Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s Espaço Modulado (Modulated Space) (1958) is comprised of a monochromatic modular composition consisting of positive and negative planes, and reflects a moment in Clark’s practice as she moved away from the representational to the sensorial.

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These essays are extracted from The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (1997) and reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher. The first essay, “Women in the South in Relation to Women in the North”, is an excerpt from a paper given to the Afrikagrupperna conference, Stockholm, 13 March 1993. The second, “Women’s Voice in the North-South Dialogue”, was part of a keynote address by El Saadawi to an EEC/Council of Europe conference in Barcelona, 30–31 May 1988.

Women in the South in Relation to Women in the North¹

Egypt, my home country and where I live, is part of Africa of course. Just look at the map and you will be sure of that. I mean the map of the earth, of the natural earth (our very ancient mother goddess) and the natural boundaries – not the boundaries made by the colonialists, who divided Africa into so-called “white Africa” and “black Africa”. I believe we should undo what the colonialists and neocolonialists did and are still doing. We should have one Africa.

Why one Africa? some people ask. Why one Europe? The reasons for one Europe are exactly the same as for one Africa, but the colonialists and neocolonialists accept the idea and practice of one Europe but not the idea and practice of one Africa. It is obvious that the unity of Africa (or of any oppressed continent or country or countries) will be against the colonial or neocolonial powers that exploit them. “Divide and rule” has been the philosophy of exploitation since the evolution of slavery (or the patriarchal class-race system). Divide the earth or the universe into sky (spirit) and earth (body). Divide the country, divide the people into masters and slaves. Divide the human being into body and spirit, or soul or mind. Let the masters, the rulers, the patriarchs and their gods and their philosophers represent the mind and the soul. Let the slaves and women and the devil represent the body, the inferior body, with all its animal instincts and sins.

During the Gulf War in 1991 we saw the face of the so-called “devil” in newspapers and magazines in Europe and the USA. Who was the devil? He was the “enemy” of the USA and Europe – the dictator of Iraq who was oppressing the Kuwaitis and the Kurds, who was violating human rights and democracy and not respecting UN resolutions. Thirty armies from the USA and Europe gathered their high-tech military weapons to punish this devil. This same devil was their good friend when he was fighting another devil (Iran). Who is the devil in Africa now? Who is disobeying the orders of the masters in the USA?

How many times did the South African apartheid government and the Israeli government violate human rights and democracy and fail to respect UN resolutions? In 1993 Israel deported four hundred Palestinians and did not respect the UN resolution that it should return them, but there was no punishment, no war was waged against Israel, there were not even any economic sanctions. Just read the history of the struggle of the South African and Palestinian people, just read the newspapers today and you see the obvious double standard of the rulers in the so-called “first” or “developed” world – what is called now the North.

Can we speak about women in the North separate from men in the North? What do we mean by “women in the North” or “women in the South”? If we mean Western feminism versus feminism in Africa can we separate feminism from politics (international and national)? Can we separate feminism from economics or history or philosophy or religion or medicine (of the body and of the so-called psyche) or sociology or anthropology or science or art?

I am originally a medical doctor. I studied the body separate from the mind. I became a very good physician ignorant of the human being as a whole. I had to study psychology and psychiatry to know more. I had to go beyond the medical sciences to study religion, economics, politics, history, philosophy, etcetera, to understand why I was oppressed as a woman, why Egypt was colonised by the British and other foreign powers, why Africa is suffering hunger, starvation, famines and foreign debt though Africa, as I learned in primary school, is a very rich continent.

Africa is one of the richest continents in the world, rich in both material and human resources. Who made Africa so poor? Just one week ago I asked this question to one of the leading feminists in the USA. She said, “You know, poverty in Egypt or Africa is due to the population problem: women there give birth to more children.” I told her: “Do you think that women and children are the cause and not colonialism or neocolonialism?” She said, “Oh my god, why do you blame others? Why blame the United States and not the local dictatorship or African governments?” I told her: “Of course the local governments in Africa are responsible, but who keeps them in power?” She said: “Their people, their people in Africa elected them and keep them in power.” I told her: “But a few seconds ago you were mentioning dictatorships in Africa, which means no democracy and no real free elections.” She could not answer the question.

Feminists in the USA (and in the North in general) are not all the same. They differ a great deal. Some of them are aware of the link between colonialism or international imperialism and poverty or other problems from which we suffer (women and men) in Africa and other parts of the so-called Third World. A feminist from the North (the USA) called Susan Griffin, who is a poet and a researcher living in California, has this to say:

I wrote “Hunger” [a poem] after seeing an exhibition in Paris of a series of photographs taken by Sebastião Salgado. The photographs document the starvation in a region of Africa known as the Sahel. In the United States we have told ourselves that this is a natural calamity. But if we look more closely at the history of colonialism, we discover a different story. Disregard for the natural ecology of a region goes hand in hand with disregard for the natural rights of people to determine their own fate and to live the way they choose. This pattern of domination and disregard has created many of the famines in Africa. Many African people in areas subject to drought used to grow millet and rotate it seasonally. Millet is an important crop because it can grow with very little water. When the white colonists came to Africa they uprooted the millet and substituted other crops such as wheat. When the weather conditions changed, as the tribal societies that had lived there for centuries understood would happen, the wheat could not withstand the dry spells, and hence a famine was created. Seasons of drought would not have had such a devastating effect on millet, but because of the planting of wheat, terrible starvation resulted.

This pattern has been repeated over and over again and is still being repeated. Today, now not in the name of colonialism but in the name of development.²

How was such an American woman able to know some of the truth about our continent? Because Susan Griffin is not an academic but a poet. She is not a pure scientist using only her intellect to understand the world, but a real artist who does not work with her head only but with all her being. That is why I write novels more than so-called non-fiction. In art you feel whole, with no separation between body and mind, spirit or soul. With no separation between form and content, or art and politics or economics or medicine.

“The oppression of women, especially of women who start to learn, is universal, even though the degree of oppression differs from country to country.”

As a medical doctor in rural Egypt in 1956 I asked myself why poor people became more sick than rich people, and I discovered the relationship between poverty and disease. When I asked myself why people became poor I discovered colonialism and dictatorship and politics. When I asked myself why girls are mutilated by female circumcision I discovered slavery in history and the patriarchal class system. But what happened when I started to discover the original causes of physical and mental diseases? I lost my job in the Ministry of Health in Egypt in 1972 under Sadat. I was placed on the blacklist as a writer and a novelist. In September 1981 I was sent to jail, and I was not released until 25 November 1981, two months after the assassination of Sadat.

But this is a very common story in Africa and the Arab world, and indeed in most countries. The oppression of women, especially of women who start to learn, is universal, even though the degree of oppression differs from country to country. In Africa, because the political and economic systems are not as powerful as in the capitalist, military industrial North, the governments and local dictatorships are fiercer in fighting the opposition. In the North, governments do not mind opposition so long as it does not threaten the class-patriarchal-race system. This is “Western democracy”. We in Africa call it “Hyde Park democracy”: people can talk, they can write, they can demonstrate, so long as they have no real power.³ Real power is the police, the military, capital and religion. Women are outside this real power in the North as well as in the South.

I do not like to divide the globe into North and South. Such a division hides the real causes of oppression and exploitation. There are many local black governments, containing both men and women, who oppress their own people, who collaborate with international colonial and neocolonial powers in the North. There are also many white women and men in the North who fight against their own governments and support people in the South who fight against colonialism and neocolonialism.

In 1982 we established our Arab Women’s Solidarity Association: 30 percent of our members are men fighting with us against the class patriarchal system internationally, nationally and in the family. In 1990 I was in Johannesburg to attend an international writers’ conference and met a lot of women who were fighting against the racist apartheid government. They understand feminism in the same way we understand it in our Arab Women’s Solidarity Association: there is no separation between race, gender or class oppression. There is no separation between war in the Gulf and war in South Africa or war in Bosnia or war in Palestine. The original causes are the same.

Why is it that the international powers hurried to save the Kuwaiti women who were raped by Iraqi soldiers but did not hurry to save women who were raped in Bosnia by the Serbs? I read that at least 30,000 Bosnian women were raped, versus 30 in Kuwait. Everybody now says, if Bosnia had oil … Yes, that is the real problem of the Arab world. Since the discovery of oil, our region, the so-called Middle East, has become a target of colonial and neocolonial exploitation. Since the discovery of the rich raw materials of Africa, the diamonds and other treasures of the earth, Africa has been a target of colonialism and neocolonialism.

On 9 March 1993 an American feminist called Susan Jeffords gave a lecture in Duke University under the title “Rape and US National Identity”. She explained how the US military patriarchal machine used the rape of women as a pretext to launch war against the “villain” or “devil”. She also explained how the “devil” changed all the time according to the economic and political interests of the US government and the multinationals. On 21 February 1993 I participated in a demonstration in Washington, DC, organised by the National Organization of Women (NOW). The demonstration was against the raping of women in Bosnia. It was a very cold Sunday, and hundreds of women and men stood in rain, and sometimes snow, shouting against the oppression of women all over the world, including the USA. There were five speakers, including myself. The US media covered the event on TV and radio and in newspapers, but they censored our speeches. They covered only the descriptive parts, about rape in Bosnia. They cut the points that linked the rape of women to politics and economics.

The media in the North is part of the war against us, the people in Africa and other people in the so-called Third World. In the North it is women, mainly, who support us, and who fight with us against colonialism, whether international or national or in the family.

We are facing an economic and mental crisis in the South as well as in the North. Most countries in the South and the North are facing economic crisis, manifested by high rates of unemployment, foreign debts, inflation and increasing budget deficits. The so-called “only super-power in the world”, the USA, is on the verge of economic collapse, according to President Clinton’s speech to Congress of February 1993. The former Soviet Union is collapsing economically. A young African university woman asked me, “If the US is collapsing economically why do they send military personnel to rescue Somalia from starvation and famine?” I asked her, “Why does the US want to rescue Somalia and not Bosnia, and why do children in Somalia throw stones at the US troops who have come to rescue them or feed them, as the media says?” It seems that those hungry children in Somalia are more aware of politics and the real reasons behind military intervention in Africa than many of our university women and men, and than many African leaders and journalists who participate in the media campaign of brainwashing, in the South as well as in the North.

