Coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas

Abstract

The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of a common narrative on coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. Since scholars tend to focus on either Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, a gap between these important regions has emerged in the literature on coloniality. This article seeks to bridge this gap by providing a comparative perspective on coloniality, and this hopefully will enhance Indigenous African nations’ and Indigenous American nations’ understanding of what needs to be done to overcome coloniality. The article explores three key theses. First, in spite of the differences in the extant societal power structures in the postcolonial African states and the former settler colonial states in the Americas, this article argues that the continued dynamics of coloniality are similar in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. The minority status of Indigenous American nations throughout the Americas renders addressing coloniality more challenging than in Sub-Saharan Africa where Indigenous African nations are in the majority although they generally do not have effective sovereignty. Second, the extant societal power structures associated with both coloniality and occidental modernity have weaponized occidental jurisprudence, natural science and social science to defend and proliferate the status quo assisted by state sovereignty. Addressing coloniality effectively therefore requires a renaissance of Indigenous African and Indigenous American cosmovisions unaffected by modernity. Third, addressing coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas requires the recognition of the comprehensive and supreme sovereignty of the Indigenous African nations in all of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Indigenous American nations in all of the Americas.

Between appropriation and assassination

“…By grounding our conversation in self-awareness of ourselves within spaces of higher education, students are asked to consider the ways in which ideas in the social sciences can be weaponised. Nigerian political theorist Claude Ake (1982) called social science the “most pernicious form of imperialism” for its role in proliferating the imagined geographies and ideologies of the capitalist core (see also Cabral, 1966; Poesche, 2019). In such a milieu, what are the collective resources to resist or challenge appropriations, disciplining(s) and other efforts to render decolonial and Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies not only manageable but convenient?…”

Politically Reflexive Foresight

“…The most well-described regional imaginaries include 'Buen Vivir' and related imaginaries in Latin America, 'Ubuntu' and related imaginaries in Africa, and Ecological 'Swaraj' in the Indian subcontinent. They are very much regionally embedded, but also share a number of characteristics recognized by Global South and decolonial authors, such as an egalitarian stance and focus on the collective, a holistic, non-dualistic perspective that does not distinguish humans from the earth and nature, and acknowledgement of plurality of perspectives and worldviews (Muwanga-Zake 2010, , Poesche 2019). The main characteristics of these four ideal-typical types of imaginaries are summarized in table 4.…”