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Can a Methodology
Subvert the Logics
of its Principal?
Decolonial Meditations

Nokuthula Hlabangane
University of South Africa

This paper raises a question that is fundamental in the relationship between
Euro-Western knowledge as a system of knowing, spawned and reﬁned under
particular historical circumstances, and the methodologies that are attached to
it. I argue that Euro-Western knowledge gains its hegemonic status precisely
because it is a political tool with political implications. As such, it is argued
that the methodologies attached to it cannot be modiﬁed to subvert the very
foundational motivations and spirit that inform Euro-modern knowledge.
The paper shows the politics of such knowledge and of the knowledge resulting
from its methodologies. In this vein, then, I argue that chances for those placed
on opposite sides of the “colonial difference” to engage in scholarly conversations
that give equal respect to their ontological and epistemological concerns are
non-existent. Heretofore marginalized ways of knowing and, thus, of being, need
to be restored to an equal plane of recognition and afﬁrmation for such conver-
sations to be realized. The pervasive understanding of what came to be known
as “African AIDS” is used as a case to substantiate the main argument.

I shall now close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall call away all
my senses, and thus holding conversation only with myself and
considering my own nature. I shall try, little, by little, to reach a
better knowledge of and a more familiar acquaintanceship with
myself. (Tuana 1992, p. 36; quoting Descartes)

Introduction

1.
It is almost regarded as common cause that the involvement of scholars
from the Global South1 in global scholarly conversations has the potential

1. This term, while far from precise, is used widely to denote a particular relationship
with the Global North. This is a historical relationship characterized by conquest whose

Perspectives on Science 2018, vol. 26, no. 6
© 2018 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

doi:10.1162/posc_a_00293

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to color such conversations with views and aspirations uniquely their own.
This is a dangerous common-sense assumption that gives a false sense of
ownership of and representation in conversations that are wholly informed
by a Euro-Western genealogy whose key assumptions have become common-
sensical (Grosfoguel 2013) and have assumed an almost automatic right
to be so (Mignolo 2009). Meaningful involvement by scholars from the
so-called Global South is precluded by a number of factors that are
the subject of this paper. Taking the cue from the above quote by René
Descartes, chief architect of the principles that govern dominant knowl-
edge systems, I argue that such knowledge systems are essentially inward-
looking and self-involved. The quote explicitly shows an obsession with
the self and the place for the self in the world to the exclusion of others.
As such, this monologue leaves no authentic space for a meaningful dialogue.
Rather, it shows a will to ignorance that forecloses any possibility of mutual
recognition and acknowledgement.2

The idea of meaningful conversation entails conversations that, upon
hearing, are understood and their implications considered and engaged
with seriously. A meaningful conversation assumes equals partaking in
good faith toward an idealized end, which in this case would be to put
equal value on knowledge systems of all the peoples of the world. This
paper, with centuries-long epistemicide in the quest for Euro-American
supremacy (Grosfoguel 2013), complicates this apparently simple trans-
action of hearing and understanding in order to facilitate ground breaking
engagement. Scholars from the Global South who straddle the great divide
between the world they were born into and were raised in and the new
world of academia that they are being inducted into raise questions that
arise from this liminal space—the border space (Anzaldua 1987; Mignolo
and Tlostanova 2006; Mignolo 2015, p. 117). This border space is a place
of disjuncture between the stories learned on the laps of their foremothers
and in the drumming of their forefathers in their communities of origin
and the Eurocentric knowledge systems espoused and taught in the uni-
versity (Nyamnjoh 2017). The university is by deﬁnition an institution of

ramiﬁcations remain to date albeit on an unequal scale. The term is used here to underscore
this relationship, which, while shifting, is historically conﬁgured. So while many of the
assertions made here encompass this shifting expanse of regions, emphasis is put on Africa
the continent of my origin.

2. Robin Kelley (2016) invokes the notion of “politics of recognition” in a way different
from how it is raised here. Whereas Kelley laments the politics embedded in neoliberal notions
that are currently in vogue in the university such as multiculturalism and argues that they
foreclose the critique of power and reduce Black struggles in such spaces to “politics of recog-
nition,” the sense with which I invoke the same phrase is to argue the importance of history in
a meaningful dialogue between the erstwhile colonizers and the colonized.

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Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal?

specialized knowledge that is removed from everyday community life. This
knowledge is only accessible to a few with the exclusion of the many. At
the point of encounter, any other ways of knowing have to die to make way
for the hegemonic Euro-American knowledge of the university. For in-
stance, Winona LaDuke argues that for indigenous people the ﬁrst source
of knowledge is spiritual practice encompassing prayer, fasting, vision,
quest, ceremony, or dreams (LaDuke 1997, p. 2). Such knowledge does
not fall into what is regarded as credible knowledge in the university. It
is knowledge held by many people who do not follow the “intellectual”
posture of Descartes as shown by the opening quote. As such, “[T]he en-
closing of the academy dispossessed the vast majority of knowledge
keepers, forever relegating their knowledge to witchcraft, tradition, super-
stition, folkways or, at best, some form of common sense—separation of
university and community as a commodity to be bought and sold” (Hall
and Tandon 2017, p. 8). If then the vast majority of knowledge keepers do
not follow the ways accepted and elevated in hegemonic Euro-Western
scholarship, can these ways ever deliver epistemic justice to them?

This paper is concerned with such separations which follow Cartesian
rationalism thereby sacriﬁcing what Frances Nyamnjoh calls the convi-
viality of knowledges that celebrates incompleteness and ﬂuidity against
over-prescription, over-standardization, over-routinization (Nyamnjoh
2017, p. 5). Importantly, convivial knowledge collapses dichotomies to
build bridges between ostensibly disconnected entities. Such conviviality
emphasizes radical reconciliation against the logic of “method” that cate-
gorizes and separates. Issuing from this liminal space, scholars from the
Global South are prompted to ask questions that essentially go to the core
of what colonialism means and seek to undo what over time has largely
ceased to be a question. So, while westernized universities in Africa (Ndlovu-
Gatsheni 2013) have largely included African personnel, this was not com-
plemented with an effort to domesticate the institution such that it is
informed by local languages, cosmologies, and worldviews (Nyamnjoh
2012, 2017). Therefore, what possibilities exist for meaningful conversa-
tions that give equal weight to all knowledge systems given the very
foundations on which the knowledge around which scholarly conversations
revolve? It is one of the arguments of this paper that the politics of knowledge
and knowledge-making, ostensibly the sole preserve of the university, have
closed such a possibility with almost everyone agreeing, even if not in prin-
ciple, to move on the basis of this foundation. Commenting on philosophy
in particular, Dladla (2017) argues that theories espoused by this discipline
take colonial conquest for granted thereby effectively erasing ways of know-
ing and relating prior to conquest. Very few scholars such as Ngugi wa
Thiong’o remind the dis-membered colonial subjects to re-member in a quest

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to re-humanize themselves in the aftermath of the dehumanization suffered
in the unjust wars of conquest. In the same vein, Walter Mignolo (2009)
advocates that we not only change the conversation but also change the terms
of the conversation if we are ever to achieve a plurality of voices to color
scholarly conversations. This entails acknowledging that the dominance of
Euro-American knowledge systems is born out of conquest that silenced
other ways of knowing and of being-in-the-world. Changing the terms of
the conversation also requires interrogating the role played by the university
in furthering the imperial designs of colonial super powers. By doing this,
marginalized people such as scholars from the Global South who bear
the brunt of the negative implications of this knowledge and are dis-
enchanted by it, advocate for an ecology of knowledges where all knowl-
edges will be afforded equal space to reﬂect the different experiences,
worldviews, and aspirations (Santos et al 2007). This is a call to self-deﬁne
outside the Eurocentric, Westerncentric, heterosexist, capitalistic, militaris-
tic, and Christian-centric matrix of power that has sought, throughout his-
tory, ascendance over other knowledge systems in a quest for dominance. It is
a call to de-authorize White supremacist ideas that are tightly woven into
Eurocentric knowledge.

2. Whose Knowledge? To What End?
Much has been said about how the knowledge (systems) that animate(s)
the university space is (are) Eurocentric. In other words, how such knowl-
edge issues from and is primarily reﬂective of Euro-American worldviews.
Following Shiner a point is made that wherever there is knowledge there is
power that produces and sustains it (Shiner 1982, p. 386). I go further to
explore and question the relationship between university-based knowledge
(systems) and the attendant methods, bearing in mind the close, mutually-
constitutive relationship that exists between the two. It follows that the
methods derived from a particular conception of knowledge will always
be true to it and, as such, serve agendas similar to the knowledge system
that conceived it in the ﬁrst place. Gillian Rose argues that science ought
not be reiﬁed, given a thing-like status, an identity of its own. Rather, it
should be attributed to the minds, hearts, and hands of those whose labor
it is (cited in Farganis 1989). Therefore, both the ideology and uses of sci-
ence are the expressions of the interests of the dominant groups in society
whose labor they are. To this extent then, scholars from the Global South
versed and invested in attendant theories are like “potted plants in green-
houses” (Nyamnjoh 2012) actively participating in a knowledge system
that has “sacriﬁced morality, humanity and the social on the altar of a
conscious or implied objectivity that is at best phoney [and at worst
colonizing]” (Nyamnjoh 2012, p. 3). Arguing against the idea that Africa

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is a “ﬁeld” from which “raw data” is collected for “processing” through
Eurocentric ﬁlters, Nhemachena, Mlambo, and Kaundjua (2016) posit
that scholars from Africa who have mastered the mimicry of the bank sys-
tem of education characteristic of the university without critical engage-
ment are complicit in perpetuating its colonial tendencies. For this reason,
such scholars are part of the apparatus that neutralizes a “politics of truth”
(Shiner 1982, p. 384) into an apolitical question.