Women’s Voice in the North–South Dialogue⁴

SO-CALLED FOREIGN AID

When women of the Arab countries started to organise ourselves in the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association we had no funds with which to start the projects we had formulated. So we started to seek assistance from individuals, institutions and organisations within our countries. Then we made attempts to obtain funds from foreign sources. I wrote over one hundred letters to different people and organisations. Some of the Arab petrodollar institutions agreed to assist us but posed conditions that we refused and so this source of assistance never materialised. Then some international bodies in the countries of the North sent us sums for our activities and posed no conditions except the presentation of a final report after the assistance had been expended. But after this initial phase was over, all further requests for assistance were met by complete silence. We could not understand why, but later we came to realise from various sources that this was because we had not complied with these bodies’ view of what a women’s organisation in the South should do. We were an organisation that spoke of patriarchy and class and women’s oppression and tried to organise women and make them more conscious so that they would become a progressive force capable of changing their situation and developing their societies. What they wanted was a women’s organisation that told women they should have fewer babies, that distributed contraceptives and fixed IUDs in the orifices of women’s uteri or developed the kind of “development projects” that have failed all over the Third World and only serve to fill the pockets of those who sponsor them or to change people into instruments of certain policies. So we began to depend on ourselves and in the process found out that we had possibilities that had not been thought of. We were learning to be independent, growing up. We were learning the truth of the saying, “Instead of giving me a fish, teach me how to catch it”, a principle that should apply, and rarely does, to all development aid going to the countries and institutions of the South.

I do not want to expand on a subject that is familiar to all of you. The negative impact of aid on the economies of the South is only too well known. It is one of the instruments of increased exploitation, of the linking of the economies of the South to the North, of the creation of divisions, of the depletion of resources, of the maintenance of dependence. Today we are faced with the disastrous consequences of the enormous international debt owed by the countries of the South to the North, and we feverishly seek ways to keep the economies of the countries of the South afloat. Ostensibly aid is meant to help the poorer countries of the world. In fact it is a means of linking them and exploiting their natural and human resources to the advantage of the North. And with the growing crisis in the South, its countries must seek new ways of solidarity and cooperation, new relations between themselves, and between themselves and the North in a world faced by the need to remould its economic order more equitably on a broad range of issues.

HOW CAN THE COUNTRIES OF THE SOUTH REINFORCE THEIR SOLIDARITY AND THEIR STRENGTH?

We in the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association know that solidarity can only grow in the light of knowledge and understanding. That is why the aims expressed in our motto are threefold: “Power of Women – Solidarity – Unveiling of the Mind”. How can the mind of the South be unveiled, for the South is like an African, or an Asian, or an Arab woman wearing a veil imported from abroad, who thinks that she is defying the North by returning to tradition, to what she imagines as being her identity, and by donning what is called the Muslim dress. This is one of the most widespread forms of brainwashing, and it creates the illusion that a return to the religious traditions and values practised hundreds of years ago is a solution to the economic and political dependence that holds the South in its yoke.

“Ostensibly aid is meant to help the poorer countries of the world. In fact it is a means of linking them and exploiting their natural and human resources to the advantage of the North.”

What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system.

Western orientalist circles have tried to deprive us of our history just as Western capitalist circles have deprived us of our resources. We are required to be without a civilisation, without a culture, without a past, and without roots. Misconceptions related to our history have been widely mooted. For example, Ancient Greek civilisation has been cut off from Ancient Egyptian and Ancient African civilisations; this has paved the way for a consistently dominant school of history that considers that modern Europe is the descendant of Ancient Greek civilisation and thought. According to this theory, the civilisation of the North has no roots in the South. This school of thought severs the human patrimony into two, creates the dichotomy between South and North, and facilitates the ideology of domination that still prevails in the relations between the two.

One of the modern historians, however, has made an original contribution in his book Black Athena by tracing the Egyptian and Afro-Asian roots of the civilisation of the Ancient Greeks.⁵ Martin Bernal has tried to make the human linkages that bring us together rather than the linkages of exploitation and denial that separate us and keep pushing the world to the brink of disaster.

Technology exported by the North to the South has not served as an instrument of real development but has tended to propagate the patterns that serve the interests of the North, to integrate the periphery into the centre, and to make it wholly dependent instead of helping its countries to stand on their own feet and strengthen their agricultural, industrial and human capabilities. True, the peoples of the South produce more, grow more and work more. But are they better off? And if not, how is it that aid and technological cooperation have led only to debts, a growing deficit, falling standards of living, inflation and unemployment? Are these the fruits of North–South cooperation? Western economists and politicians say this state of affairs has come about because we are lazy or inefficient or backward or have bad leaders. But is it not a fact that in the world of today our riches continue to be pumped out from South to North? True, there is a lot that the peoples of the South must do to change things: to depend on their own inner strength and their own resources to create solidarity among themselves in the struggle for a new economic order.

The world economic order is the witness of an important change in the relative development of economic forces, with the European Economic Community (EEC) and Japan moving abreast of the US giant. The economic potential of the EEC is enormous if note is taken of the fact that it encompasses a market of 325 million consumers as compared to 246 million in the USA and 122 million in Japan. By the end of 1988 it is expected that total production in the EEC will represent 22 percent of total world production, that is, $4,100 million compared to the USA’s $4,700 million. Statistics also show that the economic weight of the USA in total world production dropped from 32 percent at the beginning of the seventies to 28 percent in 1988. It also shifted from being a net creditor owed a total of $141 million, to being a debtor to the tune of $400 million.

This means that the EEC is called upon by the world economy to play an increasing role in North–South relations. To attain real equality in mutual relations and benefits between South and North countries will be a long struggle, and will require substantial changes in the direction of a new economic order. But my question is, will the EEC continue to follow policies dictated predominately by US interests, or interests linked to the USA? Is it possible to envisage a gradual transformation in relations between North and South built on a new vision of the world of tomorrow? If capitalist relations continue to govern the major part of our world, must it be the most aggressive and reactionary forces that hold the upper hand, those built on war, on military production, on the arms race, on racial, ethnic, sexual and religious discrimination, on destruction of the natural environment, pollution and imbalance of the ecosystem, on master–slave relations between countries and peoples of the South and countries and peoples of the North? Or is it possible to imagine that Europe can constitute an independent force that can discover new horizons for the capitalist world where peace between nations is possible, where economic development and profits are perceived as best served by a more balanced development for all, where a more prosperous South can help to create a greater prosperity for the North and to halt the vicious circle of currency depreciation, reduced production and unemployment, and face the rapidly growing problems of environmental deterioration?

That is the question asked with increasing insistence in many circles. So far the response has been negative. The years pass, congresses and meetings are held, politicians and experts exchange views, institutions are born or stagnate in boredom, yet nothing seems to change in the North–South dialogue. Yes, we agree on the need for solidarity and independence, but on what terms: mutual benefit, or the terms dictated by a powerful minority who can see no further than their profits and control?

We need a new solidarity, a new vision that can transform the present confrontation between South and North into a new dialogue. Let me cite as an example the UN conference for the Promotion of International Cooperation in Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy (held in Geneva, March–April 1987). The summary of the work of the conference adopted by participants includes this statement:

exclusive efforts were made by the conference to reach agreements on principles universally acceptable for international cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy […] despite its efforts, the conference was unable to reach an agreement on principles for international cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

Failure to solve this major problem indicates a deep crisis of purpose and goals resulting from the preponderance of narrow interests. In the absence of a change in the mentality of influential sectors in the North, the dialogue between South and North will continue to go round in a circle, leading to an unnecessary gap between North and South and to rapidly growing inequities in a world where scientific and technological knowledge remains the devastating prerogative of a privileged few.

“The ideas of solidarity and interdependence must receive a new impetus, a new outlook that will change master–slave relationships into a common endeavour for a better world for all concerned. In this area, solidarity between the peoples and states of the South can be a potent lever.”

It is vital that all concerned work hard towards agreement on new purposes and new goals not only in the fields of military (defensive) and nuclear technology and material production, but also in the social, educational, cultural and informational fields. This redefinition of goals and purposes is a fundamental condition for any success in the North–South dialogue. The ideas of solidarity and interdependence must receive a new impetus, a new outlook that will change master–slave relationships into a common endeavour for a better world for all concerned. In this area, solidarity between the peoples and states of the South can be a potent lever. If this is coupled with a new outlook amongst the peoples of the North, and in particular amongst capitalist circles not primarily interested in military production and war, we may witness a new turn in the North–South dialogue.

History is bringing North closer to South and East closer to West. It is bringing different, diversified cultures closer. The globe is shrinking and we face globalisation. But the concept of universality should be redefined. It should not mean central control, monopoly and domination of one country over another. Real human universality and unity should be democratic, and respect differences, interests and multiple systems.

WOMEN OF THE SOUTH AND THE NORTH

Women in the South and the North have been playing an increasingly important role through the feminist movement. You may see both negative and positive aspects in this movement, yet on the whole its general contribution in the field of human thought – of new ideas and forms of action – and in changing society has been important. Women continue to raise issues related to social justice, peace and development, and they tend to emphasise the cultural and human aspects of relationships between people rather than matters related to economic growth and military strength. They have contributed to the struggle against patriarchal class relations entrenched in state and religious institutions on a global scale: in the multinational economic and political network right down to the smallest unit constituted by the family.

The International Women’s Decade (1975–1985) helped to bring women of the North and South closer together and to eliminate some misunderstandings. In the South, mistrust of the “white woman”, which often leads to over-reaction and sensitivities, is being overcome by the multiple exchanges taking place and by common action. There has been a tendency amongst some women in the North to consider the feminist movement as a Western innovation and to lay down patterns of thought and action for all women – even those in the South whose conditions and history are different and who must therefore seek original forms of organisation and appropriate solutions to their problems.

