DECOLONISING the Human

DECOLONISING the human DECOLONISING the human Reflections from Africa on difference and oppression Edited by MELISSA STEYN AND WILLIAM MPOFU Published in South Africa by: Wits University Press 1 Jan Smuts Avenue Johannesburg 2001 www.witspress.co.za Compilation © Editors 2021 Chapters © Individual contributors 2021 Published edition © Wits University Press 2021 First published 2021 http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22021036512 978-1-77614-651-2 (Paperback) 978-1-77614-655-0 (Hardback) 978-1-77614-652-9 (Web PDF) 978-1-77614-653-6 (EPUB) 978-1-77614-678-9 (Open Access PDF) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978. This book is freely available through the OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons License (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Project manager: Elaine Williams Copyeditor: Karen Press Proofreader: Inga Norenius Indexer: Rita Sephton Cover design: Hybrid Creative Typeset in 10 point Garamond Pro CONTENTS ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS vii THE TROUBLE WITH THE HUMAN 1 William Mpofu and Melissa Steyn 1 THE INVENTION OF BLACKNESS ON A WORLD SCALE 2 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Patricia Pinky Ndlovu 25 TO WHAT EXTENT ARE WE ALL HUMANS? OF CULTURE, 3 POLITICS, LAW AND LGBT RIGHTS IN NIGERIA Olayinka Akanle, Gbenga S. Adejare and Jojolola Fasuyi 46 HUMANNESS AND ABLEISM: CONSTRUCTION AND 4 DECONSTRUCTION OF DISABILITY Sibonokuhle Ndlovu 65 DOING THE OLD HUMAN 5 Cary Burnett 86 BEING A MINEWORKER IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: 6 A DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE Robert Maseko 109 MEDITATIONS ON THE DEHUMANISATION OF THE SLAVE 7 Tendayi Sithole 130 ‘LANGUAGE AS BEING’ IN THE POLITICS OF NGU˜GI˜ WA 8 THIONG’O Brian Sibanda 143 THE UNDERSIDE OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE: AN EPISTEMIC 9 BREAK FROM WESTERN SCIENCE Nokuthula Hlabangane 164 THE FICTION OF THE JURISTIC PERSON: REASSESSING 10 PERSONHOOD IN RELATION TO PEOPLE C.D. Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara 186 THE CULTURAL VILLAGE AND ITS IDEA OF THE ‘HUMAN’ 11 Morgan Ndlovu 209 A FRAGMENTED HUMANITY AND MONOLOGUES: TOWARDS 12 A DIVERSAL HUMANISM Siphamandla Zondi 224 CONTRIBUTORS 243 INDEX 247 ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS Aids acquired immune deficiency syndrome AMCU Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union DEIC Dutch East India Company EEIC English East India Company EIC East India Company HIV human immunodeficiency virus IDP Integrated Development Plan LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender LGBTIQ+ lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or questioning NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration NUM National Union of Mineworkers RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme TB tuberculosis UN United Nations US United States USA United States of America 1 THE TROUBLE WITH THE HUMAN WILLIAM MPOFU AND MELISSA STEYN ll communities create notions of their place within the array of sentient and non-sentient beings with whom they share their worlds. The princi- Apal trouble with the grand construction of the human of Euro-modernity, however, is that it was founded on unhappy circumstances and for tragic purposes. Man, as a performative idea, created inequalities and hierarchies usable for the exclusion and oppression of the other. The status of the human was self-attributed to dominant people powerful enough to name themselves and define others. That which was categorised as non-human became things, reduced to resources, usable and disposable by the unapologetic humans. The attribute human, in other words, is not self-evident or assured. It can be wielded; given and taken away. The threat of its withdrawal from, or perma- nent denial to, weaker peoples in peripheralised spaces continues to define life within a climate of fear that makes being human a fragile condition and an uncertain reality (Soyinka 2004). These dispensable others and objects of power are found everywhere as black people, women, the poor and homeless, refugees and foreigners, gay, lesbian, queer and trans people, the old and vul- nerable, people living with disabilities and other others. The prevailing constructs of ‘man’ and ‘human’ began with the durable handiwork of (male) European humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- turies who needed convenient and powerful tools for classifying themselves and categorising others (Mignolo 2015, 158). The male Westerner, as the Christian and paradigmatic human, entered into relationships on grossly une- qual terms. Conquerors in the shape of patriarchs, empire builders, merchants Decolonising the Human and missionaries employed different approaches in disciplining the bodies of the conquered through violence, arresting the appetites and desires of the natives with goods and services, and dominating the minds and hearts of the subjects with gospels and hymns. Conquest was designed to make the conquered docile and obedient, subject to exploitation and ownership. Mahmood