Suarez-Krabbe (2013) argues that the genocidal common sense of
European imperialism was not questioned by Cartesian doubt and has not
been questioned in subsequent thought. We need to consider carefully
why it is that neo-positivists of our time skirt around the fundamental issues
relating to methodological imperialism; “what knowledge; whose knowl-
edge, and to what end?” What is at stake for them? And what is at stake
for those who want to be included in the conversation? It is my contention
that the stakes go back to the very question of who is human and by virtue of
this understanding then assert that “to have a voice is to be human. To have
something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and
being heard; it is an intensely relational act” (Gilligan quoted in Wasserman
2013, p. 78). Listening and being heard at the level of knowledge genera-
tion is precluded by the very understanding that “biases” in the practice of
science cannot be undone without simultaneously undoing its origins. The
spirit and letter integral to the idea of “method,” it is argued, carry with
them a set of historically speciﬁc Euro-American assumptions (Chilisa 2012,
p. 51), chief of which are ideas about the nature of the human which are
informed by Western enlightenment. Guided by reason and based on mea-
surable or empirical evidence, these assumptions reﬂect a particular world-
view. By claiming universality, objectivity, and neutrality, such knowledge
effectively claims God’s own view (Grosfoguel 2013) that is omniscient and
is intent on “talking without listening” (Nyamnjoh 2012, p. 6), thereby
enacting an “imperial attitude” that “seeks to erase the other through ex-
ploitation and violence” (Suarez-Krabbe 2013, pp. 83–4; emphasis in orig-
inal). Here, the West is not regarded as a place as such, but as a project
that claims neutrality, objectivity, universality, and God’s own view when
it is, in fact, provincial and subjective to Euro-America. The West is
analogous to Wynter’s (2003) “Man” who pretends to represent all human-
ity following his annihilation of other ways of being human that do not
follow his script. The imperial “I” is presented as the standard against which
all humanity should fashion itself, anything else is viewed with disdain and
suspicion.

Ramon Grosfoguel (2013) argues that the epistemological foundations
of what is generally regarded as canonical knowledge in the university and
related spaces has been laid down by white men from ﬁve countries, namely

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England, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and United States of America.
The rest of the world is left with “applying” this knowledge. This is prob-
lematic on many levels; chief among them is implied in the question raised
by Audre Lorde (1984):

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may
allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will
never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only
threatening to those women who still deﬁne the master’s house as
their only source of support. (Lorde 1984, p. 112; emphasis in
original)

As things stand, scholarly conversations do not interrogate the violent,
exploitative, and colonizing penchant of such canonical knowledge. The
choice for scholars in the Global South is to assimilate and surrender with
the humility of the humiliated (Mignolo 2009), effectively articulating
Prospero’s reason through Caliban’s voice (Masemola 2015) attesting that
“Theft is holy!” (Wa Thiong’o 1986, p. 3) thereby succumbing to the soft
means of colonization hidden in the curriculum of the university. This
properly closes thinking, with gestures towards thinking amounting to
mastering the rules of the game and thus being complicit in the preju-
dices that such knowledge espouses. Wa Thiong’o (1986), Smith (1999);
Nhemachena et al (2016), and Nyamnjoh (2012, 2017) among others show
how this knowledge—its theories and methods—is deployed to work
against those on the underside of modernity (Mignolo 2007; Maldonado-
Torres 2008).

There is a need for conversations that do not skirt around these issues
but go to their core by unearthing the foundational spirit and motives that
begot this knowledge. Such conversations will wrestle with the question of
whether research as an institution of colonial power (Smith 1999) can con-
struct knowledges that legitimate worlds other than those that are Euro-
Western. In an insightful piece, Nhemachena et al (2016) remind us of the
tally of damage wrought by research in Africa including but not limited to
experimenting with drugs, cultivating the body parts of the African poor
to save the lives of the Euro-American rich, and the collection of human
skulls to be displayed as trophies. Primarily, Nhemachena et al remind us
that associating Africa with “the ﬁeld” from which raw data is collected to
be cultivated into “knowledge” according to the norms of the West is a
basic tenet in research (2016, p. 22). They argue that research is funda-
mentally about erasure, distortion, de-territorialization, and jettisoning
of the epistemologies of the Indigenous researched people. So, the twin
activities that characterize the enterprise of re-search—discovery, and
collection—viewed from the above perspective, spell a disastrous relationship

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Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal?

with Africa and other colonized people. So, re-search as a body of tech-
niques conceptualized on the basis of Enlightenment is about power,
willful ignorance of other ways of being-in-the-world that do not lend
themselves to empirical measures, and is ultimately about reconciling
settler guilt and complicity (Tuck and Yong 2012, p. 3). These are con-
versations that have become displaced in the bank system of education
characterizing the university that focuses on mastering the tools of the
academy, taking them at face value and therefore discounting their sordid
history. Thus understood, it becomes imperative to always foreground the
provinciality and political nature of Western epistemologies. This then
places responsibility to begin to ﬁnd ways to de-universalize Western epi-
stemologies and begin to re-center other knowledges as bona ﬁde knowledges
that make up the university curriculum. In this way, all human aspirations,
experiences, and histories will be part of how the world is organized.

Far from being merely theoretical, a science of a society profoundly affects

the lived experiences of those it touches.

The very action of knowing…is an intervention in the world, which
places us within it as active contributors to its making. Different
modes of knowing, being irremediably partial and situated, will have
different consequences and effects on the world. (Santos et al 2007,
p. xxxi)

While not explicitly stated (it becomes the role of scholars to unearth), the
“use value” (Farganis 1989, p. 210) of a science is key to understanding
not only its philosophy but also its history. A move away from thinking of
science as “neutral” affords us an opportunity to deconstruct its “use value”
principal, which is that it reﬂects and perpetuates the interests of the ruling
elite. The “use value” of science in Africa has been to mask colonial exploi-
tation and the plunder of its resources while stigmatizing it as a dark con-
tinent (Nhemachena et al 2016). On a global scale, the interests of the
ruling elite are encapsulated in the politics that designate human status
or lack thereof, inextricably tied to colonial expansion and exploitation.
To “…close my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall call away all my senses,
and thus holding conversation only with myself and considering my own
nature” implies an imperial attitude with which Descartes willfully con-
jured up the “zones of being” and “non-being” (Fanon 1967) that begot the
anti-Black world.3 By imposing a provincial worldview and pretending that

3. I use the term “Black” to foreground the experience of blackness among all the peo-
ples who experienced the “underside of modernity” (Mignolo 2007; Maldonado-Torres
2008), the impact of which at once converges and diverges.

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it is the human view, superior and all-knowing, Eurocentric knowledge has
stayed true to the quest for domination and conquest that informed it in
the ﬁrst place. The question of how we perceive the world and of how we
act on that perception is at issue for both the natural and social sciences.
Bagele Chilisa asks whether the disciplines embedded in research tell re-
searchers how they must see and what they must do when they investigate,
and if this constitutes a micro-technique of power (Chilisa 2012, p. 51). If
this is the case, then how much maneuvering is possible within this straight-
jacket and what do these maneuverings amount to in relation to authentic
and unbridled dialogue between differently positioned knowledge sys-
tems? Can research, a Euro-Western preoccupation that has been able to
side-line other ways of seeking knowledge, embodying and entrenching a
power dynamic, ever be a tool for undoing the imperial agendas of its found-
ing mission? Research organized such that there is the knower and the
known, the subject and the object, the rational and the irrational, raw data
and theory, reﬂects a worldview that signals a relationship with the world that
is based on fragmentation, opposition, and domination. If the ﬁrst impulse
and motive of the founding fathers of the knowledge making up the uni-
versity system was to willful ignorance, how much can a deliberate opening
of eyes by those who have travelled to the empire and come back enable
them to see when, in fact, and fundamentally, philosophies and “[p]hilo-
sophers like other theori[es]sts privilege some experiences and ways of
seeing over others” (Tuana 1992, p. 5)? Is it possible to turn willful, stra-
tegic blindness relayed by Descartes into full sight or is the best that we
can hope for upon our return from the empire, partial sight? This is to say
that if obliteration and epistemicide were the motives that drove the West’s
interaction with the world, how much of the world can we see using their
frameworks?

