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Abstract

Decoloniality—which encompasses conceptual frameworks of grounded normativity, grounded relationality, re-earthing, and meta ethical enquiries—yields radically different opportunities for planning theory: opportunities that are explicitly de-linked from occidental systems of thought. Yet, some planning scholars question decoloniality’s transferability into practice. The aim of this article is to demonstrate decoloniality’s political and spatial outcomes from the vantagepoint of one geopolitical region by exploring communal landholdings in southern Africa where traditional leaders remain custodians of lands, cultures, languages, and nonhuman actants, and where residents continue to engage with pre-colonial land laws. Findings reveal not only optimistic possibilities but also sobering concerns.

Keywords

cecoloniality anti-colonialism anti-racism indigenous planning communal landholdings

Introduction

The field of planning theory has evolved rapidly since the critique of rational comprehensive planning in 1960s. During the past three decades we have also witnessed the growth of planning theories from the margins, including, for example, radical, insurgent, postcolonial, and Southern theories. Yet while all of these scholarships are grounded in diverse onto-epistemological traditions that encompass equally diverse normative trajectories, the one thing most planning theories have in common—whether from the margins or otherwise—is their inability to unshackle us from occidental systems of thought. This inability stems from intellectual traditions rooted in occidental frameworks, whether Gramscian, Lefebvrian, Habermasian, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Deleuzian, and the like. But this is not to suggest that planning’s manifold scholarships are misguided or irrelevant. On the contrary. They remain invaluable to the ongoing advancement of planning praxis regardless of their occidental orientation (which applies to postcolonial and Southern planning theories, see Winkler, 2018). Rather, failures to unshackle ourselves from occidental onto-epistemologies and axiologies neglect opportunities to also engage with altogether different ways of knowing, doing, and being that are deliberately de-linked and distinct from Western praxes.

By contrast, decoloniality—which encompasses conceptual frameworks of grounded normativity, grounded relationality, re-earthing, and meta ethical enquiries—yields radically different options for planning theory. Such options are derived from decoloniality’s deliberate grounding in indigenous¹ systems of thought that disrupt occidental ways of “doing science”, as argued by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012). Epistemically de-linked and “disobedient” opportunities might then be of relevance not only in the global South where colonial conquest and coercion endure, but also in the global North where ‘the settler colonial frame within which diverse configurations of power converge to produce a host of violences: from environmental degradation to white supremacy to heteropatriarchal domination to class exploitation’ remain unaddressed (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016: 251).

Furthermore, decoloniality allows us to explain and analyse the contemporary political world order from a vantagepoint of making an unambiguous distinction between colonialism and coloniality. Distinguishing between decolonization and decoloniality is arguably also relevant, as explained in section three of this article. Nevertheless, and by returning to the importance of conceptually separating colonialism from coloniality, for scholars of decoloniality it is incongruous to assume that we are living in a post-colonial moment in history, since contemporary structures of globalisation—defined as coloniality—continue to ratify land thefts, dispossessions, displacements, foreclosures and other socio-economic, cultural, and linguistic injustices through neoliberal systems of governance and repressive bi- and multi-lateral donor organisations (ongización) (Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012). The ramifications of coloniality are then regularly experienced in the global South and North.

Still, while decoloniality presents us with a radically different way of theorising planning, keynote presenters at Columbia University’s 2021 GSAPP virtual conference—titled Planning Futures: Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Abolitionist Planning—refute its travelability from its Abya Yala (the indigenous name for Latin America) origins, and hence, its relevance beyond this context; whilst others at the same conference posit the fruitlessness of imagining planning futures in settler colonial states until stolen lands are relinquished. Both sets of scholars also question decoloniality’s materiality in planning practice by arguing that if decoloniality holds any value at all, this value might pertain to theory alone (see Columbia University, GSAPP virtual conference, 2021). In other words, decoloniality’s translation into practice is contested; hence my question: what might decoloniality look like in praxis?

The aim of this article is to demonstrate an example of decoloniality’s political and spatial outcomes by exploring communal landholdings in southern Africa where traditional leaders remain custodians of lands, cultures, languages, and nonhuman actants, and where residents continue to engage with pre-colonial land laws despite colonialism and ongoing coloniality. Findings presented in subsequent sections challenge arguments concerning decoloniality’s travelability and inability to produce political and spatial outcomes.² Nevertheless, findings also demonstrate how decoloniality in praxis is complex, fractured, multi-directional, messy, and open to corruption by ruling elites. Such findings do not however nullify decoloniality’s onto-ethical values and possibilities for planning praxis.

