A World of Possibilities

Some people say we got a lot of malice, some say it’s a lotta nerve

But I say we won’t quit movin’ until we get what we deserve

We’ve been buked and we’ve been scourned

We’ve been treated bad, talked about as sure as you’re born

But just as sure as it take two eyes to make a pair, huh!

Brother we can’t quit until we get our share

Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud

James Brown

Colonialism, we once said, was the negation of man. It was the reduction of possibilities; an inability to envision different ways of living, of being in this world. Black Radical Tradition, in response was a crack in that armour. It was meant to create to a new universalism or universalisms; One which didn’t center on the white European man. What the black radical tradition created was a vantage point through which to see the histories of black people. If the common perception of African history was that of oppression and dehumanization, then “Black Radical Tradition” as coined by Cedric Robinson is a historical legacy of resistance. It is simply a story of love. It begins at absolute despair, at abject tyranny and bare lives and ends at hope and possibilities, at beauty. It is not a rebuttal of their pain and grief but an acceptance of it and an effort to reconcile it, knowing full well that they may never reconcile with it.

This tradition was more than just a resistance against power structures rooted in the systems of slavery and racism, it was creation of ontology. From ship revolts to abolition to the civil rights movement, the aim has being to affirm the humanity of black people, to show them agents of their history. CLR James, in his book Black Jacobins, quotes “the docile negro is a myth”. He overturns the axis of history by illustrating the Haitian revolution not as a result of the ideals of the French Revolution but the outcome of centuries of small revolts and resistance by black people, since they were forced onto the slave ships. He refuses to show black people as passive in their own history, instead shedding light on the constants ways the black people have resisted their enslavement throughout time. This is just aspect or way of seeing black history. It is no more homogeneous than any other discourse. Others have seen this history as a history of agency, of trying to claim a home. But the end goal is similar. It is to render the veil, as Du Bois puts it, that colonization and colonizers have set up.

When I think of Black Radical Tradition, I think of Toni Morrison I think of what she said about reading as a writer- of being aware of the choices involved in the production of knowledge. The stories we choose to tell and the ones we don’t, both consciously and unconsciously, either enforce citations of a norm or refute it. One has to be mindful of that, all the while knowing that the language in which he writes itself symbolizes a power structure. It exists in language that both enables and enforces the erasure of their existence. Morrison taught me that about the power that exists not just in knowledge production but also the tools used to make them. She said “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” It allows us to see how some come to make history while others are just the subjects of history. It is a haunting frame to see power from for it presents it in its totalitarian form. But it also gives us a way out. It forces us to see the silences and understand what is left out; the suffering of the oppressed and the non-represented. It tells me to about the importance of bearing witness to a past and to people who cant bear witness, despite the seemingly impossibility of it. It gives us a vantage point from which to see the world.

Similarly, when I think of Black Radical Tradition, I think of Frantz Fanon and how he conceptualized the Manichean relationship between African and Europeans. I see the ethics he practiced, one where a man is no longer defined by his skin color. When he is neither black nor white, he is simply human. “The Negro” he says “is no more than the white man”. And what beautiful statement it is, loaded with centuries of enslavement and oppression. I think of Malcolm and his belief in an ongoing struggle. His saw racism and capitalism as tied together, and believed in constantly fighting for redemption, for justice. I see Bell Hooks and her refusal to believe in a monolith Black Tradition. She taught me to see the links between different oppressions. Hooks talked about the how a black women faces different levels of oppression from both her own and white people. It gave me a name, a framework to oppression I have always felt.

When I think of Black Radical Tradition, I think of them, of their mistakes and their struggles. I think of what they stood for, a world of possibilities.

The Importance of Intersectional Politics

In Aint I woman, Bell Hooks challenges the language used in feminist discourse to understand and analogue the circumstances of women and the conditions of blacks. The sentence alone, according to Hooks, stated and thus created a reality where all women were white and all blacks were men. Hence, language itself “had no place for black women”. This helped inspire a critique and deconstruction of the narrow categories of both “women” and “race” and bring about an intersectional analysis of socio-economic divisions. For this blog, I will be focusing on the intersectionality of black women.

