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It is without doubt that black South Africans are physically free, which means they can move from one place to another without unnecessarily encountering any institutional inhibition to their freedom of movement. They can create and step into any platform to voice concerns on a variety of issues that continues to plague them without there being deployed state machinery to monitor what they say or do and for the purposes of harassment and victimisation.
But such physical freedom does not mean black people have attained full freedom, which entails soul, spiritual and mental freedom, if mentally as a result of deep seated structural and systematic issues, they still expect to be seen as a problem every where they go.
If everywhere they go black people still think that they are going to be seen as a potential danger or a potential criminal.
If everywhere they go they have to validate themselves first in one way or the other before being considered fully human.
If they know they are still persona non grata and therefore have to be hidden in corner tables in exclusive restaurants in Cape Town because they are seen as a distraction and a nuisance to white European and American tourists who frequent these restaurants.
And if in every supermarket and restaurant they are seen as the ones whose credit cards are more likely to bounce which means they are more likely to be requested to pay up front before services are rendered or an excuse might be created to refuse them service outright.
If Africans are perpetually told and feel that to be African and to practice African cultural practices is to be backward and therefore have to westernise a little bit more to be taken seriously because the more African you look, the more backward you are and the more western you look, physically and in terms of intellectual thought and stuff like that and the better your English accent is, the more intelligent you are, and the more you are unable to speak English in an “acceptable” accent that signals conformity to everything western, than the more intellectually inept you are.
So as long as the shanes of coloniality have broken free in terms of the physical strictures and have not broken free in terms of black people’s mental and spiritual lives, then we are not fully free.
We need All efforts, countrywide, continentally and globally which seeks to enable us to break free from the mental and spiritual shanes of coloniality that are still intact and continue, broadly to force black people, generally, to have low self esteem, low confidence in the African continent and the African people wherever they are, and to attract violence against African bodies with unspeakable impunity, as we have seen in Israel where Africans are routinely hounded up on a regular basis and being beaten to death, just as in the US where the mere appearance of a black man suggests danger or suggest criminality.
As Africans we have to realise and recognise the fact that we have mental and spiritual strictures that remain intact even though we long attained physical freedom and secondly we have to do something about it.
To quote one of the first freed slaves in America, he said “ I freed a thousand slaves, and I could have freed a thousand more slaves had they known that they are slaves”, as Africans we thus have to acknowledge that we remain mental and spiritual slaves living and appearing as free before we can actually undertake the process of liberating ourselves mentally and spiritually so that we don’t take independence as an end but as a process and don’t take democracy as an end but as a milestone in an ongoing process.
We need to find unique ways to free our selves from these mental strictures as the great Mali singer lamented in music that “non but ourselves can free ourselves”.
In this process we first have to unmask the very reality that the current African knowledge production systems, and institutions are not purely African, in fact there is almost nothing that says African in them, in terms of knowledge production except the fact that these are African universities mostly because they are physically in Africa, but for all intents and purposes, these are western university places in Africa and therefore the produced negative knowledge which mainly constitute conventional wisdom about Africa and Africans in these institutions is a coloniality of some sort, and are not contributing in the process of soul, spiritual and mental decolonisation.
This is proven by the very fact that these “African” universities are generally hostile to ideas that may actually dislocate the hegemony of western thinking and western solutions to problems of the world.
The process of full liberation of Africans and the undoing of mental and spiritual slavery is a long process that cannot be expected to be completed in 20 years or a single century.
What makes the uprooting of coloniality a very difficult and complex process is that no one came from Europe and publicly proclaimed that they are establishing colonialism, they all said they are coming to bring civilization, but to bring civilization means to make “civil” what was not civil, and civil means human being, therefore in this context “is to make human beings those who were not fully human”, guess who are those?
The process of undoing centuries of years of mental slavery should be expected to last centuries, this is because Africans are injured, they still have spiritual scars, they were stabbed.
We all know that if somebody is stabbed in a fight and gets all sorts of scars, what is likely to happen when after the fight you come to terms with what has just happened is that the scars on the body are unlikely to be removed in a short number of years, they will forever be there as a reminder of what happened unless you use modern technologies to remove them, therefore modern African thinking is required to fast track the rediscovery of Africa.
It is important to make clear that the notion of liberation is not to revenge but to live freely again and perhaps re-humanise those who dominated others because the very notion of domination, the very notion of conquest, of causing scars on others and plundering their land, the very notion of stopping people in their tracks as they were developing themselves in ways suitable for their societies, the very notion of stopping people thinking their own way, practising their own religions and generally doing things their own way is it self a very inhumane thing, a very evil thing and therefore the people who did all these things were themselves very evil.
It is for this reason therefore that the process of true liberation must seek to humanise both the one who was dominated and the one who dominated the other.
The phenomenon of Mandela is important here because it was not about removing the shanes from the one who was dominated in order to put them on the one who previously dominated the other, but to set them free of their own shanes because racial superiority is a deception of the mind, the sense that because of your skin colour you are superior is an illusion that you live with and have to do a whole lot of evil and inhumane things to make it visible.
I believe though it will be difficult to get the dominators to truly understand that they benefitted immensely from dominating Africans, and they are at a huge advantage.
Even today when you look at the matric results, they just tell that story, though many black children were born way after apartheid. But they were born with deficits as a result of apartheid. Therefore getting the dominators to understand that the reason why many white children do well, much better than Africans is not because of their supposed racial superiority but it’s because of how they have benefitted throughout the history of oppression for starters will not prove to be a walk in the park as we have seen in the recent past the arrogance with which such suggestions have been met.