This article is structured as five sections. The first section revisits decoloniality’s possibilities for planning theory. These possibilities are deepened, in the second section, by engaging with grounded normativity and grounded relationality as conceptual frameworks for decoloniality, and by encouraging planners to explore meta ethical enquiries and re-earthing praxes before attempting to address how we ought to plan. Section three serves to set the scene for understanding decoloniality in praxis, while the fourth section demonstrates this praxis from the perspective of southern Africa’s communal landholdings. Conclusions are presented in the final section.

Establishing the value of decoloniality for planning theory

Decoloniality simultaneously presents us with an alternative philosophical option of knowledge production whilst teaching us the value of intellectual generosity (de Sousa Santos, 2014; Escobar, 2020; Mignolo, 2009; 2011). I will return to the meaning of an alternative philosophical option shortly. For now, it is important to emphasise decoloniality’s generosity of spirit which is evidenced in its call for pluri-versal (as opposed to uni-versal) ways of knowing, being, and doing. To clarify, pluriversality resembles a world that accommodates and respects multiple knowledge claims (including occidental knowledge claims) instead of ‘reinscribing only one privileged position’ which is often the approach used in occidental theory-making (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 24). And by advocating for a multiplicity of worldviews, pluriversality encompasses a horizontal coexistence of non-dominant knowledge forms that are explicitly grounded in a relational ontology (Ortiz, 2022; Vasudevan and Novoa, 2022). This said, pluri-versal thinking—which was originally conceptualised by Water Mignolo (2002) and later refined by Arturo Escobar (2011; 2018; 2020), and which is a prerequisite to decoloniality—is neither an attempt to ‘collude in the reproduction of hegemonic knowledge’ (Dei, 2000: 129), nor is it geared towards replacing occidental philosophies, since doing so would merely evoke coloniality in action (Halvorsen, 2019). Rather, pluri-versal thinking refutes assumptions of the existence of a universally acceptable approach to knowledge production (de Sousa Santos, 2014), and it does so by embracing a form of epistemic disobedience, or what Sylvia Wynter (2001) terms as resistant texts. Such texts disrupt forgone conclusions about the urban, the rural, land, and planning by resisting dominant onto-epistemologies and axiologies in ways that are foreign to mainstream planning praxes (Winkler, 2018). Above all else, resistant texts are found in ‘indigenous planning [that is] distinct from the colonial apparatus; and [that has been] practiced since time immemorial’ (Matunga, 2013: 3; see also Barry and Agyeman, 2020; Barry and Thompson-Fawcett, 2020; Hibbard, 2021; Jojola, 2008; Patrick, 2017; Porter and Barry, 2015; 2016; Prusak et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2013). To be sure, indigenous planning incorporates an altogether different ontological and ethical understandings of land, attachments to land, ancestral values, and nonhuman actants. Yet, as Hirini Matunga (2017: 641) argues:

A form of soporific amnesia has airbrushed [indigenous planning] out of existence because confronting it requires facing up to [the postcolonial state’s] own history, its own complicity with the colonial project, and its ongoing marginalisation and dispossession of the very communities it actually needs to engage.

Matunga’s concerns are echoed by Yasminah Beebeejaun (2021: 1) who demonstrates ‘the deliberate distancing of empire’ found in contemporary planning education in the United Kingdom. This deliberate distancing of empire is arguably also found in communicative, collaborative, radical, and insurgent planning theories despite their inclusionary and counter-hegemonic assertions, because these theories often fail to critically examine the genealogy of planning as oppressive from a non-occidental standpoint (Porter and Barry, 2015; Huq, 2020; Vasudevan and Novoa, 2022). Decoloniality, by contrast, challenges this distancing by paying acute attention to planning’s intellectual roots and functions, in addition to paying attention to how coloniality continues to be used for the purpose of controlling knowledge and relationships between particular peoples, lands, and diverse plant and animal nations (Matunga, 2017). Decoloniality’s response to ongoing amnesia and dominant mechanisms of control is to engender an unambiguous de-linking from occidental categories of thought. In so doing, it dares to deviate from ‘the established rules of scientific practice’ (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999: 53). Importantly, it is this epistemic de-linking from occidental categories of thought that presents us with an alternative philosophical option of knowledge production. Decoloniality is therefore not influenced by ‘liberal, Marxist, et cetera [onto-epistemologies] that leave intact the logic of coloniality’ (Mignolo, 2011: 49).