Mamdani (2013) elucidates this political principle as ‘define and rule’, where power is able to name and by so doing dominate its subjects as inadequate people with deficits and lacks, whose oppression may therefore not be so morally wrong. Power has distributive privilege and enjoys the resources of classifying and categorising the objects and subjects around itself. Human differences, in that scheme of constructions, classifications and hierarchisations, are not expressions of human diversity, but excuses for the oppression and exploitation of the other. Power, without naming itself, is able to name, define, judge and place others as weaker. It enjoys the privilege of presenting itself in salvationist, protective, developmentalist, democratic and humanitarian terms that hide the domination it exercises and the often deadly consequences of this for those who have lost their equality and full membership of the human category. The paradox of Western modernity, therefore, is that its grand rhetoric which announces freedom, happiness, progress and development has marched hand in hand with the logic of coloniality. The coloniality of Western modernity has participated in the appropriation of natural resources, exploitation of labour, legal control of ‘undesirables’, imposition of the interests and world view inherent in a capitalist economy, and denial of the full humanity of the disempowered and the impoverished (Mignolo 2015, 164). The condition of the oppressed is not a condition resulting from natural causes. Gendered violence and inequality are not the inevitable consequence of biology. Peripheralised countries are not undeveloped, their people are not powerless and poor; the countries have been underdeveloped, the people impoverished and also disempowered through displacement and dispossession. The enslavement and colonisation of Africans was based on their removal from the category of the human. Those who were to be enslaved and colonised first had to lose their human equality and be characterised as inferior and incomplete beings. The work of decoloniality in Africa, therefore, becomes a search for completeness through the recovery, restoration and recognition of the equal belonging of black people to the world. Dani Wadada Nabudere 2 The Trouble with the Human (2011, 1) correctly notes that ‘Afrikology’ as a philosophy is the search for human wholeness in a world that has been defined by loss of equality and denial of the full humanity of the conquered and oppressed. The fight for liberation as a form of social justice is also a struggle for the recovery of denied and lost humanity. Our book is positioned within this decolonial struggle. THE PHILOSOPHICAL DILEMMA OF THE HUMAN IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH ‘Where and when exactly did the rain begin to beat us?’ is a philosophical question that is posed by Chinua Achebe (1989, 43) in his meditation on the African political and social condition. Achebe is one of the African thinkers who have demanded a return to historical sources and political genealogies and provenances in search of the time and place in which Africans lost their equality within the human family. Achebe ponders the ‘hopes and impedi- ments’ that have defined attempts at understanding between the North and the South, and amongst people positioned differently within intersecting power relations. Achebe’s demand to know what happened to the common humanity of human beings reminds us of the unstable link between the human and the humane. How some humans use power to monopolise being human and expel others from the human family remains a haunting philosophical dilemma of inhumanity that has a long historical trajectory in the South and in the North. Socrates, a questioning mind, left the fourth century BCE with the haunting question of why everyone on earth seemed to believe in humanity ‘but not in the existence of humans’ (Plato 2010, 24). He was perplexed by the fact that everywhere, from religious pulpits to political podiums, beauti- ful things were being said about the love of humanity, and yet the majority of human beings were being oppressed everywhere. Multitudes were being thingified right in the centre of Athens, the city state celebrated as the cradle of reason and democracy, much as coloniality was born and bred right at the centre of what has been celebrated as liberty and progress. In the same vein as Achebe (1989) pondering the beginnings of the dehumanisation of Africans, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1755] 2004, 1) in the eighteenth century agonised over the ‘origins of inequality’ among human beings, to the extent that he wished humans could have remained at the level of animals that show respect for life and mercy for the weak among 3 Decolonising the Human themselves. Yearning for the ways of the animal kingdom was Rousseau’s way of condemning the evil done by humans to other humans. To compare the human to the animal, and to favour the animal, becomes an expression of the deepest philosophical indictment of the evil perpetrated by humans.

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