Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa and Vice-Dean of Research in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.
Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a prolific scholar with over a hundred publications including more than 20 books to his name. His latest publications include Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization; Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over a New Leaf; and Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South.
Could you please tell us about your contribution to knowledge over the course of your career?
A combination of academic and intellectual exposure at the University of Zimbabwe to African nationalist historiography and Third World radical political economy shaped my contribution to knowledge over the course of my academic career.
For my PhD thesis, I was supervised by two leading African nationalist historians Professor Terence Osborne Ranger and Professor Ngwabi M. Bhebe. I focused on the pre-colonial history of the Ndebele-speaking people from 1818 to 1934 and the specific interest was to understand how power was built and practised (coercion and consent), how governance was practised (establishment of Khumalo hegemony), entitlements and rights, gender relations, spirituality and rituals (social life), economy (accumulation, ownership and distribution of resources), legitimacy, judiciary and law, as well as encounters with missionaries, British South Africa Company, and how the Ndebele responded and adapted to early colonialism, before the rise of modern African nationalism.
Theoretically, I drew from the Gramscian theory of hegemony, and this moved me away from being an archival empirical historian into theory, especially postcolonial theory and later decolonial thought/theory. Here, I tried to combine my interest in African nationalist historiography to recover and write African history from an African perspective and how to bring theory into African Studies. I also expanded my scholarship from its focus on history as a discipline to African Studies as a field of study, becoming a transdisciplinary scholar.
Therefore, during my career I have contributed to the understanding of the history of the Ndebele-speaking people through the publication of a book entitled The Ndebele Nation: Historiography, Hegemony, Memory. I have deployed a combination of historical approaches, postcolonial theory and decolonial thought to contribute to the understanding of colonial encounters, empires, colonialism, decolonization, African nationalism, liberation struggles, African identities, development in Africa, and postcolonial history/politics. This contribution is exemplified in my books Do Zimbabweans Exist? Trajectories of Nationalism, National Identity Formation and Crisis in a Postcolonial State; Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity and Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization.
I have now turned my academic and intellectual attention to the understanding of such figures as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, and Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo of Zimbabwe. Their lives of struggle sit at the centre of anti-colonial/anti-apartheid nationalist armed struggles in southern Africa and their legacies are visited and revisited as part of reflections on postcolonial/post-apartheid developments. My contributions to the understanding of these figures must not be read as biographies they are rather studies on formations of nationalist identities, ideologies, imaginaries and visions of liberation, nation-building strategies, as well as memories, leadership, and governance challenges.
Why do you think decoloniality is so important to practice and study?
The importance of decoloniality as a resurgent and insurgent epistemic perspective is that it intervenes at many levels beyond the cultural turn.
It revisits the very foundations of modernity to unmask its underside which is termed coloniality. Something which is reproducing itself in its most detestable form in such places as Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, and other sites of violence, wars, and genocides.
It connects the dots of racism, enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchal sexism to provide a better understanding of the origins, productions, and reproductions of modern problems and the limits of modern solutions.
It poses big questions such as ‘how did the world get here’, ‘how do we as modern subjects get out of here’, and ‘what can be gained if a shift of lens and reading of the modern world system is to the Global South as a locus of enunciation’?
It does this by shifting analysis of global politics from the dominant neo-Enlightenment linear thinking (rhetoric of modernity: salvation, progress, civilizing mission, development, emancipation, democracy, and human rights) to what Walter D. Mignolo terms “decolonial investigations” predicated on overshadowed histories/underside of modernity (racism, enslavement, colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchal sexism and underdevelopment).
It draws insights from those thinkers, intellectuals, academics, activists and revolutionaries that are ignored, those that produced knowledge from the thick and thin of anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchy, anti-sexist and anti-capitalist struggles and make possible what Mignolo termed “border gnosis”.
Have academic discussions on these subjects changed significantly since they entered mainstream public dialogue in the West?
When academic discussions informed by decoloniality entered the mainstream public dialogue in the West several reactions ensued. The first was embracement it to de-radicalise decoloniality, defanging it and domesticating it. The second was reducing decoloniality to issues of inclusion, diversity and equality and thus turn it into a liberal discourse. The third was to deliberately misread decoloniality and caricature it so as to dismiss it. The fourth was to mount a full-scale war on it after giving it such bad names as reverse racism, Islamo-leftism, anti-Semitic thought, and many others.
