1 Introduction
[The Western canon] is the imposition of one’s understanding of the world as the hallmark of superiority, enabling those who so describe themselves to condemn others to immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of those who hold themselves to be the masters of the universe. This immaturity is forced upon them, not incurred if its cause is not a lack of understanding. Still, lack of autonomy and recognition to use their knowledge as they please and without the guidance of another. The motto of the [Western canon] is not, therefore: Sapere Aude! (Have the courage to use your understanding!) It is rather Audere in propriis verbis sapere non est optabile! (Daring to be wise on your terms is not desirable.)
[Colonialism and oppression] are why such a large proportion of men unwillingly remain immature despite holding them in bondage, claiming to subscribe to the values of human dignity, solidarity, and justice, which their practices betrayed. Subject peoples can’t emancipate themselves from alien guidance by the freedom nature bestowed on them (naturaliter maiorennes) because the claims to absolute truth made by the canon would not allow it. For the same reasons, it is too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians owing to the colonial condition. It is not convenient to be immature; instead, it is hard to escape from it under colonial circumstances! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, because my knowledge and way of life are held to be inferior, and as standing in the form of progress, it is not the case that I need not make any
efforts at all. It is simply more complex. It is not that I need not think so long as I can pay; the reason others will soon enough take the tiresome job over is that I have been reduced to the condition of the Subaltern who cannot speak as centuries later an Indian scholar would claim (Spivak 1991). The guardians who have [cruelly] taken upon themselves the work of supervision will soon see to it that if by far the most significant part of humanity (including the entire fair sex) were to consider the step forward to maturity, this would endanger the privileges of those who held them in subjection. Having first infatuated their domesticated animals and carefully prevented the docile creatures from daring to take a single step without the top strings to which they are tied, they next show them the danger that threatens them if they try to walk unaided. This danger is indeed very great, for if they were to learn to walk eventually after a few falls, they would be able to mount a formidable challenge to the epistemic might of their oppressors. But an example of this kind is intimidating and usually frightens their oppressors, who block any attempt at emancipation. Thus it is difficult for each separate [culture] to work its way out of the immaturity that has become almost second nature to Western canon’s epistemic power. Subject cultures have neither grown fond of it nor are they incapable (for the time being) of using their understanding because they were prevented from doing so by colonialism and oppression; those mechanical instruments that prevent them from using their natural endowments are the ball and chain of their permanent immaturity. And should the day come when they would throw them off through the anticolonial struggles for self-determination, they would boldly jump over even the narrowest of trenches, for they would know this kind’s value of free movement. Thus, only a few who cultivated their minds have succeeded in freeing themselves from immaturity and continuing boldly on their way because the world built by Europeans seemed to be premised on preventing the majority from emancipating itself.
There is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself. This is indeed almost inevitable if only the public concerned is left in freedom, for there will always be a few who think for themselves, even among those appointed as guardians of the common mass. Once they have thrown off the yoke of colonial arrogance, such guardians will disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the right, not the duty, of all men and women to think for themselves. The remarkable thing about this is that if the public, which was previously put under this yoke by the guardians, is suitably stirred up by some of the latter who are incapable of living up to
their values of enlightenment, this may subsequently compel the guardians themselves to respect the right that all have to whatever good things the Enlightenment promises. It is very harmful to propagate prejudices because they finally avenge themselves on the people who first encouraged them (or whose predecessors did so). Thus the public can achieve enlightenment. A revolution may well end autocratic despotism and rapacious or power-seeking oppression. Still, it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking if colonial ways of thinking are not confronted head-on. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great mass that is prevented from thinking. For enlightenment of this kind, all that is needed is freedom. And the freedom in question is the most innocuous form of all freedom – to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. But I hear on all sides the cry: Don’t argue! The [philosopher] says: Don’t argue; learn to think like a Westerner! The [sociologist]: Don’t argue; think about how to make the world compatible with Modernity! The [intellectual]: Don’t argue, have faith in Western culture! (Only one ruler in the world says: Argue as much as you like and about whatever you want, but obey!). All this means restrictions on freedom everywhere. But which sort of restriction prevents enlightenment, and which, instead of hindering it, can promote it? I reply: The public use of [one]’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among [humans]; the private use of reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted, however, without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one’s sense, I mean that use which anyone may make of it as someone of learning addressing the entire critical reading public. What I term the [decolonial] use of reason is that which a person may make of it in the particular position or context they find themselves in.
