulushi
Another unique aspect of this volume is its combination of
theoretical and empirical studies. With regard to the latter, issues of
land reform, mining, and feminist policy are some of the topics
that come to the foreground. Can you tell us why these topics are
especially important when it comes to thinking about where
Marxists and decolonial thinkers might turn today to apply their
ideas in radical forms of praxis?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
This again takes me back to my first point about the place of
South Africa in modernity and more specifically in colonial
modernity. Perhaps let me make reference to the uniqueness of the
Southern African region as a whole, in the sense that it was
dominated by what is called settler colonialism (Odukoya 2018). I
think that’s an important point to begin with because if we don’t
understand that, we won’t understand why the issue of land, for
instance, becomes a central issue, or the issue of minerals and
mines. You will not understand why there is a formation like
Economic Freedom Fighters, if you don’t take that background into
account, in the sense that even after the liberation struggles in
Southern Africa, you find that perhaps what was gained was
political independence, without economic independence, without
cognitive justice and epistemic freedom. The question of minerals
and nationalization is also very central in their discourses. Southern
Africa is rich in minerals like gold, diamonds, and many others.
There is a feeling mainly among youth that what was gained in
1994 in South Africa was bourgeois liberal democracy, and that
social justice and economic justice were never delivered. So, in that
sense, immediately you speak about both Marxism and
decolonization, they seem to take them to the necessary existential
issues of life in an antiblack world, continuations of racial capitalist
exploitation, as well as heteronormative patriarchal sexism.
On the question of land also, you will find that Zimbabwe also
stands at the center of debates in the sense that the attempt to do
compulsory land reclamation provoked so many problems on the
one hand, and on the other hand, it was necessary (Moyo and
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Chambati 2013). And the feeling is that global capital and the
powerful regimes of the global North wanted to make an example
of Zimbabwe, that if you take this radical position, this is the
disciplining which you will receive. So that others must never
attempt what Zimbabwe attempted to do. So that’s what everyone
cautions now: “Don’t do it the way Zimbabwe did it, because you
will see the consequences.” So, Namibia is not moving as fast as
it’s supposed to move in terms of land reform. South Africa is also
very cautionary in the way they want to do it. So, on that
Zimbabwe question, we were happy to receive that chapter which
actually speaks about the land reform in Zimbabwe from a Marxist
and decolonial perspective as an important aspect of Black
economic liberation.
And then, if you come to South Africa, the issue of mines and
minerals and you link it with the Marikana massacre of 2012,
whereby Lonmin—which is actually a multinational company in
cahoots with the South African neo-apartheid state—gained
against labor and killed 34 miners who were striking for a living
wage. What is perhaps emerging poignantly in the book is that
Marxism continues to be seen as a very good science of
understanding capitalism. And perhaps, decolonization is another
very good science for understanding colonialism. But also revealing
that capitalism and colonialism are self-co-constituting each other.
So, if you combine them, you will understand the modern world-
system better. And in understanding the modern world-system
better, the issue of feminism, the issue of gender, the issue of
sexism, then arises not as an addition, but as an intrinsic part of
the constitution and the cartography of power of coloniality. To
the extent that the argument is you’ll never have a genuine
decolonization without de-patriarchization, this is where that
chapter that brings in the issue of feminist policy becomes very
important, in the sense that this is not another terrain of struggle
which is on the side. It is really a central part of the decolonization
struggles, because the major problem with decolonization in the
20th century was that it then became dominated by men, it
became androcentric, and the issue of de-patriarchization fell by
the wayside. So now, when we’re reorganizing and rearticulating
decolonization in the 21st century, the issue of gender must not be
a peripheral issue, it must be an interesting part of the
decolonization, because there can never be decolonization without
de-patriarchization. And secondly, there can never be a good social
science, that ignores more than 50% of the population which is of
the female gender. And there was always this critique when I went
to the university in the 90s, that Marxism was gender and race
blind because of its concentration on class analysis. And I think the
position is now changed as research on Marxism has progressed in
that it depends on which version of Marxism one is referring to.
Friedrich Engels engaged the gender question and there are many
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Marxist feminists. Decolonization was also suffering from the same
limit of sometimes sidelining gender but now the question of
heteronormative patriarchal sexism is central to it. Yes, in the
1960s, the dominance of big men, whenever you talk about
decolonization, big names like Nkrumah, Nyerere, and others, and
very few women, was common. But there were many women in
the struggles. So, that’s why we are trying to say that theory and
praxis need to go together to reflect on the actually existing social,
political, cultural, economic, and epistemic challenges, and the
gender question as well as the sexuality question cannot be
ignored.
Al-Bulushi
Along that line of thought, I would like to ask you about the
importance of feminist analysis in the volume. In radical
geography, it has often been social reproduction, broadly
conceived, that has been an extremely important field of analysis
for us. And this is thanks in large part to interventions by scholars
like Altha Cravey, Cindi Katz, Melissa Wright, and many others. In
the African context, we can think of the work of Pumla Gqola, Ifi
Amadiume, Oyeronkẹ́ Oyewumı, and Sylvia Tamale, among many
others, as having advanced the study of gender, decolonial
feminism, and racial capitalism. So, I’m wondering how the other
contributors—beyond that important chapter you referenced by
Funzani Mtembu on feminist policy—engage with questions of
social reproduction, on the one hand, from the Marxist tradition,
and what Maria Lugones called the coloniality of gender, on the
other hand, from the decolonial tradition?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
That’s an important question in the sense that even among the
contributors there was a skewing toward men. And that’s always a
challenge even in the wake of decolonizing, which we’re trying to
do, in the sense that most of the time, the responses are mainly
from men because they dominate the academies. So, we need a
targeted and deliberate invitation of women into these spaces so
that we don’t reproduce the same problems of the domain of
knowledge being dominated by men, even if they are Black. This is
one aspect. So, as I was saying, what we are trying to do is to
make sure that the issue of gender is not an addition and certainly
we are not yet there. Gender questions should be cutting across
decolonizing work. We must not be found saying: “Oh, there is
gender, that we did not take into consideration!” What we were
trying to do is to make it part of the broader decolonization of the
21st century, to the extent that we’re saying the problem is the
modern world-system and the global orders. And if the problem is
the modern world-system, and its global orders, then at the center
is the heteronormative patriarchal sexist order of things that has to
fall. And if it is a central part of that, how do you change the
modern world-system, therefore, without engaging the question of
gender? We might not be succeeding the way we wish to succeed.
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But we were very aware of that important aspect of it. And we
were really very happy that Funzani and the other colleague from
India, Debadrita Chakraborty, who also dealt with the question of
the Dalits, actually dealt with it from Maria Lugones’ concept of
coloniality of gender. It actually was very interesting for us, because
we needed more of that type of thinking. But at the moment, we
are very aware that consciously, we need to address the question
of gender as an intrinsic part of decolonizing. So, it might not be
cutting across all the other chapters of our book at the moment.
Just like race, which continues to privilege white supremacy and
bourgeois lifestyles, gender inequalities continue to privilege men,
and hence, there is slowness in moving away from it by the
beneficiaries of patriarchy (Willoughby-Herard 2014). They need to
be pushed to take a deliberate position to reflect on and embrace
feminism and womanism.
Al-Bulushi
I wanted to ask you a little bit about the broader movement
context (Pithouse 2016) that may have informed this volume. You
have already touched on it by talking about how your decolonial
theory working group that began in 2011 may have influenced the
“Fallist” movement in important ways. But I’m wondering if you
could say a little bit more about how the movement may have also
influenced your theorizing. I’m thinking of some of the problems
and tensions that emerged, either in the “Fallist” movement itself,
or in what we could call the broader globalization of the
Movement for Black Lives, which is now definitely decentered from
the United States exclusively. Did those of you involved in this
volume have specific conversations around the problems that
emerged in these movements, when these struggles began to have
ripple effects on college campuses throughout the world, and
might we view the volume as also responding to and thinking
further about these problems that emerged in the movements?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Yeah. In fact, even within the intellectual decolonial movement, we
always had these tensions about what we have just discussed. The
tensions about how seriously we are taking the gender question
into account, and how committed are we? How different are we
from other patriarchs who have been parroting this concept of
decolonization but practicing patriarchy at the same time? That
tension has always been there. The other issue was that of doing
decolonization as an intellectual project versus doing
decolonization as a liberation project. So, there were also tensions
between those who are using decoloniality for careerist purposes
mainly and then abandon the mud and brick aspect of it, which is
the activist part.
You’re talking here to somebody who led in the formation of
ADERN (the Africa Decolonial Research Network) in 2011 as an
epistemic movement in the first instance that was concerned with
issues inside universities where the politics of knowledge was a
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glaring issue. The outbreak of Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall
in 2015 and 2016, respectively, read to us like a translation of
theory into praxis. It was mainly because of the Rhodes Must Fall
and the Fees Must Fall movements that even conservative
academics and the universities were put under pressure to
implement changes in institutional cultures, curriculum,
scholarship, funding models, pedagogies, demographics, and
iconography. On one end was the urgent need on the part of the
university leaders to placate the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must
Fall activists because the university feared further eruptions, and,
on the other, there were committed progressive academics and
students who thought that this was an opportunity to bring about
real and genuine change within the universities, and even outside
the universities, informed by decolonization thinking and praxis. At
the University of South Africa in 2016, they built what is called the
“Change Management” unit within the vice chancellor’s office. I
was invited into that space. And again, I consulted with the
network and comrades because it can be dangerous to move into
these spaces of administration where managerialism rules. But at
the same time, it can also be dangerous to leave that space for
reactionary forces and their hypocritical politics. So, we felt that
there was a need to push some of our forces into those spaces,
while others remained on the ground to make sure that all the
flanks were covered, and to monitor any tendencies that
undermined the struggles for decolonization. So, I did move from
being head of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied
Social Policy Research (AMRI) and became a director of that
Change Management unit responsible for the scholarship and
curriculum transformation. Administrators of the university were
comfortable with the concept “transformation” rather than
“decolonization”. Activists were saying “we are beyond
transformation and we are for decolonization”. At the
management level, they were not very comfortable with the term
decolonization. I maintained the concept of decolonization and
critiqued “transformation” as not radical enough and as having
failed. Rhodes Must Fall never cried for “transformation”. They
were clear that they wanted decolonization. So if the university’s
new initiatives were really developed in response to those
movement demands, I asked, why weren’t we using the language
which the movement was using? And then the question came:
“But there are so many grammars of change. Transformation is
one of them. Social Inclusion is one of them. Africanisation is one
of them. Decolonisation is one of them”. So, then it meant that we
were exhausting ourselves in these grammars. Which one? Then I
said: “No, no, no”. I don’t want to be trapped in nomenclatures
while the realities on the ground were dire for students, young
academics, and women academics who were on the receiving end
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of what Ramon Grosfoguel correctly termed “racist/sexist” cultures
of domination.
If we’re using Africanization, what I demanded was a practical
explanation of what was being done under this grammar of
change. If we are using social inclusion, again I demanded that it
be explained practically, so as to see whether it was really
adequate to the task at hand. And that’s how I will measure
whether you are moving forward or not. So, that’s the way we
broke the deadlock, while they were trying to trap us into
spending a lot of time debating: “Is it decolonisation? Is this
transformation? Is it social inclusion? Is it Africanisation? Is it
indigenisation?” So, I said: “No, no, no”, use whatever concept
you want to use. Whatever grammar you want to use. But for me,
from the office which I occupy, I want to see changes concretely on
the ground. Whether we are changing using indigenisation,
Africanisation, I have no problem with the name. But I will come to
assess, what are you doing within a department? What are you
doing within a faculty? What are you doing within a college? And if
there is actually concrete change, I have no worry about what term
we are using. So, I spent the last five years before I came to
Bayreuth in that office, where I ended up being the Acting
Executive Director, and we were not comfortable with the concept
of “Change Management”. We thought it smelled neoliberal. So
we renamed the office into a Department of Leadership and
Transformation (DLT). And it had very clear areas of change. We
wanted to change scholarship, curriculum, and the language of
learning, teaching, and research. That was one area. Then there
was a second strand, which concerned a change of institutional
cultures, including racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other aspects.
