The Thirsty Vine
Physical decolonisation is conceptually simple; it is the domestication of sovereignty, the relinquishment of political control by foreign powers. This has long since been achieved. But unsatisfied with second place in their place of birth, South Africans rightly have set about to redefine the trajectory of the culture. The problem with philosophical decolonisation is that far too often, opposition to former colonists does not take the shape of a return to tradition to cultivate new fruits and flowers, but the purchase of cut flowers from a rival florist. In Africa, as in many other places, rebels against the West European powers did not invent new ways of thinking, nor did they root themselves in old ways of thinking and lean their vines on the trellis of civilisation, instead, they sufficed to sow the seeds of Marxist dogma, with some minor variations.
Strangely, none of the scholars of the new decolonisation movement have thought to turn to country which has faced these challenges before - Japan. The Japanese first acquired their written language from the Chinese, before inventing their own. They started out by borrowing from the foreign, before eventually realising what was and wasn't compatible in it, eventually turning to cultivating their roots, with little preconception of what the flowers out to look like, but rather an honest recognition of the native soil conditions. We are now in the midst of a drought, and until something waters our nation, its roots will likely die.
The Tender Roots
South Africa is a country of many soils, tropical, desert, escarpment, alpine, temperate and mediterranean. Likewise, it is home to many "new natives" and archaic traditions which form a dense undergrowth waiting to break forth from beneath the blackened shade of post-Marxist, postcolonial corruption. Their natures are varied: the honour and ceremonialism of the Zulu, the reverent, prophetic mysticism of the Xhosa, the achievement-driven Sotho-Tswana continuum, the Liberal pragmatism of the Anglos, the soilbound republican self-sufficiency of the Boer, the compassionate, stoic pessimism of the Coloured Cape, and the religious milieu of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. It is out of these that any future thought must spring, respecting the aesthetic and moral roots that feed the stem of our body politic.
Much like the Japanese Shinto, the Southern Bantu have an embedded practice of veneration to spirits and ancestors which has survived despite prophetic religions and foreign civilisation - a Shinto wa Bantu if you will. But if this were the only similarity, it would be unremarkable. What is particularly interesting, is that African spirits and Japanese kami are not the gods and demons of the West, even if Christianity has played a role in colouring the Southern experience of animism. Appeasing or appealing to spirits is always deemed a dangerous enterprise, since the true desire of these entities can never be known except by rare insight. They also have a strong communitarian consciousness.
Botho and Ubuntu are much misunderstood. Like every culture-bound concept, they must be seen as a double-edged sword. For example, it is quite common to refer to people from outside the community, race, religion or tribe, with noun classes which usually denote animals or objects (le; ma), rather than the human classes which designate people (mo; ba). On the other hand, they conceive of human beings as community-bound, and duty-bound to the community, acquiring status through embracing a useful role in the community, hence Mbiti's now-clicheed quote - "I am am because we are". Each has a part to play in the social organism, as inextricable as orchids and mycorrhizal fungi.
In conversation with intelligent uneducated black South Africans, particularly of older generations, I perceive a similar manner to the Japanese; a desire to harmonise. Similarly, the polite but direct form of disagreement, like an evangelical appeal to save the other's soul maintains common ground, and can be seen in Afrikaans political discussions - it is an appeal to perceive a truth, rather than to discover one, as in the Anglo tradition, where, like in analytical philosophy, the emphasis on transparency, simple language and dispassionate explanation calls to us to consider conflicting options without coming to blows.
Much like in traditionally rooted societies like Japan, the Southern Bantu nations have a profound respect for social rank and status, and woebetide he who disrespects his elders or superiors. Failure to accept one's place in society causes misery, that's for sure. Only in South Africa, where race continues to define expectations, understanding one's station can be difficult to impossible - there is no reasonable way in which one's station can be defined on the basis of race or ethnicity. But we must understand and engage in these things nonetheless. The Botho (and to a similar extent, Ubuntu) approaches to social status depend largely on embedded social roles of resource provision - what good do you provide? The evidence in your social value is how many people daily rely on your services. Much like the Eastern notion of "face", African status is a resource.
This is an easily perverted system. In the modern world, the pursuit of status in traditional value systems must find specific places to root itself, or else lose itself in materialism, identitarianism and narcissism. The constant aspiration to accumulate status must be tempered with a transcendental aim to self perfection. Thus, the urge to build oneself up becomes sublimated and invested in a self-image bound to its service to the community, but not dependent on superficial markers of success like recognition or money. These roots can only be found in the professions.
