Decolonising the Human , livre ebook

WITS University Press - Siphamandla Zondi , Tendayi Sithole , Brian Sibanda , Charmika Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara , Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni , Sibonokuhle Ndlovu , Pinky Patricia Ndlovu , Morgan Ndlovu , Robert Maseko , Nokuthula Hlabangane , Jojolola Fasuyi , Cary Burnett , Olayinka Akanle , Gbenga S Adejare , William Mpofu , Melissa Steyn

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African scholars examine the construction of ‘the human’ as it’s been conceived through the power of coloniality, arguing for indigenous knowledge systems and traditional wisdom to be part of the conversation.
Decolonising the Human examines the ongoing project of constituting ‘the human’ in light of the durability of coloniality and the persistence of multiple oppressions. The ‘human’ emerges as a deeply political category, historically constructed as a scarce existential resource. Once weaponised, it allows for the social, political and economic elevation of those who are centred within its magic circle, and the degradation, marginalisation and immiseration of those excluded as the different and inferior Other, the less than human.
Speaking from Africa, a key site where the category of the human has been used throughout European modernity to control, exclude and deny equality of being, the contributors use decoloniality as a potent theoretical and philosophical tool, gesturing towards a liberated, pluriversal world where human difference will be recognised as a gift, not used to police the boundaries of the human. Here is a transdisciplinary critical exploration of a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and decolonial studies.
Acronyms and Abbreviations

Chapter 1 The Trouble with the Human – William Mpofu and Melissa Steyn

Chapter 2 The Invention of Blackness on a World Scale – Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Patricia Pinky Nkete

Chapter 3 To What Extent Are We All Humans? Of Culture, Politics, Law and LGBT Rights in Nigeria – Olayinka Akanle, Gbenga S. Adejare and Jojolola Fasuyi

Chapter 4 Humanness and Ableism: Construction and Deconstruction of Disability – Sibonokuhle Ndlovu

Chapter 5 Doing the Old Human – Cary Burnett

Chapter 6 Being a Mineworker in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Decolonial Perspective – Robert Maseko

Chapter 7 Meditations on the Dehumanisation of the Slave– Tendayi Sithole

Chapter 8 ‘Language as Being’ in the Politics of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o – Brian Sibanda

Chapter 9 The Underside of Modern Knowledge: An Epistemic Break from Western Science – Nokuthula Hlabangane

Chapter 10 The Fiction of the Juristic Person: Reassessing Personhood in Relation to People – C.D. Samaradiwakera-Wijesundara

Chapter 11 The Cultural Village and its Idea of the ‘Human’ – Morgan Ndlovu

Chapter 12 A Fragmented Humanity and Monologues: Towards a Diversal Humanism – Siphamandla Zondi

Contributors

Index

Sujets

People with Disabilities

Social Science

Sociologie, société et politique

General officer

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Publié par	WITS University Press
Date de parution	01 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776146536
Langue	English

