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BlackHouse Kollective’s Nonkosi Mathonsi started us off with a powerful spoken-word piece that introduced the main theme of the event: combative decoloniality (Mathonsi 2021). Organized by the Frantz Fanon Foundation, the event commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the passing of Frantz Fanon and the publication of his classic decolonial treatise, The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 2004; Fanon Mendès France and Maldonado-Torres 2021; Fondation Frantz Fanon 2021). For organizations like the Frantz Fanon Foundation and BlackHouse Kollective-Soweto (BHK), decolonial thought is not decolonial if it is not also combative. Combativity, however, is not easy to pursue or sustain within modern/colonial institutions such as academia, where we find increasing references to decoloniality today.
The propagation of decolonial thought in some circles and networks of the academy in the past decade represents a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it can offer more opportunities for new generations to learn about, research and contribute to the unfinished struggle for decolonization; on the other, it risks creating and normalizing a non-combative version of decoloniality that makes decoloniality collapse into a teaching and research theme within the hegemonic liberal paradigm of knowledge production within academia. Our concern is not only with the field of critical theory writ large and with
We approach the globalized Western university largely as a “white academic field” (Maldonado-Torres 2020) and argue that its power and influence should not be underestimated. The dominant ethos and the multilayered set of priorities at work in the liberal space of the hegemonic academy function as goals and boundaries that shape the sensibilities and work of scholars in the global North and South, including those who might agree that decolonization is not a metaphor. There are multiple ways in which the modern/colonial and liberal paradigm of knowledge simultaneously rejects the incorporation of ideas of combative provenance into the academy while preparing the ground for the mistranslation, domestication, eradication and effective deactivation of the combative dimension of any such idea that makes it to the table of academic disquisition and debate.
At least three modes of operation – key parts of the coloniality of knowledge – are readily observable in the workings of the immune system of the liberal paradigm of knowledge that is central in the globalized, modern research, Kantian/Humboldtian university and its contemporary neoliberalized formations. The first is the rejection of decoloniality and related themes like Black consciousness or reparations, which challenge a liberal conceptualization of modern nation-states and the world order. This rejection often takes place in the name of supposedly neutral conceptions of excellence, reason, rigour and science, according to which decolonization and reparations are social and political matters, not epistemic. From this perspective, the search for
The second mode, which arises when the first is too difficult to sustain, is the incorporation of carefully selected ideas and concepts that recognize the existence of inequality and its effects within the academy, but in such a way as to shield the liberal and neoliberal academy from challenges that exceed its limits. This includes the reduction of systematic and systemic inequality and dehumanization to matters of “diversity and inclusion” and to institutionally defined “transformation”, as well as the strategic mistranslation of terms that originate outside of the university (for example, Black Lives Matter) in the effort to further strengthen the corporate and liberal diversity and inclusion framework in the academy. There is a domestication that limits the critical power of the adopted concepts, along with the creation of liberal echo chambers that constantly reiterate the accepted terminologies and prevent serious engagement with frameworks that challenge the premises of liberalism, capitalism, settler colonialism and coloniality. In this context, it is not strange to encounter the apparently ironical situation of discourses on inclusion that serve to exclude other frameworks, such as Black Power, Black consciousness, decolonization, abolition and decoloniality, among others.
A third mode of operation becomes obvious when, as a result of the pressures of social and student movements, ideas like decoloniality start to have some presence in the academy, in spite of resistance from the established fields, disciplines and the administration of the university. In this context, the dominant attitudes and practices of modern/colonial homo academicus in the university function as a safety net of sorts, making it appear that combativity is exhausted or fulfilled through intellectual debates alone.2 In this context, concepts like decoloniality can start to have some recognition and value within the academy but only to the extent that the vital connections and effective relations with grassroots organizations and movements that promote decoloniality are increasingly severed.
Fanon offered a different model, a combative one, according to which knowledge creation, transformation and critique are grounded on a decolonial turn. This sees subjects and communities shed the desire to assimilate to modern/colonial ideals and turn to each other in the process of creating new relations among themselves and new concepts that reflect those relations and their possibilities (Fanon Mendés France and Maldonado-Torres 2021; Maldonado-Torres 2006, 2011, 2016, 2017). For Fanon, combativity is first and foremost a matter of collective responsibility in the face of the catastrophe of modernity/coloniality, which implies the formation of collectives and the mobilization of those collectives against the forces of coloniality and towards the creation of an-other world (Fanon Mendés France and Maldonado-Torres 2021; Maldonado-Torres 2016).
