Introduction

This chapter paints a canvas, in broad strokes, of the politics of memory, knowledge and freedom. It is conceptual in its orientation. The chapter begins with an analysis of how colonialism forcibly and violently submitted the colonised part of the world to European memory and knowledge. It proceeds to deploy the concepts of “dismemberment” and “re-membering” to explicate how colonised people were pushed out of the human family as they were denied history and memory on the one hand, and on the other hand how re-membering as a necessary anticolonial and decolonial project should be predicated on the radical restoration of memory, knowledge and re-writing of history, as part of the broader agenda of attaining liberation and freedom. This is necessary because genuine decolonisation must not only destroy colonialism and transcend it, but must also establish a new humanism. Survivors of large-scale violence—such as that of colonial apartheid in South Africa, with its dismembering technologies—have to simultaneously confront the past while seeking to build a new, inclusive political society. The significance of this chapter is that it unpacks the complex technologies of dismemberment/dehumanisation which were meant to erase colonised people's history, memory and knowledge, while at the same time providing re-membering initiatives with their visions of new societies and a new world. Dismemberment and remembering constitute the two poles between which memory, knowledge and freedom oscillate.

The submission of the colonised world to European memory and knowledge

The transhistorical and transnational expansion of Europe, together with its civilisation, cartography (mapping), conquest, naming and owning, resulted in the submission of the colonised parts of the world to European memory and knowledge (Mudimbe, 1984). The intention of this submission of the colonised world to European memory and knowledge was part of what the European historian, John M. Headley (2008), celebrated as the “Europeanisation of the world”. The colonial world was to be remade in the image and interests of the colonisers. This submission of the colonised world to the European memory and knowledge materialised in three major ways: in the first instance, the transhistorical and transnational expansion of Europe beyond its borders entailed the invasion of the mental universe of its victims (Ngũgῖ wa Thiong’o, 1986; see also Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018).

Introduction

Resistance in Africa is primarily a response to the coloniality reproduced by the postcolony and global multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Coloniality is the location of power within which resistance emerges, radiates and is disciplined into emancipatory reformism bereft of revolutionary transformation. It is itself a central motif of global imperial designs, but it must not be confused with colonialism. Colonialism entails a political and economic relation in which sovereignty of a nation and a people ‘rests on the power of another nation, which makes such a nation an empire’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243). Coloniality emerged as a result of colonialism but it survives it. It is a power structure that defines and permeates ‘culture, labour, inter subjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243). Coloniality is embedded in books, cultural patterns, common sense, self-image, aspirations of self, and other various aspects of African experience since the time of colonial encounters, and ‘[i]n a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243).

Coloniality operates through assumption of various disguises and markers including religion, ethnicity, epistemology, and even notions of beauty and its opposites. As such it forms an ideal entry point to analyse the unfolding character and dynamics of African forms of resistance.