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Foremost experts in the academia have argued that Southern Africa is yet to transcend colonialist and apartheid realities, many years after independence.
This observation was part of the many others made at the last Toyin Falola Interview Series held on Sunday and streamed on various social media platforms, television and online radio platforms.
The panel which consisted of very distinguished academics noted that there is an urgent need to strengthen decolonial studies and push for better representations of weak and alternative voices, particularly those of colonized regions of the world. It was also stated that there must be a deliberate attempt to strengthen decolonial networks.
Speaking at the interaction with the theme on Decolonization/Decoloniality were prominent scholars such as Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Professor Walter D. Mignolo, Professor Shose Kessi, Professor Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Professor Julia Suarez-Krabbe and Professor Oyewumi Oyeronke.
In his intervention, Professor Sabelo stated that “I am from Zimbabwe and I was born at a time when the region of Southern Africa was engulfed in armed liberation struggles and Zimbabwe prosecuted 15 years of armed liberation struggle. My consciousness was influenced by this epic struggle against colonialism. Southern America is the place where I think from, where I am epistemically located. It was the last part of the continent to undergo ‘decolonisation’, if you like, with Angola 1975 and Zimbabwe 1980, Namibia 1990, and South Africa 1994. So in the Southern African region, colonialism and apartheid are not just a past in the true sense of the word, they are actually a living reality which we are still trying to transcend. At the university, I studied both history and economic history. In the economic history, the dominant approach then was what we called ‘The third world dependency school’. Outside the university, there was also another very influential school which was pushed by the southern African political economic series which pushed the issue of political economy, class analysis and pan-Africanism. ”
Speaking of her contributions to Decolonial Studies, Professor Julia told the gathering that “I was born and raised in Colombia by a Colombian father and a Danish mother. I was born into the Colombian war. As a child, there were efforts of many that had been about negotiating peace. At about 10 or 11 years old, I wondered why it was difficult to get peace. That question has stayed with me for a long time in a sense that also questions what makes people not want to work for justice, equity or the dignity of everyone. We had to leave Colombia when I was 12 because of the war so I grew up in Denmark where I am now, and I took my university studies here. When it became possible for me to come back to Colombia through an exchange agreement, I did and so I ended up finishing my Master’s degree in Colombia and having it validated in Denmark. I stayed in Colombia and worked with feminist movements and I started connecting and attending the meetings of social movements that were discussing what to do with the war. We were working for the defense of our human rights. This helped save the lives of some people immediately but the struggle continued. I started to work on those questions; I was lucky to receive the permission to work with the spiritual authorities for people in Colombia whom I discussed these questions of what would human rights be from their epistemological, cosmological view point. Even after completing my PhD here in Denmark, it also became difficult to discuss racism with colleagues over here. I began to address racism in Danish communities. I also began to connect with social movements who tried to put this in their agenda. That is how I have continued my work, particularly in doing so with Colombia. I must say that we are living in very scary times in Europe, the world in general. We are having rising levels of fascism in Europe and also the normalization of racism in public speech very much and also what is perceived as progressive left. There is an escalation of this with the current intensification of Israel’s colonial project in Pakistan.”
On her part, Professor Oyewumi told the gathering that the urge to understand how colonialism impacted the African family formed the background of her scholarship. According to her, “My going to Zimbabwe on a Fulbright in 2014/2015 is because I don’t think Africans understand enough about the differences between settler colonization and non-settler colonization. I come from Nigeria and yes, Zimbabwe was colonized by the British and so was Nigeria but I saw a vast gulf in the ways in which this colonization went and that continues to influence my thinking on colonization and then it was compounded a year later when I spent my sabbatical year at the University of South Africa at an institute been run by Sabelo. All those things had an impact on me. I was born in Nigeria and I attended the University of Ibadan but one of the things that I discovered that I missed at that university was that I was trained as a political scientist but a historian. But history was a very hot discipline at the university when I was there but I didn’t know it. But I became interested in sociology, not because I took so many courses in sociology. I took one course: The Sociology of the Family. That course was taught by an Italian woman, and we didn’t talk about the African family. We were talking about families in East London; we were talking about families in Europe. But the course did make an impression on me that I wanted to talk about the family. I wanted to go beyond the state which was what political scientists were talking about. I also became interested in the family because of my personal experiences. I am from a large family quite different from the families of my friends many of whose mothers had gone to college. They had been thoroughly schooled in western norms. My mother was the complete opposite. I always could see the differences between the family in which I was growing up and the families of what I would call my so-called modern friends. I started thinking of the impact of colonization on the African families. I started to see divisions. This was a time I had never heard of gender, women studies but I knew I wanted to do something on family and colonization. By the time I went to graduate school at the University of California, I applied to do sociology.”