The term intersectionality was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989, when she attempted to name the oppression that black women faced all fronts. And, though at times the wording seems clunky, one cannot deny their importance. It emphasizes that people can be disadvantaged by several discriminations. It acknowledges people’s experiences in order to comprehend how there are different avenues for marginalization and how these avenues overlap. Kimberly Crenshawstated that the goal of intersectionality was “to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized groups for who it can be said “when they enter, we enter[1]“.

For Kimberly Crenshaw, as with Bell Hooks, the Combahee River Collective and other black female activists, the first goal was to name the oppression. They wanted bring to light, a systematic subjugation that had been largely ignored. According to them, black women were doubly oppressed; both because they were black and because they were women. Their unique position meant that they understood that “there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual[2].” For example “For instance, a black man and a white woman make $0.74 and $0.78 to a white man’s dollar, respectively. Black women, faced with multiple forms of oppression, only make $0.64[3]”. U Realizing the politics of intersectionality is vital to contesting the overlapping prejudices people face in their daily lives . Hence, the importance in intersectionality in understanding and fighting the overlapping prejudices that people face in their daily lives.

However, intersectional politics run the risk of creating hierarchies of oppression. Accepting that there are different avenues of oppression and that these avenues of oppressions overlap mean that at any point, there is always someone being oppressed. Then the question, arises, “what and who to fight for? There is also the problem of naming the oppression since the currently stated categories do not work for them. As one constantly keeps trying adding different types of oppression, the idea of fundamental oppression begins to crumble.

Another and bigger problem of intersectionality is that it leads to a politics of difference. That is the same problem that Judith Butler talks about in Politics of Performativity, according to her when an identity is naturalized, it is taken for granted. Judith Butler points to the subject of women as the basis of critique. According to her, when the subject of woman is naturalized, it no longer takes into account the power relations that created the subject in the first place. The same can be said for race or gender or even both. There is nothing natural about an identity they are produced because of hierarchy of power and we risk losing out on the productive element when we naturalize it. However, though intersectional politics can lead to this, it is not a naturalization of identity. Identity as Kimberly Crenshaw understands is a construct created out social reality and lived experiences and social position. While to simply define yourself with one identity is essentialist, accepting that a part of your multifaceted reality can be shared with others is not monolithic or essential and that is what intersectional politics tries to emphasize. Describing communal identity means trying to analyses the power relations that created those identities and imposed them on us in the first place. Intersectionality helps see through the naturalization by showing how different social realities both empower and restrict different people be it class, gender, sexuality, race etc. Being aware of these prejudices makes one aware of the sufferings in the world that one is not party to, rendering the veil as DuBois calls it. Hence, there is great value in intersectional politics if we want to create a world where the most oppressed and vulnerable are listened to and protected.

[1] Crenshaw, Kimberle () “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum

[2] Ibid.

[3] Alemán, Rosa, “What Is Intersectionality, and What Does It Have to Do with Me?” YW Boston. April 25, 2018, https://www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/.

Student Activism and the Decolonization of Education

‘It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die’

– Steve Biko

One of my favorite memories in LUMS was participating in the student protest march last year. A spur of the moment decision, it impacted me quite a lot. It made me deliberate on their necessity and impact.

In particular, I loved the balance between the universal and the particular that they capture. Student protests are a global phenomenon and encapsulate people of all religions, race ethnicities and class etc. However, for the project I want to focus on the students protests in the wake of decolonization and their demands for a new system of education.