The combination of the above factors is to preclude the actualization of
meaningful conversations between hegemonic and marginalized knowl-
edges; they entrench a power dynamic that perpetuates the status quo.
On the contrary, meaningful conversations take conquest as the primary
unit of analysis. They begin with acknowledging that humanity and
how to be human should not take its cue from Euro-American ideas of
progress espoused by the university. I argue that it is important to ask
fundamental questions pertaining to methodology precisely because
methodologies issue from and adhere to a particular knowledge system
despite the best intentions of the individual researchers. The very idea
of research invokes a battle ground for competing knowledge systems with
participants already variously positioned and ideas about what comprises
credible knowledge and how to get (to) it already established. It is thus
my argument in this paper that it is precisely because of this genealogy

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Can a Methodology Subvert the Logics of its Principal?

that methodologies cannot hope to escape the very imperial attitude that
informed the human and social sciences and virtually every other disci-
pline that is part of the university apparatus. In this regard, the best that
can be hoped for from this neo-colonial arsenal is transformation whose
end goal is legitimating an illusion (Nyamnjoh 2012, p. 130). Therefore,
the nature of the questions we ask inﬂuence the answers we come to. If
the questions asked do no more than interrogate surface issues whose
objective is to tweak on the margins, then the answers will yield no
more than this set objective. For example, for Indigenous dispossessed
people, knowledge is tied to the land. LaDuke says that such knowl-
edge is tied to spiritual practice comprising of prayer, fasting, vision
quest, and ceremony and makes cosmic sense when understood in rela-
tionship to the land (LaDuke 1997, p. 2). Dispossessed of any claims to
the land, such knowledge is summarily discounted. As ﬂoating beings,
without claim to any knowledge system, they are apprehended through
the master’s tool for, after all, are they not a ﬁgment of the master’s imag-
ination? Research as a way of knowing and of relating, with ﬁxed assump-
tions, cannot help but be caught up in these power dynamics. This
explains Linda Smith’s indictment that research is a dirty word for those
who suffer under its gaze despite the best efforts of individual researchers
(Smith 1999, p. 2). Therefore, research and attendant methods cannot
be taken at face value. They necessarily have to be subjected to critical
scrutiny beyond the surface level that generally characterizes any such
criticism.

3. Science and Slavery
Lewis Gordon argues that through various constellations Europe sought
to become ontological, what dialectitians call absolute being or a human
way of being (Gordon 2005, p. 1). In so doing, it became the sole voice on
what it means to be human. So, it is a-historical and not a logical process
that has delineated the norms of science as we know them. In other words,
there is no logical reason why science developed as it did, embracing the
notions and premises that it has, except as a force of history. Therefore, as
with all knowledge, science should be understood in the context which
spawned it. Berman (1989) argues that the rise of capitalism coincided
with the increase in slavery. Importantly, she argues that the historical
origins of present-day science ﬁnd their genesis in early slavery. Ignoring
this history distorts our conception of modern-day science. From their
inception, the human and social sciences have invoked evolutionary ideas
that at their core hold to the natural inequality of species. This is the
genesis of the philosophies reﬂecting these emerging social and productive
power relations underlying the dualist thinking integral to the Eurocentric

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worldview (Berman 1989, p. 235). In fact, Spencer’s notions of competi-
tion and selection in the social realm were a major inﬂuence on Darwin’s
biological thesis of the survival of the species. The rise of the idiom of the
body as a machine, adopted by science, following from the Cartesian sep-
aration of the body from the mind, should be understood in relation to the
context of the time. The machine-like bodies invoked here are those of
the enslaved. Abstracted from their humanity, their individuality erased in the
service of the master class they were subjected to, serving in a monotonous
and predictable fashion, the bodies of the enslaved were the prime com-
modity that was to drive capitalism.4 Therefore, the relationship between
the extractivist, exploitative, capitalist system and slavish surrender in aid
of its logic is key to understanding the “use value” of the human and social
sciences in the politics of the day.

The idea that immutable laws of nature also govern human relations
was to form the core of evolutionary thinking. “This freezes living systems
into static models of themselves denying the uniqueness of their develop-
ment in time and space. Phenomena lose their speciﬁc, idiosyncratic
responses and interactions as they are seen as better or worse approxima-
tions of some ideal system” (Berman 1989, p. 240). Approximating the
bodies of the enslaved to machines justiﬁed the denial of their very human-
ity and could thus be exploited for maximum proﬁt. This marking of
some as dispensable (machines) has a close relationship with Descartes’
will to ignorance typiﬁed by the opening quote and is informed by what
Maldonado-Torres calls Manichean misanthropic skepticism:

Misanthropic skepticism provides the basis for the preferential option
for the ego conquiro, which explains why security for some can
conceivably be obtained at the expense of the lives of others. The
imperial attitude promotes a fundamentally genocidal attitude in
respect to colonized and racialized people. Through it, colonial and
racial subjects are marked as dispensable (Maldonado-Torres 2007,
p. 246; emphasis in original).

The imagery of a machine is in direct contradiction to the human whose
existence is primarily ascertained by possession of an intelligent soul that
shows the idiosyncratic properties of the humans whose possession it is.
Denying this, denies the humanity of those reduced to machines. True to

4. It behoves underscoring that while this was the intention of the colonizers, this was
met with ﬁerce resistance; enslavement in form was not always enslavement in deed, as
Kelley (2016) so eloquently argues. It is the same spirit of resistance, I argue, that precludes
the wholesale uptake of “ﬁndings” about Africa using Westerncentric tools. This is the gist
of this article.

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the Manichean attitude that bestows on some the humanity it denies
others, “Descartes asserts that he has considered only the figure, motion,
and magnitude of each body, and what must follow from their collisions
according to the laws of mechanics, as they are confirmed by certain daily
experiences” (Waugh and Ariew 2008, p. 28). In an interesting article on
the coloniality of Western education in Africa, Nyamnjoh (2012) recounts
how the teachers imported into Malawi to teach in an elitist school did not
view education in itself as a vehicle for change. Rather, they viewed them-
selves as the change. In other words, contrary to viewing European educa-
tion in Malawi as bringing (positive) change, their very presence in the
country was viewed as a civilizing input. In this way, Malawian culture
lost its speciﬁc, idiosyncratic sense against the approximation of civiliza-
tion the teachers espoused.

The “laws of mechanics” alluded to engendered the violent, unjust, and
exploitative dispensation that was to characterize Western modernity for
centuries and which undergirds the reigning colonial matrix of power.
As such, Maldonado-Torres (2007) calls Western modernity a civilization
of death that radicalizes and naturalizes a “non-ethics of war” character-
ized by logocentric, omniscient, and omnipotent God-like qualities that
render every Other absent and thus not human. Therefore, the methodol-
ogies spawned by this worldview dehumanize the West’s Other by render-
ing her unintelligible and mute; reducing her to an image of herself that is
distorted and deformed. Writing about what she characterizes as damage-
centered research carried out on Indigenous people, Tuck (2009) asserts
that such research is by the same token damaging as its ultimate impact
is to leave them thinking of themselves as broken and thus in need of res-
cuing. She writes that while the damage that is the subject of research is a
by-product of racism and colonization, these are usually underplayed with
the subsequent result that damage “is relegated to our own bodies, our
own families, our own social networks, our own leadership. After the re-
search team leaves, after the town meeting, after the news cameras have
gone away, all we are left with is the damage” (Tuck 2009, p. 7). Such
methodologies ﬂowing from the Cartesian will to ignorance are instrumen-
tal in perpetuating the misrecognition of the colonized. “Look a Negro…
Mama, see a Negro!, look, a Negro!” (Fanon [1952] 1967, p. 93) is an all-
devastating summation of the mirage of Blackness conjured up by imperial
Whiteness (Fanon 1967; Sithole 2016) that renders the Other objects in a
European frame of reference (Nhemachena et al 2016). Scientiﬁc method-
ologies that are essentially Eurocentric ﬁlters of understanding reality in-
formed by the solipsism demonstrated by Descartes negate the possibility
for understanding the spectrum of ways of being human that do not “call
away senses” but seek to achieve a balance between thinking and feeling.

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So, while “[w]e recognize that the social sciences have deeply European
genealogies, somehow we hope that with occasional adjustments and amend-
ments they will serve to understand the non-West, because we presume that
despite this Western genealogy, these categories are universal” (Seth 2013,
p. 144). The bottom line of all this is that “[Blacks] want to be human
in the face of a structure that denies their humanity” (Gordon 2005, p. 3).
Collision according to the laws of mechanics perpetuates the erasure of the
so-called non-West. In this vein, Seth (2013) argues that the validity of
the concepts central to Euro-Western knowledge systems depend on the
denial of “their concepts” that recognize that one thing cannot be some-
thing without also being another thing (Nyamnjoh 2012, p. 131; 2017,
p. 39). Such concepts rally against the Eurocentric worldview that separates
and fragments—the master race from the slave and humanity from the
human be-ing.

According to Jaggar (1989) science of whatever type raises both epis-
temological concerns of a theoretical kind and political concerns of a
practical order. As such, the conﬂuence of both the philosophical and
methodological questions relating to western science is at issue here. This
posture helps us to understand the current global politics of belonging:
“zone of being,” and exclusion: “zone of non-being”; the former Euro-
American, white, male, and “rational,” and the latter Negroid, effeminized,
and a body without a soul. This foundational basis explains my use of the
term Global South that, while not precise, conveys a shared colonial wound
that encompasses dispossession of land, lifeways, and be-ing. Given this
foundational base, the question arises: Does Western science, including its
machinations, have the ability to partake in a meaningful conversation that
gives expression to an-other world that upholds and afﬁrms the humanity
of all people—the Indigenous conquered people and their vanquisher,
the enslaved and the enslaver. In other words, can a science whose founda-
tional basis was to deny the humanity of the Other ever be freed from this
inﬂuence? Can meaning derived from such a science ever afford the Other
subject status?

The history that is central to the above assertions is one of conquest
whose legacies have become commonplace (Suarez-Krabbe 2013). For
instance, the idea of the scientist who is above and detached is one such
legacy as are the tools that he employs to understand reality. This is part
ofthe arsenal that aids and abets imperial denials, what Tuck and Eve
call settler moves to innocence (Tuck and Yong 2012, p. 3). What follows
is a brief exposition of some of the criticisms that have been levelled
against conventional and prevailing notions of science and have not been
dealt with adequately by neo-positivists. These are implied in the atten-
dant methodologies. I use the example of HIV/AIDS in Africa to show

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how notions of science, its philosophies, and tools come together in a cock-
tail of Othering by engendering an “African AIDS.” I argue that the tools
through which the HIV/AIDS epidemic was ﬁltered reﬂect the imperialism
and racism of the societies that created them. Political meaning is read into
the caricatured, literal, and hyperbolic nature in which the epidemic was
interpreted.