Decoloniality’s problem with liberalism concerns the “liberal myth” of freedom and individualism that is selectively apportioned to only some “worthy” citizens regardless of liberalism’s subscription to universalism (Linebaugh, 1992). It relies not only on the logic of surplus extraction by treating land as a mere material object with exchange values, but also on racial hierarchies and subjugation to dispossess, enslave, and colonise by rendering the dispossessed, enslaved, and colonised as “less-than-human” (Lowe, 2015; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Nichols, 2019). Liberalism is therefore inextricably linked to processes of racialisation and racism (Robinson, 2000) via a schema that is backed by the rule of law and state-sanctioned violence (Byrd et al., 2018; Kelley, 2017).

On the other hand, while Karl Marx’s ([1867] 1996) Das Kapital emphasises the imbricated connections between liberalism/capitalism and colonialism via his theory of primitive accumulation, this theory’s temporal character and prescription to linear developmentalism necessitates an urgent overhaul (Coulthard, 2014). It assumes that primitive accumulation is a mere historic precursor to capitalist modes of production, and in so doing it ignores ongoing practices of land theft, dispossession, displacement, and foreclosure that structure capitalism in the present (Coulthard, 2014). So, while Marxism provides us with a robust critique of capitalist exploitation, the strategies it relies on to ‘move us beyond the violent mess we have inherited’ distance themselves from ‘the falsely universalizing, urban, white, heterosexist, masculinist, class reductionist, and state-centric character that informs dominant Western articulations’ (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016: 252). Such articulations deny ‘attachments to land, language, and culture in exchange for [an] integration’ into occidental ways of knowing, being, and doing (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016: 252; see also Franz Fanon, 1961, 1967 and Kwasi Wiredu, 1996, 1998 for a rigorous critique of Marxism from an African onto-epistemological standpoint).

Decoloniality, conversely, offers us an alternative approach to theorising and practicing planning. But this alternative requires a relational onto-ethical approach that respects all interacting entities as opposed to privileging only the human by entrenching vertical ontologies (Gunder and Winkler, 2021). Such alternative options have always informed indigenous political systems, as argued by Glen Coulthard (2014).

Deepening our understanding of alternative onto-ethical standpoints that inform decoloniality

Inspired by Frantz Fanon (1961; 1967), Glen Coulthard (2014) calls for a reinvigoration of pre-colonial land laws that uphold reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman worlds via an ethical praxis that he terms as grounded normativity. For Coulthard (2014), this ethical praxis is shaped by an ontological standpoint that is grounded in intimate relationships to the land itself. And ‘to wilfully abandon’ these reciprocal and intimate relationships to land ‘would amount to a form of auto-genocide’ (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016: 254). Grounded normativity thus ‘teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly non-authoritarian, non-dominating, non-exploitive manner’ by promoting an ethical way of knowing, doing, and being that negates vertical ontologies (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016: 254). Traditional planning ethics, however, tend to privilege the human over all other entities regardless of some scholars’ ardent calls for ‘broadening the scope of beings that count’ (Metzger, 2020: 194). In contrast to vertical ontologies that privilege human subjects over other entities, the general principle of grounded normativity is that all entities equally exist in the world. However, this equal existence differs from posthumanism’s and neo-materialism’s more-than-human tenets because these tenets tend to be influenced by existential assemblages and Deleuzo-guattarian concepts that preclude indigenous knowledge systems while ignoring the reality of coloniality. Grounded normativity, by contrast, allows planners to consider how coloniality continues to inform taken-for-granted understandings of nature, memory, and history through ‘the production of archives and certain kinds of knowledges that favor hegemonic white possession’ (Byrd et al., 2018: 13). Moreover (and regardless of its normative orientation), grounded normativity allows us to engage with meta ethical questions before attempting to identify planning interventions. Meta ethical questions include, for example, what is the nature and meaning of an ethical planning judgment that informs our understanding of the object under study? And when the object under study is land, the meta ethical question is: what is the nature and meaning of land?

But let me explain by drawing on an argument that James Duminy and I made in 2016 that begins by suggesting that alternative ways of theorising planning might rest not only with how we know and act in the world, but also with how we theorise ethics, since planners’ onto-epistemological standpoints are shaped by the ethical values we adopt. So, while planners might accept that knowledge and actions are historically grounded and embedded in context-specific power relations, our accompanying ethical principles tend to concern normative ethical values alone. Such ethical concerns however preclude further explorations of the nature and meaning of adopted ethical values that inform how we conceptualise the object under study in situated contexts. The field of normative ethics is preoccupied with questions concerning what should be done, or how we ought to plan—which are, of course, important questions. Nevertheless, as Winkler and Duminy (2016) argue, before homing in on answers to these types of (first-order) ethical questions, planners might be wise to also consider (second-order) meta ethical questions that seeks to understand the nature and meaning of our ethical evaluations of the object under study. Thus, for example, Jodi Byrd et al.’s (2018: 11, my emphasis) question: ‘what happens when land is understood not as property, but as a source of relation with an agency of its own?’, necessitates deep, reflexive engagements with the nature and meaning of land and its relational agency before any attempt “to plan” might be imagined. Likewise, as Byrd et al. (2018: 5) argue, we need to ‘think and work for a relationality grounded both in place and in movement, which simultaneously addresses Black geographies, dispossessions, and other racialized proprietary violences’ before seeking answers to first-order ethical questions. To this end, they establish a framework of grounded relationality that purposefully engages with the nature, meaning and value of relationalities to and with land but without ‘precluding movement, multiplicity, multi-directionality, transversals, and other elementary or material currents that have agential significance in ways that exceed liberal conceptions of the human’ (Byrd et al., 2018: 5). In so doing, they engage with meta ethical concerns that are relevant to planning praxis, since grounded relationality spotlights how we might begin to de-link planning from codified settler land laws.

But rather than engage with meta ethical questions, some planning scholars are quick to assume that such engagements might lead us down a relativist path that ‘derails a search for a common good’ (Campbell and Marshall, 1999: 474). Similar assumptions are made about decoloniality (Fanon, 1967). Relegating grounded normativity, meta ethical enquiries, and grounded relationality to the realm of relativism is however implausible, since philosophically de-linked frameworks cannot be evaluated or interpreted against occidental modes of analyses (Desai and Sanya, 2016).

Before turning to the next section, it is important to note that grounded normativity and grounded relationality corroborate Arturo Escobar’s (2019) call to re-earth planning praxis. This call is prompted by Escobar’s (2019: 133) concern that the current climate, energy, food, inequality, and poverty crisis is a ‘crisis of occidental modes of planning that have eroded the systemic mode of living based on radical interdependence’. Redressing this crisis necessitates an ‘ontological [shift] towards relational principles and practices’ that, above all else, encompass an ethos of reciprocity and care by being attuned to ‘indigenous cosmovisions' (Escobar, 2019: 132, 133). This ethos, in turn, speaks of Coulthard’s (2014) and Byrd et al.’s (2018) grounded relational agency to land. For Escobar (2019; 132), it is an ‘indubitable fact that everything exists because nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it. Entities, processes, and forms are always in the process of dependent co-arising’. To be sure, Escobar (2019: 138) is calling for a relational approach to planning where nature is integrated into planning thinking and doing, and where ‘the idioms of autonomy and community contribute to [a type of] re-earthing with an explicit sense of politics’. Such idioms arguably exist in southern Africa’s communal landholding, as evidenced in the penultimate section of this article.

Setting the scene to explore decoloniality in praxis

Yet while decoloniality—which comprises grounded normativity, grounded relationality, meta ethical enquiries, and re-earthing—yields radically transformative opportunities for planning praxis, several acclaimed planning scholars renounce it as a valuable project (see Columbia University, GSAPP virtual conference, 2021). Reasons for this renouncement might rest with the fact that indigenous planning continues to be treated as “a-nice-to-have” than a core component of planning curricula. Alternatively, this renouncement might rest with a growing, but unhelpful, debate amongst some North American scholars who frame Black abolition and decolonisation as antagonistic political projects (Garba and Sorentino, 2020; see also Curley et al, 2022 for a counter argument). For some planning scholars at the GSAPP conference in particular, decoloniality is grounded in a specific Latin American history and context, and, as such, it cannot travel or hold relevance for contexts beyond its origin (see Columbia University, GSAPP virtual conference, 2021). Some also maintain that if decoloniality holds any value at all, this value pertains to theory alone, as it cannot be implemented in practice; whilst others posit the fruitlessness of imagining planning futures in settler colonial states until stolen lands are relinquished (see Columbia University, GSAPP virtual conference, 2021). To support the latter argument, planning scholars draw on Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012: 21, 19) who remind us that:

[D]ecolinization is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of “helping” the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggles against oppressive conditions and outcomes; [and] it is not a metonymy for social justice. … [Rather,] until the stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. … Decolonisation specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life.

Being reminded that decolonization is a political project—and that it is a process and not an event (Kelley, 2017)—is highly relevant in the contemporary era of predatory accumulation and surplus extraction. Still, by focusing only on decolonization as a political project, albeit an important project, we might obscure opportunities to equally embrace decoloniality as a philosophical project that concerns how we know and what we value. This is not to suggest that critics of decoloniality are correct in refuting its practical applications. Nor am I suggesting the need to establish a binary between a political project (decolonization) and a philosophical project (decoloniality), since binaries run counter to de-linked frameworks, and decoloniality is a political endeavour in-itself (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012). Rather, if we remove our onto-epistemological groundings from our political endeavours we risk grafting pre-existing discourses and frameworks onto our anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-heteropatriarchal actions. In doing so, we also risk forgetting that planning ‘repeatedly makes peace with violence’ (Roy, 2021: 120), because it is inextricably linked to occidental understandings of land, where land is cast as property that can be alienated, bounded, and owned, and from which use and exchange values can be extracted (Blomley, 2017; Escobar, 1992). The implementation of development plans, zoning schemes, planning regulations, and by-laws across various world regions is undoubtably based on occidental conceptualisations of land that serve more-often-than-not to protect private interests while safeguarding the status quo (Murphy and Fox-Rogers, 2015).

What then might decoloniality resemble in praxis? And might planning scholars at the GSAPP conference be correct in refuting its travelability and value beyond Latin America? Before attempting to answer these questions, it might be worth our while to pause on Lorenzo Veracini’s (2007: 1337) claim that:

Discontinuing settler colonial forms requires conceptual frames and supporting narratives that have yet to be fully developed and narrated. Nation building in formerly colonized contexts can be difficult, but at least it can be conceptualized. Enacting genuine post-settler passages in white settler nations is another matter.

The conceptual frames and supporting narratives that Veracini (2007) refers to might include movements towards embracing decoloniality’s epistemic de-linking. But, actualising these in planning practice might still necessitates further developments and narrations, as Veracini (2007) suggests. Similarly, while nation building was conceptualised in South Africa, for example, decolonization was not achieved with the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, thereby highlighting Veracini’s (2007) concerns regarding the failure of enacting genuine post-settler passages.

Remaining with the South African example, post-apartheid legislation includes policies for land redistribution and restitution. But this legislation is proving difficult to implement, especially in rural regions where at least seventeen million South Africans live on communal landholdings that are under the custodianship of eight-hundred-and-forty-four traditional leaders (BusinessTech, 2018; Oomen, 2005). This situation is a remnant of the colonial Natives Locations and Commonage Act of 1879, the Glen Grey Act of 1894, and the Native Trust and Land Act of 1936 that were promogulated to replace pre-colonial kingdoms and chiefdoms with “native reserves” for the purpose of “controlling” residents (Winkler, 2021). I will return to a discussion on the “native reserves”—that were recast as “homelands” under apartheid—shortly. But first it is important to understand that while:

For the first time in the history of African decolonization, a settler minority relinquished exclusive political power without an outright political defeat, … [and while] this change is of epochal significance, for it has set the political trajectory of the African continent on a course radically different from that of the Americas, … the fact that both settler and native are citizens in a post-apartheid order does not mean that this citizenship is equal.

(Mamdani, 1998: 8)

So, while democracy was established in South Africa in 1994, and while civic citizenship was deracialised, “ethnic citizenship” remains—in accordance with Mahmood Mamdani’s (1998; 2017) thesis—unreformed. To clarify, ‘racism was the original sin of civil society in colonial Africa’ (Mamdani, 1998: 1). As such, civic rights were bestowed only upon white settlers under colonialism and apartheid—and these settlers comprised Mamdani’s (2017) “citizens”. But the majority of the population—who are termed “subjects” by Mamdani (2017)—was excluded from this regime of rights, because ‘natives were said to belong not to any civic space, but to an ethnic space’ (Mamdani, 1998: 1). “Ethnic spaces”, in turn, were designated as “native reserves” under colonialism, and recast as “homelands” under the apartheid regime. These ethnic spaces remain almost unaltered in the contemporary era. Only now they are renamed as communal landholdings. The custodianship of these landholdings continues to be vested in traditional leaders who include kings, queens, and chiefs. Still, most of these landholdings are held in trust by the state (as was the case under colonialism and apartheid); and where trust landholdings remain intact, neither traditional leaders nor residents officially own the land (from an occidental understanding of ownership), even if residents’ de facto usufruct rights are acknowledged by the state (Winkler, 2019). Some of these communal landholdings align with pre-colonial kingdoms or chiefdoms. But many do not, because pre-colonial kingdoms and chiefdoms were often fluid in nature (Hammond-Tooke, 1968).