For example, in the countries of the South we do not believe that the women’s emancipation movement should be developed on the basis of solidarity between women against men, that the struggle is that of woman against man. Women must organise and be able to exert pressure as a political, economic and cultural force. But the aim is a concerted effort to change relations within society – and between men and women – in the direction of greater equality, a more profound understanding and a deeper humanity. This will entail struggle, but we are against animosity, hatred and enmity between the sexes, which can only serve to accentuate problems and prevent men and women from being partners in building a better future.

One notable development has been the changing attitude of women in the “socialist countries” toward the feminist movement. I quote from the opening statement made by the president of the World Federation of Democratic Women, Freda Brown, at the International Conference of Women held in Moscow during June 1987:

We have never made an effort to understand and analyse the feminist movement, despite the deep influence it has had on events in different areas and in different parts of the world. In the “Plan of Work” approved by the Federation one of the resolutions runs as follows: “Give special attention and importance to the understanding and analysis of feminist movements, and to studying ways and means of cooperation with these movements and with different groups of women all over the world.”⁶

There is no doubt that we have learned a lot during the period through which we are living. We realise that the world is growing smaller, that peoples and nations are coming closer, that our future hangs together. Men and women all over the world must seek to change the system under which we live, a system built on exploitation and oppression, on a dualism that creates more and more divisions between higher and lower, black and white, men and women, North and South, rich and poor. We need to work towards a new world system, a new economic, political and information order built on increasing equality, mutual respect and exchange, human dignity and human rights.

In this difficult struggle women can play an increasingly important role. Not only do they constitute half the society, they suffer a double burden of oppression, and their relations with the human experiences of life, death, reproduction and child rearing are much more intimate and concrete than those of men. They can therefore bring to the task of creating new relations between North and South a human depth that so far has been sadly lacking in the ruthless struggle for power and wealth.

The post ‘Women in the South in Relation to Women in the North’ and ‘Women’s Voice in the North–South Dialogue’ appeared first on JCAF Journal.

This article is based on an inaugural lecture delivered at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation on 28 February 2020. I am especially grateful to Achille Mbembe and Clive Kellner for their invitation and to the gracious audience on that occasion. I am also grateful to Dilip Menon, Vyjayanthi Rao and Erica Robles-Anderson for their penetrating comments on an earlier draft.

I begin with a strange inversion in the cultural life of Europe. Europe has extended itself across the planet through its tools of cartography, war and navigation and its bottomless urge to find and explore new examples of the boundary between humanity and its others. But as it has thus extended its dominion, it has also always wanted to bring its colonies closer to home, for the purposes of display, scientific study and entertainment. Thus, the museum and the colony are two ends of the same binocular urge. The museum, from this point of view, is a planet miniaturised by empire. But the planet, as we shall see, is also Europe’s museum. This observation is the starting point for my observations in this essay. I engage here with several recent debates that are generally not addressed in a common framework: one concerns the future of museums as creatures of Europe’s curatorial empire; another, the role of the colony in Europe’s internal debates about its unique character and mission; yet another, the relationships between the animation of museum objects and the objectification of human migrants; and the most urgent debate is about the fate of humanity in the future of our planet. These disparate debates come together, in my sense, that the story of the museum is bigger and more puzzling than its overt history suggests, and that this story is tied up with a theodicy. In this theodicy, the world is a special sort of object for Europe’s sense of its own transcendent mission, and museums are the home of those objects in which this transcendence can be sanctified, exhibited and enjoyed. This theodicy, as I aim to show, is an ongoing negotiation between Europe’s place on earth and the planet’s place in a wider natural order.

THE SELF-MAKING OF EUROPE

One of the persistent puzzles about the European world journey has been the question of the link between the universalism of the Enlightenment (which argued for the necessity of worldwide equality through the spread of knowledge, among other things) and the European imperial project, a project of spatial dominion that ended up also as a project of world conquest.¹ In spite of many efforts to cast light on this inner affinity between the project of Aufklärung (Enlightenment) and the project of world dominion, by authors like Edward Said, Valentin Mudimbe, Immanuel Wallerstein and many others,² we have made no real progress on this problem. Michel Foucault, who might have had something to say on this matter, did not speak much of the French imperial project, and even the great Max Weber did not elect to link the global journey of capitalist ethics to the project of empire. Karl Marx was excessively preoccupied with the dynamics of industrial capitalism.

To me, it does not seem likely that the journey from Renaissance humanism to Kantian universalism, roughly from the 16th to the 18th centuries in Europe, was disconnected from the project of Vasco da Gama and his many maritime successors to find the New World in searching for the Old World (and vice versa). Well before the age of industrial capitalism and the imperial adventure of Europe in the 19th century, Iberian sailors and conquistadors had connected the projects of conquest, conversion and economic plunder in the New World, a connection touched upon in the work of writers like Anthony Pagden and Peter Hulme, and even more brilliantly in that of Michel-Rolph Trouillot.³

Perhaps this is not the first time in human history that a project of ethical universalism was tied to a project of conversion and conquest: two large earlier examples are the Roman Empire and the early history of Islamic expansion. But there is something special about the European understanding of its ethical universalism (rooted in Enlightenment ideas of knowledge, reason and common humanity) and the urge to world exploration and global expansion that characterises the Dutch, English and French projects after 1800, and later the German, Belgian and Italian adventures, especially in Africa. What is this special quality?

I propose that this quality has something to do with the post-Renaissance European idea of universality, which requires complete global expansion for its own inner logic to be revealed and justified.⁴ In both the Roman and Islamic examples, the ethical project was self-standing and conquest was a secondary extension of this project. But the post-Renaissance European idea of universality could not see itself as fulfilled without covering the surface of the globe.

Empire, specifically European imperialism of the last three centuries, is a transverse spatial enactment of a defective vision of temporality in which time’s arrow always has a single direction and a known destination. That destination is the world written in the image of Europe. Europe, in this mode of thinking, is unthinkable except as the singular expression of time’s arrow, and this arrow is so conceived as to require its dominion over the globe. Thus, the world and the globe become one and the same, and each is seen as Europe’s tomorrow and Europe’s elsewhere. This is the road from universalism to globalism to a new kind of planetarism, a journey in which museums, as I will shortly argue, are a crucial invention and site.

This journey has another dimension, and that is the gradual shift in the European cartography of the cosmos, from the geocentrism of Ptolemy to the heliocentrism of Copernicus, though the Copernican model has been much debated and refined since his day. Whatever the debates surrounding the logic of the heavens after Copernicus, they certainly had two effects. One was to add one more stream of arguments against the Christian logic that put all nature at man’s disposal (man as the centre of the cosmos) and for a more skeptical sense of man’s place in the order of things. This trend also augmented the role of maps, astronomy and shipbuilding in the great sea journeys from southern Europe that led to the “discovery” of the Americas and, by the end of the 15th century, also to the discovery of India and Southeast Asia. All this suggests that the Copernican revolution might have reinforced the idea that Europe was the centre of the earth, even if the earth was no more seen as the still centre around which the other planets revolved. In this sense, and even if as part of a complex series of developments in religion, science and long-distance oceanic explorations, the planet was being staged as a canvas for European curiosity. The 17th century, the century that bridges Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment universalism, also sees the birth of the idea of the cosmopolis,⁵ which marks the idea of the polis and the cosmos as ideally being one and the same for Europeans, since they did not see the Others they encountered as either knowing the world or properly understanding citizenship.

This arrogation to Europeans of the sole claim to cosmopolitanism in a world of patently real cultural alternatives cannot be understood except by recourse to the lingering life of Christian thought well into the 18th century (and beyond, as we now know). From Augustine and Isidore of Seville in the earlier periods of Christianity to the dominant theologians of Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries, European Christians had little trouble finding theological support for the ethics of enslaving, exploiting or seeking to convert pagan populations from the Americas and Africa and later from Asia.⁶ This point of view did not square easily with the incipient universalism of the Enlightenment, which flowed from the ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity that took root in much of Europe in the late 18th century. This was especially true of the countries of Northern and Western Europe, which became the key players in European imperialism due to their technological and mercantile skills, which left Spain and Portugal behind in the global imperial game.

Thus, when the idea of the cosmopolis takes shape in Europe after the 17th century, what it exports to the rest of the world is less a unified value system or world-picture and more a series of efforts to paper over the cracks in the European metanarrative, the struggle between its contradictory trajectorist narratives. The battle between church and state, the struggle between private property and various visions of collective ownership, the tension between the rule of law and the rule of the masses, the opposition of this and otherworldly impulses in European religiosity – these are all examples of the unresolved contradictions that Europe played out in the imperial project, in which the continent encountered societies and ideologies that contained their own, often very different, visions of these matters. For cosmopolitanism is ultimately a matter of ideas, and what Europe exported in its imperial projects was its own demons, divisions and unresolved anxieties, this time on a global terrain. Nowhere is this troubled project of cosmopolis more evident than in the modern Western museum.

“In this light, I propose that ethnological objects currently in the possession of European museums must also be seen as migrants or as accidental refugees.”

There is widespread agreement that the museum as an institution emerges from ideas of collection, display, learning and taste with deep roots in Europe’s troubled encounters with those societies that were under imperial rule or came under some sort of Western sovereignty. Though most Western museums have indisputably come out of prior histories of conquest, commerce and political exploitation, the museum has struggled from its beginnings to be a forum for the broadening of knowledge and for the transformation of curiosities into popular experiences of the “savage sublime”.⁷ It joins the university, the scientific laboratory, the archive, the church and the prison in a complex of institutions devoted to the collected and researchable sublime. The governing ideology of this evolution expresses the best values of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment: knowledge, learning, curiosity, discovery, with the hope of achieving understanding across languages, cultures and social experiences.