4. Epistemic Closure: Methodologies of Equilibrium
Science is a discourse. It is a way of speaking about the world and if we
look at science in this way, it becomes logical to deconstruct the relation-
ship between science and power that stipulates what is credible knowledge
and who counts for authority. These standards were arrived at without
consulting those who were to bear the brunt of the “white eyes, the only
real eyes” (Fanon 1967, p. 87). Therefore, the view of science as acquiring
knowledge that is grounded in the objective reading of “data” through the
use of empirical evidence does not tell the whole story. Both the mode of
investigation and the person of the investigator in the social sciences belie
this ideal. The ideal of a value-free social science is thus a myth. In the
same vein, issues of methodology necessarily include a strategy to build
a collection of methods, techniques, and rules—it delineates a research
process to follow, that in turn takes its cue from a particular research par-
adigm. Values are implicated in the conditions under which one set of
rules rather than another prevails. It remains an open question whether
the ideal of a value-free science is completely realized in the natural sci-
ences where objects of study can be subjected to the mathematical model
with rigorous laws of regulation that are communicated in stringent terms.
This model cannot be attributed to the knowledge of the less technical
social sciences. Subjects with more ﬂuid properties and behaviors cannot
be reduced to inanimate objects. The kinds of interests embedded in these
distinctive knowledge systems are not the same, hence Fanon’s ([1952]
1967, p. 12) famous quip “I will leave the methods to the botanists and
the mathematicians. There is a point in which methods devour them-
selves.” Even more than this, our categories are a fabrication in place
and time and therefore do not serve well in understanding worlds that
have been fabricated differently (Seth 2013, p. 146). Shiner’s (1982) read-
ing of Foucault’s work as essentially anti-method point to the possibility of
understanding “method” as yet another micro-technique in the arsenal of
discharging power. Therefore, any attempt to tweak methods at their
seams is an exercise in equilibrium that does not fundamentally change
its fundamentals. The very idea of “methods” follows the imperial need
for certainty and stability. It is antithetical to ambiguity and ﬂux, the basis
of how some worlds are fabricated.

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The social sciences are involved in studying (and in the process con-
structing) value-laden phenomena that have social import among which,
I argue, is inequality. Such inequality is embedded in the instrumental
rationality of Descartes characterized by hierarchical dualism and with a
prejudice for the mind (i.e., male, European and white) and bias against
the body (female and Other) and is thus at the heart of western episte-
mology and moral thought (Suarez-Krabbe 2013). Westerncentric episte-
mologies are grounded in binary hierarchies that sharply separate the
body/mind, master/slave, universal/particular, here/there, reason/emotion,
master/science/ﬁction, knowledge/superstition, attachment/detachment,
economy/society, men/women, nature/culture among others. These episte-
mological and ontological assumptions come together to constitute a matrix
of power that privileges the white, marauding, and conquering male.

The Cartesian point of view, therefore, conceptualizes phenomena
as composed of discrete, individual elemental units, the whole
consisting of an assemblage of the separate elements. It embraces
masculine values, the destructive dimensions of that world through
scientization, rationalization and bureaucratization. Here, science
as practiced is seen as a juggernaut, embracing capitalist and
militaristic values. (Berman 1989, p. 240)

The strict separation of phenomena imagined by the Cartesian divide ignores
the dialectical relationship of each pair. Therefore, the power dynamic
integral to Western science should not be subsidiary in our analysis. This
power dynamic is a fundamental that should inform any and every question
we ask when interrogating the enterprise. In particular, and as is the subject
of this paper, we should ask how much room does this power dynamic allow
other ways of be-ing and knowing such that an authentic conversation that
fundamentally questions the prevailing status quo is possible.

The notion of “data” is central to the human and social sciences. Methods
are deployed in particular well-established and agreed upon ways to “collect
data.” The question of what are viewed as data, in the ﬁrst place, remains
elusive (Nhemachena 2016). In particular, “the idea that data is ‘there’ to
be read by observers who use a method embodying a form of reason that
incorporates detachment and distancing and that brackets emotion, pas-
sion, and commitment” has been found wanting (Farganis 1989, p. 211).
Data as a collection of what is believed to be fact arrived at through scien-
tiﬁc methods of analysis follows the same logic that informs scientiﬁc rea-
son. The conclusions thereof also fall into the same trap. Such data depend
on a speaking individual with unbridled agency who is able to abstract
himself from the webs of signiﬁcance in which he is caught. This image
conjures that of Descartes who “birthed himself out of himself” by ignoring

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sociality and historicity ( Wilshire 1989, p. 94). This individualism is a
singularly Western trait and ideal. “It also suggests the kind of adult
who is responsible for himself and no one else. It is associated with the
universal and the transcendental, with creation and achievement, with
abstract rationality, and with tangible and enduring products. The self as
individual glows with the glamour of heroic, solitary, self-discovering trav-
elers” (Dimen 1989, p. 39). The solitary, self-discovering traveler is a meta-
phor for a marauding white male on his way to conquering and subjugating
the world for his own gain. It is instrumental reason through which “raw
data” collected in the “non-West” is ﬁltered. The same attitude that informed
Descartes’ quest for certainty, order, and clarity that led to him abstracting
himself from his location, and through his mind (and the tools that this gave
rise to) became a knower of all things; this knowledge being relevant in all
situations and settings informs the methods used in the university today.

Descartes emphasized the general applicability of his ideas to all
phenomena. But both are now expressed as mechanics—they seek
only mechanical, reproducible, no-evolutionary change—the kind
that can indeed be described by immutable laws, derived by
abstracting selected data points at ﬁxed times at ﬁxed conditions…
(Berman 1989, p. 240).
So, while the idea of “data” as the basis for research is invoked willy-
nilly at the best of times and by well-meaning scholars, it is one that needs
to be re-thought and attributed to its foundations. The idea that “data”
could be abstracted at ﬁxed data points, at a ﬁxed time, and under ﬁxed
conditions is contrary to African ways of knowing that do not always
appeal to cognitive reason but are comfortable with ﬂuidity and indeter-
minacy (Nyamnjoh 2017). Another related and highly problematic myth
of Eurocentric knowledge is that of a dispassionate investigator. This myth
is associated with the view that like other sciences, the social sciences
should be value-free. Supposedly carried out by a non-located, dispassion-
ate investigator, using non-located tools, to understand objective reality,
the myth of a value-free science is perpetuated. The dispassionate inves-
tigator does not exist as “[t]hought bears the marks of a thinker’s social
characteristics” (Farganis 1989, p. 208) and as such, how one experiences
the world bears on how one perceives and acts on the world. In other
words, “[t]he form and content of thought or the ideas and the processes
through which those ideas are generated and understood, are affected
by concrete social factors.” Therefore, the reading and interpretation of
reality are always caught up in both the thinker’s social characteristics
and the social factors that prevail. Therefore, Queeneth Mkabela’s (2005)
assertion that qualitative research methods are more amenable to Afrocentric

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673

sensibilities is short-sighted in that these methods still ﬂow from a frame-
work that gives primacy to the idea that “data” are out there and can be
gathered and harnessed to reﬂect a particular conception of reality. This
view is still caught in the need to discipline reality with the goal of ﬁtting
it into a Eurocentric worldview with its concomitant emphasis on “order.”
This effectively reduces the plane of knowledge to Eurocentric conceptions
of what is real (Nyamnjoh 2017).

Therefore, the ideas of a value-free science, an unembedded scientist,
and objective data are all informed by the “point zero” view of society
(Grosfoguel 2011, p. 5). They assume equality of representation and har-
mony in social relationships resulting in the neutralization and/or refusal of
responsibility because they fail to account for inequalities and asymmetri-
cal relations of power, status, and privilege that exist in society (Tagore and
Herising 2007, p. 280). They, together, form the strategy that is calculated
to promote and proﬁt Euro-Western agendas of civilized oppression (Smith
1999; Tuck and Yong 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Nhemachena 2016).
Mignolo suggests that these strategies calcify a commitment to an episte-
mological tract that proﬁts from replicating itself (Mignolo 2015, p. 108).
This strategy is at once backward- and forward-looking; working to en-
trench itself so that it sustains its relevance in the future. This litany of
critiques shows how then the logic of science is not rational but political.
That is why tampering with aspects of the whole cannot fundamentally
change the establishment of science. Tampering on the fringes results in
epistemologies of equilibrium (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013) that take the pre-
mises of Western science as a given, and thus have limited possibility to
change anything. The assumptions of Western science properly close off
all efforts at further enquiry, effectively amounting to epistemic closure
(Gordon 2014). As such, constructive communication between differently-
positioned groups whose idea of what constitutes existential reality who,
following Sylvia Wynter (2003), can be characterized as Man—rational, en-
lightened, subject and Human vs. the human—irrational, subhuman,
object, is impossible. I have argued that knowledge is a site of political
struggle and as such knowledge claims are part of a political strategy—a
system of truth (Shiner, 1982). While it is true that methods, through
one form of critique or another, have evolved, such an evolution has not
shifted the fundamentals from which the methodology originated. The
role of the university as bearers of theories of equilibrium that maintain the
status quo is the subject of the following section (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013).