The formation of collectives among Black and racialized subjects is nothing less than extraordinary. To do this, they have to overcome, or at least start to leave behind, the expected antiblackness and the desire to appear human on the basis of the established criteria of the modern/colonial world. This chapter focuses on the combative work and possibilities that characterize the collaborations between one such collective, BlackHouse Kollective in Occupied Azania (aka South Africa), and academic spaces and projects, such as decolonial ethnic studies and Caribbean thought in the United States and the Caribbean, and the Frantz Fanon Foundation in France.3 Our work is also informed by the actions of other collectives and similar organizations, such as Decolonize This Place in New York City and the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción in Puerto Rico, among other movements, some of which we discuss in this chapter (Colectiva Feminista en Construcción 2018; Decolonize This Place 2021; The Laura Flanders Show 2018).
For us, RMF/FMF was not a mere object of analysis and we have not sought to join the sudden large list of “specialists” and “experts” on the movements. Rather, we see our task as a combative one and not merely academic: while South African universities desperately engaged in mistranslations of the challenges of RMF/FMF, we sought to build connections from existing decolonial spaces within and outside the academy, and from inside and outside South Africa, to develop a project of combative decoloniality, which we have tentatively termed the BlackHouse (BHK) paradigm of knowledge creation and epistemic and artistic change. This paradigm simultaneously counters the coloniality of the dominant liberal paradigm of knowledge production in the academy and advances the combative decoloniality of existing collectives and projects through South–South collaborations that include, but exceed, the limited space of the academy.
In this approach, the task of decolonizing the university is to be first and foremost rooted and expressed not in the creation of new administrative positions or the production of new modules, publications and manuals, as important (though also often ambiguous) as they could be, but in the creative work of linking pedagogical, research and artistic projects that express and advance a combative, decolonial and Black consciousness within and, particularly, outside the academy. This implies that the decolonial university (to the extent that there could be one) and combative decoloniality in academia would emerge from these collaborations that always already exceed the space of the liberal academy and its preferred modes of knowledge production, dissemination and engagement.
1 Genealogy of the BHK, Soweto (by Zandi Radebe)
It is perhaps fitting to start off by examining the real reasons which make it necessary for us to think collectively about a problem we never created.
BIKO 2004: 96
The BHK, within the paradigm of decolonizing knowledge, is a community-based organization, founded in Soweto in 2014 against the backdrop of dominant colonial epistemologies and political theories that do not centre Blackness. We concern ourselves with programmes that educate on racism. Decolonial scholarship that is anchored in Black consciousness and Pan Africanism is our mainstay. Our activism and advocacy for heightened awareness agitates against systemic and institutional racism where it pervades private and public institutions, community and our country in general.
Shaped by the lived experiences of its founding members at various points of their lives, the BHK was born from our collective encounters with the realities of South Africa, post 1994. In many ways, the BHK became our political home because we had collectively called into question the status quo, particularly the continued existence of antiblack violence in post-1994 South Africa, thereby making unpopular decisions about the direction of our young lives. In search of a new system of values capable of providing answers to the Black experience post 1994, we sought ways to escape coercion into occupations designed for the youth of capitalist societies. Black graduates separated from their communities become easy prey to being coerced into and swallowed by an exploitative society in which, very often, we are direct objects of exploitation (Fanon 2004: 104). This separation further reduces the possibilities of detaching ourselves from the debilitating experiences of colonized education. This, we argue, is unsustainable because capitalist societies, historically, have
1.1 From UCKAR to Siyaphambili Youth Pioneers (SYP): Black Consciousness Ideas and Praxis
Ironically, my experience as a Black student at the University currently known as Rhodes (UCKAR) in 2006–2008 was no different from what was expressed by the students behind the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015 and the subsequent responses to racism and white supremacy in South African universities captured through various hash tags, such as #MyCurriculumSoWhite, among others. As a Black postgraduate student and tutor in a predominately white setting, I became acutely aware of Black students who, unprepared, made it to universities that not only taught a Westernized curriculum but were also racist in their culture and outlook. UCKAR left me with a deep sense of anxiety about the prospects for Black youth in institutions of higher learning. This experience inadvertently radicalized my attitude to the university and, by extension, the project of higher learning in its entirety.
Whereas most graduates are generally excited about the prospects of employment and dream jobs after completing their studies at university, I wanted something different. What I wanted had nothing to do with financial security. I had already grown deeply critical of the academic project, owing to my experience at UCKAR. As a young Black graduate who grew up in the township of Soweto, which is also the home of Black Consciousness and the Pan-Africanist culture of resistance, I equally became aware of the fact that, and as Mike Stainbank (2011: xiv) observed, “not a single national programme illuminates a cognitive understanding of the violence inherent in racism”, let alone provides conscientization programmes that seek to provide some level of political orientation to Black youth in post-1994 South Africa.