Facebook: Siphokuhle Innocent Dludla Twitter: @sidludla
But such physical freedom does not mean black people have attained full freedom, which entails soul, spiritual and mental freedom, if mentally as a result of deep seated structural and systematic issues, they still expect to be seen as a problem every where they go.
If everywhere they go black people still think that they are going to be seen as a potential danger or a potential criminal.
If everywhere they go they have to validate themselves first in one way or the other before being considered fully human.
If they know they are still persona non grata and therefore have to be hidden in corner tables in exclusive restaurants in Cape Town because they are seen as a distraction and a nuisance to white European and American tourists who frequent these restaurants.
And if in every supermarket and restaurant they are seen as the ones whose credit cards are more likely to bounce which means they are more likely to be requested to pay up front before services are rendered or an excuse might be created to refuse them service outright.
If Africans are perpetually told and feel that to be African and to practice African cultural practices is to be backward and therefore have to westernise a little bit more to be taken seriously because the more African you look, the more backward you are and the more western you look, physically and in terms of intellectual thought and stuff like that and the better your English accent is, the more intelligent you are, and the more you are unable to speak English in an “acceptable” accent that signals conformity to everything western, than the more intellectually inept you are.
So as long as the shanes of coloniality have broken free in terms of the physical strictures and have not broken free in terms of black people’s mental and spiritual lives, then we are not fully free.
We need All efforts, countrywide, continentally and globally which seeks to enable us to break free from the mental and spiritual shanes of coloniality that are still intact and continue, broadly to force black people, generally, to have low self esteem, low confidence in the African continent and the African people wherever they are, and to attract violence against African bodies with unspeakable impunity, as we have seen in Israel where Africans are routinely hounded up on a regular basis and being beaten to death, just as in the US where the mere appearance of a black man suggests danger or suggest criminality.
As Africans we have to realise and recognise the fact that we have mental and spiritual strictures that remain intact even though we long attained physical freedom and secondly we have to do something about it.
To quote one of the first freed slaves in America, he said “ I freed a thousand slaves, and I could have freed a thousand more slaves had they known that they are slaves”, as Africans we thus have to acknowledge that we remain mental and spiritual slaves living and appearing as free before we can actually undertake the process of liberating ourselves mentally and spiritually so that we don’t take independence as an end but as a process and don’t take democracy as an end but as a milestone in an ongoing process.
We need to find unique ways to free our selves from these mental strictures as the great Mali singer lamented in music that “non but ourselves can free ourselves”.
In this process we first have to unmask the very reality that the current African knowledge production systems, and institutions are not purely African, in fact there is almost nothing that says African in them, in terms of knowledge production except the fact that these are African universities mostly because they are physically in Africa, but for all intents and purposes, these are western university places in Africa and therefore the produced negative knowledge which mainly constitute conventional wisdom about Africa and Africans in these institutions is a coloniality of some sort, and are not contributing in the process of soul, spiritual and mental decolonisation.
This is proven by the very fact that these “African” universities are generally hostile to ideas that may actually dislocate the hegemony of western thinking and western solutions to problems of the world.
The process of full liberation of Africans and the undoing of mental and spiritual slavery is a long process that cannot be expected to be completed in 20 years or a single century.
What makes the uprooting of coloniality a very difficult and complex process is that no one came from Europe and publicly proclaimed that they are establishing colonialism, they all said they are coming to bring civilization, but to bring civilization means to make “civil” what was not civil, and civil means human being, therefore in this context “is to make human beings those who were not fully human”, guess who are those?
The process of undoing centuries of years of mental slavery should be expected to last centuries, this is because Africans are injured, they still have spiritual scars, they were stabbed.
We all know that if somebody is stabbed in a fight and gets all sorts of scars, what is likely to happen when after the fight you come to terms with what has just happened is that the scars on the body are unlikely to be removed in a short number of years, they will forever be there as a reminder of what happened unless you use modern technologies to remove them, therefore modern African thinking is required to fast track the rediscovery of Africa.
It is important to make clear that the notion of liberation is not to revenge but to live freely again and perhaps re-humanise those who dominated others because the very notion of domination, the very notion of conquest, of causing scars on others and plundering their land, the very notion of stopping people in their tracks as they were developing themselves in ways suitable for their societies, the very notion of stopping people thinking their own way, practising their own religions and generally doing things their own way is it self a very inhumane thing, a very evil thing and therefore the people who did all these things were themselves very evil.
It is for this reason therefore that the process of true liberation must seek to humanise both the one who was dominated and the one who dominated the other.
The phenomenon of Mandela is important here because it was not about removing the shanes from the one who was dominated in order to put them on the one who previously dominated the other, but to set them free of their own shanes because racial superiority is a deception of the mind, the sense that because of your skin colour you are superior is an illusion that you live with and have to do a whole lot of evil and inhumane things to make it visible.
I believe though it will be difficult to get the dominators to truly understand that they benefitted immensely from dominating Africans, and they are at a huge advantage.
Even today when you look at the matric results, they just tell that story, though many black children were born way after apartheid. But they were born with deficits as a result of apartheid. Therefore getting the dominators to understand that the reason why many white children do well, much better than Africans is not because of their supposed racial superiority but it’s because of how they have benefitted throughout the history of oppression for starters will not prove to be a walk in the park as we have seen in the recent past the arrogance with which such suggestions have been met.
Facebook: Siphokuhle Innocent Dludla Twitter: @sidludla