The University as a Colonial Space

5.
The growing calls to “decolonize the university” signal a restlessness
with the prevailing organization and ethos that animate the university

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space.5 Grosfoguel (2013) characterizes the university as a westernized
space in that it follows the same template wherever it is situated in the
world. In other words, the university, beyond it being a westernized space
is similarly organized and espouses the same canons wherever it is situated
geographically. It is characterized as a satellite of Western ideals, a hand-
maiden of such ideals despite the best intentions of the individual scholars
(see Nyamnjoh 2012; 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Nhemachena et al
2016; Nhemachena 2016). The quote below underscores the pivotal role
that university (and thus Euro-modern) knowledge plays in masking and
thus perpetuating its colonial nature.

Modernity will never again, up to the present, ask existentially or
philosophically for the right to dominate the periphery. Rather, the
right to domination will be imposed as the nature of things and will
underpin all modern philosophy. (Dussel 2014, pp. 32–3; emphasis in
the original)

The precepts of Western modernity are not natural; they have, through
many processes and systems, been made universal and normative. Nelson
Maldonado-Torres (2007) singles out the university as a vehicle of and
conduit for coloniality and as such has facilitated the above. In deﬁning
coloniality, Maldonado-Torres argues that:

It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic
performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image
of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of
our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe
coloniality all the time and every day. (Maldonado-Torres 2007,
p. 243)
The university is thus the citadel and life blood of coloniality—it is a
singular space in which coloniality is purported as the natural order of
things. As a result, Grosfoguel argues that “… our job in the Westernized
university is basically reduced to that of learning these theories born from
the experience and problems of a particular region of the world (ﬁve coun-
tries in Western Europe) with its own particular time/space dimensions
and ‘applying’ them to other geographical locations even if the experience

5. A cynical question that could be asked of those making this call, who might fall into
what Kelley characterizes as “… in the university but are not of the university” is why they
then remain in this space when they are clearly disenchanted with it (Kelley 2016, p. 13).
Kelley concedes that the university, by its very character and entanglements, cannot be a
revolutionary space. However, it remains a site for critical thinking and a space for collec-
tive work.

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and time/space of the former are quite different from the latter” (Grosfoguel
2013, p. 74). Nhemachena et al (2016) argue that even in collaborative
projects, Western epistemologies are foregrounded at the expense of African
ways of knowing. In a similar vein, Tuck (2009) argues that while Indig-
enous communities are over-researched, they are made invisible in the
process. It, therefore, follows that the need to decolonize the university
may be shared by all those who do not ﬁnd their histories, philosophies,
cosmologies, and future aspirations represented by the prevailing theories
that are generated using the Western canon. This raises some important
points and calls us to ask the question: what is it fundamentally that is
colonial about the university? As Ngugi Wa Thiong’o argues the effect
of coloniality is:

to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages,
in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity,
in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see
their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them
want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them
want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves;
for instance, with other people’s languages rather than their own.
It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary,
all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even
plants serious doubt about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities
of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams… Indeed,
this refrain sums up the new creed of neo-colonial bourgeoisie
in many “independent” African states. ( Wa Thiong’o 1986,
p. 3)

By espousing the Western canon and privileging the knowledge, the
university is the singular space that is the breeding ground for the above.
Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015) reacting to the notion that there exists
African universities that espouse African values and worldviews, for in-
stance, argues rather that there exist Westernized universities on African
soil. The idea of the (uni)versity readily declares this space as a space that
privileges one tradition of knowledge to the systematic exclusion of others.
In Grosfoguel’s (2013) words, it is a space where the few deﬁne for the
many. This in itself signals that the university is a violent space that
systematically undermines other ways of knowing and thus different ways
of being human. This is a political matter that effectively touches on a
people’s ability to leave a mark in the world that is peculiar to them. It
is about the politics of existence as: “… politics [is] also a condition of
appearance. To be political is to emerge, to appear to exist” (Gordon
2014, p. 88). Colonization, informed by the imperial attitude that some

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beings are superior, their knowledge just as superior, militates against the
right of the colonized to “appear” in their own terms. In this way,
colonization eliminates the possibility of speech by the colonized precisely
by imposing the conditions of its possibility (Gordon 2014).

“Method” is a colonial imposition that dictates the terms for the emer-
gence of subjectivity. The very idea of “method” thwarts other ways of
being a knowing subject with the right to engage on one’s own terms.
As a colonial imposition, method foments the erasure of the colonized as
political subjects with a will to chart the contours of their own existence.
“Method” has the effect of hollowing out a way-of-being-in-the world that
does not conform to these terms. Filtered through the colonial prisms that
distort and alienate such as “method,” the colonized are overrun by what
Boaventura Santos, Arrisando Nunes, and Maria Meneses call the “sociol-
ogy of absences” (Santos et al 2007, pp. xxvi). The Westernized university
is a space where the Other is empirically institutionalized and is dis-
cursively constituted through these absences (Wynter 2003, p. 5). Origi-
nating from the Cartesian credo “I think, therefore I am”—reﬂecting a
particular positionality and disposition, the university, by assuming the
authority to speak on behalf of mute others who are imagined through
particular prisms, perpetuates this creed. As Maldonado-Torres (2008; in
Grosfoguel 2013) afﬁrms, the other side of “I think, therefore I am” is the
racist/sexist structure of “I do not think, therefore I do not exist” that
applies to all of the world’s marginalized whose knowledge systems have
been viliﬁed as irrational and thus inferior and destined for erasure. The
logic of “I am, therefore I exist” that animates the university as a colonial
institution relegates the many into the Fanonian “zone of non-being.” In
this vein, Gordon argues that:

it is not that colonized groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking
lacks appearance or mediating it is not transformed into speech.
The erasure of speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of
its appearance such as gestural sites and the constellation of muscles
that facilitate speech—the face. As faceless problem people are
derailed from the dialectics of recognition of self and other, with
the consequence of neither self nor of self and other. (Gordon 2014,
p. 88)

It is this foundational “colonial difference” on which the world of moder-
nity was to institute itself (Wynter 2003). It is this colonial difference that
makes it possible for institutions of higher learning the world over to es-
pouse uni-knowledge and present it as universal. As such, Wynter posits
that the most important struggle for the Western bourgeois in this millen-
nium is to disabuse itself of the conception of the human, in the persona of

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the Western man, that over-represents itself as if it were the human itself
(Wynter 2003, p. 3). Adopting the tenets of modern science uncritically, at
worst, or tampering on their fringes, at best, will not give full recognition
to the colonized. Maldonado-Torres’ (2007) exposition of coloniality as an
ongoing, all pervasive relationship between the erstwhile colonized and
colonizers disabuses us of the notion of a “post” in colonial relations. Hence
the need to consider the many and varied ways in which knowledge and its
production perpetuate this relationship. As scholars, ours is to unmask the
politics that continue this colonial relationship.

Knowledge was and is the main engine through which the Other is
imagined, produced and reproduced. Tuck (2009) recounts how the Indig-
enous researched people are “thematized” according to the fantasies of
researchers. In a similar vein, Santos et al (2007) argue that colonial alterity
is a space of inferiority that mutates but is always based on sex, race, and
tradition—with women, the savage, and nature produced and reproduced
through various discursive tools. Filtered through Western prisms and
sensibilities that are essentially Eurocentric and androcentric, these sub-
alternized groups have been misrecognized, stripped, and humiliated in
the name of modern science (Dussel 2014, p. 49–50). These were to be
the processes made possible only on the basis of dynamics of a colonizer/
colonized relation (Wynter 2003, p. 5). The university is still the singular
space within which “we, as Western and Westernized intellectuals, con-
tinue to articulate, in however radically oppositional a manner, the rules
of the social order and its sanctioned theories” (Wynter 2003, p. 171).
When we take the university as an unqualiﬁed good, we slavishly per-
petuate the agendas of empire despite our best intentions.

Science, while conveying “knowledge” also carries connotations “to split,
to cleave” and fragment (Gordon 2014). As such, science represents a
particular conceptual tradition associated with particular idioms of in-
struction all of which aid this mission of splitting (Seth 2013). Instruc-
tively, Seth (2013) isolates the idea of society—separated from the
“supernatural”—and argues that in scientiﬁc terms, society is at once the
cause and the locale of explanation, both ﬁrst mover and substance. Issuing
from and thus married to this tradition of conceiving reality as split be-
tween the “natural” and the “supernatural,” scientiﬁc knowledge espoused
in the university is a space for and by the rational man. In a similar vein,
Nyamnjoh attributes the South African student movement against colo-
nized education taught at universities to the dissonance that arises from
the objective world governed by Cartesian rationalism “where the sub-
jectivities of their childhood fantasies are purportedly shackled and con-
trolled,” the possibilities of creativity frustrated (Nyamnjoh 2017, p. 115).
The question is whether the university, as the bulwark of knowledge

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production from which society takes its cue, can defend the dignity of
humanity with all its quirks and fantasies and in this way free knowledge
from the stranglehold of modern rationality.6 This is directly linked to
ways of knowing, how we come to knowledge and what we think of as
knowledge (Santos et al 2007). This is to say that the university faces the
challenge to free knowledge from one culture with a deep imprint of
particular conventions, boundary work procedures, and values all of which
ﬂow from Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” the precedent of which is “I
think, therefore I conquer,” the precedent of which, in turn, is “I think, there-
fore I exterminate” (Grosfoguel 2013, pp. 73–4). This egoistic, conquering,
fragmenting spirit has informed the extermination of people, their ways
of life, and knowledge systems since what Emmanuel Wallestein calls the
“long sixteenth century” (Wallestein 2011). It is from this basic under-
standing that this article will proceed to interrogate the poetics and
politics of the methodologies that ultimately result in theories of equilibrium
that not only fundamentally question but also perpetuate the status quo.
Science, then, becomes a vehicle of oppression and silencing. Decolonizing
the university will mean ﬁrst and foremost that lifeways that have here-
tofore been silenced and erased are restored back into the canon such
that pluri-verses are regarded on the same plane of importance. These life-
ways and ways of knowing are intimately connected to the land and the
relationship that Indigenous, dispossessed people had with it. It is on this
basis that Eve Tuck and Wayne Yong (2012) caution that decolonization
is not a metaphor, that is, it does not stand for the many ways in which
the university has sought to transform itself with the ultimate effect of
preserving the dispossession begun in the long sixteenth century. This
necessarily means that questions about colonial knowledge systems and
their uses/impacts are asked about the very fundamentals that inform the
university—its ethos, practices, assumptions and reasons for being.