2 Making the Canon Apocryphal
The man whose imagined response is illustrated above would have been the great eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. This long excerpt is based on the first two pages of Kant’s celebrated essay, “What is Enlightenment?” (Kant 1784). I took the (creative, or destructive) liberty of introducing words and arguments to subvert the original meaning of Kant’s text. Instead of preserving the idea that the Enlightenment was a historic moment because it purportedly signalled humankind’s courage to know by
I did so by portraying the Enlightenment as the repository of an account of a widely circulated story held to be true, but one of doubtful authenticity. It is the story of the “Western canon”, a library of knowledge allegedly preserving all that humankind needs to know to be able to know. The biblical Apocrypha was a collection of ancient books that were originally accepted within the canon of scripture but later were excluded. The use of the concept in this text aims to draw attention to the hidden side of the account that grounds the conceptual vocabulary that informs knowledge production today.
By putting forward this understanding of the Enlightenment, I do not wish to undermine its epistemological worth. Rather, I seek to offer a reflection on African studies as a critical introduction to the methodology of the social sciences. The claim is that the challenge of undoing the canon consists in recovering the critical edge of the social sciences. I associate this critical edge with the idea of poiesis, that is, bringing into existence something that was not there before. In line with this, African studies should be understood not as the production of knowledge about Africa but rather as the careful reflection on the conditions under which knowledge is at all possible. Making the canon “apocryphal” suggests exposing what is dubious about our ways of knowing so that we can be in a position to know better, or at any rate, to know what we cannot know now because of what we know.
If, as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) argues, a decolonial perspective inquires critically into the constitution of a “Cartesian subject” and “African subjectivity”, then this chapter is part of this critical perspective. However, making the canon apocryphal means confronting two challenges. One consists in standing up to the claims to truthfulness that the deployment of the vocabulary of the social sciences may encourage us to make. The other is to seek to find in the critique ways of advancing knowledge production in general. Both challenges boil down to the task of rethinking translation in a very broad sense.
Much of what we have to discuss in the study of Africa revolves around translation, its role in the production of knowledge, and the methodological challenges it presents. It is fair to argue that, fundamentally, the decolonial discourse deals politically with methodological issues that it may perhaps confuse with epistemological issues. If that is the case, then it would seem to compromise the important intellectual agenda that it represents. Towards the end of this chapter I will try to be more constructive and propose some ways out of the paradoxical position in which the discourse finds itself.
My parents’ mother tongue, Xitsua, is spoken in southern Mozambique, more specifically, in parts of Gaza and Inhambane provinces. They have a
There is a sense in which one could take this translation challenge to mean not only that the English language is limited but that it can lead the translator into misrepresenting meaning. The problem with saying this is that I am the one who is responsible for the translation. Attempting to render something intelligible in another language entails making decisions that draw from one’s knowledge of the original and the target context. Furthermore, and perhaps because of taking certain decisions, every act of translation entails a loss. There is probably no way to translate from one language to another without the danger of losing some meaning.
The question is to know if what is lost is important enough to worry about. In this particular case, we may ask whether it makes any difference to convey the idea that both grandmother and grandson can carry the other on their back. I come back to this question later, in the conclusion. For the time being, I draw attention to the fact that translation entails not only the loss of meaning. It exposes the richness of one language and, conversely, the poverty of another. This is at least the way we are used to thinking about things, especially in the social sciences, which are heir to a historically and politically specific vocabulary. This vocabulary emerged at a particular moment in European history, to describe the world of Europeans. From an epistemological point of view, the question is: to what extent is this vocabulary able to adequately recover the experiences of other cultures and societies?
Our epistemological habitus has instilled in us the idea that the world fits into the vocabulary of the social sciences. What this vocabulary cannot account for constitutes, so to speak, an anomaly, something that escapes the
The problem that the translation of the Xitsua saying presents corresponds roughly to something that the late Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, pointed out several years ago. Wiredu spoke of translation, but in a curious way. He spoke of what he called “untranslatability” (Wiredu 1984). He was a philosopher, and his concern, therefore, was whether concepts developed within the philosophy practised in Europe could be translated into other cultures and not only retain their meanings but also respect the worldviews of other cultures. His response was to say that translation was impossible. But he set a condition. He said that translation presupposes understanding. In other words, for anyone to be able to translate something into another language, they need to be sure that they understand it.