Then third, there was the leadership, management, and
governance domain that also needed to be decolonized. It had
embraced neoliberal corporatist cultures in which knowledge,
education, and research were commodified and commercialized.
Then the systems and the policies of the university had to be
subjected to change so as to make them supportive of the agenda
of decolonization. And that’s the way it was structured.
It was not the easiest part of the job because you needed to
mobilize the entire constituency of the university behind the
agenda of decolonization. Academics in Westernized universities
work through dissensus rather than consensus [laughter]. So, really,
you need to spend a lot of time to make sure that what we are
bringing is a superior thinking to what they are used to. The
university council and vice chancellor seemed genuine in wanting
to decolonize the university. So I spent most of the time really
mobilizing. From an administrative point of view, DLT was also
even given the task of documenting where there was resistance.
But because I was also an academic, I was not very comfortable
quickly saying “these people are resisting”. Perhaps they don’t
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understand what we are talking about. So, that’s basically the
tension which I saw.
But in the movements themselves, there were also tensions
related to other identities that were not accommodated, like
LGBT+. There were a lot of reactions within the movement. And I
think they were inevitable, if I can put it that way. This Rhodes
Must Fall/Fees Must Fall movement—just like the liberation
struggles—they were schools in revolutionary thinking and
revolutionary praxis. You learn while you’re doing. So, throughout
there is learning and unlearning of a lot of things.
And then the other aspect which I learned is the issue that if you
create an office like the one which I’m talking about, which is
located in the vice chancellor’s office, people take whatever you
say in terms of “compliance”. And that’s a very problematic way of
thinking, that “now the office has said X, and we need to comply”.
But in their hearts and minds, they have not changed. So, that’s
another reality, which I realized. If you make it a matter of
compliance, people will give you a good report, but without
having changed their consciousness of knowledge or their politics
of knowledge.
The other challenge which we faced as a challenge, which is
continuing now, is the issue of sexual harassment within the
institutions. It divided a lot of comrades who were supposed to be
on one side. So, there were really many factions within the
movement. And the good part, we always say, is that it was never
meant to be an event. It is a process, and it is a process which is
not about other people, but about ourselves. And that issue of
being about ourselves I’ve tried to emphasize many times. Because
a person like myself, I was never produced by a decolonial
university or something like that. I’m also produced by these very
problematic institutions. So, on a daily basis, I must also
interrogate myself, learn to unlearn in order to relearn some of the
things, so that we become better and perhaps we will create the
institutions of relationality which are better than the previous ones.
So, it’s really a learning curve which I came through, and I’m
thankful for being at the center because it made me a better
person and helped me to express my ideas writing books better.
But you’ll realize that, while I was in office, I also wrote a book
called Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and
Decolonization (2018). And that book, I wrote it because I always
told the vice chancellor: “Those who are in this office of yours,
who are supposed to lead in this decolonisation, they need to be
on top of the scholarship of revolutionary change to be effective.
And being on top of the revolutionary discourses requires that they
must research widely on all these other topics. They must also be
research-led in thinking and action”. And that book, I wrote it
while I was in office, because I was reacting to critical questions
which were posed to the office and to me. So, it’s another way of
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learning how to write a book while you are still doing the work of
activism and administration.
Now you mentioned Black Lives Matter and I was saying, in
South Africa, it was more of Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall as
the rupturing point. Of course, it converges with the Black Lives
Matter movement. And analytically, we need to read them as
events of the same moment, or some conjuncture. And if we read
them that way, we will then see that, despite the fact that they
emerge in different geospatial regions of the world—the US and
South Africa—there are a lot of commonalities. They all quickly
traveled out of their areas of origin, into the planetary, if I can use
that word. That’s where you will see Rhodes Must Fall starting in
Cape Town, and then Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford. You will see the
Black Lives Matter and the killing of George Floyd in the USA,
sparking the movements against statues all over the world
targeting monuments and iconography of racists, enslavers,
imperialists, and colonialists. And I think I always think about these
as planetary decolonial movements of the 21st century. Of course,
there are specific locations with regard to where they come from,
but they quickly become planetary in terms of their resonance.
Al-Bulushi
What you’ve just conveyed about the back and forth between the
work of movements and the work of scholarship, even when
working within the institution, is such a rich example of praxis. So I
want to ask you a little bit more about the centrality of praxis to
this volume. In conversation with the work of Hamid Dabashi, you
explain in the volume that philosophers of liberation write across
and against disciplines. And that this is because they write with
“blood and tears”. This means that praxis arguably lies at the heart
of your conception of Marxism and decolonization. And this is
certainly a challenge to many purely academic theorizations of
radical critique, although it’s obviously most loyal to the original
formulations of actually existing Marxism and decolonization. As
the US-based ethnic studies scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
have argued about the overly loose use of the term decolonization,
“decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012). So, I’m
wondering if you can expand upon the priority of praxis to your
theorization and what it might look like for scholars to take the
necessity of engaging in praxis more seriously. As we train the next
generation of Marxist and decolonial scholars, should we be
insisting that their scholarship always involve radical forms of praxis
as well?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
It’s an important question that also preoccupied a lot of us: how
adequate is it to think from disciplines? How adequate is thinking
from the disciplines for practical changes? And going back to the
work of Lewis Gordon about Disciplinary Decadence (2006),
whereby the discipline becomes a spectacle, which makes you see
some things and not see others. We always have an issue because
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all of us were trained in disciplines. But the issue is how do you get
out of the discipline into the existential problems facing humanity?
And Marxism and decolonization became handy to me in the
sense that I always said, “but Marx never wrote for a promotion to
professorship”. He was not sitting down writing a book so that he
could become a lecturer, senior lecturer, associate professor, etc.
Behind all the writing, there was an agenda of liberation and
exposure of the dangers of capitalism as well as bourgeois
leadership of the world. And I then thought about Frantz Fanon,
who, when he was writing, was also involved in a very violent
struggle for liberation in Algeria. And the issue was how to make
sense of what was taking place, and also to equip the comrades
with a better way of understanding the complexities of the
struggles they’re involved in. Then I thought about the work of
Amılcar Cabral. All the theorization that he was doing was not
from a lecture room, or a lecture theatre, or an office. But it was
from the bush and it was meant for the consumption of the
comrades who were involved practically on the ground (deGrassi
2023). So, that’s why I was really happy about the idea of
knowledge from the battlefields of history. And if we link it with
the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to the epistemologies of
the South, that is, those knowledges which emerged from
struggles against colonialism, against capitalism, and against
patriarchy. Was it not Karl Marx who said capitalism emerged
dripping with blood from every pore? So, the “blood and tears” is
not a metaphor if the world is read from Marxism and
decolonization, because the colonizer’s model of the world
emerged through violence, warfare, genocides, enslavement,
dispossession, displacement, and racial and gender exploitations.
And I think if we think from this “underside of modernity” (to
use a concept from Enrique Dussel) and build from that, the
question of thought, knowledge, and action as always intertwined
becomes clear and urgent. And in the Southern African region
during the armed liberation struggles against white settler regimes,
there was a clear thinking that the guns and revolutionary thought
belonged together. One had to always think about the revolution,
but with your gun under your arm [laughter] so that you could do
both simultaneously. So, it’s not like bourgeois intellectualism, or
bourgeois pontification. The Tanzanian intellectual Issa Shivji once
said that bourgeois pontification is 99% irrelevant [laughter]. Only
perhaps 1% relevant. So, I thought, when we bring together the
issue of Marxism and decolonization, we’re bringing something
which is 99% relevant, and practical. And I saw it, in the sense that
Rhodes Must Fall was full of action. So it’s really important to me
that we don’t fall into bourgeois intellectualism, which is always
just pontificating, while you are sitting in air-conditioned offices
and hotels. We need to combine the two. But our training was not
meant to be like that. And I think what we need to do is to do
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scholarship differently. We need to know that scholarship has to
have a liberatory purpose.
But I must hasten to say, there are spaces whereby we are
divided as academics and intellectuals into those who push for a
purposeful scholarship, a liberatory purpose, and those who think
that, no, no, if you do that, you are bringing ideology to
scholarship and undermining scientific thinking. You are actually
bringing identity to scholarship. You are bringing subjectivity to
scholarship. You are really moving away from objectivity and
impartiality and all that. But to me it’s important that knowledge
has to be relevant and useful. Scholarship has to have an agenda.
It can’t be an agenda-less game. To me, I’m not shy to say my
research and scholarship is informed by the struggles for liberation
of the oppressed and this does not mean I compromise on
scientific quality. I do both. And secondly, that does not therefore
mean that it is not rigorous. I do both, but I think it is important
that there must be a higher purpose. Why are we doing it? And I
think even the Western philosophers, whatever they were doing in
philosophizing, had a purpose. There was philosophical support for
racism, enslavement, and colonialism! So we need to do
scholarship which has a purpose for decolonization. It was never
just philosophy for the sake of philosophy. There were Western
thinkers who were in support of imperialism and the colonial
project. And if you then say we must do scholarship which is not in
support of anything, then it’s a useless scholarship. We need to be
on fire for justice, if I can be allowed to draw from Cornel West’s
concept of “Black prophetic fire”! We need to be on fire for gender
equality. We need to be on fire for equal redistribution of material
resources. We need to be on fire in defense of Black lives. The
scholarship needs to be animated by realities which actually
decimate human lives. And fundamentally, to even save the Earth
from capitalist exploitative logics.
Al-Bulushi
Studies
of
Africa
within
Africa—as
opposed
to
the
Western
formations, institutionalized in bodies, such as the African Studies
Associations in the UK and the US—have arguably oscillated
between two competing poles over the past half-century. On the
one hand, at the height of the anticolonial struggles in the 1960s
and 1970s, political economy and the question of development
came to dominate many studies as an exclusive lens through which
one was supposed to pursue all forms of intellectual inquiry. On
the other hand, especially since the 1990s, scholars like Mahmood
Mamdani and Achille Mbembe have been somewhat critical of
what they viewed as an overemphasis upon political economy. And
instead, they’ve examined other questions such as the relative
autonomy of the political, postcoloniality, and questions of
subjectivity. The critique of Marxism is a question that this volume
takes up, but via other reference points, such as Ayi Kwei Armah,
Stokely Carmichael, and Onkgopotse Tiro. Can you share some of
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these critiques with us and explain what they might offer to
ongoing conversations across sometimes competing liberatory
traditions of struggle?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
The starting point is very good: what are the key questions which
animate African Studies and African thought? I think you have
raised the question of development. Decolonization starts with
existential questions. For example, W.E.B. Du Bois posed the
question as follows: “How does it feel to be a problem?” And
that’s an existential question. And this is then picked up by Aime
Cesaire, putting it in terms of the tormenting question: “Who am
I? Who are we? What are we in the antiblack world?” I think these
existential questions form an ideal background for what is called
the Black Radical Tradition. There are questions of life. And then, of
course, the next question which also animates African Studies is the
question of history and being human (McKittrick 2015). And that
question of history arose from a context where there were
attempts to deny that those designated as Black are human beings
and therefore have history. There is a lot of work in the volume
trying to answer that question, and to say: “No, we’re human
beings with a history”. Then, of course, the developmental
question, which is also linked to that.
Thinking about it from the continent, it has taken me back to
the 1960s. It takes me back to what was happening in Ghana
when it gained independence in 1957. Kwame Nkrumah was the
head of state, but he was also actively involved in the struggles for
epistemic freedom to the extent that he was a leading figure in the
establishment of the Institute of African Studies at the University of
Ghana. This was a catalyst for change within a university that was
linked to the University of London tradition. There was no African
Studies; it was very peripheral. If you look at his speech at the
formal opening of African Studies, it talks about the African genius:
how do we regain the African genius? And then at the Congress of
the Pan-Africanists he talks about the African renaissance. And
Professor Kenneth Dike from Ibadan, who was also there, talks
about regaining our epistemic sovereignty. So that is an attempt to
say, “but political independence without epistemic freedom would
be empty”. So, it would be important to move in that direction, to
the extent of Nkrumah inviting W.E.B. Du Bois to Ghana to
continue with his Africana encyclopedia. And if Nkrumah was not
removed from power in 1966, we don’t really know what would
have been the outcome of all these efforts. But I found that to be a
very important aspect of this issue of African Studies. Because at
the moment, a lot of the way people are thinking about African
Studies is to think from the US and also to think from England.