But a funny thing happened to Western museums on the way to the 20th century. They became sites of deep misunderstanding of both the European self and the colonised, objectified Other. These misunderstandings are multiple, and they tell us something of the archaeology of our current ambivalence about museums. One such misunderstanding concerns the difference and the similarity between the museum of fine art and the ethnological museum. This misunderstanding has not yet been resolved, as we can see in the strange spectacle of the Humboldt Forum art centre in Berlin, where several classical fine art museums will encircle ethnological specimens newly arrived from the city’s periphery. Another such misunderstanding involves the very categories into which the objects of the savage sublime might be divided: functional, ritual, art, craft, shamanic, decorative and other categories were invented to help group, store, archive and (occasionally) display these objects. Here the tectonic struggle is between ethnological museums and natural-history museums, since they do not agree on how and where to draw the line between human and nonhuman others, a struggle first captured by Donna Haraway in her pioneering work on the American Museum of Natural History, in New York.⁸ The misunderstanding of the savage sublime is thus a three-way misunderstanding between the disciplines of ethnology, natural history and art history, each of which is in fact a product of the age of empire and has a different stake in the proper understanding of the objects of the Other.

Yet another misunderstanding that has plagued modern museums is the notion that they are also sites of research and teaching, similar to universities and colleges. This pedagogical ambition has its roots in figures such as Alexander von Humboldt (and his many admirers), who combined travel, science, research and collecting as seamlessly linked activities in their lives. But is the museum really meant to be a classroom? Can it entertain and educate at the same time? Does the museum really have the capacity to foster critical thinking and new knowledge in the manner of the best modern universities?

And finally, we have the figure of the museum as a sacred place, a place of icons, silence, transcendental experiences, a church for those whom a Christian God has failed or abandoned. Notwithstanding the recent efforts of modern museums to become more interactive, user-friendly, sociable and welcoming, the truth is that noise, loud commentary, playful explorations of museum spaces, jokes about signage, vulgarities about iconic objects, are generally discouraged. In this regard, museums continue to think of themselves as churches, in which a powerful clergy provides sacraments and glimpses of the divine to ordinary humans, who, for a brief period of time, are lifted into the space of the savage sublime or the more elevated Kantian sublime.

“The work of art and artists in the Global South in the period beginning with decolonisation may be viewed broadly as part of this struggle to create ‘artscapes’ outside the rule of the commodity and the narrative of the nation.”

Thus, the fundamental contradictions, confusions and conundrums surrounding modern museums are products of a foundational misunderstanding about whether the museum is a university, a church, a laboratory or a place of entertainment. The many debates surrounding museums in Europe and the United States today, including the recent one about the repatriation of objects taken from the sites of Euro-American empire, have roots in our failure to probe whether we want the museum to be a space for the sacred, the scientific, the educational or the spectacular, all at the same time. This categorical burden or overdetermination is rooted in the journey of Europe from the universality of the global to the universality of the planetary, which has been recovered in the last few decades.

In the history of Europe, the planetary sensibility has come full circle. It began as a term indicating a systematic, static, stable order of celestial objects, with Earth at its still centre in Ptolemy’s model, the sun at its centre in the Copernican model. The planetary has returned in a new guise in our times, due to our sense of our mortality as a species, our ethical loneliness, and the realisation that the global ecosystem has likely wrecked the possibility of a planetary future. This change requires us to see the ways in which the epoch of globalisation (roughly 1500 to now) was colonised by our sense of the universal, largely by confining it in the prison house of the nation-state.

If the central struggle of the era of globalisation can be seen as a struggle between capital and what Étienne Balibar has called “the nation form”⁹ to define the very terms of modernity, one place to look for the implications of this struggle is the transformation of the experience of time in the period of global capitalist modernity. On the side of the nation, the struggle over time takes the form, so shrewdly noted and theorised by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities,¹⁰ of an effort to create a sense of national temporality and to create the illusion that national time is indeed all of time – time without residue. Nation-states sought to create this world of national time through many practices, most notably through the national production of history, in schools, monuments, calendars, clocks, memorials and so on.

There are important complicities between the efforts of capital to capture time by commodifying it and of the modern state to capture time by nationalising it. The key point is that these efforts were never wholly successful, not least because the very struggle between these large actors – global capital and the nation-state – created spaces, moments and opportunities for various forms of escape, opposition and critique. The work of art and artists in the Global South in the period beginning with decolonisation may be viewed broadly as part of this struggle to create “artscapes” outside the rule of the commodity and the narrative of the nation. These works were produced to escape the burden of repetition.

THE BURDEN OF REPETITION

One feature of critical intellectual discourse and representation concerning time – especially in postcolonial contexts – is a central concern with repetition. Southern artists, scholars and intellectuals, whether they are inside or outside the apparatuses of the state (and no one is entirely outside), face a special and overwhelming burden. They always fear that they cannot represent anything without somehow inhabiting the optic of tradition, whether it is imaged as civilisation, culture or simply tradition. Much of the art that we see in postcolonial art-worlds can be read – as it is so often in the clichéd discourse of a certain cosmopolitan class – as an effort to harness the magic of tradition, the secrets of ancient civilisation, the styles of great cultures, and so on, to more inventively capture the present, the here and now.

Therefore, representing the present in the present became a very difficult move in the era of Enlightenment globalisation; for, whenever a social visionary or an artist appropriates a traditional form, they may win the battle for authenticity but lose the battle for originality. In the era of Enlightenment globalisation, with its special blend of ethical universalism, industrial capitalism and imperial modernisation, artists, intellectuals and activists of every type in the Global South have turned to the production of designs for alternative, multiple, counter or vernacular modernities, in order to negotiate new forms of space and time. In spatial terms, they wished to imagine new geographies inflected by interactive experiences with other cultural regions. Thus, they have contributed to the creation of new artscapes – new images of mediated space that cut across existing national geographies. But in so transforming space, creative cultural producers also had to face – especially in postcolonial societies – the burdens of repetition and the anxieties of tradition, which often force them to address only their own (imagined) traditions.

These efforts to produce alternative imaginaries of the modern under the shadow of industrial capitalism, global capital and pedagogy were not made easier by decolonisation. The force of Enlightenment globalisation and its special view of its own universalism continued to haunt the search for new imaginaries. In the last few decades, in the collective wake of a digital world, an Anthropocene-climate-based planetary crisis, and a host of massive transnational problems (including migration, disease, terrorism and authoritarianism), the critical question is: is awareness of the planet the last tragic phase of globalisation, or does it promise a new contract among imagined communities, new economies and new forms of governance? We cannot take on this problem in all its manifestations here, but let us return to the museum, to ask whether its imperial history can be redeemed by some new form of planetary imagination.

MUSEUMS AND THE STILL LIFE OF EMPIRE

The European museum is an institution of empire, quintessentially and irredeemably, whether it speaks in the name of art, science, research, pedagogy or entertainment. In my view, museums, from their early beginnings in royal courts and spectacles, through their high-imperial affiliation with world fairs and exhibitions, to their current efforts to turn their black boxes into white boxes, are above all a solution to the turbulence, vitality, unruliness and sheer vivacity of their colonies. Museums are the greatest trustees of what I call “the still life of empire”. What do I mean by this?

I used the trope of “the still life of empire” more than 15 years ago, when I made an argument (in an unpublished lecture) about the development of the various visual forms through which British or British-sponsored artists, photographers, travellers, administrators and scholars in India chose to represent India to their domestic audiences. In the first half of the 19th century, roughly speaking, British art shows us Indian temples, mosques, forts, mausoleums and palaces with one uncanny characteristic. They seem devoid of people. They look uninhabited, deserted, silent, like Shelley’s Ozymandias etherised on a people-free Indian landscape. There are exceptions, of course, images in which humans can be detected, but these are relatively rare. As painting gradually gives way to various precursors of modern photography, roughly in the middle and second half of the 19th century, the imperial gaze becomes ethnological, and people now crowd the scene: pictures of kings and queens, Brahmins and untouchables, courtiers and craftsmen. In every case, they are tokens of a type: a caste, tribe, guild or sect, or of a social type, such as a king, snake charmer, holy man or prostitute. This makes sense, of course, given the imperial uses of the census, the ethnographic survey and the district gazette, which were India’s biggest contributions to the invention of modern surveillance, along with new forms of incarceration, torture and law. But these pictures of humans are also typological, classificatory, static, all in service of an undisturbed imperial gaze. The humans here are as immobile as the monuments were in the first half of the century. They are still lives. This stilling of the live and living scenes of the colony is in the service of a gaze that is simultaneously aesthetic, disciplinary, scientific and racialised.

“The objects of the imperial subject are stilled, silenced and stabilised to be classified, grouped, restored, inventoried, cataloged and, occasionally, exhibited, without the distraction of real lives, real societies, living dramas of labour, reproduction, power or ritual.”

The museum is the major site in which the human worlds of the colony are turned into still lives for publics in the metropolis. The savage sublime to which I referred earlier has stillness at its centre. The objects of the imperial subject are stilled, silenced and stabilised to be classified, grouped, restored, inventoried, cataloged and, occasionally, exhibited, without the distraction of real lives, real societies, living dramas of labour, reproduction, power or ritual. Just as the monuments of India were portrayed in colonial paintings and early photographs as without human beings, as uninhabited, so the objects of all the European colonies were stripped of their dynamic environments and sedated, disciplined and rendered supine in the precincts of the European ethnological museum. This is the way the chaos, dynamism and vital energy of the colonised world is turned into a series of still lives, available for study, entertainment or scientific curiosity. In this sense, the ethnological museum is the key to the still life of empire, and it has more than a hint of necrophilia in its orientation.

But there is one more twist to this story. In imperial capitals like London, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels, and later Rome, Berlin, Chicago and New York, it was possible to separate the sedated objects of the colony from the actual human beings who were exhibited in circuses, spectacles, world fairs and other public settings. But today that separation is no longer easy to maintain, since the relationship of objects and humans has become confused and complicated, both for European post-imperial societies and for the Euro-American world. This is also why recent calls to “decolonise” the museum, especially in the big cities of the West, have a hollow ring, because they fail to notice the intimate ties between the fixities of the classical museum and the still-mobile debris of empire. Such myopia is more fully addressed in Ann Laura Stoler’s general critique of the currently fashionable call to “decolonise” many institutions, from classrooms and museums to curricula and public monuments. Such myopia also brings us to the connection between humans and objects in our times, which marks the end of the era of globalisation and the return of the age of the planet.