I had also come across the anti-apartheid speech that got Ongkopotse Tiro expelled from university, when I decided to convert my mother’s backyard into a school in 2008.5 In the same year, on the anniversary of the Soweto Uprising of 1976, a group of instructors, including myself, officially launched our organization, Siyaphambili Youth Pioneers (SYP). With Afrikan History and
The combative nature of SYP was evident in its infusion of Black consciousness ideas in its programme which, undeniably, was disruptive to the neoliberal ANC Charterist framework (Sobukwe [1957] 2013). This was demonstrated in various ways among our Pioneers both within their schools and families. Within a few months we began to see a noticeable transformation in many of our students; their newly found thinking manifested itself in various ways, including challenging their peers, teachers and parents on an array of topics. By testing their knowledge on teachers, SYP students inadvertently exposed problematic aspects of township schooling that national govement throught respective management at schools had been sweeping under the carpet. We encouraged the Pioneers to use their Black consciousness-oriented thinking and superior debating skills to question limits and problematize the state’s reluctance to mainstream Black consciousness in their learning experience.
During this period of working with young learners, I would become aware of the unquestionable relevance of Black consciousness as a living philosophy. There were instances when SYP, and by extension our school programmes, were met with hostility and outright rejection by the school management, who we later learned were members of the ruling party. It was therefore not surprising that they were not supportive of Black consciousness and Pan Afrikanist ideals in teaching and learning at their respective schools. Ironically, these occasions gave us the opportunity to appreciate the continued relevance and challenge of Black consciousness as a philosophy and practice thereby fortifying our resolve. We began to appreciate the urgent need to revitalize and popularize the teachings of Steve Biko and Mangaliso Sobukwe.
Not everyone was opposed to the SYP approach and lessons at the schools where we worked. A handful of schools and teachers had grown critical of the post-1994 political order and were therefore receptive to our alternative ideas and Black consciousness pedagogy. These would become our host schools. Moletsane High School stood out as a formidable example. Its teachers provided
The following year, 2009, I would encounter Blaq Aesthetics, a collective of young Black artists who, with a heightened sense of political awareness, took seriously the need to do work in our communities that amplified the ideas of Black consciousness. Blaq Aesthetics understood that Black culture is an integral component in the search for Black liberation. Biko’s declaration that “Black culture above all implies freedom on our part to innovate without recourse to white values” (Biko [1978] 2004: 106) helped the movement to reimagine better schools for decolonized education. Blaq Aesthetics graciously opened its doors and welcomed SYP students to Khaya Lendaba, the historical home and shrine of Isanusi, seer, sage, healer, teacher, philosopher, historian, artist, playwright, orator, sculptor, writer and Indigenous wisdom-keeper, Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa, located in Jabavu, Soweto – a historical hub and heritage of the Soweto Revolt of 1976 (Setai 2020).
Through the works of Black Aesthetics, Black youth within the cultural and activism space in Soweto aligned their projects with Credo Mutwa’s work. This alignment was significant to the quest for, among other things, epistemic justice, the promotion of the ideas of Credo Mutwa and safeguarding his lifelong vision of validating and legitimizing the various facets of indigenous knowledge systems that have sustained society through the ages. The programmes of SYP and Blaq Aesthetics were designed to foster critical youth consciousness, drawing from the South African Student’s Organization (SASO) tradition of conscientization. SASO defined Black consciousness as “essentially a slogan directing us away from the traditional political big talk to a new approach” (Biko 1971: 1).
At this time, I accepted an invitation to a talk at Wits University by Andile Mngxitama, one of the leading thinkers of a youth-based Black-conscious movement called Blackwash (BW). After the Wits talk, I was introduced to some of BW’s members at a meeting held in a restaurant. Between the light conversations that sought to unpack Mngxitama’s stimulating talk, over drinks and snacks, I recognized two of the sisters who were introduced as leaders and cofounders of BW. They were both former students from UCKAR. There was a plan to meet with other BW members after the Wits University talk and this was the meeting that set into motion the next three years of my involvement in the organization.
I had first heard about Blackwash in 2007 from a brother who wanted to “recruit” me to what he described as an emerging “Black think tank”. Having
At this meeting I made a request for the movement to relocate to Soweto. The meeting was in favour of my suggestion and, indeed, the next Blackwash meetings and subsequent programmes were hosted at the Credo Mutwa cultural village, which was also home to Blaq Aesthetics. SYP and Blaq Aesthetics had collaborated on various youth events and had become natural allies. As a result, members of SYP and Blaq Aesthetics would become members of Blackwash and were very instrumental in developing the programmes and politics of the organization, using political education through literature, arts, debating and public speaking. While SYP brought the enthusiasm and energy of youth to Blackwash, Blaq Aesthetics provided artistic and cultural flavour. Blackwash programmes appealed to a large portion of Black youth in their high school and university studies.