Under welfare socialism, status is pursued by stealing from the taxpayer and building patronage networks. This reduces Botho to material wealth just as much as the American greed-driven capitalist image. This image of the American Dream is largely a Marxist construction - much like the Afrikaner ethic, the American Dream was, and to a lesser extent these days, is defined by self-sufficiency, honest living and providing for a family. The Bantu conception of the ideal social role is the same, only at a greater scale - one attempts to provide for as many as possible under one's own name, whether materially or spiritually.
One of the most notable features of traditional thought and rhetoric is the nature and role of Zulu praise poems. The rhetoric relies on evocation and implication rather than declaration. The virtual audience (the ancestor) becomes the means by which the Bongani can appeal to the real audience without directly calling for anything controversial, and yet make dramatic calls to action nonetheless. The significance of the ancestor lends legitimacy to the evocation, and the evocation provides a medium to non-confrontationally introduce novel ideas, or polish the legitimacy of venerable ones.
There is yet another danger here - how one draws the boundaries of community defines what these calls to action entail. And which ancestors (or philosophers) one appeals to, can lead to vastly different outcomes. There is always a danger of exclusionary radicalism that must be avoided. We must proceed with a light touch.
The Pollen Brush
Japan’s attitude in adopting European Culture was problematic in every respect. The Japanese did not try to transplant the roots of the plant, but simply cut off eye-catching flowers [...] but the roots that could have produced such blossoms did not come to grow in our country. Nishida Kitarō
There are two successful traditions which found a way around foreign cultural domination, and yet managed to generate a new native corpus. Most Eastern Civilisations have not needed to do this, having a pre-existing scholarly tradition ready to hand, like India, China and the Islamic world. But in Japan, and certain parts of Africa, prior to the foreign domination of Chinese and Western culture respectively, the culture was not emphatically understood at an institutional level, dispersed as it was through the myriad social relations which characterised everyday life.
One of the most peculiar features of the Japanese tradition is how remarkably distinct it is from the Western antagonism, or the Chinese dogmatism. It consists of a series of standard manoeuvres which arise from social conditions not too different from the precolonial Southern Bantu. A quasi-feudal arrangement based on social ties and inherited status, subsumed like cells in a great organism. Even the English once thought this way, before Classical thought dominated - the Great Chain of Being, much like the Japanese and the Zulu, saw the monarch as the embodiment of the spirit of the people which linked them to the transcendent by a coextensive relationship.
When Japanese thinkers assume two items are related (whether the items be physical entities, ideas, persons, social structures, etc.), they commonly begin by examining how the items internally overlap (how they interrelate) rather than by looking for something additional (a third item whether it be another thing, idea, force, or whatever) that externally connects or bonds them. In the case of the external relation, if the relation dissolves (or is omitted from the analysis), a and b each retains its own integrity without loss. Only the context of their connection disappears. In the case of an internal relation, on the other hand, if the relation dissolves (or is omitted from the analysis), a loses part of itself, as does b. For instance, as a legal arrangement, marriage is an external, contractual relation into which two individuals enter. Should that arrangement end, each of the pair returns to his or her originally discrete individuality and attendant rights. As a loving arrangement, however, marriage is an internal relation in which two people share part of themselves and should the love connection dissolve, each person loses part of what one had formerly been, the part that had been invested in the other. As Emily Dickinson (1884) wrote after losing a beloved friend, she became a “crescent” of her former self. Stanford Encyclopedia
Beyond simply seeing conceptual relations differently, the Japanese have several very different styles and modes of argumentation. Rather than pursuing refutation, the Japanese will try to save as much of the opponent's viewpoint as they can, demonstrating magnanimity and a desire to cooperate. By relegating the opposing view, one acknowledges that it is true, but is already accounted for in one's own view, and therefore adds little to nothing. By allocating, one acknowledges that the interlocutor has something to say, but that it only applies in a limited context. In hybridisation, the aim is clear - to harmonise and seek reconciliation. I think that all three have their place in a philosophical nationbuilding project.
Essay writing in Japan also follows a different mode. The Western one can be summed up in three parts, like a Greek play. My first philosophy teacher put it this way - say what you're going to say (introduce the subject and explain the terms), say it (lay out you evidence and argument) and then say what you've said (concisely recapitulate and affirm the conclusion). The Japanese offer this as only one style, called jo ha kyuu. They additionally have several other styles. Traditional essays introduce a baseline theme, and then string along several seemingly unrelated topics, threading them back to the original topic. Modern newspaper articles use what Hinds and Yutani call a "tempura" style, in which you bury the lead, by introducing a collection of facts, differentiating the relevant from the superfluous, before finishing by delivering the argument and conclusion at the end. If you are familiar with Christopher Hitchens's essays, you know tempura.