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Decolonising the Human
Decolonising the Human
Reflections from Africa on Difference and Oppression
Edited by Melissa Steyn and William Mpofu
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
www.witspress.co.za
Compilation Editors 2021
Chapters Individual contributors 2021
Published edition Wits University Press 2021
First published 2021
http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22021036512
978-1-77614-651-2 (Paperback)
978-1-77614-655-0 (Hardback)
978-1-77614-652-9 (Web PDF)
978-1-77614-653-6 (EPUB)
978-1-77614-678-9 (Open Access PDF)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
This book is freely available through the OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ).
Project manager: Elaine Williams
Copyeditor: Karen Press
Proofreader: Inga Norenius
Indexer: Rita Sephton
Cover design: Hybrid Creative
Typeset in 10 point Garamond Pro
Contents
Acronyms and abbreviations
1 The Trouble with the Human
2 The Invention of Blackness on a World Scale
3 To What Extent Are We All Humans? Of Culture, Politics, Law and LGBT Rights in Nigeria
4 Humanness and Ableism: Construction and Deconstruction of Disability
5 Doing the Old Human
6 Being a Mineworker in Post-Apartheid South Africa: A Decolonial Perspective
7 Meditations on the Dehumanisation of the Slave
8 Language as Being in the Politics of Ngu gi wa Thiong o
9 The Underside of Modern Knowledge: An Epistemic Break from Western Science
10 The Fiction of the Juristic Person: Reassessing Personhood in Relation to People
11 The Cultural Village and its Idea of the Human
12 A Fragmented Humanity and Monologues: Towards a Diversal Humanism
Contributors
Index
Acronyms and abbreviations Aids
acquired immune deficiency syndrome AMCU
Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union DEIC
Dutch East India Company EEIC
English East India Company EIC
East India Company HIV
human immunodeficiency virus IDP
Integrated Development Plan LGBT
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender LGBTIQ+
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex or questioning NASA
National Aeronautics and Space Administration NUM
National Union of Mineworkers RDP
Reconstruction and Development Programme TB
tuberculosis UN
United Nations US
United States USA
United States of America
1 The Trouble with the Human
William Mpofu, Melissa Steyn
All communities create notions of their place within the array of sentient and non-sentient beings with whom they share their worlds. The principal trouble with the grand construction of the human of Euro-modernity, however, is that it was founded on unhappy circumstances and for tragic purposes. Man , as a performative idea, created inequalities and hierarchies usable for the exclusion and oppression of the other. The status of the human was self-attributed to dominant people powerful enough to name themselves and define others. That which was categorised as non-human became things, reduced to resources, usable and disposable by the unapologetic humans . The attribute human, in other words, is not self-evident or assured. It can be wielded; given and taken away. The threat of its withdrawal from, or permanent denial to, weaker peoples in peripheralised spaces continues to define life within a climate of fear that makes being human a fragile condition and an uncertain reality (Soyinka 2004 ). These dispensable others and objects of power are found everywhere as black people, women, the poor and homeless, refugees and foreigners, gay, lesbian, queer and trans people, the old and vulnerable, people living with disabilities and other others.
The prevailing constructs of man and human began with the durable handiwork of (male) European humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who needed convenient and powerful tools for classifying themselves and categorising others (Mignolo 2015 , 158). The male Westerner, as the Christian and paradigmatic human , entered into relationships on grossly unequal terms. Conquerors in the shape of patriarchs, empire builders, merchants and missionaries employed different approaches in disciplining the bodies of the conquered through violence, arresting the appetites and desires of the natives with goods and services, and dominating the minds and hearts of the subjects with gospels and hymns. Conquest was designed to make the conquered docile and obedient, subject to exploitation and ownership.
Mahmood Mamdani ( 2013 ) elucidates this political principle as define and rule , where power is able to name and by so doing dominate its subjects as inadequate people with deficits and lacks, whose oppression may therefore not be so morally wrong. Power has distributive privilege and enjoys the resources of classifying and categorising the objects and subjects around itself. Human differences, in that scheme of constructions, classifications and hierarchisations, are not expressions of human diversity, but excuses for the oppression and exploitation of the other. Power, without naming itself, is able to name, define, judge and place others as weaker. It enjoys the privilege of presenting itself in salvationist, protective, developmentalist, democratic and humanitarian terms that hide the domination it exercises and the often deadly consequences of this for those who have lost their equality and full membership of the human category.
The paradox of Western modernity, therefore, is that its grand rhetoric which announces freedom, happiness, progress and development has marched hand in hand with the logic of coloniality. The coloniality of Western modernity has participated in the appropriation of natural resources, exploitation of labour, legal control of undesirables , imposition of the interests and world view inherent in a capitalist economy, and denial of the full humanity of the disempowered and the impoverished (Mignolo 2015 , 164). The condition of the oppressed is not a condition resulting from natural causes. Gendered violence and inequality are not the inevitable consequence of biology. Peripheralised countries are not undeveloped, their people are not powerless and poor; the countries have been underdeveloped, the people impoverished and also disempowered through displacement and dispossession.
The enslavement and colonisation of Africans was based on their removal from the category of the human. Those who were to be enslaved and colonised first had to lose their human equality and be characterised as inferior and incomplete beings. The work of decoloniality in Africa, therefore, becomes a search for completeness through the recovery, restoration and recognition of the equal belonging of black people to the world. Dani Wadada Nabudere ( 2011 , 1) correctly notes that Afrikology as a philosophy is the search for human wholeness in a world that has been defined by loss of equality and denial of the full humanity of the conquered and oppressed. The fight for liberation as a form of social justice is also a struggle for the recovery of denied and lost humanity. Our book is positioned within this decolonial struggle.
The philosophical dilemma of the human in the Global South
Where and when exactly did the rain begin to beat us? is a philosophical question that is posed by Chinua Achebe ( 1989 , 43) in his meditation on the African political and social condition. Achebe is one of the African thinkers who have demanded a return to historical sources and political genealogies and provenances in search of the time and place in which Africans lost their equality within the human family. Achebe ponders the hopes and impediments that have defined attempts at understanding between the North and the South, and amongst people positioned differently within intersecting power relations.
Achebes demand to know what happened to the common humanity of human beings reminds us of the unstable link between the human and the humane. How some humans use power to monopolise being human and expel others from the human family remains a haunting philosophical dilemma of inhumanity that has a long historical trajectory in the South and in the North. Socrates, a questioning mind, left the fourth century BCE with the haunting question of why everyone on earth seemed to believe in humanity but not in the existence of humans (Plato 2010 , 24). He was perplexed by the fact that everywhere, from religious pulpits to political podiums, beautiful things were being said about the love of humanity, and yet the majority of human beings were being oppressed everywhere. Multitudes were being thingified right in the centre of Athens, the city state celebrated as the cradle of reason and democracy, much as coloniality was born and bred right at the centre of what has been celebrated as liberty and progress.
In the same vein as Achebe ( 1989 ) pondering the beginnings of the dehumanisation of Africans, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ([1755] 2004 , 1) in the eighteenth century agonised over the origins of inequality among human beings, to the extent that he wished humans could have remained at the level of animals that show respect for life and mercy for the weak among themselves. Yearning for the ways of the animal kingdom was Rousseaus way of condemning the evil done by humans to other humans. To compare the human to the animal, and to favour the animal, becomes an expression of the deepest philosophical indictment of the evil perpetrated by humans. Human success in the arts and the sciences, Rousseau opined, only served to conceal the truth that humans were worse than beasts in their cruel and evil practices.
Friedrich