THE SLAVERY OF OBJECTS: EXTRACTION, DECONTEXTUALISATION, COLLECTION

It is now commonly said that objects are mobile, animate and agentive subjects, capable of expressing purpose, desire and telos. Today, the debate about the line between human and nonhuman actors has become part of bigger debates about climate change, the Anthropocene, robotics, informatics, the life sciences and more. So, the concern of curators, ethnologists and museum professionals with how to curate, represent and display objects has become inevitably more heated and controversial. Furthermore, the building of all Western ethnological collections is inevitably tied up with difficult issues of conquest, commerce and power in the age of empire, as the recent debate about the repatriation of looted African artworks so clearly shows.

But, not all things are of equal interest to ethnological museums. “Objects” are of special interest to those assembling or maintaining such collections, because they have been deliberately crafted, designed, or manufactured for some special purpose in their places and times of origin. The materiality of objects is tied up with their pedagogical value, for what they can show, teach and illustrate. It is thus no surprise that objects are not often discussed in terms of their journey from their original homes to museums, but rather are made pure tools of representation, icons of other ways of living. What is lost in this erasure is a vital part of the biography of these objects.¹¹ My own earlier insight was to say that these cultural biographies are part of larger social lives, which span long periods of time and large geographical distances, and reflect complex circuits of knowledge, trade and connoisseurship.¹² Thus, the cultural biographies and the social lives of such objects are two sides of the same coin. In the case of ethnological objects, which end up in Western museums, these object biographies and social lives are tied up with complex histories in which empire, science, the market and Western popular curiosity all play some significant role.

Some scholars, like W.J.T. Mitchell, have seen images, also a type of object, as having wants and desires, as demanding something of us that is not a mere projection of our own wishes onto them.¹³ That is because objects – especially those that are the product of deliberate human design – carry the force of their histories, their journeys, the accidents and adventures that befall them, and these often show up in their shape, form and force. Objects are not simply mirrors of our own norms and perceptions in any given moment of viewing. They also resist interpretation, choreography and manipulation by those humans who might seek to make them speak in some particular way.

In this light, I propose that ethnological objects currently in the possession of European museums must also be seen as migrants or as accidental refugees.¹⁴ This angle might open a new perspective on museums, collections and curatorship in the contemporary West. The question of cultural objects that find a new home and a new life through the great museums of Europe is not usually connected to the question of refugees and other migrants and the sort of new life they might find in Europe. But these refugees need a new story as much as the objects in Europe’s museums do. On the face of it, the objects that have ended up in, for example, German custodianship did not come to Germany willingly or of their own volition. Like all objects discovered through conquest, collection and curation in the great museums of the West, they are accidental refugees. The human migrants who come to Germany today are there largely of their own volition, through acts of agency, aspiration and courage that allowed them to take enormous risks to cross the border into Germany. The objects in German museums, especially in the museums of Berlin, have historically been given voice through the work of the scholars, curators, exhibition professionals and museum educators who have ended up as trustees of these objects. The stories told on behalf of these objects are usually not about their journeys of displacement, relocation and rehabilitation, which are normally treated as irrelevant to their cultural significance. Rather, these stories are about their roles, uses and meanings in the places from which they originally came. Thus, these objects become texts or tools to tell stories about distant places, histories and cosmologies. Their status as accidental refugees is rarely voiced, exhibited or interpreted for the general public. In short, these objects are made into testaments of fixity and not of circulation, though complex processes of circulation and displacement are what is most important about them. They are rendered tokens of the still life of empire.

With human refugees, the situation is virtually the reverse. Their own stories usually focus on their dislocation, disenfranchisement and suffering as key elements of who they are. Both for those who welcome them to Europe and for those who are suspicious or fearful of them, these human refugees are seen as damaged, incomplete and unstable, and are viewed as disturbances and irregularities in the framework of citizenship, sovereignty and belonging that characterises unquestioned citizens of the countries of northern and western Europe, almost all previously imperial powers. Even when their pasts are seen as worthy of compassion, the futures of undocumented migrants are seen as illegible and problematic. In narrative terms, they are characters in search of a plot, players in a story without a resolution. The refugees who have arrived in Europe since 2015 are seen as artefacts of excessive circulation, while the objects that already live in European museum collections are seen exclusively as fixed and stable. A better balance could be achieved if refugee objects and refugee humans could be seen as complex and interactive mixtures of stability and dislocation.

“The question for museums is whether they can curate, exhibit and mediate flowing forms rather than etherise them upon the table of some sort of imperial gaze, and resist turning their animated motion into still lives for the comfort of the metropolis.”

Of course, it is not as if the foreign objects and the refugees who are today in Europe come from exactly the same places or tell neatly connected stories, since their geographies and dislocations are the product of different pressures and accidents. But they share the need for better stories, and this need might be more creatively met if they were seen as part of a general story of the way in which foreign lives can find a dignified home in Europe. Such a perspective takes us further than a simple repetition of older criticisms of European imperial collections, criticisms that usually focus on Orientalism, racism, ethnocentrism and so on. These criticisms have some validity. But a deeper strategy for ethnological collections could be found if we looked at the objects in these collections also as migrants – indeed, even as refugees or exiles – which share much with those human beings who are today causing much debate in Europe. In this manner we can deepen the standard view of power and inequality in the relation between Europe and its museological assets, for by adding migrancy to the earlier critiques, we introduce an element of mobility and contingency to the otherwise frozen tropes of Orientalism, racism and ethno-centrism. If we can see both human and nonhuman agents as having history, voice, purpose and force, perhaps we will treat our human migrants with a deeper sense of their humanity, just as we will treat our ethnological objects as more than mute representations of faraway times and places. But this requires European societies to ask whether they can repatriate previously colonial objects and still welcome ex-colonial subjects. Put differently, can European societies abandon both their necrophiliac approach to objects from the colony and their xenophobic reactions to subjects from the colony?

POSSIBLE PLANETS: EXTINCTION, INNOVATION, IMAGINATION

I now return to the issue of the planetary predicament and the place of museums today, as well as of their objects, curators, audiences and patrons. I agree with Dipesh Chakrabarty¹⁵ that there is a gulf between the global and the planetary, which is a product of recent discoveries about the climate, the planet and the Anthropocene, and of the minor place of humanity among the myriad vital beings that compose the known universe. Chakrabarty, as well as Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Spivak and other scholars across the natural and human sciences, has begun a discussion about our planetary time and their ethical, ontological and epistemological demands upon us.¹⁶ Each of these scholars has commented on the unpredictable transition from the global to the planetary in their own ways.

These discussions are symptoms of a major underlying contradiction between the view of humanity as too small to matter and the opposite view, that humanity is too big for the survival of the natural world. Too small, because we are one of millions of vital agents, and too big, because we have destroyed an entire planet on our own. In my view, we need to avoid a new hubris, after the age of globalisation, when our big mistake was to treat the globe as our museum and our museums as the globe. Now we are at risk of imagining that we can make the planet our oyster and use the museum (as well as the university or the lab or the cloud), as sites to crack it open to examine its insides. This is both vivisectionist and premature, since the global (in the form of inequality, race, disease, war and displacement) has hardly left us, and the planetary owl of Minerva has barely flapped its wings.

Museums can hardly be an exclusive site for understanding or managing this moment of transition, crisis and emergence. To contribute to this emergent possibility, museums need to pay attention to the global flow of forms, and to the friction and refraction that occur in the journey of these forms. This process requires attention to what I have earlier called the relationship between the circulation of forms and the forms of circulation.¹⁷ The question for museums is whether they can curate, exhibit and mediate flowing forms rather than etherise them upon the table of some sort of imperial gaze, and resist turning their animated motion into still lives for the comfort of the metropolis. This might require a different type of museum than what dominates our cities and art worlds today, one that combines the institutional stability of the contemporary museum with the impermanence and ephemerality of biennales and pop-up art events. Even this would not be enough. For such a denationalised, decolonised and progressive and planetary life to be explored, museums would need to be newly alert to those artists, activists, designers and curators who are prepared to forsake the universal and the global in support of the planetary. The museums with whom they work are those led by the few who are prepared to travel light, shed their inherited privileges and give up the illusion of permanence. These are all individuals who have found ways to go beyond the burden of repetition, the seductions of classification and the monopoly of good taste. Enlightenment universalism, as I have hinted, is the last refuge of all the other key Enlightenment values of the last four centuries. If we give up the universe, we might both discover the planet and find ways to extend its life, rather than remain enslaved to the impossible and brutal dream of turning the planet into a museum. The radical potential of such a planetary horizon is that it indexes a cosmos that is infinite and indefinite, centres that are also always peripheries, a cosmos filled with quarks, holes and folds. For the museum, this vision opens up a world where objects and actors always circulate, where sovereignty is always unstable, and no life is forever still.

The post The Museum, the Colony and the Planet: Territories of the Imperial Imagination appeared first on JCAF Journal.

The experience of student protests in South Africa has generated difficult but necessary debates about whiteness and the damage resulting from institutionalised racial hierarchies and violence. It has forced upon us new questions about what counts as knowledge and why. It has also obliged society at large to reflect on whether academic institutions can be turned into spaces of radical hospitality and if so, how, for whom and under what conditions; or whether they are simply sites that replay power relations already existing within society. Moreover, it has brought back to the centre perennial “postcolonial dilemmas” such as: what should we do with institutions inherited from a cruel past? Are such institutions “reformable” or should they simply be “decommissioned” or, for that matter, literally burnt down in the hope that from the ashes, something new will eventually emerge?¹

At the core of these events is the hope, especially among the youth, for something new, which would not simply be a repetition of what we thought we had got rid of.² It is this hope that explains the renewed injunction to decolonise institutions, or for that matter, knowledge itself.