6. “I Think Therefore I Am”: The Cynical Genius of a
Non-Situated Enunciator/ Knowledge
When René Descartes declared, in the seventeenth century, “I think,
therefore I am,” he was thinking as a white man in imperial Europe
(Dussel 2014). He was clearly and ﬁrmly positioned thus, and as such,
embodies a history that carries particular anxieties and aspirations. Enrique
Dussel (2014) further argues that in uttering this philosophical stance,

6. Kelley (2016) sums up this notion eloquently thus: “We [at university spaces] talk
about breaking glass ceilings in corporate America while building more jail cells for the
rest.” The jail cells need not be literal.

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Descartes was willfully and strategically blinding himself from reckoning
with slavery and was thus side-stepping accountability for the suffering it
wrought. By purporting a thinking head that is dismembered from a
feeling and situated body, Descartes was effectively justifying imperialism/
colonization and slavery which were calamities visited on ostensibly lesser
beings amounting to bodies without a soul. The Rational Man whose
knowledge issues from the mind and is thus instrumentalist, is engineered
such that it precludes historical conversations about colonization and slavery.
This knowledge takes conquest and the resultant alienation for granted
(Tuck 2009; Dladla 2017). The tools bequeathed to us through this knowl-
edge system privilege in situ conversations that are severed from the imperial
impulse from which it originates. Instead, any historical conversations these
tools allow do not go far and deep enough, leading to the systematic mis-
recognition and (re)production of the colonized and enslaved as “problem
people.”

As “problems” they are a function of a world in which they are posited
as illegitimate although they could exist nowhere. Such people are treated
by dominant organizations of knowledge especially those falling under the
human and social sciences as problems instead of people who face prob-
lems. Their problem status is a function of the pre-supposed legitimacy
of the systems (Gordon 2014, p. 83).

Such “problem people” are increasing as the majority of the world’s
people suffocate under the colonial matrix of power whose sole purpose
is to perpetuate the cogito ergo sum (and its precedents of conquering and
exterminating), of which Western epistemology is a central cog. The tools
that separate the thinking head from the feeling and situated body and the
epochal effects of the “I conquer, therefore I am” imperial attitude on the
wretched of the earth (Fanon [1961] 2004) hide the cumulative effects of
colonization. And in so doing produce problem people—victims blamed
for their plight. This furthers their misrecognition as they are relegated to
exteriority/object status/zone of non-being, without a soul, a history, or
knowledge. Such tools normalize settler colonialism.

7. Anthropology as a Convenient Test Case
Anthropology is usually singled out as the most colonial and colonizing
discipline. For instance, anthropology is the only science whose raison d’etre
is to study the Other. As Gordon argues, the search to understand “man”
was also producing him (Gordon 2014, p. 83). Anthropology is thus
complicit in introducing and cementing the notion of an Other who is
fundamentally different from the West (Pierre 2006). “…it is now glaringly
evident that contempt for (and perhaps fear of) people of color is implicit in
the nineteenth century anthropology’s interpretation and even construction

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of anthropological facts” (Jaggar 1989, p. 156). Anthropology, is not only
involved in responding to the questions: who are you (you being Europe’s
Other) and who are you in relation to me (me being the Imperial Man), it
also engages in the justiﬁcation of the “us” vs. “them” dichotomy. Anthro-
pology as a discipline has been instrumental in producing the savage and
proving his inferiority. This is done through tools, concepts, and theories
that systematically distance the self from the other, that together constitute
the “anthropologizing” of anthropological subjects-made-objects. The
anthropological tools that ﬂow from the “two cultures” thesis lead to mis-
recognition, misrepresentation, muting, and production of an Other, effec-
tively cementing the imperial premise “I think, therefore I exist” that by
implication means that Others do not think and therefore do not exist (or
are childlike against purported adults) (Maldonado-Torres 2007). So, while
anthropology can be said to be one of the least positivist of disciplines, it
remains burdened with a number of historical legacies that go back to its
foundations, principal of which was the premise of cultural evolution that
led to gross ethnocentric biases.

For instance, treating the ethnographic encounter as a meeting of
strangers who are not entangled with each other is a muting mechanism.
How is “immersing oneself in a culture in order to understand its internal
workings” not different from “I shall try, little, by little, to reach a better
knowledge of and a more familiar acquaintanceship with myself [them]”
(Tuana 1992, p. 36)? The tendency to shut out important relations and
factors from analysis and focus on the immediate context leads to a
manufacturing of a people and their misrecognition as players in the long
range of global politics. Moving from a premise that one is civilized and
the Other savage, anthropology is trapped in the schemas of rational
modernity that are then deployed to prove the existence of “the savage
slot” (Trouillot 2003). Writing as recently as 2017, anthropology professor
Nyamnjoh argues that the discipline, as is the case with other disciplines,
is still caught up in Western intellectual modes that do not show much
sympathy with African beliefs and African endogenous systems of thought
in the framework of their own rationality or epistemological locus. The
result is gross misrepresentation. The muting process is also evident in
insisting on taking those studied at face value as if the ethnographic en-
counter is not mediated by events and histories not captured in con-
versation with them—the “present absences” (Nhemachena 2016). What
do these conversations—interviews, participatory action research, and
their variations—disallow and thus distort? Further, what by-products
result from tools and methods that together can be conceptualized as
fundamentally stemming from the misrecognition informed by the dictum
“I think therefore, I am,” thereby discounting other ways of knowing?

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This fundamental misrecognition (Savransky 2012; Seth 2013) is not
radically undermined by the safeguards such as reﬂexivity and cultural
relativism.

Pierre (2006), for instance, argues that the concept of racial differ-
ence was replaced with cultural relativism without any radical shift.
The difference is that the former is overtly racist whereas the latter
carries connotations of “difference without being overtly racist.” So,
its founding ambition to deﬁne what it means to be human based on
Eurocentric notions of humanity and the concomitant discursive legit-
imization of difference as inequality is not one that is easy for the dis-
cipline to shed. Endogenous systems of thought continue to be severed
from their epistemological locus and subjected to the Western episte-
mological order in which the discipline is steeped, like ﬁsh swimming
in water. Radical reﬂexivity would entail highlighting the pivotal role
played by the discipline in the colonial matrix of power, questioning
the very existence of the discipline as an entrapment of a Westernized
university that conceals by proscribing analysis into artiﬁcial boxes.
Further, how the discipline is complicit in justifying the overrepresen-
tation of Man, promoting beliefs and values congenial to [its dominance],
and naturalizing and universalizing them so as to render them self-
evident and apparently inevitable needs to be interrogated (Wynter 2003,
p. 67).

“Anthropological culturalism,” the idea that cultures are bounded
organic wholes that have a determining inﬂuence on those within them
and thus serve to essentialize difference, produces a de-historicizing and
dehumanizing effect. In this vein, Fassin (2007) argues that objectiﬁca-
tion is both pain-inﬂicting and renders such pain inadmissible to public
discourse. As such, behavioral and culturalist interpretations that have
been used to explain the dramatic spread of general ill-being that besets
Indigenous conquered people the world-over are as ineffective as they
are unjust. Kelley (2016) argues that personalizing and culturalizing
group struggles are two vectors of depoliticizing what are essentially
political issues. Commenting speciﬁcally on the injustices of HIV/AIDS
research in South Africa, Fassin (2007) goes on to say that causing suf-
fering and ignoring the effects of that suffering are a contemporary re-
ality. He asks a moral question: What is a just society? He responds that
it is one that remembers because ignoring the past not only harms
understanding of the present, but also compromises present action
(cf. Tuck 2009). In this paper, I posit that remembering goes beyond
accounting for past injustices but also entails restoring lifeways and
knowledge systems heretofore dismissed as primitive and thus without
merit.

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8. HIV/AIDS as the Site of Hyper Othering
The advent of HIV/AIDS, drawing from colonial views of Africa, resur-
rected notions of the Other, who is not only different, but also inferior;
“the problem people” (Gordon 2014) with deﬁcits (Ndlovu-Gatsheni
2015) and who are “damaged” (Tuck 2009). Sexuality, while a site of
soft oppression, is very much at the center of questions about one’s human-
ity. Africa is a continent that has borne the brunt and suffered the con-
sequences of the colonial gaze that sought to paint Africans as incomplete
humans, if not outright non-humans. Therefore, the idea of “African AIDS”
is not a new one. It is integral to the narrative that forms the “white man’s
burden to civilize for salvation.” The high prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS in
Africa was attributed to “African sexuality” that is characterized by exotic
practices such as polygyny, dry sex, wife inheritance, promiscuity, the virgin
cleansing myth, and intergenerational sexual relations. In turn, African
sexuality is informed by “African culture” that is yet to evolve—unbridled
sexuality that is animal-like and does not show a higher consciousness. It
is the same rationale that engendered the narrative about the 4 H’s—Haiti,
homosexuals, heroin users, and hemophiliacs—,so-called risk groups exhibit-
ing risk behaviors (see Treichler 1991). This section will focus on how this
was the case and as such is a prime example of how meaningful conversations
between the colonizer and the colonized is thwarted by the fundamentals of
Cartesian thinking ably expressed through colonial methodologies.