What I’m trying to do is ask, how do we think about the
movement for African Studies in Africa itself? And you already
mentioned the issue of associations. 1957—Ghana gains
independence. 1957—US Association of African Studies is
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established. It begins to overwhelmingly push the issue of African
Studies as Area Studies, while Nkrumah is pushing African Studies
as part of the advancement of Pan-Africanism and the African
national revolution. Whether it was a coincidence or not I don’t
know, but it happened in the same year—when Nkrumah is talking
about epistemic autonomy (African genius and African
renaissance), then in the US they are establishing an association to
read Africa from the outside, funded from the US which was
involved in a Cold War. But during that time, it looked like the
continent was very confident of where it wanted to go. If we move
from Ghana to Nigeria (Ibadan), you will also find that there was a
clear argument: “In order for us to move forward, we need to
rewrite African history”. And if we went to Dakar, with Cheikh Anta
Diop, “we need to dispel the Eurocentric conception of African
history”. And if you moved to Dar es Salaam, again, you will find a
very interesting leftist tradition with Walter Rodney, Samir Amin,
Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, and others, of course, also
critiquing the Ibadan School, arguing that the Ibadan School is all
about kings and queens. It’s not about the people. History is not
made by queens and kings. It is made by the people and then the
Dar es Salaam School begins to do what might be called a People’s
History From Below.
In 1967, there was the establishment of the Association of
African Universities. And in that association there is a clear
definition of what an African university is. It is born in Africa, not
transplanted from outside. Then you move up to 1973 with the
establishment of CODESRIA and others. You’ll begin to see that
there is a shift. First, the economies were no longer performing
well enough to finance the universities. Second, on the political
front, you had military dictators and the rise of Idi Amin and the
others. And then third, at a global scale, you have the beginnings
of the Washington Consensus and the Structural Adjustment
Programs. And then the whole African national decolonial project
collapses. And when it collapses, a lot of academics engage in
what we call survivalist politics. Either you adopt a comprador
position in the intellectual sphere in which you just become a
conduit so that you get paid, or you degenerate into sycophancy,
again singing for your supper.
And this takes us to the emergence of what you were talking
about—postcolonial discourses. And again, I always try to be very
careful when I’m talking about this. Because some people want to
dismiss it and say “the posts” were a problem—that
postcolonialism was actually born out of postmodernism and
poststructuralism. But I think we need to nuance this as well, in the
sense that there is a version of postcolonialism which is informed
by postmodernism and poststructuralism, but there is also another
version that is informed by anticolonialism. If you look at the
significant work of scholars like V.Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of
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Africa (1994), The Invention of Africa (1988), you can’t dismiss this
literature and say: “It contributes nothing to African Studies!” Even
Mbembe’s (2001) On the Postcolony has generated so much for us
in African Studies. And then you go to the work of Pal Ahluwalia,
who wrote this book Out of Africa (2010), in which he was saying:
“Let’s not quickly say that the postcolonialism is coming from
Europe”. And his idea is that you will find that thinkers like Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others are Maghrebian thinkers,
rather than French thinkers, if their history and linkages with
Tunisia and Algeria are considered. And if you think that way then
you will understand them differently. So, it’s a complex terrain in
which African Studies finds itself, but you cannot then dismiss the
contribution of post-colonial thought easily.
What I’ve always tried to say is that there is a long decolonial
intellectual movement, with its own sub-movements. So, if you
think in that way, then you spend all your time trying to consider
nuances and contexts of particular moments and intellectual
traditions that emerged. Julian Go’s work (2016) on how
anticolonial thought is social theory helps us also to understand
this better by using the idea that there are waves. He uses
postcolonial for everything—rather than the decolonial—in his
waves perspective. Importantly, he identifies the significance of
1973 as a turning point in postcolonial thought. And he says that
in 1973, first of all there is the assassination of Amılcar Cabral, who
was a leading light in the anticolonial phase of postcolonial
thought. It becomes a turning point. And he also says that in
1973, we have the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war, which was
being watched by Edward Said. And he begins to write that
canonical text, Orientalism, based on the observations he made
during the Arab–Israeli War, whereby Western media was
Orientalizing the Arabs as cowards destined to be defeated by
Israel. And I always add that, if we were thinking from the
continent, 1973 was also the formation of CODESRIA.
So, it’s a very complex terrain, which, as I said, forces you to end
up presenting another lecture. But it also takes us to the other
dimension, which is always falling between the cracks: the
gendering of African Studies and the contribution of feminist
scholarship to African Studies. What changes does it bring? How is it
cutting across? Where did it intervene? I then see the recent
insurgence of decolonization in the 21st century as perhaps a “fourth
wave” within this context in which we return to reopening the basic
epistemological questions, if I can use that argument from Immanuel
Wallerstein. To me the basic epistemological questions include: What
is the relationship between knowledge and identity, for instance?
What is the relationship between knowledge and ideology, for
instance? What is the relationship between knowledge and
geography, for instance? And all these questions, you cannot just
dismiss them as they are doing in France (Mbembe 2011) and say:
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“This is Critical Race Studies which is something from America,
which is an imposition on us”. I think that’s a lazy way of dealing
with it. These are difficult questions which have come back to haunt
us. And we need to confront them directly.
Al-Bulushi
You’ve just mentioned the question of geography. And I think
you’ve already given us a rich sense of how you were thinking
about, and how the volume is thinking about, how we might
radicalize and decolonize our geographic imaginations. So I’m
hoping you can say a little bit more about that, with regard to the
geographic imagination that is at work in this volume. And
relatedly, I wonder what you make of the burgeoning field of Black
Geographies and the interventions by people like Katherine
McKittrick, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Clyde Woods? Might we see
your volume as helping to further globalize some of the themes in
their work, even if more implicitly than explicitly?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Yeah, in fact, when I saw that question, I thought that the
departure link perhaps in decolonial thinking is the work of James
Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (1993). And he was a
geographer, I think. The issue which we are trying to engage is this
notion of “worlding from Europe”. And what Marxism and the
decolonial in combination are trying to do is to pose a counter re-
worlding from the global South. If we think that way then you will
center certain events which might otherwise be peripheral, like the
Haitian Revolution. This becomes a very central example of re-
worlding from the global South. You will find the people who were
enslaved, who were kept in chains but who never lost the drive to
reproduce space on their own terms.
And the second aspect takes us to the concept of the
geographies of opulence versus the geographies of poverty. And
our approach is to study this, not from a conventional geographic
way where it can be naturalized, but by denaturalizing what has
been naturalized by the colonizer’s model. And if you bring Fanon
into this issue of the geographies, his concept of the zone of being
and the zone of non-being has links with urban space and the
Manichaean structure. The town of the Black, and town of the
whites. I supervised a Master’s thesis which was using Fanon to
study the geography of Sandton, which is the richest suburb in
South Africa, and the poor township of Alexandria, which is just
across the M1 highway. And they were using the M1 as really a
dividing line between the two. And it really brought out very
clearly the Manichaean structure. They are just neighbors; on one
side, the houses are very small matchboxes, and on the other side
are gigantic houses. And if the police see you [a resident from
Alexandria] on the other side in Sandton at one o’clock, they will
always ask you where you are going. And you need to say “well
I’m going to George’s house” or something like that, or “I’m
working” if you are Black. And if you have no answer for the
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police, they just take you across the M1 and drop you back in
Alexandria. You belong in that geographic field—don’t come to
this other side.
So, I found this concept of Black Geographies to be very
important, but I also found that it is breaking out of the
disciplinary. Geography was not always known that way. It’s really
an interesting way to bring in race, to bring in gender into issues
of space. And this type of thinking makes people rethink their fields
of study. If it wasn’t for your question, I wasn’t following Black
Geographies that much. So, I really had to go back to check,
because I’m reading Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science (2021)
here. So, I knew a bit about it. But I hadn’t delved deeply into
thinking about Black Geographies yet. It actually links very well
within the whole concept of the coloniality of being. Because if
you don’t understand the coloniality of being, you won’t
understand why some people were subjected to genocide, while
others were subjected to enslavement, while others were subjected
to dispossession. You won’t understand. Because the issue is the
coloniality of being. If we pose it properly, it actually says: “This is
a device”. They were looking for a device: “Who are we going to
colonise? Who are we going to enslave? Who are we going to
dispossess?” And then they brought a criterion that the ontologies
of human beings will be graduated. So there will be some with the
higher ontology who are white, and then there are others who are
lighter, and some who are darker. And then there are others who
are pushed out of the human family altogether. And those are the
ones who were subjected to genocide. Those are the ones who are
pushed into a subhuman category. Those are the ones who were
subjected to slavery. Colonialism was not a random process. You
needed to have clear targets and a structure which allowed you to
say: “No, I will colonise these”. You fight them, then you target
them differently, and you subject them to modern colonial power
differently. So I found that we can link those things in a very
interesting way.
Al-Bulushi
Finally, the book really underscores the importance of Marxism in
the 21st century as being democratic. And this term may mean
different things to different people. Can you expand upon the
specificity of the democratic in your democratic Marxism of the 21st
century and why it is so important for your project?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni
And
when
you
raised
the
question
I
thought
it’s not
only
“democratic Marxism”, but it must also be “democratic
decolonisation”. And I think we were supposed to put it in
quotation marks, the “democratic”. Because it doesn’t mean the
liberal democracy which we’re all familiar with. It must mean
something deeper than that. And with reference to Marxism, we’re
thinking about how to shift from the orthodox version of Marxism,
which was very prescriptive, very rigid, very dogmatic, highly
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curated, if I can use such a word, and perhaps even intolerant of
diversity. This tradition suffered the high price of Stalinism. It was
also state-led. This gave Marxism a bad name. People then decided
to associate the failure of the Soviet Union with the failure of
Marxism. But, to me, Marxism is a science. And it is still relevant
even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Because as a science of
understanding capitalism, there is nothing which rivals it. It
continues to be a very useful science. Then its democratization
concerns rerouting it through people’s struggles, rather than the
way it has been hijacked by elites. I think that’s what we mean by
“democratic”. If we reroute it through people’s concrete struggles,
which are anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, then it regains
its popular aspect, whereby it is not an imposition from above.
And if we think that way, even for decolonization, then we need to
think how to re-route it through the people’s struggles. Rather
than the way it has been hijacked by the petite bourgeoisie and
nationalist elites, which, if we use Fanon’s terminology, are
associated with the “pitfalls of national consciousness”, and all its
corresponding problems. This then means that the Marxism and
decolonization of the 21st century are open to other movements,
like radical ecological movements, feminist movements, and
Indigenous peoples’ movements. In that way, it is really not rigidly
proletarian, so to speak. It adapts to the challenges of the present
times. And if Stalin is used as an example of a spoiler in Marxism,
then we can say there were also many spoilers in decolonization
during the 20th century. People like Mobutu Sese Seko and many
others gave it a bad name. So, the democratic is really to say: we
take into account the distortions and the abuses of these liberatory
theories, as the book is trying to say, but you don’t then throw
away the bathwater together with the baby. As a science of
understanding capitalism, in all its mutations, I think Marxism is
still very useful. And decolonization and decoloniality are very
useful in understanding the afterlives of colonialism. So that’s what
we meant by “democratic”. But we don’t mean the liberal
definition of democracy.
But at the same time, I think, if we take them together, Marxism
and decolonization, it also enables us to speak today about the
sovereignty of the people rather than the sovereignty of the state.