Calls to “decolonise” are not new. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s they were issued under different names, the most recognisable of which were “Africanisation”, “indigenisation”, “endogenisation” and so on. So far – and as far as Africa is concerned – the decolonising injunction has mostly consisted of a critique of the colonial knowledge chain (what is taught, produced and disseminated) and a denunciation of its deleterious effects on the African society, culture and psyche. To be sure, a lot of resources have been invested in the study of “indigenous knowledge” or “technological systems”.³ Most of these studies could in fact be assembled under the rubric of ethno-knowledges, so tight are their connections with the politics of identity and ethnicity (for a critique, see John and Jean Comaroff’s Ethnicity Inc.⁴).

But we still do not have a precise idea of what a “truly decolonised knowledge” might look like. Nor do we have a theory of knowledge as such that might compellingly underpin the African injunction to decolonise. Because of the absence of both a theory of knowledge and a theory of institutions, the injunction to decolonise may be, at least for the time being, better understood as a compensatory act whose function is to heal what amounts to racial shame.⁵

THE INJUNCTION TO DECOLONISE

Take for instance Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and his now canonical Decolonising the Mind.⁶ Of all the practical implications Ngũgĩ draws from his programmatic statements, the most important is arguably the necessity for curriculum reform. Crucial in this regard is, for him, the need to teach African languages. A decolonised university in Africa, he believes, should put African languages at the centre of its teaching and learning project. Ngũgĩ probably assumes that language inevitably shapes knowledge or what it is possible to know; he probably believes that language inevitably grounds knowledge in a particular culture and influences what we know and how we know it. But language alone cannot stand or compensate for the lack of a theory of knowledge as such.

Another example is Paulin Hountondji, for whom decolonising knowledge amounts to making sure that our scientific activity is not externally oriented; is “not intended to meet the theoretical needs of our Western counterparts and answer the questions they pose.”⁷

For him, to decolonise knowledge is to replace such vertical relations with what he calls “horizontalism” – which he understands as “an autonomous, self-reliant process of knowledge production and capitalisation that enables us to answer our own questions and meet both the intellectual and the material needs of African societies.”

Hountondji makes a distinction between discourses on, or about Africa, which are coming from, or are produced or developed by Africans within Africa – the study of Africa by Africans in Africa (I do not know where this leaves the diasporas) – and any other discourse on the same subject, but which might originate from somewhere else.

The willingness to debunk whiteness, the over-reliance on US-made theories (Black feminism, queer theory, Afropessimism, theories of intersectionality) and the idea of the university as a public good notwithstanding, the lack of a theory of knowledge – a potentially fatal weakness of the decolonising project – is also at the heart of South African late injunctions to decolonise.

To put it succinctly, “decolonisation” in the African context has meant, pell-mell: (1) changing the curriculum or syllabus or content (this mostly applies to the humanities); (2) changing the criteria for defining what texts are included in, or excluded from the canon; (3) changing student demographics while recruiting more Black staff and transforming the academic and administrative bodies; and (4) recalibrating the activities of teaching and learning in such a way as to institute a different teacher–learner power relation.

“In this sense, the ‘decolonial’ ‘decolonisation’ project is an epistemological project premised on the idea that social worlds are multiple, fractured and contested.”

In the process, an instrumentalist view of knowledge has generally been privileged, which reduces knowledge to a matter of power (which by the way it is – the famous Foucauldian knowledge/power nexus – but only partly). Curriculum reform is spoken about in terms of the rehabilitation of marginalised or defeated narratives but hardly in response to current shifts in knowledge landscapes (of which more later). There is hardly any critique of so-called indigenous epistemologies and in more than one instance, the latter is simply conflated with traditional cosmogonies, vernacular arts de faire, including crafts, narratives and proverbs.

In some instances, decolonisation is easily reduced to a matter of origins and identity, race and location. What confers authority is where one comes from, the putative community one belongs to, not the truth validity of the claims being made.

Furthermore, the concept of Africa invoked in most discourses on “decolonisation” is deployed as if there was unanimity within Africa itself about what is “African” and what is not. Most of the time, the “African” is equated with the “indigenous”/”ethnic”/”native”, as if there were no other grounds for an African identity than the “indigenous” and the “ethnic”.⁸

These observations do not constitute sufficient ground for an outright repudiation of the decolonising project. After all, an uncompromising critique of the dominant Eurocentric academic model – the fight against what Latin Americans in particular call “epistemic coloniality” – that is, the endless production of theories that are based on European traditions, is still necessary. So is the critique of particular anthropological knowledges (knowing about Others) that never fully acknowledge these Others as thinking and knowledge-producing subjects in their own terms.⁹

Indeed, there is a recognition of the exhaustion of the present academic model with its origins in the universalism of the Enlightenment. Boaventura de Sousa Santos or Enrique Dussel, for instance, make it clear that knowledge can only be thought of as universal if it is by definition pluriversal.¹⁰ They have made it clear, too, that at the end of the decolonising process, we will no longer have a university. We will only have what they call a “pluriversity”.¹¹ For them, a pluriversity is not merely “the extension throughout the world of a Eurocentric model presumed to be universal and now being reproduced almost everywhere thanks to commercial internationalism.” By pluriversity, they understand a process of knowledge production that is open to “epistemic diversity”.

The end goal is not to abandon the notion of universal knowledge for humanity, but to embrace such a notion via a “horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions.” Within such a perspective, to decolonise the university is therefore to reform it with the aim of “creating a less provincial and more open critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism” – a task that involves the radical re-founding of our ways of thinking and a “transcendence of our disciplinary divisions.”

Properly understood (and in spite of its obvious limitations), the “decolonial” “decolonisation” project (just like postcolonial theory and feminist theory) has aimed at expanding our conceptual, methodological and theoretical imaginary. In most instances, it has resisted unified accounts of the human. Downplaying regimes of knowledge that have constituted the human or even the world as one, or have framed humanity as an undifferentiated whole, it has instead sought to map and interrogate the social, cultural and historical differences and uneven power relations that divide the Anthropos.

In this sense, the “decolonial” “decolonisation” project is an epistemological project premised on the idea that social worlds are multiple, fractured and contested. Thus the necessity to embrace multivocality and translation as a way not to perpetuate the knowledge/power asymmetries that currently fracture global humanity. In this model, knowledge of the empirical world is thought to be gained through the embrace of multiplicity, of a plurality of narratives from many voices and places.

Unfortunately, in the “decolonial” “decolonisation” project (just as in some strands of feminist and postcolonial theories), multiplicity has been theorised as “difference”. Difference itself has been understood as that which separates and cuts off one cultural or historical entity from another. A decolonial act, in this perspective, is taken to be an act of disconnection and separation (a gesture by which one is cut, or one cuts oneself from the rest). The challenge has therefore been to understand difference as a particular fold or twist in the undulating fabric of the universe – or in a set of continuous, entangled folds of the whole.

BIFURCATIONS

Whatever the case, attempts at “transcending our disciplinary divisions” have in fact been happening partly in response to a set of challenges universities worldwide have been facing, and ongoing contestations affecting the disciplines that constitute the foundations of modern knowledge.

Some of these challenges are of a political nature. In the South African case, they have to do with profound and still unresolved questions of racial justice. They have to do with the conditions under which the university can be recognised as a truly common, public good, and as such a microcosm of a society in which each voice counts, which is built on the idea of radical hospitality, co-belonging and openness as opposed to separation and closure. Of late, such disputes have dramatically crystalised around, amongst others, the problem of student debt and the decommodification of higher education.

Other such contestations are of a generational nature. Indeed massive cultural shifts are underway as we increasingly live our lives in reconfigured environments of informational stimuli and as digital technologies become tightly woven into the fabric of our everyday life. As suggested by N. Katherine Hayles and others, we can suspect that a “technologically enhanced rewiring of the brain” is underway especially among the younger generations.¹² If indeed, as we are led to believe, dealing with digital and computational media on an everyday basis entails significant neurological changes, then the assumptions we used to entertain about humans and their relations to the world may no longer be entirely valid in relation to the kind of self that is emerging among the younger generations.

Other challenges are of an institutional nature. Not so long ago, institutionalised knowledge was all that counted. It was an object to be taught in clearly circumscribed institutions and disciplines. Knowledge produced by the university was bounded and restricted by organisational apparatuses. As a matter of fact, there is no boundary for any knowledge today. Extra-institutional knowledge is unbounded, uncontainable and easily searchable. It is no longer so easily restricted by organisational apparatuses. To know nowadays requires the development of a range of new literacies required, for instance, by changes in writing, in reading, in forms of public presentation, in the capacity to interpret images, or to work on a screen. Old knowledge platforms now appear dated or in any case, are falling into obsolescence at a higher rate and pace.¹³

“With the advent of algorithmic thinking and various forms of automated reasoning, new debates are unfolding concerning the faculties of knowing, desiring and judging as well as the meaning of truth.”

Other contestations are of a pedagogical nature, triggered as they are by new learning methods, devices and publics. Traditional ways of teaching have been changing thanks to a range of new practices and methods enabled by digital environments. The sense, nowadays, is that everything can be searched and found. This is what Google is for – an efficient way to deliver knowledge to the public. Meanwhile, various open learning platforms are increasingly created by the learners themselves. Such platforms do challenge the very notion of disciplinarity – how to think properly, the questions that are the right ones to ask, the right method to deploy in addressing those questions.

Techno-facilitation of knowledge, with flipped classrooms, innovative project works and collaborative writing is increasingly becoming the norm. The epoch is characterised by a massive acceleration, which contrasts with the humanistic predisposition to slow down. The role of the teacher in its old form might not exist for much longer. Massive open online courses are no longer a rarity. The old vertical teacher–student relationship is increasingly replaced by the idea of a learning community, one in which the teacher gives away control and learning encompasses the total social experience of the students. Furthermore, it happens inside and outside the classroom, and it takes seriously the knowledge the students already have.

Yet other challenges are of an epistemological nature. It remains to be seen whether the perennial question of what we can know and how we came to know things will ever be resolved. If anything, old disputes are far from having been settled as standard realist, rationalist and objectivist understandings of truth and knowledge are undercut by the proliferation of new, hybrid thought styles and new thought collectives.

