(John McCann/M&G)
Freedom and education cannot be disentangled from each other. The freedom in question goes beyond the ability to participate in electoral politics — which 41% of eligible voters did on 29 May 2024. Freedom, in the Pan-African tradition, is guided by principles of solidarity, ethical praxis, local circuits of value, responsibility, non-human centeredness and love. Education, too, is not limited to the instruction that one receives in formal institutions of learning. Education comprises all the political, economic, cultural and social forces that develop in us particular values, habits, ways of being and forms of consciousness. We receive it in our homes, on the street, in churches, through music, on televisions, in our interactions with others and what we read.
In essence, Pan-African pedagogy requires that as a first step we take the time to assess with honesty the ways in which our sense of self has been distorted. We throw racial slurs at one another based on nationalities and nation states that were determined by colonisers to facilitate their access to mineral and other resources at the Berlin Conference (1884-1885). Three women are killed every day, 84 people murdered and 12 200 women raped within a period of three months, according to the South African Police Service (SAPS) 2023 report. A food survey completed by the Human Sciences Resource Council shows that 17.5% of South African households are severely food insecure, meaning that “they often had to cut back on meal size, or the number of meals consumed, and also experienced running out of food, going to bed hungry, or going a whole day and night without eating”.
We are hungry, violated and dying and yet this is not the whole narrative of our existence. To accept our fate as being precariously rooted in the politics of putative scarcity — limited resources that we must fight and or annihilate one another to access — is to relinquish the power that we have to demand a different status quo, one which radically reconfigures politics, sociality and economics.
What is the relationship between what we teach and the type of people we are trying to develop for our families, kinship networks and communities? To answer this question, we need to be embedded in our communities in ways that acknowledge that value cannot be determined from the outside and imposed. We are told that to have graduates from our communities is something to be valued and celebrated and will have knock-on effects that result in the transformation of societies from lack to prosperity. This is meant to be a neutral fact. But there are many problems with this type of thinking. Some graduates go on to become leaders of business and politics that continue patterns of abuse and exploitation that will mark the predominant experience of people in those communities. We also have alarmingly high numbers of unemployed graduates, who on the one hand have failed to be integrated into the project of liberal individualisation, where one has complete autonomy of one’s success and on the other hand, lack the imagination of other ways in which they can contribute towards the upliftment, maintenance, protection and defence of their communities. The capitalist myth that one’s value as a person is merely as human capital, as a worker/labourer is dangerous.
But Pan-African liberatory pedagogy acknowledges that within communities we need healers, guides, mothers, fathers, sages, herbalists, tutelaries and organisers. Our performance of these roles is crucial in the type of consciousness we nurture in our children and communities. That consciousness goes on to sculpt a particular type of awareness of the power we have in our capacity to coordinate our efforts to reclaim communities of care that reject externally imposed narratives of what they should be and desire and rather begin to insist on a symbiosis of relationality with one another and our surroundings.
We need to pour into our children a confidence and stern belief that they are worthy of dignity and affirmation so that when the world delivers a different message, they are equipped with the consciousness to not acquiesce and resist, as difficult and dangerous as it will be.
Take away: We need to give our children the tools to discern their talents, value and power outside of the market, affirm and develop those talents and invest them back into our communities.
Solidarity
A Pan-African liberatory pedagogy resists the temptation of creating a vertical hierarchy of struggle within which certain forms of marginalisation, violation and alienation are more significant and urgent than others. It asserts with confidence that the strategy of divide and conquer, perfected over centuries using multiple forms of differentiation and division, cannot persist if we understand the deeply historical and structural interrelatedness of our struggles.
It also cannot exist if the brotherhood and sisterhood of Pan-Africanism is embedded in our relations with one another not bastardised by forms of nationality that form part of our colonial inheritance. When we as Africans throw around such terms as “Proudly South African” we affirm our being by allegiance to a nationalist frame that was never imagined as including us in any sense other than outliers/pariahs. There can be no slain Mgcineni ‘Mambush’ Noki without a slain Hector Peterson. Makwerekwere are a direct result of the Berlin Conference. The impunity for the genocide in Gaza is etched in the apartheid spacial planning that continues to dictate African social life in 2024. Rape, murder, genocide — forms of violation that require our unified, equal, urgent attention to heal the inheritances of animosity between us reared by those whose privilege and impunity relies on us not standing together.