And I think that emerged clearly in the Arab Spring, where people
were really trying to gain their sovereignty against the sovereignty
of the state. But there was a time in the decolonization of the 20th
century, whereby the sovereignty of the state was confused with
the sovereignty of the people. But I think now we’ve learned that
the sovereignty of the state is never the sovereignty of the people.
It also makes us reconsider the horizon of decolonization. In the
20th century, the horizon or the heaven of decolonization was the
attainment of state status, or national status. But I think we’ve
realized that the state is actually a coup within the modern world-
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system, saving capital more than the people. Approaching it that
way enables us to rethink many things which went wrong in the
20th century.
[3] Decolonization and Afro-Feminism—A Conversation
between Sylvia Tamale, Sylvia Bawa, and Grace
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin
Sylvia Bawa
Prof. Tamale, it is good to meet your heroes! In this case, it’s
particularly fantastic for us, Grace and I, that we get to talk to you
about your work, because it has been really inspirational for us. It’s
made things a lot easier for us in Canada, in the diaspora, and just
as African feminists in general, in terms of talking about some very
difficult things. Our people say that the palm wine tapper has a
view that those who are on the ground are not privy to. Therefore,
we are grateful that we get to tap into your wisdom today in terms
of discussing these important questions of the future with you.
Both Grace and I read this—your book—mostly as something that
gives us a roadmap for the future. Therefore, I think the
conversations that we’ve been having and those that we are going
to be having today with you are primarily about the future.
Indeed, you say that in the book that you are writing this with the
future in mind.
Sylvia Tamale
Thank you for the kind words. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Bawa
Thank you so much for making the time. We are going to start
with the brief anecdote you gave about the American academic
who jokingly called this book project about decolonization,
“African science fiction”. We both had a good chuckle when we
read that. You clearly do not believe this and boldly declared in the
book that African decolonization is not science fiction, but that it is
indeed realizable. Could you tell us how you came to this
conclusion, especially given the circumstances we find ourselves in
today, with multiple crises? As you even said, it looks like we
always take one step forward and sometimes multiple steps back
on the continent. Could you tell us where your hope comes from
and how you came to this conclusion?
Tamale
Well, that American academic was speaking from a place of
ignorance and prejudice, in my view, like most people around the
world, including Africans, by the way; as Africans we should know
better that we are included in this ignorance and prejudice about
who we are and what our continent is. Like most people around
the world, the construction and ideas that this academic has about
Africa are probably informed by the consistent diet of primitivist
myths that are fed to the world by their very efficient propagandist
machinery. That is, the imperialists’ propagandist machinery.
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Coloniality uses broad brush strokes to freely paint Africa as an
impoverished backwater, this hot land of disease, war, corruption,
and poverty. Very few people have the capacity to identify all the
mechanisms in domination, production, knowledge acquisition,
and knowledge dissemination. The firm grip that the “new
empire”—the G7 countries, the big multinational corporations,
China, multilateral institutions like the World Bank and IMF—has
on the management of information systems and knowledge is
unprecedented and almost uncheckable.
Despite the debilitating legacies of slavery and colonialism that
continue to hold our continent and perpetuate global geopolitical
and economic imbalances, I think Africa will inevitably rise like
those many heads of the hydra whereby you strike one and
another one that is twice as strong emerges. The anticolonial
movement is catching on more in the Global South, including in
Africa, particularly among the youth. This is where I find hope. The
colonial blinders are beginning to slip off our eyes, and we are
waking up to reclaim our dignity and our position in the world.
I find that these ripples are being felt around the continent. You
can see it in small pockets such as the Fallist Movements, the
emergence of Pan-Africanist institutes around the continent,
decolonial research networks, and popular street and civic
resistance in countries like Sudan and Burkina Faso. The world is
definitely changing, and Africa is no exception. Young people are
now including decolonial and anti-oppression literature on their
book club reading lists, bell hooks, Fanon, Freire, Rodney, and so
on. Things are changing. You asked, how did I come to this
conclusion? It’s because of these things that I can witness. I know
it won’t happen in my lifetime, but things are beginning to
change. People are beginning to understand what decolonizing
the mind is about and what it means for our decolonization
project.
Bawa
I think decolonizing the mind is probably the last hurdle we have.
You have outlined that well in your book. I’ll pass it over to Grace
now.
Grace Adeniyi-
Ogunyankin
Thank you, Professor. In listening to you, and obviously from
reading your book, we can definitely tell that you do have this
sense of hope. I like what you pointed out about how people are
waking up to reclaim our dignity and our position in the world. In
relation to that, I would say in terms of a segue, you write this
book with the objective of reaching and opening up dialogue and
spaces of possibilities with young Africans, grappling with Afro-
feminism and decolonization. You called for us to “re-story”
ourselves. Recent Afro-futuristic projects, such as art, literature, and
cinema, project a viable, decolonial and futuristic Africa. We think
these projects are, like your book, about power and resistance and
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are similar to your previous response. So, power to reclaim and
proclaim, and resistance to the coloniality of being in various ways.
Do you think these kinds of projects open up spaces for hope and
dreams about the future we deserve?
Tamale
Definitely. I think African futurism and the interdisciplinary genre
and movement hold a lot of promise for the imaginaries of our
people. I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt who said that the future
belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Last
year, I was lucky enough to be part of the editorial team that
published an issue of Feminist Africa on “Gender and Sexuality in
African Futurism”.3 That’s when I really got to understand the
power of imagination. Imagination grounded in African
indigeneity, histories, cultures, technologies, and experiences.
Nelson Mandela also told us that dreams are the roads that lead
to our goals. Actually, many Africans believe that dreams are voices
of our ancestors. There’s an African proverb, I think, that says
something like dreams are related to the past, but connected to
the future. African futurism can help us reimagine gender roles and
relations. Reimagine and map out the possibilities of a continent
that utilizes the abundance of its resources. And by resources, I
think about human, physical, technological, and so forth. So,
building an awesome continent from which its people don’t flee,
but return to in droves, including you two [laughs]. Now, never
underestimate the power of the mind. What African futurism does
is harness that power into action. It empowers us to craft the
future that we want.
Adeniyi-
Ogunyankin
Thank you, Professor. I love that. Never underestimate the power
of the mind. I like what you said about dreams as well. Yes, we will
return to the continent, Sylvia, right?
Bawa
Definitely. We return in various ways. Sometimes, I like to believe
that although we are physically living in the West, we are present
in Africa through various ways. When you talk about return ... and
I’m not going to go on this tangent, but I always talk about time
travel that I think Africans have been doing, if we think about it, in
the kinds of spiritual journeys that our people undertake. But like I
said, I will not go off on that tangent, not today.
Prof. Tamale, as African women who did grad school in North
America, we often did not see ourselves reflected in our readings,
especially concerning feminist projects. It’s always exciting for us
when we read scholarship that centers on African feminisms,
Afrofeminism. In particular, you make a very compelling argument
that African liberation is only possible through a decolonial Pan-
African feminist lens with Ubuntu at its core. Could you please
elaborate more on the important relationship between Ubuntu and
Afrofeminism and the ways it offers a roadmap toward
decolonization?
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Tamale
Sadly, even here on the continent, the education system promotes
Eurocentric orthodoxies and hierarchies. It’s not just there. This is
how our minds and imaginations are captured by coloniality. Of
course, there are other institutions that complement education like
religion, the media, the law, and so on. But for me, it is simple
logic that whatever it is that we are doing now is not working. I’ve
been part of the African feminist movement for over three decades,
and I just feel like a hamster on a wheel. All the work and sacrifices
that we poured into this movement have very little to show for it.
The situation for the ordinary people on the ground, particularly
women, has not shifted much. This should signal to all of us that
there is something fundamentally wrong with the frameworks and
paradigms that we are using.
Being under the grip of coloniality, we keep returning to its
logic; we keep returning to its processes to solve our problems. We
are fooled into thinking that it’s where it will lead us to modernity
and development. So, our ways of thinking, our ways of being and
doing, have been captured by Eurocentric worldviews, which
actually denigrate African traditional worldviews. The Ubuntu
worldview reflects Africans’ understanding of the essence of
humanity. It understands very well that you cannot live well if
others do not.
Solidarity and interconnectedness are key to the health of the
community. It’s about belonging to a community and being
protected by it, as well as being one with nature. Most non-
Western countries share this worldview. Ubuntu values unity in
diversity and it holds a lot of promise for human dignity and
compassion. I am because we are. How would such a philosophy
lead us to decolonization? When you look at its core values—
solidarity, interconnectedness, humaneness, respect, dignity,
egalitarianism—and then you juxtapose them with the neoliberal
philosophy that valorizes individualism, competition, the market,
privatization, commodifying humans and social relations, this alone
tells you that it can act as our moral compass toward
decolonization.
There’s a lot of promise in Ubuntu as a source of inspiration for our
future in Africa. In whatever we plan, we should aim at inclusivity,
not exclusivity. We must promote sharing and the interest of the
collective, as well as individuals within the collective. In addition to
all that, the fact that Ubuntu views humanity as part and parcel of
physical nature means that it celebrates the values that connect us to
nature. This is very different from the neocolonial capitalist view of
nature, which is very exploitative and extractivist. In my view,
Ubuntu practices can stem the destructive processes of global
warming and decolonize the climate crisis and all its vulnerabilities.
Bawa
You
have
rehashed
the
importance
of
Ubuntu
in
centering
liberatory projects and practices. I’m really glad you touched on
the fact that, because the situation on the ground hasn’t shifted
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much for the ordinary African woman, actually Black women in the
world, we do need to shift our focus and our framework. I think
when you talk about Ubuntu in this way, you also point to a way
in which we can actually do more ethical interplanetary politics.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin How can we overcome the reality on the ground that doesn’t
always point us toward Afro-communitarianism, particularly given
the assault of Ubuntu by capitalism?
Tamale
It is indeed a monumental challenge that we face as Africans to
reorient and to reconfigure our ways of thinking and being. After
over a century of imbibing coloniality, it is extremely difficult for us
to adopt alternative ways of perceiving, of understanding, and of
interpreting the world. We have to be very proactive and very
intentional in adopting processes and policies that will reorient our
thinking and reconnect us to our indigenous values of Ubuntu. I’m
talking about a complete overhaul of all colonial structures,
institutions, and policies that will transform our continent for the
better.
Take the education system, where students continue to
uncritically consume Eurocentric material that only helps to infringe
the continent deeper into global capitalist hierarchical structures,
capitalist spaces and even ideologies. I’ve always wondered why,
when we are learning, the alphabet tells us A is for apple when we
don’t have apples in the tropics. They don’t grow here. It becomes
very difficult for a child to visualize and understand something that
they do not know. I think the first time I saw an apple was in the
1980s. Africa and its people can’t create the futures that we seek if
we continue with business as usual. And it has to be a continental,
Pan-African effort.
Bawa
I got excited about the example of the apple. Because I still
remember so many things that I read about and only seeing here
for the first time, and realizing that, if only somebody could have
made that local connection for me when I was still growing up to
understand what was happening. One of the things that we like
about the book is that the decolonial project is not just about
deconstruction, but also about reconstruction. In other words, you
just don’t provide a critique, as it were, but you provide a roadmap
for achieving decolonization. Two of the things you highlight as
being critical to reconstruction are the restoration of our spirituality
and Afro-ecofeminism. Could you please elaborate a bit more on
these two pillars and tell us why they are integral to reconstructing
Africa?
Tamale
I think Africa needs a decolonial break from the tether that ties its
economies to the global capitalist market. Now, reconstructing
Africa would entail excavating the values that were buried by the
empire. It requires radical structural changes such as adopting an
alternative economic system and making a series of
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transformational processes to replace global development,
discourses of development and modernization. Some center
socialism, where it is not the market that drives it, but the
optimum utilization and distribution of resources. This can only be
done after we restore our indigenous spirituality or cosmological
interconnectedness between humans, animals, and nature. Details
of how such an economy would operate would have to be worked
out, but it’s inevitable.
Bawa
That connection with nature is really crucial in thinking about the
future.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin Part of what you also emphasized in your book is community
justice. Particularly in Chapter Five, you mentioned that community
justice challenges the colonially imposed systems of justice of
policing. While reading this, it reminded us a little of the prison
abolition movement, particularly Mariame Kaba’s book We Do This
’Til We Free Us (2021) where she emphasizes “Building community-
based interventions that address harms without relying on police”
and “Thinking through the end of the police and imagining
alternatives”. Would you say that abolition is a possible decolonial
project in the African context?
Tamale
Of course, it is. The prison system as we know it today reflects the
Eurocentric liberal moral system and not the values and moral
system of, say, Ubuntu. The former glorifies individual moralism
and autonomy, while the latter, that is Ubuntu, emphasizes
collective moral responsibility of individuals. Can we honestly say
that the current prison system in our countries is working? It is
designed to control and regulate and does not solve the problem
of reoffending and rehabilitation or reintegrating the offending
people in society. Statistics clearly show that the prison system is a
disaster. You must know, Sylvia, the Sankofa symbol from West
Africa.
Bawa
Yes, I do.
Tamale
I love it. I have adopted it as my logo now that I’ve retired and it’s
on my personal letterhead. It depicts a bird moving forward with
its head turned backward. It’s associated with the Ashanti proverb
that says, it is not wrong to go back for that which you have
forgotten. The Sankofa theory reminds us that we have so many
gems in our indigenous traditions that we have lost and need to
retrieve. Most African traditional ecosystems aimed at restorative
justice and based themselves on participatory communal
reconciliation. To provide examples of such community-based
conflict resolution mechanisms: the Gacaca courts in Rwanda, for
example, the Mato Oput among the Acholi in East Africa; both
these models are based on the philosophy of reconciliation and
reparation, not the incarceration and retribution prison regimes. I
think it is possible to return to these processes that, instead of
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dehumanizing and breaking offenders, work to make them
accountable while preserving their integrity and dignity.
Bawa
Thank you for talking about restorative justice. I’m grateful that
you are very hopeful about things. But then there are all these
other entanglements that we have to deal with before then.
Sometimes I think about them, in the meantime, before we arrive.
As Grace asks in her work (Adeniyi-Ogunyankin 2019), have we
arrived or what’s the process of arrival at that place? The question
that we have next relates to the last one that you just answered
about abolition. Because one of the contributions that we found
useful that has also heavily influenced our work and feminisms is
the argument that culture and rights are not antagonistic to each
other as we’ve been made to believe for a very long time. And in
fact, as you’ve said, using Sankofa, to go back to look at the
nuggets in our histories that we could reclaim and use very
critically toward our liberation.
You argue in Chapter Five that “Our decolonial efforts must
therefore shift the focus to the practice of living customary law and
its amenability to change”. How do you imagine this project of
restoring the dignity of our people will unfold in this time of
multiple crises? How do we, as you ask in the book, “navigate
Eurocentric ‘modernity’ without losing our ‘Africanness’”, especially
with regard to the rights discourse and the ways in which they’re
pitched against each other? Do you think third-generation human
rights, that is, the right to development and the right to solidarity,
which is still in drafting state, provide some hope? Can you
elaborate, especially, on this legal pluralism that you talk about in
the book?
Tamale
Well, I think in the previous responses, I’ve touched on the issue of
how I imagine the project of restoring the dignity of Africans will
unfold. But on the issue of this so-called third-generation human
rights development and solidarity, as you must have read in
Chapter Six of the book, I don’t have much faith in the human
rights system, mainly because of its discourses and practices that
are informed by the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism—that life-
giving spirit of capitalism. There are too many complexities and
contradictions between the current system of human rights and
decolonization. I don’t think that adjusting and tinkering with the
current human rights framework will work. I think for me, it’s a
clear case of using a master’s tools to dismantle a master’s house.
On the face of it, these beautifully crafted rights to development
and international solidarity, seem to rhyme with decolonization
under Ubuntu philosophy. But on closer scrutiny, you will find that
the development model that the international human rights
framework has in mind is the neoliberal universalistic essentialist
one, steeped in modernity and conceptualized in the capitalist
global political economy. The right to solidarity, as you know,
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already exists in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
It was Africa’s attempt to incorporate the Ubuntu philosophy of
interconnectedness, reciprocity, and compassion into the human
rights framework at the regional level. However, it’s always faced
steep resistance from the West, mainly because its spirit does not
sit comfortably with neoliberal capitalist values of individualism,
competition, and sovereignty.
The other problem is that, as legal constructs, these two rights
are incapable of protecting vulnerable people. Why do I say this?
Because the neoliberal Western paradigm that informs the treaty-
based human rights framework simply cannot stand up to the
abuses of neoliberal economic policies and practices. For example,
neoliberal states that privatized basic services such as water,
healthcare, transport, education, electricity, sanitation, and so on,
result in serious tensions with human rights. I think Africa needs to
be wary of international human rights law.
In the book, I talk about the contextual cultural approach to
rights, espoused by some African feminists, as one that offers a
more nuanced approach and depth of understanding to people’s
lived reality. One that is rooted in communitarianism and the ethos
of Ubuntu. In short, I think we are talking here about an
Africanized notion of human rights. But I really don’t think that this
so-called third-generation ... even just prioritizing rights in that
way, first-generation, second-generation, and third-generation, is
very problematic.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin Thank you, Professor, for that insight. It seems like all your
responses so far keep pushing us back to the bird that you like—to
fly forward, but with our heads looking back. We need to, without
romanticizing, go back to how things used to be, be more
nuanced about things, be rooted in communitarianism. The one
thing that I find challenging is the overhauling of the system
because, where do we start? But let’s say that we do successfully
follow all the blueprints, that you highlighted in the book, and that
you’ve also discussed today, for liberation and decolonization—
what do you think Africa will be like, say, 100 years from now?
Tamale
It will be like Wakanda. No, but seriously, I think futuristic cinema,
such as Wakanda and The Woman King, more recently, may have
their flaws, but they offer a glimpse of the futuristic African space. I
particularly like them for their decolonial frame, their critical
agendas, and their feminist representations of women as people of
power, people of wisdom, strength. I like that glimpse into the
future of Africa. So, yeah, Wakanda.
Adeniyi-Ogunyankin Wakanda Forever! I really like what you mentioned in terms of the
feminist representations of women as people of power, wisdom,
and strength. You’re right. Both of those films have their own
flaws. But I do remember when I was watching The Woman King ...
I don’t always get emotional when I watch movies, but there was
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just this little bit of emotion that came out, even though I think it
was a really difficult subject and topic. But these women, it was
just so nice to see them; especially when you’re here in the West,
for us, there are all these problematic representations of African
women, but it was just so wonderful to see that power, wisdom,
and strength.
And like you argue in your book, we need to have an
Afrofeminist approach to decolonization and to thinking through
the future of Africa. If we can do that with this wisdom and
strength that comes along with feminism, maybe we definitely
might achieve that future that you just mentioned, that you’ve
imagined and that we’ve seen others imagine in various forms of
work, whether it’s literature, art, etc., etc. Sylvia, do you have
something to add?
Bawa
One of the things that excites us is this idea of intrusion; this taking
over of space, as it were, by artists on the continent and in the
diaspora. All these Afro-futuristic works that we see in art, in design,
in film. Particularly in film, I remember going to watch Black Panther.
It was a whole project, especially in the diaspora, perhaps not as
much on the continent. Because again, on the continent, I don’t
think that we necessarily see the assault on our humanity in the
same way. People in the diaspora really responded well to this very
positive and futuristic depiction of Africa in Black Panther.
We’re talking about all these things that are coming out; Afro-
futuristic work, novels that we’ve started to read in our graduate
courses. We tend to assign these things to our students so that
people can make certain other connections about Africa. You discuss
the challenges of shaking off this coloniality of being and trying to
do decolonial work. In trying to reclaim our humanity, we spend
way too much time fighting and fighting these things.
Subsequently, we sometimes actually forget to dream about the
future. To think about what it would look like in another 100 years if
we weren’t so focused on the master’s house. But we should focus
on dreaming and looking ahead, something you do exceptionally
well in your book.
[4] “Defiant Scholarship: Learning from African
Intellectuals”—A Reflection by Patricia Daley
Antipode’s engagement with three African scholars (Franklin Obeng-Odoom,
Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and Sylvia Tamale) aims to challenge the limited pres-
ence of African scholarship in debates on global societal transformation, especially
in new wave 21st century interventions on decolonization and decoloniality within
the discipline of geography. Except for the work of Achille Mbembe, which has
also
been
repeatedly
featured
in
the
pages
of
Antipode
(see
e.g.
Davies
et al. 2017; Death 2022; Hutta 2022; Ortega 2020), African critical thought is
rarely engaged with in and beyond radical geography (for exceptions, see Al-
African Decolonial Theory
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Bulushi 2023; deGrassi 2023), despite its long history of defiant scholarship4 chal-
lenging imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism, and Eurocentric knowledge sys-
tems; its extensive research on the “premodern” and precapitalist world; and its
emancipatory visions for human futures. In this commentary, I would like to
explore some of the explanations for the continued marginalization of African
intellectual contributions by discussing how coloniality affects the production of
scholarship in and on Africa and its external reception, despite moves to decolo-
nize knowledge by African and African diaspora scholars.
Elsewhere, I have argued, with colleagues, that geography’s “epistemic igno-
rance” (Grosfoguel 2021) can be attributed to the marginalization of Area Studies
within the Western academy and of Africa in geography (Daley and Kamata 2017),
and colonial logics that persist in the discipline in Africa (Daley and Murrey 2022).
This peripheralization is deeply rooted in white supremacist colonial epistemol-
ogies that devalue and subjugate African knowledge systems, and promote Afri-
can exceptionalism. These practices of dismissal are not just common among
Western liberal scholars but are equally evident in the Eurocentricity and latent
racism that inform the worldview of many on the Western left. This commentary
builds on Obeng-Odoom’s (2019) substantive discussion on the marginalization
of African intellectual thought. His critique of the “Western Left Consensus”
(Obeng-Odoom 2021b) follows a tradition of African and African diaspora intel-
lectuals’ refusal to adopt Eurocentric left perspectives uncritically (e.g. as espoused
by Hubert Harrison and Walter Rodney).
Africa’s role in the geopolitics of knowledge production is maintained by the
long-held prejudice that African scholarship is characterized by empiricism—only
addressing realities peculiar to the continent. Lessons from research conducted in
Africa, even those using Western-derived theories, are considered to lack universal
applicability. White supremacy within the modern academy maintains the intellec-
tual hegemony that Western Africanist scholars have over the production of
knowledge about Africa. Such academic propriety is unparalleled anywhere else in
the
Global
South
(Mafeje
1996).
Nigerian
political
scientist
Claude
Ake (1982:124) described the “mainstream Western social science in Africa ... as
imperialism”: “it is a crucial tool in controlling Third World perceptions of their
world”.
African intellectuals, including those in the diaspora, have been producing defi-
ant scholarship on decolonization since the imposition of colonial rule, and espe-
cially since the beginning of print journalism in the late 19th century (see Daley
and Murrey 2022; Grosfoguel 2021; Younis 2022). In Africa, what Mignolo (2009)
terms “epistemic disobedience” was partly constrained by the influence of Chris-
tian missionary education, which introduced European ontologies and epistemol-
ogies as superior, while denigrating African thought to the realm of the primitive
and uncivilized, thus denying the possibility of dynamism and critical insights
(Mafeje 1992). Some of the mission-educated elites and their descendants have
remained Francophiles, Anglophiles, and Lusophiles, adopting Western modernity
as the endpoint of human progress, and embracing former colonizers as benevo-
lent aid donors. It is this coloniality that explains why, as Sylvia Tamale notes,
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children in postcolonial Africa start their learning with “A is for apple”. This dis-
juncture between the language of modern education and that of the children’s
social worlds limits the depth of experience that can be brought into their class-
room and later academic scholarship. Ng~ug~ı wa Thiong’o, who wrote his sixth
novel Matigari (first published 1986) in his native language G~ık~uy~u, states that
colonialism’s “most important area of domination was the mental universe of the
colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and
their relationship to the world” (wa Thiong’o 1986:16).