1.2 The Blackwash Dream – “‘Coz’ 94 Changed Fokol”
In a context where coloniality perpetuates itself through multiple forms of deception and confusion, clarity can be a powerful weapon (Maldonado-Torres 2016: 2). Blackwash (BW) emerged from a context in which our Black population was seemingly hypnotized into accepting 1994 as the moment of Black triumph against apartheid racism. BW was one of the most prominent Black consciousness youth voices to offer political clarity against the colonial deception birthed by the 1994 liberation project. Thus, BW represented a generation of Black youth who refused to accept the Mandelarization qua democratization project that expressed itself through the imposition of ANC “culture” and “politics” post 1994. For the Black majority, BW argued, the victory of the ANC in 1994 did not signify a moment of rupture expressed by the repossession of stolen lands and rehumanisation efforts, but rather the normalization of a system of dispossession and racism. Therefore, for BW, the post-1994 state represented a continuity of the apartheid system, through the Mandelarization project, among other technologies of coloniality.
Blackwash stands ultimately for the love of Black people and the end of our suffering. We shall walk as we talk. We shall make our own mistakes; we shall learn and improve on our practice. [author’s emphasis] We hope to oppress none, but we shall not dialogue with forces that continue to perpetuate our oppression ….
BLACKWASH, 2009: n.p.
Blackwash stands for the liberation of Black people who want to be liberated, this means amongst others, self-governance, and equitable sharing of our natural resources. But it also means we need to find collective and democratic practices to define and arrive at our final destiny.
BLACKWASH, 2009: n.p.
The document was a fresh and penetrating critique of the notion of the “New South Africa” that had been orchestrated through a negotiated settlement that had failed to dislodge the structures of white power and reverse Black landlessness and dehumanisation. The Blackwash tag, “’Coz’ 94 Changed Fokol” best captures the movement’s sustained critique and opposition to what, following Fanon, one could refer to as pseudo-freedom, flag-independence or “pseudo-independence” (More 2011: 178). The movement maintained that “1994 was the inauguration of a new phase in the ongoing racist colonial project which is settler colonial South Africa. The only thing that was new or different was that the same system of racism got new spokespersons, managers and guardians who had Black skin (Blackwash 2009).
In many ways, the BW critique of the Mandelarization project of 1994 represented what decolonial scholar, Maldonado-Torres (2016: 2), termed “a battle of temporalities”, which is the rise of youth movements whose ideas question and threaten the status quo. However, BW had a short record of mobilizing
The SNI would mutate into a movement independent of Blackwash, which caused confusion among BW members who felt that the SNI had diluted the identity and radical politics of Blackwash as a movement committed to Black consciousness and Pan Africanism. Five years later, both movements would collapse, and I would seek to continue the work of BW in an outfit that we later termed BlackHouse Kollective-Soweto (BHK). The following section deals with BlackHouse Kollective, what it is, where it comes from and the politico social dynamics and contexts that gave birth to it as a space and movement for decolonial thinking and practice that advocates for the unfinished business of decolonization in Occupied Azania from a Black Power Pan Afrikanist lense.
1.3 The BlackHouse Kollective Soweto (BHK) Paradigm of Decolonizing Knowledge
My experience and work with building, organizing and mobilizing in Black spaces, and communities in particular, provided me with a deeper appreciation of the relationship between “theory, action, and the importance of space and time in decolonial projects” (Maldonado-Torres 2016: 2) that would later inform the creation of the BlackHouse Kollective (BHK). Further, in giving breath to the visions of BHK, I sought to be part of an activist community that was founded on the principles of Black Love and the genuine articulation of Black Rage in recognition of our collective efforts to decolonize our lives. BHK would become the space where Black people could generate and imagine new positions and decolonial horizons for their ideas, desires and fears. It arose out of a context defined by modernity and coloniality – that is, reinforced by the continuous existence of imposed settler occupation.
Born out of a desperate need to scream BLACK POWER, in disappointment at the 1994 project, BHK calls on all Black thinkers and prophets alike to gather and reconstitute the state of Blackness. We are called on to break from the dominant logic of theorizing about Blackness, from spaces that have so far served to maintain the intellectual negation, if not erasure, of Black bodies that embody philosophical thought – white-dominated spaces, such as universities and other state-owned institutions.
BHK draws strength from the trajectory of Black people’s search for true liberation and the desire to quench a 365-year-old thirst for Black liberation
The BHK project pays careful attention to the limitations of Blacks in antiblack spaces, but goes further and tries to create fresh furrows from which organic ideological trails for black thought lead to the end of the world as we know it. In problematizing the contradiction that comes with the structuring of Black thinking within white supremacist academia, BHK provides a cathartic space for Black philosophers, thinkers and activists alike that will shape their next generation. BHK thus aims to advance a Black liberation project and Black liberation thought beyond the confines of white academia and liberal universities, at least in the context of South Afrika.