Laws and state power have been used to executive the full-scale war on bodies of thought such as critical race theory, intersectionality theory, Black radical tradition and many others which form part of building blocks of decolonial epistemic perspective. It has also provoked conservative scholars linked with right-wing politics to try to counter decoloniality by proposing that colonialism was good, it had ethics, and there is a need for a balance sheet of its history and legacy.
When the decolonial perspective raises questions of race, geography, biography, experience, gender, sex, class etc a flag is raised that they are politicising the social question, as though it was not political in the first instance. What is good is that the decolonial epistemic perspective has successfully shaken the foundations of mainstream thought and made serious inroads into mainstream dialogues in the West pushing conservative thought and public discourse onto the ropes.
Your new book is on the coloniality of internationalism, can you unpack that phrase and explain why you thought it was an important subject to address?
My forthcoming book is entitled Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South. I was provoked to write this book by the escalating conflicts, violence, and wars across the world and the seeming paralysis of multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. I observed the nakedness of contemporary internationalism which claimed to be predicated on international rules. I saw a neoliberal internationalism that was paralysed. Normatively, I saw the long-standing colonial “will to power” driving a paradigm of war in which the intensification of ongoing wars through gifts of weapons of mass destruction was sold to the world as the only search for peace. I saw attempts to revive the Cold War, and efforts to divide the world into “free world” and “autocratic” world failing, thanks largely to the leaders of the Global East, Global Africa, and indeed Global South that defied such archaic thinking.
It is within this context that I thought of two concepts: (a) the concept of “coloniality of internationalism,” building on Anibal Quijano’s concept of “coloniality of power” to make sense of logics behind the current imperialist wars; and (b) worlding the world from the Global South to make sense of resistance to imperialist wars which even invokes non-alignment strategy. The concept of coloniality of internationalism posits that neoliberal contemporary internationalism with the US as its head always hides colonialities and the wars in the Ukraine, Gaza and other places have unmasked the beast. Now that discourses of democracy and human rights have revealed their hypocrisy and racism in the context of the genocide in Gaza, the decadence of Western civilization that was predicted by Aime Cesaire in 1955, is upon the current generation.
How does your work on history, and epistemology feed into and support each other?
The concept of “epistemic freedom” which I invoked in my book Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization demonstrated how historical approaches and epistemological concerns feed into each other. It begins with the question of which epistemology underpins and drives history as a discipline in general and African history as a discipline in particular. The idea and philosophy of history is underpinned by a particular epistemology which in the words of Jacques Depelchin remains Eurocentric. My work pulls back to the foundational ontological question of a colonized people whose very being human was questioned and how this impinged on their knowledge, histories, cultures, and languages. It is here that my work on history and epistemology feed into and support each other. Denial of history was part of a denial of being human, and indeed a denial of knowledge, with racial epistemology being used as a justification. Therefore, my research forays into denied history are automatically and simultaneously forays into subjugated knowledges. These two concerns have led me to expand my research into the domain of higher education and epistemologies of the Global South, epistemologies from the battlefields of history and born of struggles, which Hamid Dabashi depicted as written in “tears and blood.”
What knowledge or insights have you gained from your research that you wish had known when you started?
The fundamental lesson and knowledge I gained is that naturalism limits thinking, paralyses action, and normalises the abnormal in many cases. I have learnt that there is history, usually dirty history, behind most of what exists as gifts of modernity.
Through my research, I have gained knowledge on how the modern world was invented and how a transcendental model of power (coloniality) was constructed and introduced with its binaries, dichotomies and hierarchies/heterarchies through what Ricardo Sanin-Restrepo termed “encryption of power.”
I have learnt that through encryption, knowledge to live by (knowledge for life) is turned into expertise where it is transformed into knowledge for control, domination, and exploitation.
I have learnt of how being human itself was invaded, colonized, racialised, gendered, classed, and hierarchised to produce an invisible social pyramid with those invented whites at the apex, those condemned as black pushed to the bottom, and those designated as Indigenous exposed to genocides.
I have learnt that colonialism is a power structure that survived the decolonization of the 20th century and during the transition from empire to modern nation-states after 1945, it turned itself into invisible global coloniality hiding in systems, institutions and structures and constantly reproducing itself in modern subjects’ psyches/minds provoking Ngugi wa Thiong’o to call for decolonization of the minds.
I have learnt that what exists as contemporary internationalism is underpinned by invisible colonialities of various kinds.
What about your area of study do you wish more people knew?
What Immanuel Wallerstein termed “the re-opened basic epistemological questions” which are crying out for better understanding beyond the previous positivism, universalism and scientism. It is these re-opened basic epistemological questions that not only enable us to appreciate the exhaustion of mainstream knowledge but also to acknowledge the current “uncertainties of knowledge” as was put by Wallerstein. This research is predicated on a long-standing thesis that the knowledge which carried us previously and plunged us into the current problems cannot be the same knowledge that enables us to come out of crisis and carry us into the future. It is here that research into Indigenous knowledge and indeed knowledge and epistemologies of the Global South became urgent and necessary.
How has your background and ethnicity influenced your work?
I was born into the minority Ndebele-speaking people of Zimbabwe who were subjected to ethnic cleansing between 1983 and 1987 spearheaded by a political army specially trained for this purpose by North Korean officers. The campaign resulted in the death of over 20,000 people. This led me to develop a contradictory consciousness vis-à-vis the Zimbabwean postcolonial national project. This targeted killing of the Ndebele-speaking people under the pretext of fighting against dissidents made me to question to seek to understand how positive mass anti-colonial nationalism failed to be translated into postcolonial pan-ethnic patriotism.
My writings on Zimbabwe reflect my positionality as a scholar born in the Matabeleland part of Zimbabwe where I also lived in fear of being killed for just being a Ndebele speaker. At the same time, I could not use this to condemn the entire nationalist struggle and liberation struggle. My work tries to search for where the nationalist project lost its way and how this produced a postcolonial Leviathan that ate its own children. Because of this, figures like Mugabe who were expected to be heroes ended up as villains. This has implications for how I approach decolonization, I am very conscious of movements that began as anti-colonial forces and ended up as oppressive formations. I don’t confuse being “anti-colonial” with being “decolonial.” Being decolonial demands decolonial love for those who have been oppressed. Radical love that is amenable to their will to live and strive after liberation.
If you had infinite time and resources what understudied area would you want to research and why?
The entire African history requires re-writing from a decolonial perspective following in the footsteps of such historians as Toyin Falola who is at the forefront of this necessary work. When I researched the history of the Ndebele from 1818, I thought I was venturing into the pre-colonial history of southern Africa. The decolonial epistemic perspective has made me realise that it was not pre-colonial history but that of a people under the encirclement of mercantilism. It was this mercantile encirclement with the Dutch and the British at the Cape, the British at Natal, and the Portuguese in Maputo (Delagoa Bay) that put pressure on African formations in the coastal areas and making them to move into the interior and clash with each other in what became known as the Mfecane. If I write African history in the future, I will be even more critical of written archival sources than when I did my PhD.
Which African Thinkers and/or books by African authors would you recommend people read?
There are numerous African/Black scholars and authors that I recommend here: from the African Diaspora (Global Africa), I recommend William E. B. Dubois who wrote a book on how Africans made history and located them in human history, and John Henrik Clarke who also made excellent contributions to the re-writing of African history from an African perspective. Toyin Falola is an indefatigable historian and doyen of Africa Studies whose expansive archive is a treasure trove to delve into including his groundbreaking on ritual archives. Ali A. Mazrui wrote on many aspects of African history and African condition. Achille Mbembe brings philosophy, history and theory into his writing of Africa and Africans. Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a very consistent scholar on decolonization. Samir Amin whose expansive archive is informed by Marxist ideas is a feast of ideas. Mahmood Mamdani whose research and writings is enlightening on late colonialism. Thandika Mkandawire whose writing on development in Africa are very instructive. And Sam Moyo whose research on land and agrarian studies is unmatched.