Ake (1982) refers to the dominance of “European teleologism” in Western
social science that positions actually existing European society as the “ideal soci-
ety”. Consequently, the discourse of European modernity as a counter to African
primitivity limited the capacity of the “educated” to value indigenous experiences
and to learn from their histories and cultures. Looking back or internally was stig-
matized as romantic introspection and relegated to the realm of ethnic national-
ism or, much worse, “tribalism”. This has had implications for the transferal of
revolutionary critique into decolonial praxis. Despite the extensive literature
denouncing colonial formulations and their saliency in popular consciousness
(e.g. Mafeje 1971), ethnicity still provides effective political tools for violence and
oppression.
Critical African scholars have challenged the Western academy’s dehumanizing
views of their peoples and sought to produce alternative scholarship that drew
from their lived experiences and those of their ancestors (Archie Mafeje, Joseph
Ki-Zerbo, Ben Magubane, V.Y. Mudimbe, IfiAmadiume, Oyeronkẹ́ Oyewumı). For
example, in 1963, Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop introduced the matriar-
chal principle as the foundation of African societies and the basis for a pan-African
cultural unity, thereby showing how patriarchy and matriarchy differ between
and within the Global North and the South (Diop 1989).
While Western universities experienced a form of creeping neoliberalization, in
many African universities its impact was immediate and blunt (Mamdani 2007;
Wuyts and Shivji 2008). The 1970s debt crisis precipitated a trend in state disin-
vestment in African universities. The decades that followed saw a concerted attack
on radical scholarship. Debates about disciplinary relevance focused on whether
they were advancing the neoliberal policy agenda. Governments sought to silence
critics, ban protests, and shut down forms of activism that addressed injustices.
Student activists were expelled, harassed, and progressive newspapers banned
(Omanga and Buigutt 2017). With the liberalization of the university sector,
coupled with increasing authoritarian practices, African academics were faced
with three choices: succumbing to neoliberal orthodoxy and donor-approved and
sponsored policy research; marginalization and impoverishment; or joining in the
brain drain and fleeing the continent. Many took multiple jobs on the new univer-
sity campuses springing up and found nonacademic side hustles in consultancy or
business. With that university-based liberatory research declined, and critical think-
ing was left largely to research centers funded by progressive institutions from the
Global North (the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in
Africa, CODESRIA, founded by Egyptian economist Samir Amin, being the main
African Decolonial Theory
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example). Protecting academic freedom and gender/feminist studies became pri-
orities for radical scholars, as well as transforming Africa’s inherited universities to
generate scholarship reflective of the continent’s diagnosis of its own needs
(Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017; Tamale and Oloka-Onyango 1997). Mafeje (1992) advo-
cated “non-disciplinarity” as the way forward to Africanize political and intellec-
tual discourse. In the 21st century, the more sustained African challenge to the
Western academy in Africa has emanated from South Africa, where academic
institutions still have some resources and independence from state and donor
institutions, amidst the glaring failure of the modernity project to foster racial
inclusivity and the universities to transcend their apartheid education legacies.
Decolonial Marxism
The experience of imperialism in the periphery and the global structural inequal-
ities that it enforced meant that Marxism provided a suitable explanatory frame-
work in Africa. Anticolonial scholarship drew on orthodox Marxism to understand
how the productive forces in Africa could “develop”, and neo-Marxists explained
the limits of capitalist accumulation as a development strategy. Such was the rev-
olutionary power of Marxism that anticolonial leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba,
Amılcar Cabral, Samora Machel, and Thomas Sankara, who espoused socialism,
were assassinated by an alliance of conservative African and imperial forces.
Unlike in the Western academy where Marxism and political economy analytical
frameworks lost traction due to the emergence of poststructuralist critiques, in
Africa, their demise can be attributed to the epistemic violence of neoliberalism.
To impose structural adjustment in the 1980s, Marxism had to be discredited by
governments and academic institutions eager to gain acceptance from the World
Bank and International Monetary Fund (Wuyts and Shivji 2008). The collapse of
the Soviet Union was used to reinforce the view that there was no alternative to
capitalism. Therefore, the intellectual space for sustained Marxist thought in the
African academy deteriorated in almost all countries, except for South Africa and
to some extent Zimbabwe. Here, post-apartheid, proponents of Black conscious-
ness, the progressive wing of the African National Congress, and the Pan-African
Congress drew on Marxism to articulate more just post-racial futures.
In the face of neocolonial realities, a political economy approach remains cen-
tral to radical scholarship in Africa. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Morgan Ndlovu,
in their edited volume Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: Living Theo-
ries and True Ideas (2021), point out the “planetary vision of liberation” that
Marxism presented, and its common ground with decoloniality. Linking epistemic
liberation to a reconfiguration of the relationship that African societies have with
capital opens the imagination to the possibilities of radical Afrocentric futures.
Modern endemic poverty in Africa might have multiple dimensions but it is
racialized, structural, and has deep colonial roots. Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s
(2021b) critique of Western liberals as well as the “Western Left Consensus” con-
tinues the tradition of Black and African decolonization scholars who refuse to be
straight-jacketed by Marxist epistemology. In Marxism and Decolonization, Ndlovu-
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Gatsheni and Ndlovu (2021:2) describe Black and African Marxists as intellectuals
whose “lives of struggle and ideological orientations reflect how they deployed,
critiqued, and stretched Marxism practically in the context of concrete forcefields
and battlefields of national liberation histories and anti-colonial struggles”. For
them, Marxism and decolonization “exist as living theories of life”.
Class formation in Africa is still of interest to foreign investors looking for mar-
kets in 21st century Africa. Structural adjustment virtually wiped out the middle
class in the 1980s and 1990s; however, two decades later, Deloitte, the consul-
tancy firm, produced a report proclaiming a rising middle class with Westernized
consumptive patterns as a positive consequence of population growth. They
write, “[n]umbers move product ... we will focus only on the opportunity on the
premise that profit is underpinned by volume” (Deloitte 2013:1). Deloitte’s proc-
lamation led to a flurry of interest in the spending power of the new middle clas-
ses—only for radical critique to expose its fallacy (Melber 2016). This new middle
class is not to be confused with Africa’s established elites whose excessive con-
sumption patterns and global mobility make them part of the new cosmopolitan
Africans or Afropolitans.
Obeng-Odoom’s focus on the significance of land in the debates about plane-
tary futures echoes Tuck and Yang’s (2012) thesis on the fundamentals of land to
the decolonial project in North America. In many parts of settler-colonial Africa,
the land question remains unresolved. For the continent as a whole 21st century
land grabbing by corporations, wealthy individuals, private equity companies,
conservation non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and external states, mir-
rors the 19th century scramble for Africa in its dehumanized practices of disposses-
sion,
forced
displacement,
and
impoverishment.
Land
restitution
is
often
dismissed by both liberals and the Western left as a retrogressive and affective
step that is out of line with modern systems of land use and productivity. Obeng-
Odoom foregrounds the importance of land as he makes a case for learning from
Africa’s experience of the commons as the basis of a new global ecological politi-
cal economy.
Global Connections
In his interview, Ndlovu-Gatsheni demonstrates the solidarities that African intel-
lectuals continue to sustain with radical scholars worldwide, particularly in the
Global South. Black and African radical intellectual thought has always maintained
a global perspective to understanding and overcoming capitalist oppression (You-
nis 2022). Pan-Africanism and Third Worldism are geographic imaginaries that
challenge the bounded spatialities within which Africans are confined in Western
intellectual thought. Thinking beyond the colonial-capitalist social groupings of
“tribes”, “races”, and “nation-states” allows for the imagining of social formations
with the potential for true liberation.
As with African Marxists, African feminists recognized the importance of form-
ing transnational alliances within the continent and with the diaspora as part of
the Pan-African movement. Sylvia Tamale represents the cohort of African
African Decolonial Theory
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feminists in the academy who have challenged all forms of oppression, militarism,
patriarchy, and homophobia. From the early 1980s, African feminists theorizing
gender were engaging in decolonial praxis, questioning the European experience
of gender as the global norm. In her seminal text, Male Daughters Female Hus-
bands, IfiAmadiume (1987) drew on Cheikh Anta Diop’s understanding of patri-
archy and matriarchy in the Global South to explore gender identities in Eastern
Nigeria. In the same way European Marxists dismissed Diop’s matriarchal principle
as Afrocentric mythmaking, Western feminists rejected Amadiume’s findings as
romanticized
accounts
of
precolonial
relations
emanating
from
a
Nigerian
diaspora-based scholar. Africans seeking to understand their societies outside of
European frameworks suffer, and may fear, accusations of romanticizing the past,
or of being preoccupied with ethnicity. But decolonial methods require accessing
those ways of knowing that were labeled evil, backward, barbaric, and bush, and
were stigmatized and forbidden within colonial education systems. As Tamale
explains, these traditional ways are important, especially in warzones where liberal
peace negotiations have failed to stop direct violence and people yearn for peace-
ful co-existence.
In contemporary Africa, elite capture of public goods, external domination, and
patriarchal power is crudely enacted and opposition brutally squashed. As Tamale
states in her interview, for women, progress has been slow. The reasons are com-
plex and include the de-politicization that has accompanied gender mainstream-
ing in development policy, and the channeling of women’s voices into donor-
funded NGOs that became vulnerable to state regulation. NGOization allowed
African First Ladies to establish nonprofits to counter movements from below.
Mainstreaming resulted in the adoption of limits to women’s empowerment. For
example, the 30% quota as the level of women’s political participation has
enabled authoritarian regimes to plant compliant women into positions of power
and
declare
progress
to
Western
donors.
In
Decolonization
and
Afro-
Feminism (2020), Tamale’s optimism for liberated futures is grounded in the com-
ing together of pan-Africanism and decolonial African feminism, which makes
sense, since pan-Africanism transcended the bounded loyalties and imaginations
of nation-states, and decoloniality forces a rethink of gender relations that is non-
European in its ontology. But class needs to be part of the equation, as not
enough attention has been paid to differences between African women and the
disempowering effects of class politics on poor and rural women in African femi-
nist studies.
Concluding Remarks
The voices of African intellectuals should be more prominent in radical scholarship
globally, not as interlocutors of African knowledge systems to the Global North,
but as purveyors of insights on how to live and struggle in spaces subjected to
ongoing practices of accumulation by dispossession. Spaces in which social and
medical experiments are tested and refined, matriarchy has been superseded by
modern patriarchy, and progress is dictated by external institutions bent on
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reproducing colonial relations of domination. Finally, there can be no successful
addressing of the socioecological crises of capitalism without the centering of race
and extractivism in the Global South. Decoloniality has been at the heart of Afri-
can peoples’ liberatory projects and anticipated futures. 21st century rearticula-
tions of decoloniality allow for consideration of African relational ways of knowing
and living on the planet.
Even when academia and the populace were under neoliberal onslaught, public
intellectuals remained defiant. Writers, visual artists, and musicians have popular-
ized epistemic disobedience. For decades, the emancipatory lyrics of reggae musi-
cians Bob Marley and Peter Tosh resonated across and between continents. The
Nigerian artist Fela Anıkulapo Kuti translated democracy as “democrazy” in his
Afrobeat song Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense to reflect the lived realities of
electoral politics, and Edson “Azagaia” da Luz attacked the corrupt Mozambican
elites in his rap song C~aes de Raca (“Pedigree Dogs”). These critiques draw on tra-
ditions of communal storytelling in palavers, insakas, and barazas—the social
worlds of decolonial epistemologies.
[5] Decolonial Crossroads—A Reflection by Wangui
Kimari
In the “High Night of Nameless Paths”
Coloniality is everywhere. In all of our bodies, in the multiple times we live, in the
many spaces we try and cultivate lives of dignity.
In my own family, in my own body and the collective bodies that I live within,
it rears its ugly head through many diverse articulations. My grandmother died in
the early 1960s on the operating table of a White South African doctor who, it is
said, was conducting experimental tubal ligations on African women in Kenya.