In keeping true to the Black radical thought inspired by Blackwash, the BHK invites Black philosophers, thinkers and activists alike into a space that bridges the political and intellectual void, by enabling Black discussion, between Black bodies, within the white academic space. It offers Black Love founded on Black solidarity to those who are systematically precluded from this space and locked into Soweto, a zone of dehumanization. BHK has hosted and collaborated with internationally acknowledged luminaries in our arena of discourse, to share knowledge with our community through public lectures held in the township of Soweto. Some of the leading thinkers have included Charles Mills, Lewis Gordon, Janine Jones, Joy James, Magobo Ramose, Cde President Tiyani Mabasa, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, CK Raju and Nelson Maldonado-Torres. At the same time, we exposed them to currents of thought and action that can potentially enrich their work, orienting them in a community-based decolonial combative direction. The long-term objective is to build community-driven centres of knowledge production that are open to all Black people, with the purpose of employing Black thought as a tool to expose the limitations of the 1994 Mandela democratization project while advocating for the true liberation of Occupied Azania.
Lastly, the BHK initiative is a call to create a space outside white academia that responds to the needs of Black people located in zones of dehumanization. The purpose of the project, however ambitious, goes far beyond the consolidation of these spaces and hints at the need to collapse the existential
The Kollective is home to social activists, artists, students in law, philosophy and political sciences, educators, professors, intellectuals and young professionals, and has been very instrumental in the student struggles in Occupied Azania (South Africa). Our youth-anchored programmes centre on introducing young people to critical conversations, study and reflection that are imbued with decolonial thought distilled from Black consciousness and Pan Africanism. In Sobukwe parlance, education – to us – is a tool by which we serve our people and raise our collective aspiration above the desires that are anchored in colonial cognitive frameworks that lead us to negate ourselves. Taking instruction from SASO, we embrace Black consciousness as “an attitude of mind, a way of life” in our efforts towards reimagining decolonized education in Occupied Azania (Biko 1971: 1).
2 From the Summer School to the BlackHouse: Linking Combative Decolonial Projects (by Nelson Maldonado-Torres)
I first visited South Africa in January 2014, for the first decoloniality summer school at the University of South Africa (Unisa) in Pretoria. Former president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, gave the opening keynote address. There were more than a hundred participants, most of them Black South Africans avid to learn about decoloniality. I came as an instructor but also as someone who wanted to learn. Very quickly I found not only interlocutors but potential collaborators and, at least from the second year on, I started to invite some of the students to be co-lecturers. The collaborations led to the introduction of poems, storytelling and performance, and visits to a gallery guided by a curator and an artist. In this process, we were reinventing the classroom and breaking the models of traditional academic scholarship and pedagogy. The decoloniality that I wanted to teach and explore could not be reduced to a varsity topic, the theme of a lecture or the object of scholarly investigation. Decoloniality is nothing without a praxis that disrupts the modern/colonial paradigms of knowledge production. I was proud of what I was doing, but it was still just a beginning and it was still taking place at a rather surface level.
Student organizing continued throughout 2015, but by late 2015 and very early 2016 some thought that #RhodesMustFall, as the movement was called, was probably now in the rear-view mirror. Others were uncertain. Nobody knew, and probably only a few imagined, that the movement would continue and become as strong or stronger than in 2015, now under the term #FeesMustFall. As 2016 started and many Black students were finding it difficult to pay their fees to continue their studies and/or find adequate university housing, the movement was reignited through protests against the cost of education and the limits of accessibility.
Larger questions emerged regarding the economic dimensions of Black dispossession, including land expropriation and land theft. More than two months of marches and different forms of direct action followed. The media covered the events regularly. The entire nation watched, and was forced to ask itself the question: what is decolonization and why are the students asking for it? I had a decision to make in this context. Should I seclude myself and work on my book manuscript while giving lectures on decoloniality at the university? Should I venture to learn about the movement from a distance, protecting my time to conclude my book manuscript? Or should I simply make myself available to those reaching out to me to engage with what was going on and allow the process and the needs of the moment and the movements to determine how my time and energies would be used?
That I had taught in ethnic studies departments in the US for the larger part of my career, and that I approach ethnic studies in line with the aspirations of
The years 2015 and 2016 were just slightly more than two decades away from the establishment of the South African liberal republic under a new Constitution and the start of Nelson Mandela’s leadership. By then, there was deep frustration and dissatisfaction with the alleged achievements and promises of the “rainbow nation”, its liberal Constitution and its neoliberal economic approach. Even deeper, there was clearly a rejection of the preservation of a state of affairs that seemed founded on Black exploitation, marginalization and massive poverty along with the appropriation of Indigenous lands.
