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or conviviality?
Africa and Africans, the late Ali Mazrui once wrote, are a continent and people more sinned against than sinning. Even when there are violent outbursts à la Frantz Fanon, the intention and results are far less about rupture or radical breaks, than about accommodation, interdependence and conviviality. Africa and Africans, it would appear, are more inclined to social repair than social rupture.
To have Rhodes in the twenty-first century towering like a colossus at the University of Cape Town was perceived as a symbol of the continuities of colonial and apartheid-era violence. His statue was targeted by student protests spearheaded by black South African students in the main, as part of a resurgent nationwide student movement in the interest of decolonization and transformation of university education.
The student movement was articulated around the rallying cry of ‘black lives matter’ – a cry shared with blacks in diasporic spaces across the West and in the rest of the world. On the surface, these often violent protests might appear to suggest nothing short of rupture, but on a closer look, there is far less about discontinuities than continuities in them. Colonialism and apartheid may have been violent animations of racialized ambitions of dominance, but the current nibbling at their resilience speaks more of an invitation to explore conviviality through recognizing and providing for incompleteness in being and becoming than a violent severance of interconnections.
I understand rupture to mean a radical break not only with the established and predictable order of social action, but also, and more importantly, with the very framework that makes such an order possible and ensures its reproduction. The framework serves to police the borders of acceptability, tolerability, inclusivity, normalcy and possibility. Frameworks are hidden ensurers of the status quo.
Like goats tethered by ropes of a certain length, those operating under a particular framework can celebrate their freedoms and possibilities, and even their radicalness, as long as these are confined to the limits of the radius afforded them by the length of the ropes by which they are tethered (and they might actually excel at ‘eating where they are tethered’, as a Cameroonian saying about corruption in the public service goes). The moment they imagine, dream of and seek to explore pastures (seek alternatives, reimagine or reinvent the norm, so to speak) beyond the confines of their frame of reference is when they discover the true possibilities and limits of their freedom.
How do social scientists, eager perhaps to side with the underdogs, avoid the temptation to misread and exaggerate signs of outbursts and violent confrontations as evidence of rupture? Normally, minimalism, even in radicalism, is the order of the day. Although we shape in the process of being shaped, change comes in trickles, and radical change is not an everyday part of the equation, even when violence and occasional eruptions are on the menu.
Understanding frames and framing is a categorical imperative in our social scientific imagination. We cannot afford to approach our social science reflection and practice like goats tethered and confined by conventional wisdom, be this that of our disciplines or of the societies of which we are a part. To simply rearrange the contents of the frame (in the manner supermarkets occasionally and sometimes radically rearrange items on solid, firmly grounded shop shelves) while leaving the frame, its boundaries and organizational logic firmly intact and sacrosanct, may amount to respite, but it falls short of rupture.
It pays to look at the forces and faces beneath the mask of freedom, independence and autonomy, working away to trivialize and snuff out any gathering storm or surging flames with potential for rupture. In Francophone Africa, the all-powerful hidden or not so hidden hand is France, the former colonial master. France’s long history of intervention and interference in its former colonies in Africa continues with the traffic in mutual influence between French politicians and multinational corporations, on the one hand, and, on the other, African heads of state who readily waste away African resources and wealth on the French power elite with callous disregard for the plight and predicament of ordinary Africans. Often, we social scientists have acted more like the évolués of colonial times, seeking to out-French the French at being French. Are discourses of discontent and discontented discourses a necessary and sufficient indication that rupture is definitely coming home for dinner?
In a post-colonial context where there are far more continuities than discontinuities, mass violence by the oppressed may not necessarily be because of an intention to break away or to rupture. Given the possibility of creative innovation through copying, imitation, mimesis and mimicry, violent outbursts might sometimes signify a yearning to break into the ranks of the status quo.
Independence in Africa almost everywhere did not result in questioning, let alone radically redefining, inherited colonial institutions and hierarchies of value. Tough-talking educated African elites took over from the withdrawing colonial authorities, to continue with business as usual.
The rallying cry in the 2015 and 2016 #RhodesMustFall protests in Cape Town was the transformation and decolonization of university education, as well as the deracialization of daily life and interactions on university campuses. As the name indicates, the initial focus of the protesting students was the prominent and centrally located statue of Cecil John Rhodes, on the campus of the University of Cape Town. From the outset, the protesting students made it clear that removal of Rhodes’s statue was just the starting point for the transformation and decolonization they sought. So the protests did not end with the removal of the statue.
The clamour for decolonization persisted, leading me to take a closer look, over and above a cosmetic approach, where incendiary discourses and occasional violent action by students are contradicted by actions that suggest that the call for decolonization hides as much as it reveals.
Decolonization as the quest for conviviality
Among many an ordinary African in many a community in rural and urban Africa, there is a widely shared conviction that the unconnected, disconnected or isolated life is not worth living. Such a life amounts to a social death. The belief in interconnections and in inclusivity is deep and strong. Individuals are actively encouraged to stay connected in and with their humanity, whatever their personal achievements, and whatever the challenges or predicaments confronting them.
African students and scholars interested in rethinking African social sciences and humanities could maximize and capitalize upon the currency of conviviality in popular African ideas of reality and social action. Conviviality is recognition and provision for the fact or reality of being incomplete. If incompleteness is the normal order of things – natural, human and supernatural – conviviality invites us to celebrate and preserve incompleteness and mitigate delusions of grandeur that come with ambitions and claims of perfection. Conviviality emphasizes the repair rather than the rejection of human relationships. It is more about cobbling and less about ruptures. It is fundamental to being human – biologically and socially – and necessary for processes of social renewal, reconstruction and regeneration. Conviviality depicts diversity, tolerance, trust, equality, inclusiveness, cohabitation, coexistence, mutual accommodation, interaction, interdependence, getting along, generosity, hospitality, congeniality, festivity, civility and privileging peace over conflict, among other forms of sociality.
Nothing short of convivial scholarship would do justice to the legitimate quest for a reconfiguration of African universities and disciplines of knowledge.
A truly convivial scholarship doesn’t seek, the way Rhodes and Kruger did, to define and confine Africans into particular territories or geographies, racial and ethnic categories, classes, genders, generations, religions or whatever other identity marker is in vogue.
Convivial scholarship confronts and humbles the challenge of over-prescription, over-standardization and over-prediction. It is critical and evidence-based, just as it is critical of the sources of evidence. It is a scholarship that sees the local in the global and the global in the local. It brings them into informed conversations, conscious of the hierarchies and power relations at play at both the micro and macro levels of being and becoming.
Convivial scholarship challenges us – however grounded we may be in