And that is the problem. How do I know that I have understood? Is not understanding an illusion that leads me to confuse what I do not understand with what is familiar to me? How often does this happen to us? How often is it that what we think to be the faithful description of other experiences and worlds is not, in fact, the recovery of our limited world? As Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, said: “My language is my world” (Wittgenstein 1933). Kwasi Wiredu suggested that, ultimately, the challenge posed by translation is not so much to make a concept intelligible as to help us identify the limits of
There is a very interesting piece by Ludwig Wittgenstein about a great anthropological work (Wittgenstein 1979). I am referring to James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first published in 1890 (Frazer 1998). Wittgenstein wrote notes to the book, which were later published. He commented on an explanation Frazer gave of what he called the magical thinking of primitive peoples. Frazer considered irrational the act of sticking needles into a puppet that represented an enemy, in the hope that this person would feel the pain. Wittgenstein noted that the savage who does this is the same person who builds a real house to sleep in, cooks real food to eat, etc. Put another way, the villain here is possibly Frazer, not the savage. Frazer’s mistake was to force what he did not understand into what he did understand. This is why Wittgenstein (1958) also said that understanding becomes an act of violence that we commit against that which we want to understand. This is an interesting idea, but at the same time extremely disconcerting.
The explanation lies in what Wiredu was saying, which I repeat here using the language of deconstruction: there is always the danger of integrating what is different into the similarity of the same. This is, once again, the problem that the social sciences create when they apply this to the Rest (with a capital R) as opposed to the West. Note that this danger does not present itself only to those whose minds have not yet been decolonized. It is also a danger pertinent to intellectual activity that can do no other than be, I have to say, colonial. To produce knowledge is to colonize. We can do this consciously, of course. Producing knowledge is seeking knowledge and seeking knowledge is a form of coexistence, or to use a term used by a Cameroonian colleague, Francis Nyamnjoh, a form of conviviality (Nyamnjoh 2020). Conviviality is based not only on understanding. It is also based on our ability to dispel misunderstandings and, above all, to correct ourselves.
In this sense, then, the epistemological challenge posed by translation – which is another way of talking about the challenges posed by the methodology of the social sciences – is not necessarily the ability to produce faithful and truthful accounts. The problem with the canon as it manifests itself in the social sciences is not that it has misrepresented other realities. That may be a false argument, for it would imply two improbable things: one, that there is such a “truth” about us, for instance, and us or the Other; and because of who
The epistemological challenge is to create a space within which we can work together to produce accounts on the basis of criteria that we can be comfortable with. This is a methodological challenge because it has to do with the procedures that we should follow to propose accounts of reality. I address this problem in a forthcoming book (Macamo forthcoming). I argue that to study Africa is not to acquire the ability to speak the truth about it. Rather, it is to acquire the ability to develop ways of speaking about it by inviting others to participate in the conversation. I give this process the name “before we begin”, inspired by what seems to be a widespread habit in public meetings in Africa. Because speaking time is controlled, when people in meetings take the floor, one of the first things they say is: “Before I begin, I would like to say this, plus that …”. Producing knowledge is always about creating the conditions to produce knowledge. Studying Africa is creating the conditions for studying Africa.
3 Reservations
This is where it may become clear why it is important to be careful about the precise sense in which we deploy the notion of decoloniality. Making decoloniality more precise means, perhaps, to pay more attention to the creativity of critique. Perhaps the notion of poiesis is more appropriate in this regard, for it invites us to reflect on the epistemological challenges that the critique of knowledge production poses. Poiesis is used in philosophy to describe an activity in which one creates something that did not exist before. There is a certain sense in which decoloniality – and indeed, postcolonialism before it – should be understood in this creative sense. It is not simply about saying what is wrong about received ways of producing knowledge and, in the process, rejecting precisely that which makes critique possible. Rather, the idea is to elaborate on the implications of critiquing knowledge production by looking at how knowledge, in general, would be creative whenever it allows us to appreciate the world in other ways. The question is to what extent criticism meets this aspiration. My fear is that if a decolonial critique is understood as an epistemological enterprise and not as a methodological one, it might fall short of its larger calling of helping us to use critique as a creative moment.
This is done by not taking “Africa” for granted when one studies “Africa”. The study of Africa should not commit us to the view that we know what Africa is from the start. What is relevant as a definition of Africa is not Africa itself but the interest that constitutes its study. As everyone knows, the overriding interest has been colonial. The validity of what we have been able to say about Africa has always been conditioned by how we position ourselves in relation to this colonial interest. In speaking of a “colonial interest”, we are not making any value judgement. We are simply acknowledging the context within which “Africa” became an object. To acknowledge a context is to commit oneself to the view, eloquently expressed by Michel Foucault (1980), that the standards of truth and legitimate discourse in a particular epoch determine the intelligibility of our claims about the world.