The most unusual perhaps is the Kishoutenketsu, a four-part rhetorical structure based on traditional theatre.
Ki 起き: The characters are daughters of Itoya in Osaka.
Shou 承しょう: The eldest daughter is sixteen and the younger one is fourteen.
Ten 転てん: Historically in Japan, warriors have killed their enemy with bows and arrows.
Ketsu 結けつ: However, the daughters of Itoya kill only with their eyes.
The role of Ten is to recontextualise the story and set up the final twist, an essential element to creating impact through surprise.
The Japanese went through something analogous to a philosophical "decolonisation" of their own - during the peaceful Edo period, the philosopher Motoori Norinaga, among others, laboured to reformulate an indigenous intellectual tradition, called Kokugaku. His work arose from reflections on traditional Japanese literature and poetry, and his philosophy, focused as it was on the creation of a Japanese sense of communal identity, did not abandon Chinese ideas, and was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Wang Yangming, who believed human being possess an innate intuition of right and wrong, which is easily perverted by corrupt and sophisticated reasoning.
When Western Philosophy was introduced, many Japanese picked and chose without incorporating. Responding to what he deemed a disjointed and decontextualised system of borrowed negations and absolutes, Kitaro Nishida promoted the notion of basho, a form of non-dualism which maintains difference and opposition as different poles or aspects of the same entity - a way of resolving antagonisms and rooting thought once more. In Western philosophy, as in the Western legal tradition, rhetoric follows an adversarial model. In China, interpretation and reapplication of dogma is the order of the day. But in Japan, there is a third way, in which common ground is sought.
It is not only the Japanese who are capable of this sort of thing. Eritrean philosopher Tsenay Serequeberhan rejected both Marxism and liberal cosmopolitanism as too destructively absolute, and as the imposition of European particularism under a false universalism, respectively. But rather than treating European ideas as anathema in themselves, he accepts that the material culture of Africa is underdeveloped, and again, rather than taking a wholesale approach, advocated piecemeal appropriation - the adoption of discrete ideas and practices to the extent that they harmonise and augment the autochthonous African cultural ecosystem.
In much the same way, Ghana has produced prolific philosophers who combine an appreciation of Western logic and essay composition with a native cultural sensitivity. Perhaps having gained a sense of ownership so much earlier than other African nations, untainted by the Western cultural revolution of the 1960s, they managed to maintain a more contemplative attitude. Kwasi Wiredu used the similarities between analytical philosophy and the native rhetorical traditions to fashion a new epistemology. Kwame Gyekye spent almost a lifetime delving into the minds of rural elders to resuscitate, preserve and hybridise the native wisdom of past generations before it faded, and to re-envision Ghanaian thought anew, as a facet of total human culture. Rather than treating Western philosophy as a force to be negated, he employed rationally refined Akan perspectives to address core questions in analytic philosophy.
This cultural cross-pollination may be the product of colonialism, but much as the Mughal conquest of India eventually gave rise to tradition of Sikhism, an earnest engagement with an instinct to preservation will eventually give rise to new creative means of contextualised expression, political, philosophical and spiritual.
The Rusting Chainsaw
...and Moses was a stutterer,
yes Moses was a stammerer,
And Moses was a murderer
Attempts by African intellectuals to negotiate the relationship between theirs and European culture has not always been so beautiful. As the Benin philosopher Paulin Hountondji warns, the pursuit of "ethnophilosophy" - characterised by static, essentialised images of native culture, relativism and anti-European negation - can only lead to darkness. Among black Westerners (Americans, Carribbeans, etc.), the archetypical error in this category is that made by Aimee Cesaire - the elevation of negritude.
Several African postcolonial philosophers have fallen into the trap of negritude, from Leopold Senghor to Steve Biko. Perhaps out of a self-conscious double-identity, these quasi-colonised black men often embraced perverse, race-relative concepts of reason. Negritude was soundly criticised for its relegation of African and black culture to the sort of thing whites stereotyped it as. This is perhaps an inevitable in a colonial context, where the subject becomes deracinated and set against a cartoon backdrop, forced to alienate themselves from their roots to ascend the social hierarchy. Fanon rightly sought to escape this ironic fate, but in his desperation, he embraced a neo-Hegelian philosophy of the sword - we become ourselves by slaughtering the other. Emmanuel Eze believed that reason itself was a poison, and believed that the entirety of Kant's oeuvre could be treated as intrinsically and inseparably racist.
