‘Begging to Be Black’

Abstract

This article explores the distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog's Begging to Be Black. The epistemology and ontology of postcolonial becoming is the central concern. Begging to Be Black is a mytho-poetic narrative in which a world is imagined where King Moshoeshoe, missionaries from the 19th century, Antjie Krog and her friends and colleagues, ANC cadres, the Deleuzian philosopher Paul Patton, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC Y outh League are placed in the same narrative space where they can intermingle. And this is done to respond to a crisis of the present-the difficulties South Africans face in grappling with the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, and the fact that there is a process of un-homing and re-homing that Krog feels white South Africans in particular need to think about more deeply. The article compares Krog's approach to decolonization with that of the leading South African philosopher of ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose. Both Krog and Ramose offer the epistemological and ontological resources for grappling with the relationship between past, present and future in a decolonizing setting. The article examines how postcolonial critique may take place through liminal figures. Liminality is characterized as central to postcolonial becoming.

Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory

“…See, for example, Hall et al (1978). 19 See also Motha (2010) and Bhandar (2012). 20 See also Motha and Perrin (2002); Bhandar (2011); Rush (1990); Hanafin (2001).…”

Introduction: Listening with African Leadership in the 21st Century—Paradigmatic Considerations for Liminal Contexts

“…This type of intense dyadic and emergent co-creative leadership-followership process within an adaptive space to support the emergence of entrepreneurial, enabling, and operational leadership seems to be embedded within the African context and consequently manifests itself in African leadership paradigms (Le Grange, 2012;Volmink, 2010). This embedded liminal leadership context is assumed because it appears that liminality is the framework informing much of the existential reality of African people (Hallowell, 2014;Motha, 2010;Tagoe, 2011). Perhaps it is true that "There can be no genuinely global ethic until non-Africans start taking the rich and immensely long-standing ethical heritage of Black Africa seriously" (Murove, 2012).…”