From the International Communication Association Podcast Network, this is Interventions from the Global South. In this podcast, we listen to the voices of community organizers, activists and intellectuals from and of the Global South imagining different worlds. My name is Professor Mohan Dutta from Massey University in Aoteroa, New Zealand. Today, we have the pleasure of having with us Professor Colin Chasi. Colin is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He's also the director of the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice, where much of his work focuses on promoting inclusion, anti-discrimination practices and gender equity.
Colin has been seriously engaging with the question of what it means to intervene in and from the Global South. His latest book, Ubuntu for Warriors, is a call to action to transformative politics.
Today, we'll talk further about Ubuntu, an African social philosophy where one's relationships with other people guide the sense of self. We will discuss how Ubuntu and other indigenous philosophies advance anti colonial movements by centering communication, cooperation, and community support.
Colin, it is so lovely to have you here.
So, Colin, can you share with us about the broad goals of the book?
Ubuntu for Warriors is a humble book in the strange sense that it says things that should be basic. For example, some studies have suggested that King Shaka, Nelson Mandela, perhaps the two most famous African names. But we know very little about King Shaka. We take very little of the traditions that he developed with us till today. If you think about the idea of Ubuntu being this African moral philosophy that supposedly guides Africans towards a reconciliation, towards forgiveness, it turns out that the way in which we discuss this Ubuntu to has very little to do with the traditions that people such as King Shaka developed.
So, where are our traditions to do with warriorship in terms of the ways in which we seek peace? In the West, we are comfortable thinking of the need for a just war theory, for example, and we go to Thomas Aquinas and so on. And yet in the African context, we have lost that. So this book is an attempt to reclaim that in a range of ways.
So how does one go about remembering traditions?
So I think part of the challenge is for us to find a way to put our heads back where they belong. They're making a strange little reference here to the lovely argument by Ngugu wa Thiong’o, who says in the book Something Torn that what happens at the point of colonization is that our heads are literally chopped off. In many instances, the heads of a number of African leaders were chopped off, were buried facing away from directions that our cultures would have dictated that people would be buried.
And what we need to do is to go back to look at our everyday practices and say, What did those practices entail? Where did they come from? We as communication scholars, media scholars, we are wonderfully positioned to be able to be taught, to be interested in, what is said. What are the meanings that are at stake? What are other contexts that need to be engaged with? A communication imagination from the South is a necessary imagination for us to begin to recraft our traditions so that we have traditions that speak to us, speak to our lived experiences - not just customs that are stuck in some historical place, but traditions that we work and rework according to our needs.
So tradition as living practice, if you will, is how you're articulating it, and I find that really powerful. I think about my own context of my engagement with India, where it's deeply troubling for me, the ways in which the language of traditions and decolonization are being deployed to prop up and circulate forces of hate in terms of reproducing Hindu nationalism.
And for that reason I'm troubled by this idea of invented traditions. Traditions must be fundamentally creative if they're to be any use to the human creative process. In the Global South, we're supposedly disinterested in the future. We're supposedly stuck in the past, which is therefore incapable of being entrepreneurial, which is therefore incapable of being inventive, which is therefore incapable of being law-abiding. All of this, of course translates to we are also incapable of democracy, for example. So there is a specific need for us to reclaim tradition as a living process that connects us to the future.
That's really beautiful, how you're connecting communication to praxis - and praxis being the work of imagining, it seems.
Yes. And so let's maybe take another step back, right? We speak of communication, we speak of media, we speak of mediation. Yet it is not clear to me that we have yet managed to truly understand what these terms mean outside of certain Western frames. Typically, when we teach our undergraduates, we go to Raymond Williams, and we take sections out of the little book Keywords, and we say this is the history of communication. At one point, it was connected to these voyages of exploration, and to these processes of conquest, and so on.
Well, perhaps from a particular historical perspective, it was. Certainly those processes we experienced very differently where I sit. Where I sit, these were processes that were certainly associated with disruption. So if we are talking about a history of communication, we need to ask, what are the things that are called to mind when we think of communication?
Democracy seems to be a key anchor in this conversation. It seems that across the Global South in contemporary struggles, you see emergent lessons for imagining democracies.
I perfectly agree with you. And one of my key interests with a few colleagues has been to try and articulate what we have termed a participation studies approach. We have suggested that there might be some value in articulating this participation studies approach grounded upon African moral philosophies; seeing participation as the basis for how personhood in itself is something that is to be valued. To pull it back to your point, we cannot achieve democracy if we follow Western histories of democracy, if we deny Southern traditions, Southern moral philosophies that underpin the ways in which you seek to engage In the parts of the world where I live, if you say, let's promote participation, people will understand that you are saying, let's enable a form of communing, that benefits everybody. They will understand that everybody must have a voice. And this will be appreciated.
You know, this idea of community seems integral to ways of being in the Global South. So could you talk about how community emerges in this conversation on participation?
This is one of the key grounds for the struggles of peoples of the South who went into slavery. Fighting against slavery, how can we get our voices back? How can we get our rights to participate back? This language of participation I think is fundamental to a re-articulation of the idea of community, and with it the idea of communication. So what is the work of communication? How does it relate to the process of formulating communities? How does it relate to the formation of personhood? These are fundamental questions that I think still need a great deal of work.