The contradictions and limits of the South African, racial, liberal and neoliberal state could not escape university students. Few other spaces provide better conditions for an acute perception of such contradictions and limits than universities, since they are meant to offer equal access to excellence in thinking and teaching while also serving as effective sites for social mobilization. Students come to universities with the expectation of finding something new and better than they have found before, something that will empower them to significantly improve themselves and their context. In the South African, antiblack, settler colony, what students found, instead, was a vastly dominant white academic field (Maldonado-Torres 2020).
The white academic field is arguably dominant in the modern/colonial and global university system, but its obscenity – in the sense of being extremely offensive to anyone who is aware of the racial dynamics at play in it – is bound to be felt particularly strongly in a setting with a majority Black and Indigenous population that remains largely impoverished and marginalized, as in South Africa. This is one reason why the South African student response to the white academic field in Occupied Azania is relevant everywhere, not only in South Africa or in Africa. South African youth witnesses and suffers the contradictions and limits of liberal and neoliberal discourses and their modes of managing the economy and organizing society to an impressive degree. The entirety of South Africa, including and perhaps particularly its universities, can be viewed as an important site for investigations into the contemporary workings of antiblackness and the coloniality of power/knowledge/being today.
Through their direct critiques of structural racism and coloniality in universities, RMF/FMF challenged and exposed the normalization of settler colonialism and antiblackness by the liberal and neoliberal approaches of the dominant political party and some of its luminaries, who were also perceived by some as saviours of the nation. The exposure and critique of the coloniality of liberalism and neoliberalism created anxiety among politicians and intellectuals who continued to celebrate the formation of the South African liberal and neoliberal republic as a postapartheid and postcolonial formation. RMF/FMF strongly challenged this characterization. They were not the only ones to do so, but their challenge reverberated particularly loudly while the movement was active and they successfully connected those issues with modern/colonial higher education.
Soon after I arrived in South Africa in early 2016, I started to receive invitations from leaders of various departments at Unisa and other universities, to speak about decolonization. It was clear that a great part of the South African leadership structure, particularly in universities, felt the pressure of the national student movement and was struggling to understand and to respond to the call for “free and decolonised education”. I also met student organizers and was invited to speak with them. These invitations created opportunities for me to learn about the movement directly from some of the most prominent voices among the students and supporters in the faculty, as well as from those in the faculty, including heads of departments and more senior figures in university administrations, who had reacted negatively to the movement, in various degrees (Chinguno et al. 2017).
While travelling around the country, speaking about decoloniality and learning about the student movement, I was also leading a weekly seminar
I felt that I had lived a long time in South Africa during those three intense months of 2016. At the university, I felt like an ethnographer in an occupied space: occupied by overwhelming antiblack and anti-Indigenous thinking and attitudes. The atmosphere at the university was heavy. Observing primarily white academics grapple with RMF/FMF was like watching repeated performances of reason fleeing the room as soon as a Black body entered the scene.6 The experience made it particularly clear and palpable that the academy was and remains an occupied space, that the university is an institution dedicated to the modern/colonial occupation of knowledge. In that sense, as movements such as Decolonize This Place (New York City) have put it, decolonization needs to involve a de-occupation. This also explains the relevance of the BHK, which can be conceived as a space for de-occupation and as a site from where to think, feel and be with a community of others outside the occupied space that is the academy.
For me, and those whom I came to meet in the struggle, the BlackHouse was a place of togetherness and combativity that served as solid ground for the preparation of decolonization and de-occupation projects. BHK promotes a Black and Pan-African consciousness and a decolonial attitude that re-orients and brings subjects together in the effort to counter coloniality and create “the world of you” (Fanon 2008: 206). In this process, languages and knowledges – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – are reconstituted and re-oriented
The BlackHouse is at once a site of epistemic, social and political insurgency where art, philosophy, politics and ethics enrich each other and become intertwined in the process of self-discovery, self-criticism, mobilization and community formation. In short, the BHK anticipates what a decolonized university in a profoundly antiblack context should aim to be: an engine of knowledge creation and of self- and collective transformation in the exercise of decolonization.
Projects for decolonizing the university should take their lead from spaces like the BlackHouse, which defy the university’s liberal and neoliberal modes of production. Echoing Fanon, in spaces like the BlackHouse “the intellectual sheds all that calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives, that devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper among the people” (Fanon 2004: 12). In this process, intellectuals can potentially abandon their traditional, heightened individualism and the role of “sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman [or African] pedestal” (Fanon 2004: 11) and discover the productive dimension of collective efforts. The BlackHouse offers the possibility of decolonizing the position of the intellectual, the scholar and the student, which is far more difficult than taking decoloniality as a theme.