The question of AIDS in Africa cannot be fully understood unless issues
of racial exploitation, subjugation, and discrimination are simultaneously
considered. To do so would be to abstract the issue from the webs of sig-
niﬁcance from which it issues. In the ﬁrst instance, “African AIDS” perforce
invites understanding Blackness as a construction of Whiteness. Signiﬁ-
cantly though, I want to underscore the assertion that it is a particular
worldview that “needs” the White against the Black. It is one that takes
us back to Descartes’ involvement with the self, for the self. In this world-
view, binary hierarchies are a central organizing principle. Below, I make
two related points. Firstly, I make the assertion that “African AIDS,” sup-
posedly engendered by sexual excess and a general lack of “good” sexual
mores, is a prime and contemporary site of Othering aided by the weight
of The Gaze that has the power to survey, deﬁne, and displace. Secondly, I
use the unjust practice of abstraction to show how the former was enabled
by this latter point. The advent of HIV/AIDS invited the White gaze with
its historical power in which Blackness has been woven into “a thousand
of details, anecdotes, stories” (Fanon in Sithole 2016, p. 32). The power lies
in its ability to conjure and create, to name, dominate, and erase through
over-determination and abstraction. It also has the ability to designate and
ﬁx. It precludes the process of subject formation, rendering Blackness a

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thing, overdetermined from without. The white gaze is not just “a look”; it is
a crushing weight unto Blackness. It is power; the look places and displaces,
it designates, confers the status of human/non-human. It is thus a master
signiﬁer with controlling power that has life and death implications over
the Black body (Sithole 2016). It is the same power that informed the mar-
auding “discoverer” of “virgin lands”; the master of all that he surveyed, the
God-eye (Grosfoguel 2013) who, through instrumental reason, sought to
conquer and subjugate, to “discipline” the land, its people and their “wild”
ways by subjecting them to “civilization” with particular contours much like
what “method” accomplishes.

Therefore, the gaze not only informs, it performs a function of scripting
and ﬁxing the Black in the zone of non-being. It performs a political role.
It takes its meaning from Cartesian rationalism that renders every other
absent (Maldonado-Torres 2007). By espousing the “I think therefore
I am” ethos, the gaze silences and denigrates the Black to a non-thinking
body. Maldonado-Torres turns this adage on its head and reveals its impli-
cation for those whose “I” has been denigrated and demeaned in the con-
struction of Blackness (Maldonado-Torres 2007, p. 252). He argues that
the ﬂip-side of the “I think, therefore, I am” is “I do not think, therefore,
I do not exist.” The Negro is, therefore, an object among other objects, to
be named and dominated. Like the land that he was disposed of, he is
without and is devoid, he is virgin territory that can be appropriated
and misappropriated at a whim. Fanon’s classical ([1952] 1967, p. 93)
“Look the Negro!” sums it all up: “Condemned to the life of the body,
there is no memory and history. The Black is body and body’s death is
death. The Black is a penis—the Black subject is reduced to the level of
genitalia, it then means that it symbolizes biological danger” (Gibson
2003 in Sithole 2016, p. 38). As such, Blackness connotes deﬁciency of
the very attributes that Whiteness is teeming with, such as rational thought,
appearance, superior consciousness, and the ability to name and designate.
Kobena Mercer’s (1994) edited volume discusses the politics of race and
sexuality and asserts this deﬁning gaze of Whiteness on black masculinity.
HIV/AIDS is a contemporary site of emptying the Black subject of his
humanity much like the enslaved—over-determined as a penis, a beast of
burden, mindless, and needing salvation. In South Africa, Leclerc-Madlala’s
(1997) “infect one, infect all” slogan parading as theory was to set the cue
for similarly racist short-hand explanations, such as the virgin cleansing
myth (2002), as characteristic of unbridled African sexuality. It is worth
noting that Leclerc-Madlala was writing at a time when the academy
was trying to make sense of the AIDS epidemic. As such, she was borrow-
ing from a tried and tested cultural narrative of Africa espoused by anthro-
pology. She was not writing in a vacuum.

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Therefore, the advent of HIV/AIDS became the site for rationalizing the
study of the exotic Other, a curiosity that invited the unidirectional Western
gaze that ultimately makes objects of subjects in the same manner as Descartes’
refusal to acknowledge the objectiﬁcation of the enslaved bodies in Europe
and in the Americas. I argue that the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been a site that
has strengthened abyssal thinking, re-centering the West and its knowledge
systems while excluding and silencing others, effectively relegating them to
the zone of non-being where they are spoken at, spoken about, and spoken
for. This was done through, among other strategies, abstraction. Proma Tagore
and Fairn Herising argue that abstraction takes place predominantly within
the supremacy and expansion of professionalism and standardization, consoli-
dating its power through expert knowledge, exclusions, universal skills-based
interventions, and positivist interpretations and deﬁnitions of “problems” and
“solutions” (Tagore and Herising 2007, p. 277). The standardized, technical,
and detached methods and tools that were used to understand HIV/AIDS in
Africa were woefully and willfully ahistorical, ensuring what Tagore and
Herising (2007) argue: an a-historicized Black ends up being objectiﬁed.
The assumptions that underlie these tools were informed by the fundamentals
of Western science that are essentially: “I shall now close my eyes, I shall stop
my ears, I shall call away all my senses, and thus holding conversation only
with myself and considering my own nature” (Tuana 1992, p. 36). The spirit
of this posture is both erasure and silencing, what Nyamnjoh characterizes as
“talking without listening” (Nyamnjoh 2012, p. 134). The question then arises:
what kind of subject is manufactured through these tools and to what end?

It is my contention that over-reliance on these standardized technical tools
to diagnose problems and propose solutions gives rise to a being devoid of
history and absolves Whiteness of the part it plays in creating the experiences
of Blackness in a world where race is an organizing principle. Therefore,
abstraction follows the logic of Man vs. humanity in that it does not question
the anti-Black world that makes the Black more vulnerable to social ills such
as HIV/AIDS. Man gravitates towards Whiteness and is the anti-thesis of
humanity. Western science, conceived after Man, accomplishes the political
feat of depoliticizing what are essentially issues about structural oppression
and reduces them to individual culpability—racial inequalities are per-
petuated and justiﬁed by this complex matrix. Abstraction empties as it
over-determines and displaces.

The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective
death-wish. Amidst this wasteland which it has created; imperialism
presents itself as the cure and demands that the dependent sing hymns
of praise with the constant refrain: “Theft is holy.” (Wa Thiong’o
1986, p. 3)

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The wasteland that imperialism engenders reinforces the notion of “us”
and “them,” “here” and “there,” “superior” and “inferior,” “civilized” and
“savage.” Abstraction plays into this ostensible bifurcation, it masks histo-
ries of entanglement characterized by racism, violence, and exploitation. It
has the ability to empty Blackness into a thing through its extractive ten-
dencies. Conversely, it gives rise to the neurotic efforts of Blacks who then
seek recognition in a schema that seeks to erase them and with their con-
sent sing the hymn that “Theft is holy!” When social and cultural conti-
nuities are fractured and individuals are wrenched from their human and
spiritual contexts, possibilities exist that they can no longer recognize or
realize themselves. The eventual consequence of this lack of self-recognition
and self-realization is that it cements white supremacist ideas as argued
by the quote below:

And the nation echoed and enforced this criticism, saying:
Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need for
higher culture for half-men?… and behold the suicide of a
race! (Du Bois [1903] 2007, pp. 14–15)
I reiterate the identity-making potential of sexuality—herein is said
to be found the ultimate meaning of humanness ( Vaughan 1991). I,
therefore, assert that the discursive frame in which sexuality is embed-
ded is a strategic lever of symbolic power. Sexuality is fraught with sym-
bolism; HIV/AIDS is an epidemic of signiﬁcation (Treichler 1991).
Therefore, theories on sexuality more than inform, they perform a polit-
ical role of dehumanizing. As such, the gaze gives expression to the fan-
tasies of Whiteness, it disciplines and ﬁxes the Black as the inferior
Other. Filtered through Eurocentric prisms, the black subject is always
under question, it must always justify its existence. The abstracting
gaze gives sway to racialized people as dispensable people. “I am given
no chance. I am over-determined without…” (Fanon [1952] 1967,
p. 87). It is instrumental in the politics of life unto death. Death is
the closing off of human possibilities such as those visited upon human-
ity in the advent of colonization that I argue snuffed out lifeways con-
trary to its own logic and by the same token produced the calamities
experienced by “problem people” the world over. Self-realization for
Indigenous colonized people is frustrated at both the level of their lived
experiences and at the level in which such experiences are made sense of.
The gaze is cut from the same cloth as “method”: both prescribe and
dominate. They snuff out life and the possibility to re-generate and leave
a wasteland that it ironically presents itself as the cure as Wa Thiong’o
argues above.