One of the great tragedies is that because colonialism did such a great job of tearing apart our social fabrics, tearing apart our abilities to imagine societies, it becomes particularly important for us to draw upon our collective and varied insights from India, from South America from the Global South and to begin to use these to re-articulate something new. I think that the #feesmustfall movement, the Rhodes Must Fall movement, the decolonization of higher education movement reignited here in South Africa over the last decade is showing us the great potency of these kinds of collaboration.
You know, this year's theme for the International Communication Association is One World, One Network. So when you read that theme from the Global South and this conversation here, what does a Southern-led connection look like?
It looks like things that have been forgotten that we need to remember again, one of the great political movements in South Africa that led to the 1976 student protests. One of his greatest sources of inspiration was Paulo Freire. When they sat in KwaZulu-Natal in their hostel dormitories, they sat and they clandestinely read banned texts from Paulo Freire, they sat and they read Frantz Fanon. So these connections across the Global South have always - or for a significant period - been active.
It's interesting to see how we omit and are unaware of these traditions of thought that have been woven together, bringing in Freire, or bringing in Fanon and so on. And so we constantly have to start afresh, you know, and I think that's tragic. Part of the work that we do need to do is to formally surface, formally acknowledge, formally reconnect these histories so that we don't constantly every 10 years, five years, 16 years, 50 years, sort of rediscover them again.
I connect Global South conversations back to the non-aligned movement, and struggles of non-aligned nations for sovereignty. And those concepts, that movement, it almost seems like we are incentivized to forget and to position ourselves as doing something brand new - that will have personal benefits for individual scholars and our ability to make claims, but do very little in terms of the history of the movement.
Yes. So I think we areconstantly being put into corners, and we are constantly being set apart. And this is an important thing to really hear properly, right? The word apartheid, deep down at its base includes this idea of setting apart. And one of the radical things about the non-aligned movement was precisely that the non-aligned movement tried to say, we are not that. We don't have to be in one corner or another.
What is unique about us as people in the Global South is that we are able to claim heritages, inventions, traditions, articulations, that were Western - that were from a different part of the world - and we're able to make them our own.
We do this with the food we eat. In the southern part of Africa people eat mieliepap, we call it here in South Africa - sadza, we call it in Zimbabwe, where I come from - which is a maize staple. Maize is not indigenous to this part of the world. We have domesticated it, we have taken it, we have used it in certain ways. To be African is to be cosmopolitan. It is to be something that is capable of reinvention in the same ways that our forefathers 600 years ago took maize, and started to use it in a particular set of ways.
We have an interesting discussion here in South Africa, where people have asked the question, are certain things that colonialism brought good? We are capable of making it good, we are capable of taking ownership of it and making it a part of a new cosmopolitan identity. Saying this does not in any way suggest that we are saying that colonialism was good. And it does not necessitate us having a conversation about certain parts of colonialism having been good.
Could you also speak to this linkage between the everyday work of being in struggles for justice and theorizing about justice? What does the Global South offer us as a way for imagining those connections?
It's really important that we also talk about the real people who live in these contexts, right? These violent settings, settings in which often in order to be recognized as a voice, you have to articulate yourself in a particular register. You have to for example, position yourself as a translator of African thought for Western audiences if you are to be recognized as a scholar. Often the structures in themselves on a daily basis are violent. They're violent in the sense that we are often led to teach students things that really we know or should know, are not useful to the students. Things that alienate us and our students from everyday lived experiences.
One of the points that we make in the paper Smash and Grab, that I co wrote with Ylva Rodny-Gumede, is that we need to sometimes also recognize the ways in which we are fundamentally delegitimated by the systems that we find ourselves in. We are made to not belong. We are made to seem unreasonable. We are made to seem as if when we bring our idea to the table, we are imposing ideas that are foreign to academia, that are disruptive in ways that are undesirable.
And so we say for that reason, we really need to, in some sense, accept the fact that in some people's eyes, we are illegitimate, we are like thieves. And whatever knowledge we have is seen by some as not quite belonging with us. So that when we join hands, we understand that we are joining hands with people who have been delegitimated, who have experienced certain wounds, who are raw in certain places and who need a bit of gentleness. But if we do so well, there is a great deal of valuable stuff to be had from these collectives.
in the face of this violence when doing the work of intervening from the Global South, how then do we build communities guided, perhaps, by the moral philosophy of Ubuntu or other similar moral philosophies of the South?
It will turn out I think, tragically, that most of us, five years after we are gone, our work too will be forgotten. Our work perhaps will only live through or will remain through the efforts of our students and so on - our children if we have children, and so on, and the occasional reading of our articles and our books. If we humble ourselves to accept that fundamental reality, and if we ask ourselves: what does it take to generate a body of scholarship that will be picked up 1000 years from now?
Thank you so much calling. You teach us how to do the decolonizing work by doing the decolonizing work, and what an inspiring role model you are for so many of us.
Thank you so much.
This episode of the Interventions from the Global South podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association and is sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar, which produces and promotes evidence-based storytelling focused on histories, cultures, societies, and media of the Global South. Our producer is Ilana Arougheti. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production coordinator is Nick Song. The theme music is by Sleeping Ghost. If you'd like to hear more about our sponsor, please check the show notes in the episode description. Thanks for listening.