Just as the #RhodesMustFall movement symbolized the South African students demand for a decolonization of their education; similarly there were other movements and protests throughout time that had similar demands. In 2015, the black students in the University of Cape Town, demanded the institution to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes, as a symbol of decolonizing their curriculum. And while the statue was removed, the students are still struggling to have their voices heard. Recently, a statue of Gandhi was removed from the campus of University of Ghanna amid student’s protests about Gandhi’s racist attitude towards black Africans. According to Obadele Kambom, the head of language, literature and drama at the Institute of African Studies, the removal was an issue of “self-respect”.

However, the idea of decolonization of education goes far beyond the removal of statues. In Africa, the remnants of colonialism are prominent in different ways, one of them being Rhodes’s legacy in education sphere. This commemoration goes beyond statues in the form scholarships awarded in his name and the “colonially patented Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa”. These are all reminders of a colonial past but they also symbolize the subjugation of black people which exists to this day. Student protests have been an important method in fighting this subjugation and protesting against such educational systems. More so than anything, these student protests, symbolize attempts of the students who wish to take back their narrative, tell their history and shape the world as they see fit. It isn’t about the statues. The overarching theme is the urgent need for economic and social reforms. They got a debate going; about the kind of history that is taught, what constitutes our understanding of knowledge and the way they are transmitted and mostly how we can fight these ideas. Many of the debates that students initiated on campus were articulated on the political stage through the former students themselves.

I intend to make a visual timeline of these different protests in Africa through pictures taken at the protests or inspired by them in one way or the other and try to engage with them to see a pattern of emerging black consciousness in Africa and the importance of an African identity. I will also try to see how the demands of the students changed as times changed.

Senghor’s Concept of Négritude

Negritude developed in the 1930s as a literary movement of African literature, an ideological stance, an ethic and a way of being. It meant different things to different people but at the crux of it, it was about finding beauty in a world that had been tainted by colonialism. Senghor Cesaire, Damas and other Black writers, poets, activists wrote and inspired literature that affirmed and celebrated black identity and culture both alone and as integral to their arts.

Negritude for Senghor is a celebration of black African identity. He calls it “rooting oneself in oneself and self-confirmation: confirmation of one’s being[1]” At first glance, Negritude seems reductionist and that critique does hold. Senghor’s proclamation that negritude is the “sum of the cultural values of the black world[2]”, makes it seem that all black people all over the world are the same simply because of their race. In a way, it still reduces a great number of people from different countries and cities with different cultural, social, and religious values under the same banner on the basis of their skin. The only way it changes European version of universalism is by

inverting the hierarchy, where black people are celebrated for their culture and “mysticism” and white people are disdained for their “static, objected and dichotomic[3]” philosophy to life. Hence, Senghor too adheres to this construct of binaries, a relationship of negation between white and the blacks. In doing so, he is also reducing the potential of his own people. Superficially it opens the space for every black person- creating an identity they can attach to. But in reality- this broadness of definition in fact reduces the space to exist. It refuses to acknowledge differences in power and that lack of acknowledgement results in silencing and oppression. For example, Jomo Kenyatta in his book Facing Mount Kenyatta, discusses the custom of “clitoridectomy” as a beautiful African custom that marks the beginning of adulthood. He calls it the center of life in his community. What this beautiful eulogy misses out are the women subjected to that torture, and the people shunned for objecting to participate it in. in this particular African custom; the people dance and talk about their history and ancestors. It is seen as ceremony which ties their entire community together, completely different to the scientific, dry static life of the European but as stated above, there is oppression in this defense of African custom, one that no one wishes to see or talk about. Similarly, Senghor’s version of Negritude doesn’t propose a harmful custom per say but it does follow that thread. In his version of universalism, not all get a voice or a place to exist.

