Beyond dependency & state: Case for knowledge decolonization – Part I

This modern world today is entangled in a serious historical crisis manifesting itself through problems that mutate to threaten the survival of the human species.

These problems include climate change, gross human rights violations, misuse of artificial intelligence, the oppression of the weak by the strong, murderous dictatorships and lack of accountability for power, popular uprisings and the violent overthrow of governments, systemic discrimination against political minorities, including genocide against indigenous peoples, and the forceful appropriation of their lands through the cruel complicity of the modern nation state, among others.

These problems, which have globular replication, have fomented political instability. Many public intellectuals and, indeed, scholars have grappled with finding a lasting solution to these crises. How can humanity transcend the existential threats that currently confront it?

Some scholars like Walter Rodney, Basil Davidson and their compatriots in the dependency school have pointed to the unequal structural relations between the industrialized nations in the Global North and the least developed countries of the Global South.

The major claim of the dependency school is that historically, colonial capitalism created unequal power relations and a system of rule, which disadvantaged Africans and other peoples of the Global South by making them merely suppliers of labour and consumers of the products of Western industries.

There have also been other scholars like Mahmood Mamdani who see the actual problem as the system of rule that colonialism left behind, to define and rule its subjects.

Mamdani’s central claim, as we understand it, is that the modern nation state and its logic and structures need to be reconsidered to the extent that the state is an exclusionary device that denies political minorities proper belonging.

Tracing the modern state’s origins to the Reconquista in 1492 when the Spanish Castilian monarchy succeeded in expelling Muslims from Iberia, thereby cleaning it up as a homogenous homeland for Christians; and, later on, to this character fully forming at Westphalia in 1648 where European nations agreed to accommodate political minorities at home in exchange for reciprocal protections of their citizens abroad, Mamdani considers the chief fault of the modern state to be the creation of distinctions between citizens – the idea being that the state belongs to national majorities and that minorities can only be tolerated only to the degree that they do not threaten to upset the state’s majoritarian logic.

Mahmood Mamdani’s view is essentially what Yahya Sseremba builds upon in his 10-part series titled Religion, Politics and Violence: Rethinking the State that was recently published by the Observer newspaper. Sseremba considers that the modern nation-state is “the most violent, most divisive and most dictatorial form of political organization that humanity has ever invented.”

Further, he reflects that problematizing the state will help us to understand the problems and find solutions to the current crises that are haunting humanity, ranging from contradictions in religion, politics as well as violence that is resultantly caused by these sharp contradictions.

Indeed, we agree with Mahmood Mamdani, thus Yahya Sseremba’s characterization of the problem that is the modern nation-state. Undoubtedly, we should all be preoccupied with rethinking it. We also hold a favourable opinion of the dependency theorists and their critique of the political-economic structures that have kept Africa and the Global South forever bound to the capitalistic appetites and machinations of countries in the industrialized Global North.

However, we wish to alert the reader of a much more complex and fundamental problem that should daily exercise our collective minds and inform our attitudes and approaches towards navigating humanity out of the historical crisis and interregnum that confronts it presently.

This problem is epistemic. In simple terms, it has everything to do with how the world we currently inhabit was constructed for us by colonial modernity. How modern power was born at the level of knowledge and how it has managed to reproduce and repropagate itself to the present day.

To do this – we will argue subsequently – will be to understand why Africa and, indeed, much of the Global South, continues to wallow in underdevelopment, poverty, strife, hunger, political and cultural servitude decades and even centuries after flag independence.

We will explain that political decolonization alone is inadequate without cultural liberation, what Ngugi wa Thiong’o terms as decolonizing the mind. Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, one of Africa’s greatest statesmen, is reputed to have said in respect to the clamour by African states for independence from colonial rule that “Seek ye political kingdom first and the rest will be added unto you.”

We will demonstrate that Nkrumah’s clarion call, whereas true at the time, had a limitation. It underestimated the complex nature of the empire of the mind that colonial modernity carefully constructed to enslave and perpetuate itself in the minds of the colonized.