One great-grandfather, on my mother’s side, never made it back from fighting in
the First World War in Burma—if he ever made it there at all, we will never know.
But I also have an ancestor, one of society’s rascals as our last name implies, who
used to intentionally urinate on the bonfires of authoritarian chiefs, and the heri-
tage of this disobedience is registered in this name formalized in the identity doc-
uments that tie us to a neocolonial state. Through many corporealized sojourns
across generations, it is because of these kinsfolk trajectories that we have pain
and privilege; it is through these embodied experiences that we have relational
insights into the ways in which my family and others are shaped by what, using
Walter Rodney’s (1972:205) phrase for colonialism, is a “one armed bandit”.
I mention these experiences here in a bid not to forget the multiple ways
through which colonialism moulds us: from the privileges that allow me to write
this, to the death of my grandmother that is not often vocalized; it is offered,
when it is actually shared, through the pain and resignation of an older aunt who
can remember the difficulties in reconciling her mother’s death with the memory
of her leaving the house one morning full of vitality. These reflections on our own
experiences are necessary to keep “fidelity to humanity” (Depelchin 2017);
African Decolonial Theory
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against, in the words of Tamale (2020:2), “the imperial machinery [that] never
eases its stranglehold over the world”.
Thus, while, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni mentions in his earlier interview within this
series, decolonial reflections are increasingly demanded and popularized in institu-
tions of higher learning across the globe, and unfortunately sometimes prescrip-
tive and instrumental to the violent whims of academic careers, we must not
forget the many crushing ways colonialism is lived in bodies. And, importantly,
we who are called upon from time to time, due to our privilege, to elaborate on
what this can mean, must not evade the need to put our bodies, too, at the cen-
ter of the decolonial question.
The bodies that have been dealt the blows that are the forceful (and often fatal)
reactions to calls for decolonization—the bodies that are not protected by our
books, our essays, our online discussions, and who continue to live within the
worst enduring outcomes of coloniality; they require that we belong to the collec-
tive body that tries to make its way through, borrowing from the poem Rumo
Novo by Agostinho Neto (1950), the “high night of nameless paths”.5
In these routes without names, where we take uncertain steps to construct a new
“rhythm” while looking for the “[hu]man we lost”, nothing is easy. There are no
road maps. Step after step is crossroads. Yet, in the bloodied border fields of Melilla,
in the teargassed streets of Dakar, in the actions of those on the frontline in Sudan
trying to make sure that their loved ones stay safe, there are bodies that have known
an “inheritance of lashes”, but somehow, still, “remain believers” (Neto 1950).
Certainly, “decoloniality’s point of departure is existential realities of suffering,
oppression,
repression,
domination,
and
exclusion”,
writes
Ndlovu-
Gatsheni (2015:492). But, incredibly, many of those who have been claimed by
and continue to strain against the enduring sharp teeth of what Ferdinand (2022)
terms an “unsurpassable pathological irresponsibility”; those who are continuously
made as “Negroes” and reside at the very bottom of “hold politics”, they show
us that while treacherous, this road to remake power, knowledge, and being is
not, as Tamale charges in her conversation with Adeniyi-Ogunyankin and Bawa,
“science fiction”.
“Defiant scholarship” (Daley and Murrey 2022) can support these steps, and is,
in fact, inspired by it. However, it, too, as Ouma (2022:184) argues, has its “dan-
gers, limits and contradictions”. A paradox that I highlight here (and from which
I am not exempt)—albeit with important exceptions documented by Daley and
Murrey (2022), Ouma (2022), and Al-Bulushi (2023)—is this failure to recognize
our various colonial heritages, implications, vulnerabilities, and entitlements as
scholars who are working to think through decolonial pathways.
By committing to join and see in our body this collective body, of the strug-
gling masses, whose “inheritance is lashes” but “still believes”, we can take up
epistemic journeys that steer us away from the enduring colonial research that
entrenches what Depelchin (2005) terms the “syndromes of abolition and discov-
ery”. And, instead, implicate ourselves in what Thomas (2019:3), reflecting on the
afterlives of the plantation in Jamaica, refers to as “Witnessing 2.0”: an “embod-
ied
practice”
toward
recognizing
and
responding
to
“the
psychic
and
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sociopolitical dynamics in which we are complicit, and therefore to generate the
ability to be response-able, to ourselves and others”.
At the decolonial crossroads that our people face and navigate every day, this is
the least we can do.
Thinking Nairobi, Detroit, Brazil
Shimoni. On the southeastern coast of Kenya, there is the village of Shimoni
named after a set of caves that were used as a “holding pen” for enslaved Afri-
cans before they were violently transported to Zanzibar and elsewhere. This unfor-
tunate human cargo was captured from near and far, and then forced to travel
between five and seven kilometers underground—a dark subterranean railway—
from the village of Fikirini, so as to get to this terrestrial enclosure before they
were transported to its maritime version.
In Shimoni’s absence from our local school curricula, the public invisibility of
this former slave site, I am reminded of the inadequacy of African states, scholar-
ship, and institutions to really grapple with the need to heal and historicize with
the African diaspora.
Instead, like the treatment of Shimoni, which remains, for the most part, con-
fined to a subterranean presence, particularly at the state level, we recognize our
diasporic kin usually through unsustained political or commercial gestures. Ulti-
mately, our national investments to reflect and honor the memory of those who
were “the ebony wood of Africa” stolen to “sustain colonial inhabitation[s]” (Fer-
dinand 2022:59) are mediocre, if there are any at all.
In her poem Eulogy, Grace Nichols (1983), the Guyanese-British poet, asks the
“souls caught in the Middle Passage”:
How can I eulogise your names.
What dance of mourning can I make?
Despite the enduring horrors, the many “afterlives of slavery” (Hartman 2008)
in Shimoni and across many parts of the continent, there is no substantive eulogy
that is being cocreated in the region by those who have power. Instead, the
memory of the millions of lives felled and stolen is pushed further down, made
more materially and metaphysically underground. As but one example of this, the
National Museum of Slavery in Luanda, Angola—the country that is estimated to
have exported the bulk of enslaved Africans to the Americas—was, in 2019 when
I lived briefly in the city, perpetually closed or under renovation. When I was
finally able to enter one day by asking a caretaker to open it, the displays in the
three small rooms were explained by what could not have been more than a few
generic sentences; a curation that for me expressed a “sympathy-without-
connection” (Ferdinand 2022) that is gravely disturbing for a country that had
lost so much from a centuries-long sinister harvesting of its kin. But, at the same
time, don’t we need more than a museum in Shimoni, Luanda, and beyond?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015:493) states that “within the broader Global South con-
text, the decoloniality movement has produced such South–South formations as
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Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa that is geared at shifting economic
power from the West”. Nevertheless, despite their purchase with states and schol-
arship
on
the
continent,
these
bids
for
“de-imperialization”
and
“de-
westernization”, as we can see from many events, are not a decolonial “eulogy”.
Rather, in the persistent anti-Blackness seen within the articulations of these for-
mations, and particularly in the countries that comprise these blocs, we fall far
short of ensuring healing and justice. The coloniality of economic power and
knowledge may be challenged, but not the coloniality of being.
This would require, as conveyed by Fanon (1967:186–187), an interrogation of
the universals—South–South, for example—and a restoration from the “drown-
ing” they imply. As he shared:
I have barely opened eyes that had been blindfolded, and someone already wants to
drown me in the universal? What about the others? Those who “have no voice”,
those who “have no spokesman”...I need to lose myself in my negritude, to see the
fires, the segregations, the repressions, the rapes, the discriminations, the boycotts.
We need to put our fingers on every sore that mottles the black uniform.
Surely, we do need to touch wounds, and we need eulogies (and peoples
museums) that come to terms with “the segregations, the repressions, the rapes,
the discriminations, the boycotts”. These are definitely not the empty statements
emerging from presidential stages, such as those offered by, for example, Uhuru
Kenyatta who denounces imperialism while his family remains the biggest land-
owner in Kenya. Or the “flag” pan-Africanisms of Presidents Museveni, Ramaphosa
and, more recently, Ruto, while they massacre struggling people on the streets. It is
certainly not the performative solidarity of institutions such as the African Union.
In contrast, Shilliam (2015:3) advocates for a peopled “infrastructure of anti-
colonial connectivity”, one embedded in a “decolonial science of ‘deep relation’”,
which cultivates “knowledge ‘sideways’” away from the cartographic violence of
imperial maps and visions. Such a science allows us to read, think, feel, act, histor-
icize Nairobi, Detroit, Brazil together, without looking at their geographic loca-
tions; it prompts us to bring the Black Pacific and Soweto into one African story,
and simultaneously eulogize Comoros and the Virgin Islands. This is a practice
that, in the words of Kamau Brathwaite (1992), would be attuned to a “note that
has been held for 500 years”, and which bears witness to the reality that, as
Tamale (2020:11) argues, “when the empire strikes the African ‘other’ it
completely disregards the[ir] nuanced diversities”.
It would allow us to see the similarities between the colonial inhabitations that
deny Black residents in Flint, Michigan water and those that let Kenyans die of
thirst. We would be able, then, to grasp why there are similarities in the life
expectancies of Congo and Haiti.
And, too, amidst the violence and suffering, we will recognize, as Ferdi-
nand (2022) asserts, that “the Negro does not die”.
These kinds of recognitions, many would argue, are rare in the contemporary
educational institutions on the continent, where scholarship is less independent,
and is molded by the caprices of governments, foreign consultancies, and the
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neoliberal condition. On this, Daley (2023; Daley and Murrey 2022) speaks of the
intimate and public challenges faced by “defiant scholarship”, ultimately allowing
for a situation where, in the words of Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015:489), “[w]e so far
don’t have African universities. We have universities in Africa”.
To build this science that “exists underneath the wounds of coloniality” (Shil-
liam 2015:13), that centers the “underneath” of Shimoni and Luanda—the “psy-
chic life of [their] geology” (Yusoff 2021:666), would require, as Daley (2023)
writes, “accessing those ways of knowing that were labelled evil, backward, bar-
baric, and bush, and were stigmatised and forbidden within colonial education
systems”. It would necessitate that we travel through the subterranean cave sys-
tems we have created, individually and collectively, to connect Nairobi, Detroit,
Brazil, so that we can hear that decolonial “note that has lasted 500 years”.
A Road Called Mau Mau
In 1892, a few miles from the center of what would become Nairobi, the infa-
mous Captain Lugard, of divide and rule fame, observed that “at one time ... four
rhino were standing in different directions within view of the plain, and one
which I severely wounded, in making off, stumbled over a couple of magnificent
lions” (quoted in Nairobi City Council 1950:8). These kinds of narratives, of a land
teeming with game, an open terra nullius, contributed to the settler-colonial
enterprise that would seek to make, what would later be known as Kenya, a
“White man’s country” (Jackson 2011).
Over a century later, in the railway museum adjacent to Nairobi station (site of
the initial encampment from which emerged colonial Nairobi), one can still buy a
poster that advertises:
THE HIGHLANDS OF
BRITISH EAST AFRICA
AS A
WINTER HOME FOR ARISTOCRATS
HAS BECOME A FASHION
SPORTSMEN in search of BIG GAME make it a hobby
STUDENTS of NATURAL HISTORY revel in this FIELD of
NATURE’S own making
This information is followed by a graphic (see Figure 1) of the Kenya–Uganda rail-
way line, with animals literally spewing from the sides of this machine. Here, there
is a hippo and a crocodile half-submerged in a pool beside the train; a lion
appearing to consider climbing up a palm tree; snakes slithering, in long coils,
out of the railway windows; an African child launching themselves off the roof of
the locomotive; and what seems to be a misplaced bear leaning on the railway
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fence looking at an unperturbed White man. There is also a sign, by the lion and
the palm tree, declaring: “EAST AFRICAN PROTECTORATE NOTICE: THE big
GAME ARE TO BE CAREFULLY PRESERVED BY ORDER”. And other human and
nonhuman figures—elephant, bush and bird, for instance—are necessary features
of this colonial mise en scene. Towering over them all, planted firmly within the
raised section of the train station roof and clock, is the Union Jack.
Figure 1:
Poster from Nairobi Railway Museum (photo by Wangui Kimari, June 2023)
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When I first came across this poster during a visit to the railway museum in
June 2023, I thought it was a relic of history: an object that had survived nature’s
way of interacting with archives—dust, termites, tears, greasy fingers, and the
incendiary guilty purge of departing colonists—to pierce through our moment as
a mnemonic device. However, I was soon to learn that this imperial poster had
been intentionally reprinted for sale by Kenya Railways since, at least, 2005, and
even featured the affirming stamp of the Kenya Tourism Board.
There was no irony in the faces of those who sold it, and the freshly printed
copy I bought could be evidence for not only the popularity of this poster, but
also the purchase of this national frame; the enduring need to make and repre-
sent Kenya as a “winter home for aristocrats”.
Critical conservation practitioners like Mordecai Ogada have consistently dem-
onstrated the enduring seduction, with grave material effects, of this account; the
positioning of Kenya as a land of endless savannah where Theodore Roosevelt
and his entourage shot (as could you) 5,000 animals—over 160 species—and that
Prince William seeks to “protect” with his continuous attacks on African “overpop-
ulation” patterns (see Al Jazeera 2021). Almost 20 years after Binyavanga Wainai-
na’s (2005) satirical essay How to Write About Africa, an enduring “Out of Africa”
tale, replete with the language he flags, is still being reproduced by the state, giv-
ing insights into the logics and aspirations of a country that has been “indepen-
dent” for over 60 years.
My research work over the last decade has sought to understand how Nairobi’s
marginalized dwellers continue to navigate the very violent articulations of this
coloniality;
their
everyday
struggles
against
the
materialization
of
post-
independence chronicles that maintain Africa as what Obeng-Odoom, in his con-
versation with Bauriedl and Carstensen-Egwuom, calls an “open pasture”. Those
discourses that have somber bearing in the city and its lives in many intimate and
public ways include “World Class City” policies and practices, whose impress,
really, evidence imperial rationales.
Close to 70 years ago, a publication to mark the jubilee anniversary celebrations
of Nairobi, 1900–1950 (Nairobi City Council 1950), noted the following:
The people of Nairobi are engaged in building here more than a city of stone, steel
and wood, they are building a new city of human beings, working out a new way of
life in this old continent, and a new means of bringing harmony between men and
women of many kinds, drawn from many corners of the earth, with vastly different
standards and ideas. The inspiration and experience are drawn from the glory of
Britain.
Without a doubt, the majority of Nairobi’s residents will tell you that Britain is still
legible in the landscape. While Africans can now live in the city, it is, still, none-
theless visible in the design of buildings past and present, and in the bylaws and
zoning inheritances that shape access to basic services and, even, life chances.
Efforts to keep it so were more explicit in the years preceding independence,
where the declarations of “harmony between men and women of many kinds”
seen above and reproduced in the 1948 Master Plan for a Colonial Capital, were
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as believable as the notions about the “glory of Britain”. This was done via a mul-
tifaceted process—for example, legislation, force, church, school—that many
scholars have examined, and which led to an incremental coloniality of the mind,
alienation of the self from the body and nature, a “cultural bomb” (wa Thiong’o
1986).
But, like the native child who was drawn jumping off the Kenya–Uganda rail-
way in our earlier poster, marginalized Nairobians, then as now, “had vastly differ-
ent standards and ideas” for the city. The archive is full of administrative laments
about Africans driving hand carts down the “wrong side” of the road, brewing
alcohol without a permit, organizing illegal ngomas (parties), creating proscribed
“squatter situations” seen as “scattered in a nondescript fashion along meander-
ing footpaths” (Njoh 2009:307), and much more “diseased, detribalized, and
degenerate” behaviors (White 1990:121). Despite the fines, the removals, the
raids, systematized dehydration, the lack of basic services, and confinement to
minimal space, the Black urban majority, whose descendants still live on only 6%
of Nairobi’s land, held on and continue to stake claims to a city that was not
meant for them; it was intended, instead, to be a metropolitan base where White
hunters could shoot rhinos that would then, in their escape, trip over lions.
Their struggles in a colonial city, and across decades, are many; for adequate
housing, to prevent evictions, for quality schools and healthcare, and to put a
stop to state-sanctioned police bullets. These demands for life also include vernac-
ular tactics to assert that visible from the margins, and principally from the shack,
is the “durability” (Stoler 2016) of empire, despite the denials from a more privi-
leged society, and state discourses claiming otherwise.
Two inspiring examples of people’s efforts that recognize and respond to this
widespread coloniality are Mau Mau Road in Mathare, and the Dedan Kimathi
monument in the center of the town. The former is in one of the oldest settle-
ments in Nairobi, which has long been considered a site of “outcasts”—criminals,
“prostitutes”, illegal alcohol brewers and vendors; ultimately ungovernables who
don’t belong in the vision the city has for itself. While the statue of Dedan
Kimathi is the earliest of two Mau Mau monuments in Nairobi, and the only one,
to my knowledge, paid for by the Kenyan government. Interestingly, this statue is
erected a few meters away from the Stanley, the oldest hotel in the city, where
pictures of “big game hunters” and their victims still proudly hang on walls.
Mathare is “one of the most difficult urban environments in East Africa” (Muun-
gano Support Trust et al. 2011:4). But, as Gathanga Ndung’u (2022) writes, not-
withstanding
this
enduring legacy,
it remains
“an
urban
bastion
of anti-
oppression struggle”. For example, Anderson (2005) describes how, during Oper-
ation Anvil—a militarized colonial incursion into the settlement in 1954—women
would spit on their captors’ faces in defiance when they were detained in mass
raids. Furthermore, local oral narratives convey the importance of Mathare to the
Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), also known as the Mau Mau, as a court,
an urban nerve center, and a location where they had widespread support.
It is surely this history that led to the local designation of the only path that
cuts through the settlement as Mau Mau Road. The Kenya Land and Freedom
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Army was only unbanned as an organization in 2003, following the ostensive end
of a dictatorial postcolonial situation lasting from 1963 to 2002. In such a con-
text, it remains remarkable that a settlement always under threat—where four
generations have somehow fought off total state erasure—would memorialize the
Mau Mau in this way. Undoubtedly, this toponym, not yet witnessed anywhere
else in the country, is a statement about the persistence of the colonial, and, cer-
tainly, a poor people’s register that, despite their everyday encounters with its
pervasive and suffocating violence, they recognize it for what it is, and will enact
multiple movements—tangible and symbolic—to signpost its treacherous reach,
while working to halt its progress.
Across the other side of town, in the central business district, Dedan Kimathi
Waciuri’s statue (see Figure 2) stands tall. In military regalia and dreadlocks, this
figure clutches both a rifle and a dagger; his anticolonial war implements. A leg-
endary Mau Mau field marshal, Kimathi was executed in 1957, and where he was
buried has not been formally disclosed by the British. Yet, here is his bronze body.
And it is the powerful agitations of landless young people, their persistent vocali-
zations of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army and, especially, its betrayal by post-
colonial governments, which provoked the recognition of Kimathi in this way
in 2007.
Elsewhere in Kenya, museums have archaic exhibitions that uphold essentialized
views of culture and politics. But, surprisingly, in a street in the central business
Figure 2:
Picture of the Dedan Kimathi statue in downtown Nairobi (photo by Wangui
Kimari, September 2023)
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district, there is a statue of a Mau Mau leader that, in its function as a symbol of
resistance, draws in and from the presence of those the city seeks to exclude.
Undoubtedly, in a Nairobi that has long prized skyscrapers over public housing,
colonial memory over local histories, this monument, as Mau Mau Road, pierces
through the coloniality that still reproduces beings, knowledges, and power in
Figure 3:
Picture of Mau Mau Road sign in Mathare, Nairobi (photo by Wangui Kimari,
September 2023)
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the country. Both the organic impetus that prompted these two commemora-
tions of Kenya’s freedom fighters, as well as these artifacts themselves, produce
and sustain struggles, however small, toward what Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015:492)
calls a “democratization of knowledge, de-hegemonization of knowledge, de-
westernization of knowledge, and de-Europeanization of knowledge”.
For me, as I seek to argue in my work, these memorials index the reality that—
in spite of the colonial poster reproduced by the Kenya Tourism Board and the
railway museum, despite the imperial city logics that perpetuate “Out of Africa”
tales, against the formal production of the relationship between Nairobi, Detroit
and Brazil as inconsequential and subterranean, the crossroads and contradic-
tions, the lashes—the people will fight, across decades, for even just one road to
be named Mau Mau (see Figure 3).
About the Interviewers
Sybille Bauriedl is Professor of Integrative Geography at the Europa-Universit€at
Flensburg in Germany. She teaches, researches, and publishes on manifold
research topics in political ecology, feminist geography, and postcolonial studies
such as urban sustainable development, local energy transition, the platform
economy, global climate justice, and colonial infrastructure in European port cit-
ies, and she is involved in the Right to the City movement.
Inken Carstensen-Egwuom works as a postdoc at the Europa-Universit€at Flens-
burg. Her most recent work engages with approaches to reparatory justice in the
context of enslavement and colonialism, and with colonial legacies in European
harbor cities and related (sugar) plantation economies. She has also researched
and published on intersectionality and transnational migration. She teaches
courses on global citizenship education, among other things, and is an active
member of the “Flensburg Postkolonial” Network.
Yousuf Al-Bulushi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global and
International Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on
global capitalism, political geography, social movements, and the Black radical
tradition in Africa and the African diaspora. His book, Ruptures in the Afterlife of
the Apartheid City (2024), takes up the interventions by Abahlali baseMjondolo, a
movement of shack dwellers in Durban, South Africa, as a window into broader
questions of precarity, Black radicalism, development, transformation, and auton-
omy. He is a member of the editorial collective for Antipode.
Sylvia Bawa is an Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto,
and currently the Director of the Resource Centre for Public Sociology. She is a
global sociologist with expertise in human rights, development, and postcolonial
feminisms. Her research examines discourses of empowerment, decolonization,
human rights, culture, and critical development. Her work on human rights
explores structural inequalities embedded in orthodox conceptions of empower-
ment, rights, and development. She currently leads and co-leads various interna-
tional collaborative research projects with funding from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), among others. Prof. Bawa is
African Decolonial Theory
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also an elected board member of the Congress of the Federation of Humanities
and Social Sciences in Canada.
Grace Adeniyi-Ogunyankin is the Canada Research Chair in Youth and African
Urban Futures and an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her current research examines the impact
of contemporary urban transformations on youth identity, labour practices, psy-
chosocial well-being, and future orientation in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria. She
also has a research focus on popular culture that explores the issues of subjectivity
and belonging and the use of Afrofuturism and Afropolitan Imagineering in geo-
graphic projects that address the politics of difference.
Acknowledgements
We thank Andy Kent for his excellent support on curating the series and helping to get the
contributions in shape for this “Antipode longread”. We also thank the other members of
the Editorial Collective, past and present, for their encouragement to pursue this project.
Stefan Ouma’s work is driven by research conducted within the Africa Multiple Cluster of
Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – [EXC 2052/1–
390713894]. Finally, many thanks to Wangui Kimari for the Kiswahili abstract and key-
words. Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Data Availability Statement
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed dur-
ing the current study.
Endnotes
1 For a discussion of rent and Georgist political economy, see Obeng-Odoom (2015,
2021c), Haila (2016), and Harrison (2021).
2 https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/index.html (last accessed 12 November
2025).
3 https://feministafrica.net/feminist-africa-volume-2-issue-2-2021-gender-and-sexuality-in-
african-futurism/ (last accessed 12 November 2025).
4 Daley and Murrey (2022:160) define defiant scholarship as scholarship that “cultivates
those ways of thinking and those practices of thinking that are external to, in opposition
to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge”.
5 Agostinho Neto was a poet, and also Angola’s first president.
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