NEW COGNITIVE ASSEMBLAGES

As a result of technological innovations and the pressures evoked above, epistemic reconfigurations, or shifts, are under way in various disciplines and subdisciplines. They are harnessing new kinds of data and reshaping what constitutes units of analysis. New bodies of thought are involved in rethinking the nature of knowledge itself, the nature of being, of matter, how degrees of agency are distributed across human and non-human agents. Contrary to various discourses on the crisis of the humanities, the age is characterised by heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation.

Some of these shifts are paving the way for the emergence of entirely new cognitive assemblages, if not new knowledge formations. I would now like to briefly comment on those transformations that have to do with the changing epistemological landscape.

FRAGMENTATION OF THE DISCIPLINES

Not so long ago, the sciences – theoretical and applied – could still be systematically ordered and classified. For instance, life sciences, physics, the organic and the inorganic “could be demarcated and located along methodological axes, along a set of pedagogical practices.” Now, within every discipline and every field, the ramifications are so manifold that “they subvert any consistent totality.” Each specialisation ends up turning into further segmentations, which in turn branch out from their classical roots, in a process of incessant production of sub-specialisations within sub-specialisations.¹⁴

Against this argument, it can be observed that fragmentation has always been part of the life of the disciplines. In fact, disciplines and fields of study have never been entirely fixed, either in form or in organisation. They have always been continuously forming and transforming, sometimes merging but never really progressing toward any general unity or truth.

But we are clearly witnessing an acceleration of this process today. It has reached a level where many are now wondering whether disciplines as such have become obsolete. Indeed, established disciplines do no longer correspond to, or encompass the variety of “fields of inquiry”. There is a profound disjuncture between the disciplinary taxonomies and classifications inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries and the proliferation of thematic imagination, the rhythm of the constitution of diverse sub-fields.

THE VELOCITY OF SO-CALLED TURNS

A corollary of fragmentation is the velocity of so-called turns. The 1980s were marked by the linguistic turn. Nowadays, many “turns” are happening simultaneously – the affect turn, the new materialism turn, the ontological turn, the neuro-turn, the Anthropocene turn.

To be sure, some of the turns do not last. Others are not “real” turns since they do not affect deeper questions of epistemology or of method. They are part of a vast recycling and rebranding of disciplines that goes hand in hand with the creeping commodification of education. Yet, all these “turns” must be taken as “alerts”, a search for different images of thought.¹⁵

A crucial factor behind the proliferation of fields and subfields of inquiry, our sense of who is the subject of cognition and what should count as an object of knowledge is fast changing. Of particular significance, too, is the fact that entrenched and historic antagonisms between the sciences and humanities disciplines are breaking down. They are breaking down as a result of a number of developments I would like to briefly single out.

First is the gradual recognition that we humans are not as special as we once thought. Nor are we as disentangled from other species as we once thought. Actually, the terrestrial sphere is not only mostly populated by beetles and bacteria in terms of biomass¹⁶ but the future of our species will thoroughly depend on what we do to other species (principle of entanglement and mutuality).

Second is the fact that the humanities have traditionally relied on a distinction between society and nature, or culture and nature. This is reflected in the division of labour between social sciences and natural sciences. The social, in this instance, usually referred to those aspects of human life, human activity and human understanding that required some form or another of symbolisation. If nature was understood to encompass both subjects and objects, society and nature nevertheless denoted two realms that could be kept analytically distinct – the distinction between the symbolic and the pre-symbolic.

There are those who still argue for the uniqueness of human nature, or for the idea “that humans occupy a unique position in the scheme of things.”¹⁷ They still believe that humans alone are capable of rational thought; they alone have a capacity to feel emotions such as empathy.

The ontological turn (which has given rise to new subfields such as post-humanist ethnography, environmental philosophy and history, Earth System science and other strands of social science research) has put such beliefs under severe stress. Common to these subfields is the idea of distributed agency and, to some extent, the rejection of the Cartesian dichotomies between subject and object, society and nature, human and nonhuman, living and non-living entities. The drive nowadays is to perceive the various non-human entities with which we interact as sources of agency.

Third, a renewed dialogue is in the making between the social sciences, studies of science and technology, life and biological sciences and philosophy. It is not without tensions and contradictions. Issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the biological sciences are, in different ways, increasingly becoming the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and vice versa. Emergent fields or sub-fields across the life and biological sciences and the humanities are engaged in the search for new terminologies and theoretical apparatuses at points of contact and interface, across disciplinary boundaries and traditions.¹⁸ Humanities-inflected inquiries are being reshaped in ways that make them more open to biological sciences, just at the time when biological sciences are becoming more receptive to the social sciences.¹⁹

Of late, this incipient convergence has triggered the development of new research agendas. Such agendas overtly privilege ideas of co-constitution, co-evolution and co-implication. They “emphasize the complex, processual, indeterminate, contingent, non-linear and relational nature of phenomena constantly open to effects from contiguous processes.”²⁰ In other words, they start from the assumption that there are no biological or vital processes that are not “simultaneously technical, cultural, symbolic, material, economic and immaterial.”²¹ As for the human, not only is its emergence processual: the human is fundamentally an indeterminate entity. At the heart of this incipient convergence is therefore a deliberate attempt not only at breaking down all kinds of distinctions “between human and other life forms, between binary genders, between the social and the natural, the human and the technical, biology and identity, the mind and the body, self and other, material and immaterial, and many other dichotomous forms of thought and practice,”²² but also at relocating the apparent newness of the present conjuncture to longer, deeper histories. Thus, the return of deep history as the best way to elucidate the conditions under which the new emerges.

THE NEURO-TURN

Of late, the two most important turns have been the ontological turn and the neuro-turn. Both put into question a number of foundational categories the humanities have relied on for the last centuries – the category of the human and the category of the social; that of nature and that of culture. Some of the key categories of the humanistic inquiry – intention, agency, consciousness, mind, brain and language, autonomy, personhood, beliefs and feelings such as empathy, sympathy, compassion, suspicion, fear or love – have also been subjected to renewed inquiry, especially by the biological sciences.

In fact, “the webs of human social and cultural life that we had come to understand as our particular object of knowledge seem more and more open to being figured neuro-scientifically and experimentally.”²³ According to Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, many facets of human life that were, for much of the 20th century, primarily understood through the abstraction of “culture” or “society” “are increasingly understood as functions of the cerebral architecture of individuals or of groups of individuals.”²⁴

Neuroscientists are now seeking to establish the neural mechanisms that underpin almost every single human activity or emotion. For Nikolas Rose, although brains are constitutively embodied, saturated by and dependent upon their constant transactions with inputs from without, mental events can now be read in the tissues of the brain.²⁵

FORMS OF KNOWING AND SUBJECTS OF COGNITION

The changes sketched above are affecting not only the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world, or how human beings are understood in the present. They are also affecting the very forms of knowing and the subject of knowledge. Not long ago, conscious thought was seen as the defining characteristic of humans. Cognition (knowing) involved an awareness of self and others and it was associated with consciousness, symbolic reasoning, abstract thought, verbal language, mathematics and so on. The act of knowing also included perception and judgement. Today, thanks to progress in disciplines such as cognitive biology, we have a better and more complex understanding of human cognitive ecology.

First of all, as Hayles suggests, cognition is no longer “limited to humans or organisms with consciousness; it extends to all life forms, including those lacking central nervous systems such as plants and microorganisms.”²⁶ Being, as it is, the engagement of all lifeforms with their environment, cognition is a much broader capacity that “extends far beyond consciousness into other neurological brain processes.”²⁷ In other words, there are non-conscious forms of cognition.

Second, she argues, cognition is not limited to humans and life forms. It is also pervasive in complex technical systems. In other words, humans and living organisms are not the only important or relevant cognisers on the planet. Technical systems are also endowed with cognitive capabilities.

Third, knowledge does not only reside in the brain. It is also acquired through interactions with the environment. It is partly about processing information, discerning patterns, drawing inferences. We live in an epoch when the informational streams we rely upon to produce knowledge are so massive, so multifaceted and complex that they can never be processed exclusively by human brains.

Cognitive abilities once resident only in biological organisms have therefore now been exteriorised into the world. “Biological and technical cognitions are now so deeply entwined that it is more accurate to say they interpenetrate one another.”²⁸

All of this is happening amidst a return to “big questions”, the most important of which are what constitutes human life; how we are to communicate between disciplines, between cultures, between human and non-human entities; and whether there is anything we hold dear in our ways of living that we might want to preserve, nurture and foster, while overcoming the existential paradigm that has set us on a fast track to ecological collapse.²⁹

KNOWLEDGE IN A COMPUTATIONAL AGE

It is not only the entire knowledge ecology that is fast changing. It is also what actually counts as knowledge. Computers have changed the way even basic concepts in science are understood. The conflation of the mind/brain with the computer is the biggest intellectual event of our times. It is at the basis of current reconfigurations of what counts as knowledge.

Knowledge has always been tied to the requisite of “empirical validation”. Knowledge is that which has to be validated empirically; that which has undergone a methodical, systematic process of empirical validation. No knowledge is free from these constraints. Whatever is free from it represents at best wisdom, but not knowledge as such.

The epoch is in search of deterministic models of human behaviour and decision-making. Knowledge is reduced to an understanding of what lies behind people’s decision-making, their responses to marketing: the figures of the citizen, the consumer, publics and their behaviour.

It is a conception of knowledge that claims to possess laws that can be discovered through the use of mathematics.

Imitating natural sciences and mimicking physics has been a crucial trend/feature in the human/social sciences since the 19th century – the idea that we will gain privileged insight into humanity generally if we follow or apply the laws of physics to human phenomena.

Whether we have transcended that physics envy (hierarchies of knowledge) remains to be seen. In some instances, it is back with a vengeance. Take, for instance, economic theory, where this movement mostly gained steam after the Second World War. If we are to believe historians of science, this was the moment when techniques such as linear programming, statistical optimisation, matrix methods, formal logic, information theory, game theory “and a whole raft of techniques were imported into economics.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, early developments of both electronic computers and programming were consolidated and an entirely new intellectual epoch was rendered possible by the computer, which “jumpstarted” what today is known as “econometric empiricism”, which ranges from “cybernetics as a theory of certain kinds of human/automaton metaphors, to the incorporation of stochastic models in decision theory, to econometrics and simulation.”