That being said, to reduce Negritude to the sum of it criticism degrades both its aims and accomplishments. Senghor, in his essay, tries to affirm that a universalism cannot exist without the affirmation and acknowledgment of Black culture. He recognizes the diversity of opinion and experience; he simply sees them as contributing to a whole over-arching theme. He considers it an ethic. Instead of the European’s exclusion version of universalism, he calls for a more fluid, living perspective. He considers the African spirit; Xel, Sagi or Degal. He calls it an “inherent conscience that is prevalent in all Africans. It is sensitivity to the external world and the tangible qualities of life; shape, smell weight etc.[4]” Hence, for Senghor, matter is simply a system which points the one reality of the world that is “spirit or life force”. It is a statement on solidarity. Just as life forces come together for the well- being of the group over the individual, without undermining the individual himself, so does every culture has distinctive features that allow them to be instrumental to progress of humanity. Hence, Senghor’s version of universalism isn’t as exclusionary as it first seems. He is attempting to create a universalism through the particular.

Senghor for me is simply trying to affirm the African culture. He is attempting to at bring an alternate version of universalism to the European one that completely negated their existence. As a cultural movement, it helped promote and affirm the existence of black people whose culture had been consistently under attack by Europeans. That being said, I do disagree with the concept of Negritude. A universalism that is based on race isn’t a universalism that opens its doors to other. Not to mention, despite many claims there is no such thing as a singular a historic culture which transcends temporal and geographical bound. In attempting to define one, he is simply following the colonizers’ logic of imperialism. It is a logic that still sees the African and other colonized subjects from the colonizers gaze, thereby also limiting the possibility of being human.

[1] Senghor “Negritude; Humanism of the 20^th Century” Pg. 477

[2] Senghor Pg. 478

[3] Ibid. Pg. 479

[4] Senghor, Pg. 479

The centrality of Culture in National Liberation Movements

How important is culture to Cabral’s view of national liberation?

The liberation movement must besides achieve a mass character, the popular character of the culture, which is not, and cannot be the prerogative of one or of certain sectors of the society.

In his speech “National Liberation and Culture, Amilcar Cabral gives a nuanced and multilayered view of culture and the role it plays in national liberation movements. Amilcar Cabral perceives culture as one the main amour against foreign domination, stating the imperial rule cannot sustain without “permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people in questions”.

According to Cabral, for total imperial rule, the colonizer has to either liquidize entire population of the colonized country to prevent any form of cultural resistance or by “harmonize political and economic subjugation of the people with their cultural personality“. As the latter has yet to occur, Cabral sees the colonizers attempts to assimilate the native people and culture into their own as a way to subjugate the people and strengthen their own power without having to resort to complete annihilation. This so-called assimilation was simply another attempt of cultural colonization, to erase native history. Hence, for Cabral, if foreign domination is brought on by the subjugation of native culture, then national liberation is in fact, an act of cultural resistance. It is through recognizing and rebuilding their own culture that the colonized can hope to fight against the colonizers and their own destruction.

But that begs the question, what is culture to Cabral. From a superficial point of view, Cabral’s views of culture match Gandhi and Nyerere’s way of thinking. They too called for a rejection of Western mode of thinking as a method of opposition. But once, we go a bit deeper, Cabral view is more nuanced. Not to take away from their vision, but both Gandhi and Nyerere were harking back to a timeless past; a utopia where colonization never occurred and the natives (be it Africans or Indians) lived in simplicity and harmony. For Cabral, not only is that a futile endeavour, but it is also regressive and ultimately harmful to the national liberation struggle itself. For him, culture is a “vigorous manifestation of the materialist and historical reality of the society”. African culture is a dynamic, changing entity to Cabral. It is shaped by economic and political activities and the relationship between man and nature and between different social classes and group. It isnt free of class struggles but in fact produced out of it and is tied to the means and forces of production According to him:

“If history allows us to know the nature and the causes of the imbalances and conflicts (economic, political and social) which characterise the evolution of a society, culture teaches us what have been the dynamic syntheses, structured and established by the mind of society for the solution of these conflicts, at each stage in the evolution of this same society in the quest for survival and progress”.