Take-away: We need to assert in one voice, and without contradiction, that no form of suffering is necessary nor permissible in a truly liberated society. Further, we need to back this assertion by resisting all forms of discrimination and oppression both in our immediate sphere and beyond.
Ethical praxis
Pan-African liberatory pedagogy requires us to develop a disciplined, consistent, rooted praxis that embodies the principles that we wish to see take root in our communities. Outside of moments of spectacle and the performative where rhetoric often dominates as the marker of one’s revolutionary consciousness, how do we live our lives in a way that affirms our love, care and responsibility for one another. A teacher who delays marking students’ work does not care about them. A partner who physically violates a member of their community does not care about them. A child who steals from a parent, does not care about them. A leader who redirects millions from public welfare and service delivery to buy a new Mercedes or mansion, does not care about that community. A father who rapes his daughter, does not care about them.
We are consumed by and consume capitalism. Our relation to what we put into our bodies, how we relate to the land, what we read and listen to, all contribute towards our thoughts and actions that either sustain our lives and the life of our surroundings or lead us down the path of poisoning our bodies and our land resulting in toxic beings and death. When we note the inconsistencies and contradictions between the rhetoric expressed by our leaders and the details of how they conduct their professional and personal affairs, the fault is ours to have invested in one’s words rather than one’s actions.
Take-away: We need to build habits that reflect the ethical standards of our desires so that we strengthen our consciousness and resolve to maintain the integrity of our resistance at all moments.
Responsibility
Within the Pan-African tradition all humans have value. Elders, young people, mothers, fathers, teachers, guides and so on. One’s value is inextricably tied to forms of responsibility. A constituting element of one’s personhood is the acknowledgement of one’s role and responsibility in society and to perform that role, not for one’s individual benefit but for the maintenance of communities that are rooted in principles of mutual respect and recognition. Duty and responsibility are cornerstones of a Pan-Africanism that asserts without doubt that we have all the capacities required to change the fate of the African child from one depravity to one of distinction. There are political and militant aspects to this in some regards, but there are also deeply interpersonal and collective aspects. There is no individual goal of freedom as freedom marked at the individual level is symptomatic of captivity at a broader scope. Collectively, we commit to not cause harm to one another in the pursuit of emancipation. This is the prefigurative commitment that allows us to shape in the present the peaceful and prosperous African societies we imagine for our future.
Take-away: We are called to commit to the journey towards freedom. That calling comes with responsibilities that we should recognise and attend to, whilst cherishing the privilege of being a critical component of revolution.
Non-human-centred rootedness
There is a Swahili proverb that says, Itunze arthi vyema; hukupewa na wazazi; bali umekopeshwa na wazao wako (You must treat the Earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It is lent to you by your children). Humans are not the centre of the universe and engaging with other living beings purely for our own utility and or entertainment has resulted in the impending destruction of our natural world. A Pan-African liberatory pedagogy understands that the cultivation, care and protection of the natural world is an inherent part of how we understand the roots and responsibilities of our being. There is a sacred bond between us and the water, the land, the trees, other animals, that we honour through a reciprocal engagement that sustains, nourishes and enriches rather than depletes, destructs and pillages. As we relinquish the ego and greed that insists on a hierarchy of human dominance and importance, we extend sentience to our environment which both gives and sustains our lives.
Take-away: We must honour the call to cultivate our environment in ways that acknowledges the symbiosis and interdependence of our collective existence.
There is a direct link between curriculum (what we are taught), consumption (what we ingest) and consciousness (who we think we are). Faced with a world in the midst of multiple crises, none is more dangerous than the paucity of consciousness and imagination. As the neoliberal, anti-black, eco-hazardous curriculum sediments itself as sense, and manifests itself as habit, we find ourselves in a context wherein all emancipatory efforts result in a re-conscription into captivity. If we are to approach the horizons of revolution, we need to first retreat into the intimate space of consciousness and renew a revolutionary sense of ourselves and the world. It is here that I suggest a reinvigoration of Pan-African liberatory pedagogy. The possibility of freeing ourselves from complicity lies in our ability to participate in imaginative activism.
To end with, an excerpt from a poem by beloved poet, intellectual, activist and leader Aimé Césaire titled The Thoroughbreds,
As everything was dying,
I did, I did grow – as big as the world –
And my conscience wider than sea!
Last sun.
I explode. I am the fire, I am the sea.
Moshibudi Motimele is a lecturer in political studies and governance at the University of the Free State. She is co-editor of the Agenda special issue titled The Intimacies of Pandemics and the recently published book Wondering Hands and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities.