My journey with western theory in the university in Africa

Abstract

In this paper, I recount my experiences with western media theory. Working on my PhD thesis marked my turn to decolonial theory. I used the creolisation strategy of putting critical western Marxist theories in conversation with African, black and Latin American decolonial theories. I worked on my PhD thesis under conditions informed by the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), the Fees Must Fall (FMF) and other broader protests in South Africa whose connecting thread was the demand for the decolonisation of both the academy and public life. It is my conviction that, although work has already begun, there is still a lot of work to be done in decolonising the disciplines of journalism, media and cultural studies.

How do we sort through the entanglements among these conjectural formations, and what implications do these entanglements have for a different notion of theory with a lowercase t? What might this theory look like, where do we find it and what might be its resources? (Lionnet and Shih, 2011: 12).

Introduction

Writing this paper at the end of my PhD research, I should state upfront that, ‘I need to start with my own locus of enunciation, that is, the geographical, emotional and theoretical terms from where I speak’ (Giraldo, 2016: 157). I should therefore start by putting emphasis on Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) point that, what Althusser calls Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) such as schools, colleges, churches, the media and universities in the African continent are ‘sites for reproduction of coloniality’ (p. 11). I start with this articulation between the ideas of one of the leading decolonial thinkers out of Africa and a key Marxist thinker to signal the kind of decolonial Marxist theory that is my theoretical locus of enunciation. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2013) observation is based on the fact that most of the knowledge that underpins these public institutions in most of Africa is western. For example, most universities in Africa still operate on the logic left behind by colonial governments. The history that is taught at these institutions is the history of the West in Africa falsely marked African history. As a result, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) rightly posits that ‘we so far do not have African universities. We have universities in Africa’ (p. 11). In media and cultural studies, the history of these disciplines, parallels that of colonialism in Africa. It has taken the decolonial turn for some of us to outgrow this theoretical and methodological blindness, infused by coloniality and be able to speak this way. I now turn to describe my journey with western theory before my PhD thesis.

My journey of colonial theoretical and methodological blindness in the African university

One day, when I was a young boy, at around Grade 5, and an alter server at our local Catholic parish, I encountered an old man who challenged my thinking. I took my responsibilities at church seriously, was diligent and ensured that I was always on time for Mass. One Sunday morning as the church bells rang, and I was rushing to the mission, I realised that there was a short man standing on the road looking at me with fascination. The old man politely stopped me. He asked me about where I was rushing to. I told him I am rushing to church.

‘Why are you going to church?’ I realised at that point that the man was playing a mind game. ‘You mean you can’t pray to God at your home?’

I childishly told him that ‘I have to be at the mission, in church, at Mass; that is where God is’.

‘Is that what they teach you there at the mission? That God is at the mission only,’ the short man laughed gently. ‘Just say that is where you gather with other believers to pray, otherwise God is everywhere my child’.

Reflecting on this, I realise that, that old man is the first critical thinker I encountered in my life, someone who challenged me to question what I am taught and told by people and institutions around me.

I went to a Catholic mission primary school at a place that boarders Zimbabwe and Botswana. At school, we were forced to speak in English in all the subjects except for isiNdebele, my home language, which I studied from Grade 1 up until Form 6. Prefects and class monitors had the responsibility of taking down the name of anyone they heard speak in isiNdebele. In retrospect, it is strange that at some point my name went into those small pocket books for ‘speaking isiNdebele’. The point am making here is that, from the beginning I have encountered school as English which meant that home was Ndebele. From the beginning I could not bring my home experiences to school where I had to sit and learn about the English world in an English worldview. For my secondary schooling, I went to a boys’ government boarding school. At school, most textbooks were written about the experiences of the West, such that even when written by a black Zimbabwean writer, the content was western. When I grew up and worked as a journalist in Bulawayo, I realised that even when they wrote African history, they wrote it with European eyes, relying on documents left behind by early missionaries and other European who recorded their colonial expeditions. It was not until second year at university that one of the lecturers introduced us to African thinkers such as Tiyambe Zeleza and Mahmood Mamdani, among others. It was my first time to come across the idea that there were Africans involved in researching, thinking and writing from the African locus of enunciation. I was captured by the work of these writers. As I grew in the academy and began to read as wide as possible, I discovered more African theory and philosophy.

I did my master’s in journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University’s premier Journalism School in the Eastern Cape in South Africa. The reading list in all the four courses that we did were mostly based on western thinkers although the lecturers made efforts to point us to African and other thinkers from the Global South. I recall that in one of the courses we were made to read Mahmood Mamdani’s theorisation of the subject and the citizen. We read a number of scholars from India on the internet and the public sphere. When I wrote my thesis on the representation of minority ethnic groups in two newspapers in Zimbabwe, I experimented with postcolonial writers, especially the work of Gayatri Spivak. When I think back on it, it was a huge intellectual leap from my Honours dissertation where I had most relied on the work of Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci and western media scholars. My PhD thesis is a decolonial approach to the study of the articulations of the media, migration and the urban in constructions of black African subjectivity in postapartheid South Africa. Working on it, I felt I have travelled an incredible journey in terms of theory and methods. While, all my life in the academy theory had always been western, in my PhD thesis, I radically moved to embrace decolonial and African approaches to thinking about the media, the urban and migration. I unashamedly embraced decolonial thinkers in my intellectual work, especially thinkers from the African continent such as Steve Biko, Anton Lembede, Robert Sobukwe, Kwane Nkhrumah and Patrice Lumumba, among others.

Towards a decolonial Marxist approach

In my PhD research, I sought to enact a decolonial media and cultural studies through several strategies. First, I settled for a transdisciplinary design that shifts theoretical and methodological resources in the study of the representation of black African subjectivity in postapartheid South Africa. Second, I aimed at tracing the intersection of practices around the media, migration and urbanity in the discursive construction of this subjectivity. In enacting a decolonised media and cultural studies, it has always been imperative to reveal ways in which the disciplines suffer coloniality. Third, I sought to challenge and disturb the disciplines’ normative assumptions, which partly account for their coloniality. For example, where media and cultural studies are concerned, rather than think in terms of what the media as technologies of culture ideally ought to do, I focused on what the media have historically done in South Africa. This epistemic delinking from a Media and Cultural studies that proceed from liberal pluralist normative assumptions located representation at the centre of what the media have historically done in colonised and postcolonial parts of the world. Taken from a constructivist approach, representation is seen as emerging out of modernity and playing a constitutive role in contemporary postcolonial culture (Colebrook, 2000; Hall, 1997; Lloyd, 2019; Webb, 2009). This means that culture then occupies a similar space to the economy and material conditions in shaping historical events and social subjectivities (Hall, 1997). This delinking was further necessitated by historical conditions of the emergence of media and cultural studies as disciplines in the South African academy. Media and cultural studies emerged in South Africa in the 1960s as a terrain for conversations and debates between British and Afrikaner viewpoints (De Beer and Tomaselli, 2000 Tomaselli, 2002). Historically, in both media practice and media studies, the black African subject has always been represented, that is spoken about and spoken for (Alcoff, 1991; Spivak, 1988; Webb, 2009). Decolonising media and cultural studies, then, partly meant exploring and confronting this ‘visible’ black absence.

These three strategies meant I needed to consider a decolonised theoretical framework for my dissertation. Tied to the need to lay bare the coloniality of the disciplines, the decolonisation of theory is ‘a self-conscious rethinking and reorientation of the subject in the light of its past complicity, direct or indirect, with the colonial project’ (Mills, 2015: 1). In decolonising theory, I embraced the strategy of creolisation. In my study, I put the western critical theory of Marxism into crisis placing it in a conversation with anticolonial – postcolonial and decolonial – theories. Following Lionnet and Shih (2011), Gordon (2014) and Gordon and Roberts (2015), my theoretical and conceptual framework for my study was a creolisation of critical western theory and postcolonial and decolonial work. It has been argued that creolisation, as the close reading of one set of theories through another, brings ‘into conversation a set of theoretical approaches that can enable us to move past the increasingly melancholic tone adopted in the past decade by the aging field of Euro-American theory’ (Lionnet and Shih, 2011: 2; See Gordon and Roberts, 2015: 2). My choice for critical Western theory included that of Gramsci, Althusser and Michel Foucault. In this creolised approach, I sought to retain what is relevant in both Marxism and anticolonial approaches in an effort to recover ‘the human’ and put the black African subject into the centre of theory. I contended with the challenges of beginnings in theorising in Africa where theory has always been western. In an act of epistemic disobedience, I refused to start off tracing the emergence of the black African subjectivity from western theory and, therefore, deliberately began from an African perspective. This way I sought to avoid the teleology, normativity and universalisation of western theory. The coloniality of western theory is, in part, in the assumptions that history moves in a teleological manner as understood from the West such that western values, such as liberal democracy, become normative and must be universally embraced (see Mlotshwa, 2022).

In terms of methods, I had to use a triangulated, interdisciplinary and interpretivist research adopting research ethics that are alive to studying the crisis of representation of black subjects in postapartheid South Africa. In my decolonial approach to methodology, I built on the formative debates of qualitative research that I found important for thinking about decolonising research. According to Denzin and Lincoln (2005), qualitative research locates the observer in the world consisting of ‘a set of interpretive, material practices that makes the world visible’ placing emphasis on meaning-making (p. 3; Denzin and Lincoln, 2000: 14; Maxwell, 2008; Merriam, 2009). The question of the subject and how it makes sense of the world and relates to it is central to any decolonial politics. That way the politics of qualitative research is then compatible to any decolonial research. From an epistemological perspective, qualitative research puts emphasis on methods such as participant observation and case studies that result in rich textual data in the form of narratives, descriptive accounts of settings or practice (Guest et al., 2013; Nkwi et al., 2001; Parkinson and Drislane, 2011). In my PhD dissertation, I combined an ethnographic design, that included participant observation and in-depth interviews, with textual analysis. The texts that I analysed included 18 news stories taken from the Independent On line (IOL), News24 and the isiZulu Ilanga newspaper and 11 images that included 5 photojournalism and 6 photographs taken during the ethnographic field work. This material, including in-depth interviews transcripts, was analysed through a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), ideological analysis and semiotics analysis.

Challenges encountered in building a decolonial Marxist media and cultural studies

However, in the years that I worked to find my place in the decolonial terrain, I have realised two disturbing trends. First, the people who are interested in experimenting with decolonial theory and research have to spend an enormous amount of time explaining and justifying themselves to the opponents of decolonial theory. The first question is conferences is always on what decoloniality is. Just as feminists complain of the mental toll of educating patriarchs on feminism, decoloniality scholars and aspiring decoloniality scholars have to educate anti-decoloniality scholars at nearly every conference. This is why in my PhD research, I embraced the burden of not only articulating a decolonial Marxist media and cultural studies but also the responsibility of illustrating in empirical terms what it could look like. The search for a decolonial Marxist theory is the approach that has become the locus of enunciation for my work since I embraced the decolonial turn (see Mlotshwa, 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2022). I accept that my decolonial approach is just one among many (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). The second disturbing trend is that of appropriation where the decolonial turn has become a catch phrase or intellectual fashion fad. It is not unusual to go to a conference where some presenter whose work has nothing to do with inserting into theory (as history) the subjects previously barred from it claiming they are a decolonial scholar. I cannot say exiled or banished from theory, because, in the history of the university as we have it today, the black African subject has never been part of theory.