Even attempts to delve into reviving African traditions can be poisoned. The eccentric occult mystic Credo Mutwa describes other South Africans in the most disgusting and unflattering stereotypes, claiming in My People that, for example, the Xhosa are born thieves. John Mbiti helped himself to extravagant and unfounded generalisations about the functions of languages he barely understood in order to paint a picture of an irreconcilably distinct spontaneous African Philosophy. All of this aggressive relativism and anti-rationalism found its apogee in the embrace of dogmatic revolutionary Marxism. What has occurred in the twentieth century, is the supplication of Africa to colonisation by Leninism, Maoism and other Socialisms. We forget today how detrimental the effects of this in Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Algeria - starvation, mass slaughter and the planned uprooting of communities, the erasure of cultures, on a scale comparable to the worst of colonial excess. The effect of these revolutionary ideologies applied to ethnicity has an even darker effect, as seen in Rwanda and Burundi.
The ANC, dependent entirely on Soviet funding for their successes, instituted tactics and dogma passed down from their Russian patrons to eliminate autochthonous political opposition. Both the Western-philosophical fusion ideology of Black Consciousness and the traditionalism of the Inkatha Freedom party were subject to a totalitarian regime of unification, disguised by vigorous lies now embedded into the system as accepted truths. Reading academic articles on the "Third Force" reveals a lot of orthodox party-line agreement, but little to no evidence. On the other hand, in-depth historical analyses like that of Anthea Jeffrey reveal the ANC for what it was - a foreign Third Force in its own right.
The entire edifice of South African liberation was taken over from without by a foreign power hungry for influence, and crushed the blooming flowers of native joy beneath an iron heel smudged with the smoke of tire fires. The success of the ANC led to a new myth: that mob violence, murder and terrorism are the means for achieving positive change and punishing transgression, and that tradition, truth and tolerance are hindrances to revolution. They so dominate narratives of political morality that they have established a hegemony of Marxist ethics over the entire nation, which the Fallists are only the latest evolutionary stage of. Their "decolonised" curriculum is a hybridisation of American intersectionalism, Marxist economics and Hegelian negritude.
Much of the decolonisation dialogue in academia even before Fallism has revolved around a combination of simplistic nativism, and a bitter, confrontational post-Marxism. Faced with a modernity and a civilised tradition inherited from a foreign culture, most turn to ablation, deconstruction and eliminationism. Democracy is envisioned as a zero-sum battle between opposing groups, and unity means submission, not compromise or harmonisation.
In South Africa today, this poison tree has hybridised itself with the postmodern dodder weed, and turned itself into a great strangler fig, climbing the institutions left behind by white South Africa and undermining them from within before choking out the sunlight for all new shoots. The reason for this is that the three major political movements of African liberation in our country have been totally overshadowed by the Tripartite Alliance, a Soviet puppet with its strings cut off, flailing limply and directionlessly on the stage, threatening to knock over the paraffin lamps and burn the whole edifice down.
It may not appear this way to those who have embodied this ethos, since to them, the ANC having failed to uphold their revolutionary standards is evidence of compromise, even supplication. Little do they realise the compromises made by the other side - to many conservative Afrikaners, de Klerk was a traitor who handed the nation to its enemies to be destroyed. And in an unexpected way, they are correct. Black Consciousness and Inkhata were not in any way attached to foreign powers. If the NP had brokered for peace in '77, the nation might have stood a chance. Had the autochthonous ideologies succeeded, instead of the ANC through its campaign of terror and bloodshed, they would be ruling with a combination of indigenously grown ideas, not dependent at any level on the influence of foreign totalitarians like the Soviet Union.
The disappearance of this foreign power coincided with the return of Mandela, a man who in his own writings always backed a sort of liberal, unionist nationalism, carving an independent path between any foreign powers. Mbeki took this to heart, attempting to protect the nation from IMF depredations through budget cutbacks, and pursuing a human-rights dominated foreign policy. The new dispensation came on the back of a repudiation of the ANC's philosophy by the very fabric of reality, and it has taken a new generation ignorant of the communist disaster to pressure them to return to their old manifestos.
As this new generation, raised on the myths of revolution, internalising the antinomian ethic of liberation, has taken flight, they now pressure the authorities to align with their assumptions, holding them to the standards they hypocritically waved from the battlements as they they walked up the rampart rather than taking it by force. They want revenge on whites, they want power, and they want revolution. A Black National Socialism. Such a system of thought has little time for variation or accommodation.