With the advent of algorithmic thinking and various forms of automated reasoning, new debates are unfolding concerning the faculties of knowing, desiring and judging as well as the meaning of truth. The same goes for intuition, understanding and imagination.³⁰

THE PLANETARY

Each of the “turns” evoked above has paved the way for the rise of new objects of knowledge and new questions about the ways in which the human world could be re-imagined in terms of its relation with the Earth. With the end of the human condition as marked by agency, the times are propitious for the return to “big questions” and “deep history” – “big questions” concerning the relation of human life to planetary life, in a context of geological recasting of historical time.

The emerging paradigm is that “human societies and the Earth have now forged a tenuous unity.”³¹ “Planetarity” is the consciousness of that unity and of the entanglement of nature and society.

AFRO-COMPUTATION

In this last section, I will try to draw the implications of the developments I have just sketched for the study of Africa. Africa is going through a silent techno-computational revolution. Electronic and digital footprints are everywhere – ticket sales, online searches are common.

People write blog posts. Many resort to credit card transactions. The visual and auditory landscape is fast changing. In music, we are witnessing an endless recombination and remix and mash-up of sounds and rhythms, the sampling and recombining of old and new material.

Cut-up and collage practices extend well beyond music as such, as old and new creative practices keep generating innovative, useful content in almost every single domain of everyday life – in visual art, film, video, literature, culinary arts, fashion and of course Internet applications.

So, here like everywhere else in the world, life behind screens is fast becoming a fact of daily existence. People are exposed to, are producing and are absorbing more images than they ever have before.

They are increasingly surrounded by all kinds of devices, dream machines and ubiquitous technologies – cell phones, the Web, videos and films. Connection to the Internet is not simply a preoccupation for the middle class. It is increasingly in the interest of the urban poor to be connected too. Even before food, shelter and access to electricity have been secured, the first thing the African urban poor strive for is a mobile phone, then television and especially cable TV. And of course the Internet.

It follows that as the boundaries of perception are being outstretched, more and more Africans are projected from one temporal regime to another. Time now unfolds in multiple versions. Its shapes are more protean than they have ever been. The struggles to capture these protean shapes of time have hardly been documented and yet, they are paving the way for an Afropolitan aesthetic sensibility we still need to map and properly study.

“All of this is happening amidst a return to ‘big questions’, the most important of which are what constitutes human life; how we are to communicate between disciplines, between cultures, between human and non-human entities; and whether there is anything we hold dear in our ways of living that we might want to preserve, nurture and foster, while overcoming the existential paradigm that has set us on a fast track to ecological collapse.”

A prime example of the ongoing Afro-techno-revolution is the mobile phone. The introduction of the mobile phone on the continent has been a technological event of considerable singularity. Three comments in this regard are necessary.

First, the mobile phone is not simply an object of use. It has become a portable storage (grenier) of all kinds of knowledges and a crucial device that has changed the way people speak, act, write, communicate, remember and imagine who they are and how they relate to themselves, to others and to the world at large.

Second, along with the advent of other computational media, the introduction of the mobile phone has also been a major aesthetic and affect-laden event. In Africa, this device is not only a medium of communication. It is also a medium of self-stylisation and self-singularisation. People spend a lot of time with it. It is as if they wear it. It has become an extension of one’s being, a container of the lives it in turn shapes. The way people treat their phones and the way they take care of these objects is itself an indication of how they would like to be taken care of and, eventually, of the way they would like to be treated.

Third, from a philosophical point of view, the biggest impact of the mobile phone – and of digital technologies more broadly – has been at the level of the imaginary. The interaction between humans and screens has intensified, and with it, the experience of life and the world as cinema – the cinematic nature of life.

The argument I want to make, which is slightly different from a classical Afrofuturist argument, is that the plasticity of digital forms speaks powerfully to the plasticity of African precolonial cultures and to ancient ways of working with representation and mediation, of folding reality.

African precolonial cultures were obsessed with the interrogation concerning the boundaries of life. As evidenced by their myths, oral literatures and cosmogonies, among the most important human queries were those concerning the world beyond human perceptibility, visibility and consciousness. The time of objects was not unlike the time of humans. Objects were not seen as static entities. Rather, they were like flexible living beings endowed with original and at times occult, magical and even therapeutic properties.

Things and objects, the animal and organic worlds were also repositories of energy, vitality and virtuality and, as such, they constantly invited wonder and enchantment. Tools, technical objects and artefacts facilitated the capacity for human cognition and language. They belonged to the world of interfaces and as such, served as the linchpin to transgress existing boundaries so as to access the Universe’s infinite horizons. With human beings and other living entities, they entertained a relationship of reciprocal causation. This is what early anthropologists mistook for “animism”.

Turning now to knowledge as such, it must be said that precolonial African ways of knowing have been particularly difficult to fit into Western analytical vocabularies. According to Jane Guyer and Samuel Eno Belinga, in their study of Equatorial knowledge, such ways of knowing were not “specialist, in the sense of a closed esoteric system with its classifications, propositions.”³² Nor were they “controlled and monopolised by a small cadre of experts or a secret society hierarchy.”³³

Collectively, they tell us, “knowledge was conceptualised as an open repertoire and unbounded vista. Then, within collectivities the vista was divided up and quite widely distributed on the basis of personal capacity.”³⁴ “Adepts are many and varied,” they say, “each pushing up against the outside limits of their own frontier of the known world, inventing new ways of configuring, storing and using” what must have been an ever-shifting spectrum of possibility. Citing Jan Vansina and James Fernandez in particular,³⁵ Guyer and Eno Belinga argue that these were societies that knew much more about their local habitats than they needed to know for utilitarian purposes, which means that knowledge for the sake of knowledge was a key feature of social existence.

From the picture they paint, it seems to me that these societies would hardly care about questions such as the “decolonisation” of knowledge. Whatever its origins, knowledge was something to be captured, if necessary from outside, as long as it could be mobilised for action or for performance. They showed “great receptivity to novelty,” Guyer and Eno Belinga argue.³⁶ “Personal abilities existed first, but they could be augmented and actualised within the person, making that person a real person, singular to themselves”³⁷ and recognised as such by others – the social process was about putting these singularities together. It is as if the Internet was speaking unmediated to this archaic unconscious or to these societies’ deepest and hidden brain.

It is nowadays common sense to argue that the technological devices that saturate our lives have become extensions of ourselves. The novelty is that in the process, they have instituted a relationship between humans and other living or vital things African traditions had long anticipated.

Indeed, in old African traditions, human beings were never satisfied with simply being human beings. They were constantly in search of a supplement to their humanhood. Often, they added to their humanhood various attributes or properties taken from the worlds of animals, plants and various objects. Modernity rejected such ways of being and their compositional logics, confining them to the childhood of Man. Clear distinctions between ourselves and the objects with which we share our existence were established. A human being was not a thing or an object. Nor was he or she an animal or a machine. This is precisely what human emancipation was supposed to mean.

Our own relationship to ourselves and to what surrounds us has changed as a result of our increasing entanglement with objects, technologies or other animate things or beings. Today we want to capture for ourselves the forces and energies and vitalism of the objects that surround us, most of which we have invented. We think of ourselves as made up of various spare parts. This convergence, and at times fusion, between the living human being and the objects, artefacts or the technologies that supplement or augment us is at the source of the emergence of an entirely different kind of human being we have not seen before.

With the advent of algorithmic thinking and various forms of automated reasoning, machines are increasingly endowed with decision-making capacities. The concretisation of reasoning in machines – in other words the automation of reasoning – has cast a shadow on deductive reasoning and on the uniqueness of human reasoning. “Biologically bounded thought has been displaced by an abstract architecture of reasoning able to carry out tasks and make decisions by correlating data.”³⁸

In a global culture in which the footprints of social life are increasingly digitalised, software is becoming the engine of society and algorithmic reasoning a new form of thinking. To a large extent, software is remaking the human. The production of massive amounts of data at exponential rates has pushed us to the threshold of a different ontology of number. Numbers have become the engines not only of calculation and computation, but also of invention, imagination and speculation. We can no longer rely entirely on dominant epistemological and ontological assumptions about numbers. New ways of theorising measurement and quantification are more than ever required if we are to account for the ongoing computational reconfigurations of subjectivity and of the social.³⁹

CONCLUSION

If, as Gerard Delanty and Aurea Mota argue, the emerging paradigm is that “the human societies and the Earth have now forged a tenuous unity as well as a consciousness of that unity”; and “the presuppositions of modernity are now once again called into question with the emergence of an entangled conception of nature and society, Earth and the world,” then the question facing us is the following: what interpretive categories do we need for making sense of the world and of human societies, within a trajectory of time that encompasses planetary time?⁴⁰

Africa is a planetary laboratory at a time when history itself is being recast as an integrated history of the earth system, technical systems and the human world. Here, a technological revolution is taking shape at a time when the continent is increasingly perceived as the last frontier of capitalism. Out of Africa, an incredible amount of wealth has been extracted over centuries. This wealth has flowed out to every corner of the globe. To be sure, the continent’s natural assets are in danger of being depleted. Waste and pollution have increased exponentially. But Africa remains the last territory on earth that has not yet been entirely subjected to the rule of capital.

It is the last repository of a vast body of untapped wealth – minerals underground, plants and animals, water and sun, all the forms of energy latent in the earth’s crust. Its biosphere is still more or less intact. Its hydrographic power, its solar energy, its territorial immensities are hardly touched. It is the last major chunk of our planet that has not yet been entirely connected to its many different parts. This single gargantuan landmass can still support a huge number of people. It is the only place on Earth where people can still come and begin anew and where the potential for the human species is still high. The times, therefore, are propitious for big questions concerning the relation of human life to planetary life in a context of geological recasting of historical time.

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