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9. Decolonial Meditations
Decolonial meditations are essentially the antithesis of Eurocentric, patri-
archal, capitalist, and imperial norms whose knowledge system treat
Others as sub-human; raw material to be analyzed through prisms that
essentially question their humanity. While colonial methodologies are
about “shutting my eyes…,” decolonial meditations are about seeing in
relation to others, using all faculties instead of shutting them away, and
being in conversation not in order to understand and assert one’s own na-
ture but rather “for-giving”—that is, forgiving and giving for the sake of
all humanity (Maldonado-Torres 2016, p. 187), signaling an outward-
looking rather than an inward-looking posture and attitude. Decolonial
meditations are about radical openness to all possibilities that ultimately
connect rather than disconnect humans and “other beings” as Nyamnjoh
(2017) asserts. Maldonado-Torres (2008) summarizes such meditations as
“against war” as they seek to work against the imperial impulse and thus
restore humanity upon those whose humanity is subsumed by Man. As
such, decolonial meditations seek to restore relations by not only high-
lighting the historical processes that gave rise to the “underside of moder-
nity” (Mignolo 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2008) and the attendant Black
experience the world over, but also forgive in pursuit of the humanity that
was lost in the pursuit of Man. Therefore, both the Black and the White
are challenged to take ﬂight from the complexes arising from the Man vs.
human complex that engenders a wasteland, and acknowledge their re-
spective humanity which is inter-connected and inter-dependent. This
comprises the third humanist revolution that seeks to go beyond the grid
of knowledge, power, and being that locks the Black in a zone of non-
being (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015) by, among other things, relegating his
ways of knowing to the fringes of what is considered to be credible knowl-
edge. By freeing knowledge, power, and what it means to be human from
the colonial impulse the humanity of all will prevail. This also entails free-
ing understandings of AIDS causation from methodological abstraction
while, at the same time, recognizing local ways of understanding HIV/
AIDS that borrow from African worldviews that do not shy away from rec-
ognizing that one thing cannot be something without also being another
(Nyamnjoh 2017). In other words, freeing knowledge, power, and what it
means to be human from Euro-American imperialism will allow the con-
viviality of knowledges that allow for leakage to be reconciled into the incom-
plete whole that accommodates all ways of knowing and all ways of being
human. This is against the idea of “method,” that is power-laden, and has
the net-effect of foreclosing this possibility through its insistence on over-
determination, over-prescription, and over-standardization (Nyamnjoh

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2017, p. 5). Method goes against the grain of “… presence in simultaneous
multiplicit[ies] …” in order to re-generate and re-imagine oneself outside
the constricting effects of the colonial apparatus of power (Nyamnjoh,
2017, p. 6). Method is the cage through which Man fabricates and imprisons
the human. Method comes from the very spirit that informed Descartes’
solipsism that had the ultimate effect of not seeing and thus reckoning
with the enslaved. It is against this backdrop that Smith argues that “ways
in which the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers
of imperial and colonial practices” including that:

[M]any indigenous communities continue to live within political
and social conditions that perpetuate extreme levels of poverty,
chronic ill-health and poor educational opportunities; they may live
in destructive relationships which are formed and shaped by their
impoverished material conditions and structured by politically
oppressive regimes. While they live like this, they are constantly fed
messages about their worthlessness, laziness, dependence, and lack
of “higher” order human qualities. (Smith 1999, p. 2)

Treichler (1991), among others, argues that the AIDS epidemic was the
site in which power relations of domination already in place were repro-
duced. In this sense, both Smith (1999) and Treichler (1991) argue that
narratives perform a function of domination and subjugation as well as:
“Information does not simply exist; it issues from and, in turn, sustains a
way of looking and behaving towards the world” (Treichler 1991, p. 124).
As such, issues of power and representation loom large in the perpetua-
tion of a socio-political order. Treichler (1991) further asserts that far
from being objective, the language of science that constructs the very
nature of AIDS borrows from a powerful cultural narrative that “demon-
strates the persistent bias in binary constructions of social reality that
have been “articulated” or linked to the epidemic since it ﬁrst became
a subject of scientiﬁc and lay interpretation.” These factors, more than
the purported different and thus regressive cultural and sexual mores,
go a long way in accounting for the disproportionate HIV/AIDS vul-
nerability among individuals, groups, and nations. Colonial, imperial
methodologies can thus be trusted to maintain and justify Eurocentric
knowledge systems whose fundamental point of departure is to doubt
the humanity of an Other. It follows then that a methodology cannot
be relied upon to subvert the logics of its principle. It must, as of neces-
sity, ﬂow from the root of the tree of which it is a branch and thus bear the
fruit it was always intended to bear in the ﬁrst place—strategic and will-
ful ignorance.

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10. Conclusion
Calls to decolonize the university carry multiple meanings. The call at once
signals restlessness in and alienation from the university space, asserting
that another way of conceptualizing knowledge and knowledge-making
is possible. The calls herald a need for space for meaningful conversations
about how the world is structured apropos differently-positioned people
across the line of the human. The call is political in that it seeks to fore-
ground heretofore marginalized voices and experiences. Many of the newly-
inducted in the university inhabit the world of the dispossessed and want to
be listened to and heard beyond the frames of Eurocentricity, including
voices ably articulated by Smith (1999); Nyamnjoh (2012, 2017); Savransky
(2012); Seth (2013) and others. The call to decolonize the university is
about questioning the conditions put forth for what constitutes credible
and legitimate knowledge. This is intricately related to the methods that
are part of the knowledge system. To this extent then, this essay argues that
if Eurocentric knowledge lacks the conviviality that allows multiplicity of
being-in-the-world and of knowing, the “method” cannot subvert this logic.
I argue that it is possible that the idea that meaningful conversations between
those who are deeply invested in the knowledge systems that animate the
university fabric because they reﬂect their worldviews and work to attain
their agendas, and those who are newly-inducted into the philosophical basis
on which this knowledge system issues, to miss the point altogether. This is
especially the case if those who, having been newly-inducted, refuse to be
disciplined into an entrenched way of thinking, effectively making sure that
it is reproduced, entrenching the social order its theories sanctions (Wynter
2003, p. 171). I have argued in this paper that meaningful conversation is
thwarted when the view that there is a superior way of knowing that lesser
knowledges should emulate is taken for granted.

It is true that prevailing methods have been critiqued in one way or other.
Fundamentally, these critiques have sought to tweak the edges of these
methods. In contrast, decolonial meditations question the very core of
Cartesian rationalism that is the foundation of all knowledge systems in
the university. By turning the adage “I think, therefore I am” on its head
to “I am, therefore I think” foregrounding the situatedness of knowledge
and the knower, decolonial epistemic perspectives introduce issues of power
and justice in knowledge production. This perspective puts history at the
center of knowledge production. It emphasizes the need to both remember
the historical circumstances and motivations that begot Cartesian rational-
ism and re-member the dismembered knowledge systems that reconcile dis-
parate entities and seek complex nuance against the all-encompassing
brushstrokes of Eurocentric knowledge that has pretensions of universalism.
From this point of view, colonial and colonizing epistemologies that move

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from the principles of ground zero and a locus of enunciation that is obscure
essentially conceal a whole history of genocide and epistemicide. The prob-
lems that are wrought by colonialism and racial capitalism are projected
elsewhere and presented as emanating in the observable, the articulated,
the ethnographic present, and thus the measurable. Objective and thus
ahistorical methodologies, bereft of re-collection through commitment to
shutting one’s eyes and calling away one’s senses disqualify “non-scientiﬁc,”
more inclusive epistemologies that view reality as not limited to the observ-
able. At stake, of course, is the assertion that a knowledge system is not
abstract, it has real effects on the world. Eurocentric, sexist, capitalist,
and imperial epistemologies continue to bring violence to those who are
seen as Other. These epistemologies lack the moral imperatives that ought
to govern human lives. They follow Man at the expense of humanity. They
further the coloniality/modernity imperative that seeks to erase the other
through exploitation and violence. They entrench an ethics of war reminis-
cent of the invasion of land and life to further imperial designs.

The transition from a monoculture of scientiﬁc knowledge to an ecology of
knowledge will make possible the replacement of knowledge-as-regulation
with knowledge-as-emancipation (Santos et al 2007) that emphasizes
wholeness, holism, togetherness, inclusiveness, cooperation, compromise,
accommodation, value-laden and creative diversity (Nyamnjoh 2017). Such
knowledge is not logocentric, it is spiritual. It attends to the whole human
being, subverting the Eurocentric hierarchy between the body, the mind, and
the spirit and is arrived at in community. It afﬁrms a decolonial aspiration to
have the true (science), the good (ethics) and the beautiful (divine) in conver-
sation and mutual recognition and acknowledgement, ﬂeeing from disciplin-
ary decadence. Such knowledge systems have more explanatory power
(Nyamnjoh 2017) and give a better chance for the whole of humanity against
racist epistemologies that militate against a large population of the world.
They will de-authorize the matrix of power that enslaves humanity in a quest
to buttress Man of the Euro-American imagination as they give expression to
the aspirations and lived experience of many towards post-capitalist horizons.
As such, it will only be possible for non-discriminatory, non-exploitative
relations to exist within science when egalitarian relations characterize
society itself. The two are inextricably linked.

References
Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. California:

Aunt Lute Books.

Berman, Ruth. 1989. From Aristotle’s Dualism to Materialist Dialectics.
Pp. 224–255 in Gender/Body/Knowledge – Feminist Reconstructions of Being

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