Complicit: Portuguese soldiers board a ship to Angola in 1961, the year the country’s war of independence started. It ended in 1975 after 500 years of colonial rule. But a civil war, funded by Cold War countries, then ensued, ravaging the country’s economy. (AFP)
We live in strange times. When I say this, I have in mind a view characteristic of the millenarian woke brigade. On the surface, it is a view that looks fairly progressive. Not much reflection is needed, however, to demonstrate that it’s regressive — if not racist.
Everyone knows that society, the established order, has a hierarchical structure. Society consists of power relations, of differences between the haves and the have-nots, between men and women, between white and brown and black people, between, in other words, those who are part of the majority by virtue of their wealth, race, gender or religion and those who are part of the minority because they have no wealth, or they’re on the “wrong” side of the gender or race divide, or owing to their religious affiliation.
Such power relations and differences that exist between people are value laden. The general idea, that is the prejudice, is that it’s better to be a member of the majority than of the minority, it’s better to be part of the norm than to be on the margin and be marginalised.
The woke opinion is that those who are on the lower rungs of the social ladder should affirm their particular identity and those who are on the top should refrain altogether from asserting theirs. If the identity of those in power is oppressive to the point of marginalising the identity of those on the bottom end of the social ladder, then it goes without saying that those in power should refrain from asserting their identity. At the same time, so the woke opinion goes, the underprivileged should affirm their particular identity. What could be more progressive than this? Right?
Well, there are numerous problems with it. I will highlight two.
The first is the assumption that, for example, when a white man refuses to affirm his whiteness, he at the same time no longer occupies a position of power and authority, or in other words, that power and authority come from affirming your particular identity. This is sheer nonsense and is utterly misleading.
Why is whiteness dominant? Obviously not because the white man affirms his particular identity. His authority and power come from doing exactly the opposite. It is by disowning your particularity (your whiteness, your blackness, your religious beliefs, your gender etc) that you come to occupy the position of power and authority, because the position of power and authority is the position of the universal. Whiteness is the dominant or majoritarian standpoint precisely because it disowns its racial particularity and sets itself up as universal.
Now, are the woke brigade in academia in South Africa (typically consisting of white men and women) doing anything else when they urge their black colleagues and students to affirm their particular African attributes or identity? This is the second problem I want to highlight. What they do is exactly what every racial system has done in the past. First the white woke folk refuse to affirm their whiteness. In this way, they unwittingly adopt the anonymity of the universal and speak to their colleagues and students with authority, that is, with the authority of the universal that speaks for the good of everyone.
At the same time – and this is infinitely worse – they tell their colleagues and students who they are and what they must do. They tell them that they are black and that, as black people, they ought to talk about being black. The French philosopher Louis Althusser has a word to describe this ideological process where the other person is included in the established order by being told who he is. Althusser calls it “interpellation” and it is always achieved by an authority figure, that is, by someone who speaks in the voice of the universal.
This naïve and mystifying (reifying) approach to undermine racial prejudice and other forms of inequality has thoroughly infected academia in South Africa and no doubt abroad as well. In particular, I have in mind what currently goes under the name of “the decolonisation of knowledge” and “epistemic injustice”. Let me single out two issues here.
The first relates to the use of the word “colonial” you hear spoken in the corridors of departments in the humanities or you see written in recent publications, in journals and in research projects and grants for higher studies. Literally, the word “colonial” refers to a set of economic and political practices and policies whose aim is the exploitation of the natural resources of a country and of the labour force of the indigenous population by a foreign power or nation-state – policies and practices that can include permanent or temporary forms of settlement by the occupying power.
This form of political organisation does not exist today. There is no country on earth currently under colonial rule. The last country to be decolonised, the last one to affirm its political independence, was Namibia in 1990. Most countries that were under colonial rule were decolonised in the period between the end of World War II in 1945 and 1975. It is not without reason that both the word “postcolonial” and postcolonial theory appeared in 1978 at Columbia University in the US, thanks to the studies of Edward Said.
Which brings me to my point. This is that the current use of the word “colonial” in academia is metaphorical and that it is profoundly naive, and dangerous at the same time, to attempt to identify contemporary forms of oppression with the use of a metaphor, and with a dated metaphor at that. At worst, it perpetuates current forms of oppression. At best, it says nothing whatsoever about them.
This brings me to my final point, which concerns the woke idea that the underprivileged ought to assert their particular identity, the claim, in other words, that the postcolonised South African subject ought to return to its roots or revive its traditions and folklore and customs. I cannot understand this injunction in any other way save as an attempt, on the part of woke white liberals, to unwittingly resist the homogenising tendencies of globalisation.
I say “unwittingly” because I’m fairly certain they’re not aware that they’re responding to globalisation, that is, to the way global capital, at one and the same time, tends to create uniformities at a planetary level to the point that every major city looks the same, every consumer is the same, has the same needs and wants, and is satisfied in the same way by the same commodities, and the counter-tendency that exists in the affirmation of local identities and particularisms.
One final point. It is certainly true that one of the profound effects of colonisation is to have uprooted the colonised subject, to such an extent, in fact, that colonisation has irrevocably cut the link to a pre-colonised past. Nothing of it remains save ruins. It’s exactly like the ruins of the ancient Greeks and Romans we visit today as tourists.
Now, generally speaking, this gives the postcolonised subject an unprecedented opportunity. On the one hand, it gives it the opportunity to create an identity and future that is without resemblance to anything from the past. Here, there is no past that offers up models to imitate or emulate. Here, there is an opportunity for absolute invention. On the other, and at the same time, it gives the subject the chance to adhere to a strict pragmatism where we look in the here and now, and not in the past, for the solutions to the problems and the injustices that assail us in the present.
Professor Rafael Winkler teaches philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. He writes in his personal capacity.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.