It is in this sense that making the canon apocryphal should imply a view of African studies as a sort of social science methodology. One cannot study Africa without being interested in how one studies anything. As a sociologist, I can study Germany or Switzerland without worrying about knowing what knowledge means in that context because the conceptual vocabulary of reference retrieves a familiar world. Likewise, I can study white South African society without worrying about knowing what knowledge means in that context because the conceptual vocabulary of reference, especially the conceptual vocabulary that emphasizes the language of social structure, recovers a world about which the dominant social ideal in that country is articulated.
It is only those social phenomena that are constituted at the margins of the familiar world, and which are therefore difficult to recover without inscribing them in a register that potentially misrepresents them, that constitute a challenge to knowledge itself. For this very reason, the study of these phenomena can never be their description, or even criticism, but rather the reflection on the conditions of possibility of any such study.
Curiously, it is in this conception of the study of marginal phenomena as a methodology of social science that the critical potential in the sense of poeisis
The very idea of knowledge loses its innocence from the moment we recognize what is done in our culture – say, in an “African” culture – as also being “science”. Why science? It could be something else, say, art! As it happens, even art could be something else, such as science. Who knows? It could be just play. In other words, there is a certain sense in which a decolonial stance places us in a serious epistemological dilemma: either we speak, and if we are understood by those who misrepresent our reality we are left with the obligation of reformulating the problem because we are part of the same register, or else we keep silent and, because we are silent, we become complicit to mental colonization.
Perhaps there is no obvious solution to this problem. Yet, this seems to be the problem that a critique of the canon needs to address and solve. There is a great paradox here: if we critique the social sciences from our place of enunciation and we are understood, then our critique cannot be as radical as we think it is.4 It could be that the problem lies in essentializing Western epistemology. Although there is indeed a canon that can be subject to critical inquiry, there may not be any such thing as Western epistemology. There are various perspectives on knowledge in the West. In two books, Stephen Toulmin (1990, 2003) gives an account of the development of science which documents a tension between those who sought to impose rationality as the standard for knowledge production and those who resisted them. Many of the critical perspectives that we promote among ourselves to criticize “Western epistemology” embrace historical materialism, for example, which is “Western” by any account. I mentioned Montesquieu and Montaigne above. Most critiques draw from Karl Marx or Michel Foucault, both of whom are decidedly “Western” while at the same time not being “Western” in the sense of the canon, because they took a stance that enabled us to imagine different worlds.
Diagne argued that the problem with reducing intelligibility to identity was that any critique ceased to be a contribution to a better understanding of a given phenomenon and instead became an attack on the person. Prefacing any speech with ethnic references as a form of protection against, but also exposure to, criticism, seems to confirm Diagne’s fears. What Diagne is gesturing towards is the meaning that critique should have. In other words, what does it mean for social scientists to criticize anything at all and what challenges does the need to make this critique pose to us at the methodological level? No one can deny the legitimacy of reservations concerning the ability of the conceptual vocabulary of the social sciences to produce reliable representations of African reality. Indeed, this suspicion is part of the critical menu that makes up the intellectual agenda of postcolonialism, postmodernity and, now, decoloniality. The question, however, is how to validate the critique when one of its premises is increasingly the rejection of criteria of validation that would commit the critic and the criticized to a scientific ideal. One does not need to appeal to the idea advocated by Jürgen Habermas (2001), about a transcendent communicative reason. It suffices to refer to a criterion that acknowledges the simple fact that we understand each other, even if we do not agree with something. But why do we understand each other? How is it possible that we understand each other?
The position I advocate opposes, for instance, Homi Bhabha’s claim that for Fanon “the very nature of humanity becomes estranged in the colonial condition and from that ‘naked declivity’ it emerges, not as an assertion of will nor as an evocation of freedom, but as an enigmatic questioning.” My point is simply that what Bhabha finds to be Fanon’s enigmatic questioning must itself come from a position that makes that very questioning a possible critique of concepts of willing or freedom. Similarly, it cannot be more than a metaphor for Gayatri Spivak to say that “the subaltern cannot speak”. Spivak’s claim suggests in an even more radical way than does Bhabha that there can be a systematic marginalization of subjectivity such that the term of subjectivity itself becomes meaningless. But without a meaningful notion of the subject as one that ought to speak, the claim that the subaltern does not speak loses its normative force.