I maintained a conversation and relationship with the BlackHouse after 2016, and in 2019, when I returned for six weeks as distinguished visiting scholar invited by the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf), BHK became a space of comradeship, thinking and my true north as I visited and spoke to multiple audiences in a variety of major universities in the country. I spoke about the BHK paradigm then, an idea that emerged in the context of thinking about the various roles of the BlackHouse – serving as a hub for thinking among student organizers, facilitating the visit of scholars in Soweto, engaging in political education and anticipating the goals of a decolonized university – while preparing a Black-conscious and decolonial curriculum for youth in Soweto.
For the BHK, youth education is part of an encompassing view of decolonization in which knowledge is reconstituted as part of the process of communicating, teaching and learning from Black youth who are well acquainted with the harsh realities of antiblackness. It reflects the idea that collectivity is transversal – in the sense that it creates an environment for the encounter between and enrichment among subjects who are positioned in different spaces of the social sphere – and intergenerational. Today’s youth often perceive the contradiction and limits of a system and understand the possibilities of combative action in a fresh light. They are also the university students, the scholars and
The preparation of a curriculum for youth education was part of the organization of a summer camp on Black consciousness and decoloniality for young students in Soweto of no more than 16 years of age. In preparing the curriculum, BHK continued a view that it had already introduced in its engagement with the “fallists” in 2015 and 2016: it sought to connect the Black youth of today with the combative Black youth of previous generations, particularly the Black-conscious youth who had participated in student-led movements and uprisings in the 1970s. The BHK also built on its inter- and transnational scope: Africa, the larger world of the African diaspora and the colonized world were part of its spatial horizon. This inter- and transnational approach was fundamental for the summer camp project, which involved the collaboration of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies (RAICCS) in the United States.
By the time the idea of a summer school camp for youth emerged, the BHK and RAICCS had already developed important connections. I was a cofounding member and a faculty affiliate of RAICCS at the university where I taught in the United States. After my return from South Africa in 2016, I saw my role at my university and at RAICCS differently. The BHK had shown me possibilities of combative activity at the intersection of grassroots knowledge formation and higher education combined with attention to local, regional and global concerns and respect for the ancestors. All of this was reflected in the organization of a multilayered set of activities in 2018 that culminated with the third Rencontres of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, hosted by RAICCS, the main theme of which was: Frantz Fanon, Decoloniality and the Spirit of Bandung (Maldonado-Torres 2019; Maldonado-Torres et al. 2019).
The BHK was one of the principal organizations whose work was featured in the Rencontres. It involved the collaboration between an academic space (RAICCS), a non-academic international space (the Frantz Fanon Foundation) and a community organization (Lazos América Unida). Since Lazos América Unida focuses on areas such as health and youth education, the third Rencontres prioritized the themes of healing and education in its programme. In this effort to combine the questions and interests that were emerging in decolonial and antiracist community organizations with scholarly work and research in related areas, I was following the lead of the BlackHouse.
If my experience at the BHK in 2016 was fundamental to my work in the events of 2018, the activities of 2018, including the participation of the
3 Concluding Remarks
This chapter offers a glimpse into a postarea studies framework that challenges, not only the discrete conceptualization of knowledge in nationalistic or continental shapes, but also the hegemonic model of intellectual engagement in the academy, which is liberal in kind and continues to define most work even in “decolonial studies”—a formulation that we contest. We take decoloniality to be a verb and a struggle rather than a new area of expertise. Operating beyond the horizon of modern/colonial “studies,” we do not aim to create a new form of African Studies, and our goal is not to correct or reform either Caribbean or US American Studies. Our proposal is that the decolonization of knowledge, including the decolonization of the university, requires a different approach and orientation. The BHK paradigm is one among other such insurgent projects that intervene in and that challenge the university while having their centers of gravitation in collectives that are engaged in combative decolonial struggles. Ours is simultaneously a struggle-based, inter-institutional, transatlantic, transnational, and transcontinental combative decolonial project with nodes in Africa via South Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. We cross borders and connect struggles from the ground up, thereby also strengthening, making visible and linking local and regional projects, initiatives and movements for liberation and decolonization.
Through its various activities, the BlackHouse Kollective simultaneously addresses problems of primary and secondary education in the townships and in universities. Its work directly challenges the traditional linear (and racist) approach to education, according to which township youth cannot but fail at university because they are ill prepared. Rather, in BlackHouse’s work, thinking, planning, breaking bread and plotting with elders, parents and the youth in the township become the condition of possibility for decolonizing education at school and university. We are far from a conception of decolonizing the university in terms of dismantling the master’s house. Rather, the BHK itself becomes a home, generated from the ground, that can lead to reimagining and redesigning basic and higher education. From here, BHK’s activities go from teaching African history and the history of Black liberation to children, to, not only welcoming internationally renowned philosophers to the township and introducing them to our approach to knowledge creation, but also engaging the local community in the cultivation of philosophy in African languages.
At the BlackHouse, one can arguably find a clearer demonstration of the decolonization of knowledge than is found in the historically white universities and other universities where #RhodesMustFall led to some changes. We have discussed how the BHK became a place of encounter for fallists and for Black-conscious, Pan-African and decolonial thinkers. But the connections between these groups did not finish with the end of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in 2016. The encounters and collaborations have continued into the present, and they include activities at the decoloniality summer and winter schools at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and UCT. It is also notable that the BlackHouse Kollective organized its own “Black Power, Pan Afrikanism and Decoloniality”
By virtue of its multiple interrelated activities, the BHK paradigm counters academic tendencies to keep decoloniality, Black consciousness and Pan Africanism separate and to reduce them to teaching and research themes. From this perspective, teaching, research, artistic creation and theorizing are all vital parts of decoloniality as a concrete living struggle. At and through the BlackHouse, knowledges from previous movements, from youth, from the streets and from communities in struggle combine with scholarly and artistic works through activities that seek to decolonize consciousness, knowledge and social relations. The BlackHouse is more than just a site; it is a node and a project where decoloniality keeps its combative dimension as well as a paradigm that indicates some of the ways in which the idea of decoloniality can avoid capture.
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Consider that Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang’s important article was published a decade ago and that, since then, there has been a proliferation of writings about decoloniality in multiple areas of the humanities and social sciences. Our point here is that it has become increasingly important to continue challenging purely anticolonial forms of critique and metaphorical conceptions of decolonization, as Tuck and Yang did, but also to address the question of the limits of work that is mainly confined to the liberal academy, including writings that address settler colonialism and struggles for land. The issues are hardly new, but they are taking on new dimensions in the context of a considerable commodification of decolonial thinking and the spread of liberal projects of diversity and inclusion, civic engagement and the public humanities in universities of the global North and South today. Because of our proximity to movements that have sought to decolonize the university, such as the Third World Liberation Front in the US and #RhodesMustFall/#FeesMustFall in South Africa, and our work in related areas within institutions of higher learning, we have witnessed up close the impact of liberal frameworks of knowledge production in the modification and transformation of decolonial forms of knowledge in the academy.
We are pointing to the need for incorporating a racial and decolonial perspective to the analysis of homo academicus (Bourdieu 1988), such as it appears in Fanon’s reflections on the “colonized intellectual” and of intellectuals in the process of decolonization (see Fanon 2004). Fanon engaged in this analysis prior to Bourdieu, who did not understand the extent to which his own work and perspective remained caught up within the orbit of modern/colonial homo academicus. As a result, Bourdieu was unable to acknowledge Fanon’s contributions and he described Fanon’s writings as “frightening”, “false” and “dangerous” (see Bourdieu 1990: 7; Le Sueur 2001: 282).
Building on the vision of the Pan-Africanist Congress, we take the term Occupied Azania to indicate the decolonial combative imaginary that foregrounds the continued liberation claims to the recovery of Indigenous lands stolen through unjust wars of colonial conquest in what has come to be known as South Africa. The term is a critique of the continued settler colonial project of conquest and calls into question the injustice and normalization of antiblack violence embedded within the democratization project that unfolded in 1994 (see Webster 2021).
Abya Yala is an Indigenous name that has been adopted by a large number of Indigenous groups and collectives of Black and racialized peoples throughout the Americas, to refer to the entire region, including the Caribbean. The term might be most commonly used in South and Central America and in some parts of the Caribbean but it is also found in anglophone North America and other areas.
In April 1972, the South African Students’ Organization (SASO) leader and SRC President of the University of the North (Limpopo University) was expelled for his powerful anti-apartheid speech delivered at the graduation ceremony. The speech would change the course of South African politics and later cause his brutal murder. One of the most dedicated and selfless Black consciousness leaders and practitioners, Tiro was killed by a parcel bomb sent to him by the apartheid government in Botswana in 1974 (BlackHouse Kollective 2022).
This refers to the dynamics of reason and unreason in an antiblack world as Fanon describes it in Black Skin, White Masks (2008). Fanon describes a Black person’s engagement with reason in an antiblack world as a “cat and mouse” game: when embracing irrationality, they are countered with reason, and when adopting reason, they are found as limited because they fail to engage with “true rationality” (Fanon 2008: 99, 111). Lewis Gordon often describes this as follows: “When Blacks walk in the door, Reason walks out” (Gordon 1997: 29). For related critical explorations in the phenomenology of whiteness, see Gordon (2000) and Ahmed (2007).