While he does not believe in assimilating the cultures of the foreigner and the native, he does believe that in order to truly fight for liberation, one had to assert for the cultural personality of the people while at the same time acknowledging and rejecting the regressive aspects to that same culture. To him, a national liberation movement that is based on “blind acceptance of cultural values” and the “systematic exaltation of virtues without any criticisms of faults” is doomed to fail. Thus Cabral’s believes and shows that African cultures are not monolithic but in fact, capable of evolution and development, a feat granted solely European cultures.

For Cabral, the basis of a national liberation movement is the profound knowledge of all cultures of the different social categories of the nation as well an appreciation for the uniqueness of each element of the culture. The struggle must he believe achieve not just a culture with a mass character but also that of a popular culture that is representative of more than just the petty bourgeoisie and rural and urban elite of the land who have become culturally alienated to the rest of the society. It should representative of all categories of the society as then and only then would the masses be interested in fighting for revolution.

Ultimately, Cabral’s view of culture and national liberation are intimately tied to another. While culture acts as the basis for the liberation movement, the movement also results in the development of popular culture. Cabral acknowledges the numerous different cultures in Africa and calls for a movement that incorporates them and evolves into a culture that rejects exclusivity by skin colour or gender or class and welcomes and gives equal weight to all the different elements of that new culture.

“Bhinneka Tunggal Ika”- Unity in Diversity

Colonial discourse has a temporality encoded within it. It is in the accusation the colonized people were primitive and savage but mostly, that they were backwards with respect to time. They were regarded as the past. In short, one of the crimes that colonialism committed was stealing the colonized of their present. They were seen the past of the colonizers. Then and even now, the colonizers are the benchmark by which the decolonized countries measure their success; a measurement that has always found them lacking. This assessment enabled the British and the rest of the European nations to dictate their own narrow brand of humanism which proclaimed that theirs was only one way to be civilized, to be modern; the only way to be human.

Where Europeans saw diversity as a threat to their dominance, to Sukarno, and Dada Amir Haider Khan, it was a source of mutual affirmation. In the Bandung Conference, there were representatives from all over the Asia-African continent, all different and yet of one mind in their pursuit of a new form of humanity. For Sukarno, this new form of humanity meant the rupture of colonial time in favour of a new era, one where the colonized countries would stand in accordance against the immorality of the colonizers. In his speech, we can perceive a sense of palpable fear of the modern world which had fallen into decay at the hands of capitalism and colonialism but there was also hope they as the newly decolonized could “mobilize the Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace.”

Similarly, in Dada’s account, we feel the same hope and the beginning of a new epoch of history, one that is governed by communist beliefs. Though Dada’s time was before that of Sukarno’s, their belief and strive for a new reality was similar. For Dada, his experience in Moscow was an inversion of the reality that he had experienced his whole life. In Moscow, he and his fellow colleagues were seen as equals. Whereas In India, European prostitutes were not allowed near Indian camps for fear of them despoiling “white virtue or womanhood” and in America, blacks and Indians were dealt as inferior. In Moscow, they were admired, even revered, They had the freedom to speak their concerns and issues without fear of rebuttal. The Russian women walked and flirted with black men. They were all permitted and encouraged to learn and to enlighten through their own experiences; all these banal activities which had otherwise been impossible epitomized the essence of communism for them. In Moscow, Dada had the opportunity to be proud of his origins, of his brownness. Hence both pieces, though written in different time, have similar themes. Fighting against a common enemy, the colonizers, the capitalists, both Sukarno and Dada’s account mention and celebrate the virtue of diversity. In a way, Dada Amir Haider Khan’s experience in Moscow was the physical manifestation of the ambitions that Sukarno articulated in his speech.

In both cases, there is also a shift of the political geography axis the world. For too long, the world was divided and seen in the context of the relationship European nations particularly Britain had with its colonies While Europe was once seen as the centre of the civilized world, during Dada’s time, Moscow had suddenly become the revolutionary capital of the world. Poets, writers, revolutionaries etc. from all over the world came to Moscow for training. Likewise, the Bandung Conference also marked the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history. It took place in Indonesia, a previously colonized country. The location of the conference itself speaks to the inversion of the shifting political geography. This is not saying that the power had completely been vested from the hands of the British. That was neither the case in Dada’s time in Moscow during the Anti War Period nor during the Post-colonial period when the Bandung Conference took place. However, it certified a different actuality, one that was inconceivable before.

Though Dada Amir Haider’s account and Sukarno speech take place at different times in history, they are easily alignable due to the nature of their struggles. Both revolutionaries were simply advocating for an alternative reality; a new way forward. While neither were wholly victorious in their endeavours, one can not diminish the importance of either Dada’s experience in Moscow nor the existence of the conference itself and the gravity of Sukarno’s speech, either of which would have at one point, been mere wishful thinking. It was a new reality that was constructed- however messy and bloody it ended up being.

The Colonial Gaze

Colonization was an epistemological conquest. The settle colonizers didn’t just occupy the land and wealth of the natives. They completely decimated any kind of identity they had- through mass murder and by making sure that any and every account of history was articulated through their point of view. Power is intrinsically linked to queries of representation- which form or representation has hegemony and which do not. Hence, there was few if any accounts written by the native people that were accessible to the general public and thus the colonial accounts became the dominant way of thinking. As the world progressed, and the colonial academia remained the leading medium for intellectual discourse, the assumptions of the western world about the eastern or “Oriental” world spread and the way of thinking morphed into the way of being. The non-divergent representation and nuance were what Obeyesekere was mostly concerned about in his book. He didn’t understand in the account presented to him, why it was believed that Captain Cook was celebrated as a God by the natives when he first arrived in Hawaii. Obeyesekere’s beef with the European accounts was that they aren’t as objective and rational driven as they claim to be- that they too are driven by a myth model. Hence, their objective observations about the inferior natives are actually as rational and objective as they claim it to be. Obeyesekere was in fact ahead of his time. Gradually, in the wake of postcolonialism, there has been an intended effort to give platforms to non-western authors and local witnesses. Rigoberta Menchu’s testimony is an example of such a text.

In Rigoberta Menchu’s biography, you see her take back the control of the narrative through her story. She uses language as a tool to reclaim her power. Well aware of her position in Guatemala, she decides to learn Spanish and communicate with all the priests and the nuns. It allowed her to communicate with a wide range of people and help protect and protest for her father’s freedom during his imprisonment by the “Ladino police”. She is also used it help spur people to take arms against their oppressors. Mostly though, Rigoberta used language to show her side of the story in the chaotic guerilla war between the Indians and the Latin Americans. In fact, she herself divulged, that she selected what she will disclose about herself and her people to Elizabeth Burgos Debray, the writer of the biography. The biography was a reaffirmation of everything that the “Ladino” tried to deny about her and her people. It was a reaffirmation of their complexities, of their sadness and anger, and hope and courage. It was a reaffirmation of their humanity. She used the biography to tell stories, not just about the war efforts but about her family. Rigoberta communicated about the difficulties of her parent’s life, her losses and hardships, the deaths of her brothers at the hand of poverty and the Guatemala army respectively but she also illustrated the good times, the love they all shared. She mentions how she and the army fought with stones and machetes and sticks and managed to still paralyze the economy. The testimony mentions her community and customs in great details. All in all, she paints a picture of a complex people- far removed from the one dimensional almost beastly picture that is painted from accounts of the Latin Americans.

Rigoberta Menchu’s biography has been criticised regarding the authenticity of her claims, such as her lack of formal education. She also herself claimed that she revealed selective parts of her life and considers this book, not a biography but a testimony of her people. However, criticisms asides, one can not deny the importance of this biography. the book does not exist to give a blow by blow account of the war between the two people but to give voice to the plight of her people.