BIRD-POLLAN 2015: 2
This is what concerns me about the legitimate critique that is made of the Western canon. It is made possible not only by the conflation of a specific scientific discourse with general scientific discourse but also by the illusion that it is possible to speak outside the canon when it is on the basis of its theoretical and conceptual resources. Here the paradox manifests itself violently. Basically, no person who criticizes the “Western canon” in this way can be sure that his or her own critique is not a product of that canon. In this sense, such a critique is not necessarily the freedom and emancipation that is hoped for and projected. This is all the more so since we know, for example, that there have always been counter-discourses in the context of the “Western canon”.
The idea that “Western humanism” would be true only if it were representative of everything problematic and atrocious that Europeans have done for the world would be a fallacious way of approaching these questions. But it is possible precisely because of the confusion we make between specific and general scientific discourse.
There is an idea of Africa that ensues from the critique of the canon, which, although legitimately challenging the representations of the continent, appears to be functional to the social reproduction of those who criticize as a social entity. The resulting methodological problem arises around the validation of knowledge. Suddenly, the knowledge we produce is not necessarily valid because it obeys the proper scientific criteria, which we place under
This has been happening more and more frequently in the social sciences and humanities. Whereas anthropology used to be famous for validating its knowledge by resorting to the general argument that whoever speaks knows because he “has been there”, as if the truth of things were there, today there is a widespread attitude in African studies towards the validation of knowledge based on recourse to the idea that the conclusion best serves certain interests that we want to protect and promote. It is almost as if what Caliban had to say suddenly became more truthful than what Prospero said, not because of an objective standard of truth allowing us to converse but rather because we have equipped Caliban with a long-denied and withheld history that validates history in general. The problem with this, of course, is the idea that Caliban was right because he suffered at the hands of Prospero. Perhaps we need to consider the ways in which we can enable Caliban to be right because what he said makes sense.
In some sense, therefore, making the canon apocryphal entails inquiring into the conditions of any dialogue at all. It should, of course, be “decolonial”, but how should we understand this? As a conversation between like-minded people? As a conversation between people who share the same epistemological sensibilities? As a conversation between people with a common political agenda? What is “decolonial” about an event that defines itself in this way? Are we not, once again, in the problematic situation of defining ourselves based on the views others have of us and on what others have done to us? Can there be emancipation under such conditions? Indeed, does the very idea of emancipation make sense from the moment it becomes a project? Can it be true? What do ideas of Africa or Europe – or Asia and America, for that matter – describe if not history itself and its contingent nature? Why should we extract from each of these ideas an intellectual – or political – agenda that essentializes us as much as the colonial discourse essentialized us?
4 Conclusion
Making the canon apocryphal would be meaningless if the purpose were to show that it is wrong. Criticizing colonialism for having been bad, for having created a perverse world, for having committed atrocities is ethically legitimate but intellectually unsatisfactory. Intellectual criticism seems useful only when it is creative, that is, when it helps us build something that did not exist
My parents’ saying describes a situation where sadness and pain is so great that people cannot even console each other. That is why the verb “to carry on one’s back” is reflexive. Consolation is a collaborative act. Notice, too, something I have not said yet: the verb “ku velekana” etymologically refers also to the act of giving birth, although in this case the bilabial implosive “ku b’elekana” is used. So the idea here is to lament the impossibility, or rather the difficulty, of re-enacting the most profound and sublime creative moment that exists: childbirth. I think, but perhaps I am exaggerating, that the usefulness of the decolonial discourse lies precisely here. The decolonial discourse has value because, through its critique, it helps to define a moment of creation, the moment in which it becomes necessary to heal the wounds of history, to help them heal through the projection of a world that transcends the limits imposed by “global imperial designs” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). The decolonial discourse is worthwhile not because it helps us to assert more and more particular identities but, rather, because it indicates how this profusion of particular identities announces a new concept of humanity.
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The original: “Ntukulu u tshwile khwiri, kokwana u tshwile nhlana, a va koti ku velekana”.
See also Boone and Mignolo (1994).
I use “final” in the sense deployed by Richard Rorty (1989).
This is, in fact, the problem of “double consciousness” that W.E.B. Du Bois discussed in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Du Bois 1968).
PAPA is generously funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf.