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Beyond dependency and the state: The case for knowledge decolonization Part IV

In the first part of this series of articles, we acknowledged the irrefutable existence in the world today of a terminal crisis characterizing itself in climate change, gross human rights violations, misuse of artificial intelligence, oppression of the weak by the strong and the systemic discrimination against political minorities including genocide of indigenous people and the forceful stealing of their lands, among others.

All these problems haunting modern man like an angry ghost waiting to be exorcised by the living vindicate the limitations of Euro-American-centric ways of knowing which became universal through genocide and the vile categorization of human beings into two zones of being and non-being, the division of humanity into those that are human and those that are less human.

It, therefore, follows that all advancements made through the European universal lacked participation of “lesser” peoples. Principally because of negating the world outlooks, epistemologies and ontological realities of non-European peoples that Europe considered subhuman or only material for civilization projects, in the words of Mahmood Mamdani, the world is locked in crises that we do not have solutions of unless we go back into time and understand when the rain started beating us.

For instance, the current climate crisis is the result of arrogant European and, later, Euro-American- centric ideas – the heritage of Greek philosophy, that man as the most rational creature must conquer nature instead of living in accord with it as Africans, for instance, have done for thousands of years.

It seems the more Europe goes forward, the more it gets backwards and gets terminally lost. And it seeks to impose this trajectory on other people in the language of universalism or rights. Is the West the only universal? Can’t everyone else see the moon from where they are standing? Why should man subdue nature? Did he create it? Can he sustain himself out of it?

Look again at artificial intelligence (AI): why should human agency be removed? Why should it be developed without the involvement and participation of non- European peoples and then imposed onto the world? No wonder, AI is vindicating Euro-American-centric ways of warfare that have caused humanity two so-called World Wars and deployment of nuclear weapons that almost wiped-out Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Euro-American-centric methods of warfare are premised on the destruction of the enemy, not subdual. If you fight a man and defeat him, why go ahead and destroy him? This is what colonialism did to the bodies and coloniality continues to do to the minds of colonial subjects.

European ways of warfare are cowardly. Africans greatly despised a man who after throwing down an opponent in a fair fight proceeded to bite him. No wonder, the Baganda have a cautionary proverb to this effect. Tomegganga n’oluma. African warfare is based on accommodation, reconciliation and the enduring spirit of concern for others, on obuntu, as the Banyakitara people would call it: on the idea that there should not be permanent enmity.

Most of Omukama Kabalega’s elite commanders were not indigenous Banyoro. Possibly only Omuhamba Rwabudongo was. Generalissimo Ireeta lya Byangombe was a Musongora war-captive. It was this same Ireeta that formed the fulcrum of Kabalega’s outrageously heroic nine-year anti-imperialist resistance.

We should not be mistaken for saying that European ways of knowing are bad. No. Europe has bestowed to humanity uncountable profits for which we should irreparably be grateful. Take the example of the aircraft – that thing of infinite wonders, amasani – as the Banyoro-Batooro would call it.

Take, too, the example of the internet that has connected humanity and created opportunity and fraternal relations between men worlds-apart. In acknowledging the merits of European ingenuity, we stand on the ground Prince Paul Job Kafeero stood on when in the song Olulimi Lwange, he considered finally that the ways of white people should not be undiscerningly rejected but, rather, embraced only if they improve our ways of knowing.

To assert this is to signify that there is not only a universe, there are pluriverses as decolonial scholar Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni characterizes this reality. We are saying that only one way of looking at the world, the Eurocentric way, is tired.

Eurocentric ways of knowing have run their full course. They have brought us to where we are. We need to engage other ways of knowing – ecologies of knowledge – if we are to transcend the present historical interregnum.

This is the project of decoloniality. Decoloniality seeks to subvert that which coloniality seeks to assert. It is a liberatory ideology that has been bequeathed to us by great humanists like Okot p’Bitek, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, etc to enable us to think about our present condition.

Beyond dependency and the state, we should all pursue decolonial approaches to knowledge.

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Written by Kyomuhendo A. Ateenyi (1)

Human Rights Lawyer, Advocate of the High Court of Judicature in Uganda and Political Activist.

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