I have two short anecdotes to retell about appropriation. I was shocked some few years back at a media studies conference when a self-proclaimed decolonial scholar said one of the challenges she encountered was that student ‘want to do theory and not anything else’. To her, anything else referred to African and other Global South intellectual contributions, and theory referred to western contributions. It has always been one of the decolonial thinkers’ contention that, hitherto the emergence of radical decolonial scholarship, it was a settled notion in the academy that theory is western, and Africa provides case studies for the west to theorise. In my mind, I asked myself if the students are interested in theory, then why not teach them decolonial theory, why not teach them Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, among others. The second anecdote concerns what happened at the same media conference but in its latest edition, one after the COVID-19 pandemic days. Here the presenter who was trying to make a case about media freedom somehow seemed unfazed by the whiteness of South African media (and the academy) arguing as if it was unproblematic. Citing a matter before the courts, the presenter posited that dragging journalists to the courts is undermining media freedom. She did not debate why the journalists are dragged to the courts and the possibility that the media is a powerful institution in postcolonial societies that can also infringe on other people’s freedoms as well. Importantly, when her thesis was problematised by people at the session, the presenter seemed convinced that she was doing decolonial feminist media work.

These two incidents have made me realise the hard work needed in building decolonial media and cultural studies. To say decolonial theory must be intersectional is important but it opens it up, for example as in this case, to appropriation by people working from a liberal feminist perspective, as long as they have an African case study for their work. More importantly, work in decolonial media and cultural studies would have to contend with the ‘reality that mere “inclusion” and “tolerance” of difference with regard to race, class, gender, ability, sexuality and nationality cannot address the violence of White capitalist heteropatriarchy in academia’ (Asante, 2019: 485). There is a need for nuance in how decolonial theory is evoked in media and cultural studies.

Conclusion: Continuing debates and the way forward in decolonial African media studies

On the imperative to decolonise in African media studies, and taking a global perspective, Mohammed (2021) posits that decolonial media studies have always left out the African perspective (pp. 123–124). This is despite the fact that for Langmia (2022), the starting question for the decolonisation of media studies is the almost universalised question; ‘do Black lives matter in communications studies?’ (p. x). Even decolonial studies have been seen as underrepresenting African perspective focusing mainly on Black/African diaspora, Asian scholars, Middle Eastern scholars and Latinx scholars. In media studies, the implications have been that African media studies are neglected and marginalised by sections of the academy that foreground the colonial and decolonial experiences in knowledge production. This marginalisation is clear in the lack of representation of African scholarship in major communication conferences including the International Communication Association (ICA) and the National Communication Association, both in the USA (Mohammed, 2021: 124). The question of black lives, as subjects of history, in the world has played out in such a way that it centres experiences of black people in the West while excluding black people in Africa. This is the dilemma that decolonial African media studies will have to grapple with going forward and fight to ensure that Africa’s voice is heard as well. For Asante and Hanchey (2021), African knowledge systems are pregnant with the potential to teach the world, regardless of whether the West is listening or not (p. 271). Daniels (2022) argues for a specifically South African approach to decolonising media studies. What this approach looks like is still work in progress. Thinking in the context of the Fees Must Fall movement and its challenge to knowledge production, Daniels (2022) argues for an approach that combines Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and Achille Mbembe’s theories of subjection, racism, the postcolony and decoloniality, as well as Judith Butler’s concept of ‘passionate attachment’ and Slavoj Zizek’s idea of the ideological signifier as a ‘rigid designator’. Similar to a posture I took in my PhD dissertation, this is combining African and western critical theoretical resources. However, Mohammed (2022) counsels that, ‘although canonical theories can be useful in theorizing African media systems, decolonizing research must first look to Indigenous African epistemologies and knowledge systems’ (p. 7). Decolonising media and cultural studies, especially from the vantage point of Africa, is a journey of a thousand upon a thousand steps. Although it starts with a single step upon a single step, it is important to do the intellectual work of thinking and paying attention, especially, to those instances when coloniality seeks to rehabilitate itself.