The vigorous denial and aggressive rejection of the other is a typically modern (more so postmodern) effect. It comes from the radical, revolutionary tradition, which can be found both in revolutionary Marxism and apocalyptic Christianity (and some forms of Islam). Lenin and Che, Nonqawuse and Makhana. Terms cannot be negotiated, and all opposition is heresy. No reasoning can be had with heretics. Paradoxically, reason is a tool of the enemy, yet the de-colonialist left running the academy today delineates itself with inviolable boundaries of dogmatic reason, shutting out alternative constructions. What the revolutionary tradition inevitably encourages is elimination of opposition, and is inherently intolerant.
The ruling party publicly projects pragmatism, tolerance and harmony, while covertly engaging in elimination. The Party today is split, and the EFF, differing in no significant way from the ANC philosophically, fully embodies the eliminationist impulse. Internal disputes are violent and often deadly; serious political opposition is treated as unforgivable evil, even as the enemy changes day to day. "Is Zuma friend or foe, Julius?" "Ask me tomorrow, baba". But again, some lean more in one direction than the other. When South Africa is finally remade in its fourth dispensation, I hope we find ourselves in the shade of the gentle trees, not the shadow of a stone-hearted colossus. In the meantime, I fear our forest is petrifying, as the ANC and other radical parties edge ever closer to the realisation of their dogmatic plan. Azania is a monolith, and nothing grows in its shade. Mzansi is a garden, where all roots mingle and feed off each other's health.
The Pruning Knife
One cannot reason with those who will not reason. True dialogue presupposes a general assumption of rationality, truthfulness and openness to the views of others. This is a tall order at the best of times, but it does not mean that we must give up all hope of dialogue; it simply means that we must try to find another form of communication to get our message across. This is what philosophy demands of us (of me) at this stage of our history. - Adam Small
Now that we have so many tools before us, for which do we reach? My solution is that one must adopt a reciprocative approach to political and philosophical interlocutors: harmonise with the harmonic, part with the secessionists, debunk the skeptics, deconstruct the deconstructionists, overpower the supremacists and eliminate the eliminationists. This would not be a break with the rhetorical habits of South Africans. In a pluralist country, being one thing to one group and another to others is part and parcel of the negotiation of social space. Learning to engage in a more diverse rhetorical traditions, and to formalise and teach them, would go a long way in providing the bed for new philosophies. After all, they must be new philosophies; society is not what it was.
Adam Small, much in the spirit of the Kokugaku school, sought to cultivate a native Coloured philosophical approach from the immersion in poetry and theatre. But he never shied away from reaching into the works of NP van Wyk Louw for inspiration. Nor did Sol Plaatje, after his extensive work codifying the Setswana language, deny the wealth of Shakespeare. Dada Masilo and others find natural expression in the effortless fusion of ballet and African dance. The embrace of the Western Orchestra and the Zulu vocal harmony traditions of praise singing has gifted us the majesty of Mzilikazi Khumalo's uShaka KaSenzangakhona and the first Zulu opera, Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu. Zulu has already produced a wealth of modern cultural renewal through its radio plays, unheard by most South Africans. Vuka, Mzansi.
We are a country, but not a nation. We are a family of nations, coextensive and inextricable, formed in internal relation with one another through unchosen proximity, intermigration, war, struggle and pain, false promises and unsettled disputes. Our failure to achieve unity comes from two extremes - separation and homogenisation. We cannot dissect a living thing and expect it to live, nor can we expect a human made only of muscle to move without the tension provided by sinew and bone. The truth is found in realising that we must embrace a multitude of influences and traditions, and cultivate the perfection of each wherever we can, tending to the preservation of our roots and our heritage, and to each other's heritage.
We are a collection of peoples dominated by our obsessions with botany, with soil. A nation of farmers and miners, botanists, gardners and geologists, crystal vibing hippies mud-spattered soldiers and smoke-billowing offerers to the ancestors. Our work in the sacred thicket gave rise to the earliest and most complete soil and flora surveys in modern history, because our diversity and the quality of our heritage was so rich that none who settled here, white or black, could resist the fruits of our traditions of knowledge. But these are being swept away by a tide of modernity and revolution, neither interested in getting their hands dirty with the slow work of heritage maintenance. If we can recognise that our country has forced us to be family, we can see that we have a shared duty to weed the garden.
In life, we do not always get to choose where we end up. Some of us are suited to some things and not to others. It is only through trial and error that we can figure these things out. But in the error lies the finding - where we end up after trying and failing is often where we belong in a sense - not in that we deserve to be low or high, but that we deserve to be doing what we are doing, and can transcend it through achieving perfection in our craft. By focusing on the task at hand and treating it as a sacred duty, only then can we achieve that balance of pragmatism, stoicism, reverence, community service and self-sufficiency - a grand ecumenical garden.
Let our roots embrace one another.