Mamdani (2017) is therefore scathing of the post-apartheid political order that recognises majority rule but fails to produce a single, equal citizenship; and that continues to be informed by the state’s strong defence of property rights for some but not for residents living on communal landholdings. In response, Mamdani (1998: 8) calls for a radical transformation of this political and spatial divide between ‘civic and ethnic citizenship’ by forging ‘a single citizenship for all’. However, as Mamdani (1998: 8) goes on to argue:

This single citizenship cannot just be declared formally, or written into a constitution. … In the context of a former settler colony, a single citizenship for settlers and natives can only be the result of an overall metamorphosis whereby erstwhile colonizers and colonized are politically reborn as equal members of a single political community.

Rather than indorse—or even grapple with—Mamdani’s (1998) single political community, the post-apartheid South African state adopts a plural legal system of governance where urban land accords with liberal economic preferences for individual property rights and land titling, while collectivisation is sought for rural regions where institutions of traditional authorities are recognised in Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (RSA, 1996). Such plural legal regimes are also found in other post-colonial countries across southern Africa that have experienced waves of land reforms since the mid-1990s, and that recognise both communal landholders’ rights and absolute ownership through formal land titling (Simbizi et al., 2014). Legal plurality has thus become the norm in contemporary Africa, even if collectivisation is rapidly under threat. For example, Kenya’s Community Land Act of 2016 recognises communal landholdings and institutions of traditional leaders. But this Act also promotes the conversion of communal landholdings to private-owned properties for the purpose of selling landholdings to investors, whether foreign or domestic (Alden Wily, 2018). Similarly, in Benin, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Namibia, Southern Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, rural communities have legal tenure security on communal landholdings that are governed by traditional leaders, but these landholdings can be sold for the purpose of promoting respective states’ market-led agrarian reforms that ostensibly enable economic growth (Alden Wily, 2012). We might then conclude that recognitions of indigenous rights merely serve as cost-effective mechanisms under neoliberal forms of governance (Lindroth, 2014). Moreover, it is precisely this legal plurality that Mamdani (1998; 2017) cautions against, as it reinforces colonialism’s citizen/subject divide and negates opportunities to imagine a single political community.

Legal plurality simultaneously, but paradoxically, espouses occidental understandings of land as a commodity alongside pre-colonial understandings of land as relational and embedded within social networks. Yet, while communal landholdings across southern Africa remain vulnerable to free-market forces and citizen/subject inequalities, aspects of these landholdings, arguably, resemble decoloniality in praxis. After all, it is within these communal landholdings that we find tenure practices and attachments to land that are grounded in African indigenous land laws that survived the insidious land laws passed under colonialism (and apartheid in the South African context). This reality then challenges planning scholars’ dismissal of decoloniality’s travelability, since decoloniality is neither reducible to one approach of knowing, nor to one historical perspective. And if we consider that as much as seventy-eight percent of Africa’s total land mass is designated as communal landholdings (Alden Wily, 2018), then planners might have much to learn from this example of decoloniality in praxis.

Exploring what decoloniality might resemble in praxis

More than three decades ago, Hastings Okoth-Ogendo (1989: 7) argued that it is pointless explaining African indigenous land laws from an occidental epistemic that directs enquiries into ‘whether or not African social systems recognise institutions of ownership; and if they do, who in society—the chief, the family, the clan, or the lineage—is the repository of that ownership’. As an alternative, Okoth-Ogendo (1989; 2008) suggests grappling with the onto-ethical meaning of land and its relational agency if pre-colonial land laws—that remain in practice across the continent’s communal landholdings—are to be understood. Said differently, Okoth-Ogendo is calling for meta ethical explorations that encompass characteristics of Coulthard’s (2014) grounded normativity, Byrd et al.’s (2018) grounded relationality, and Escobar’s (2019) re-earthing planning praxis, even if Okoth-Ogendo abstains from explicitly referring to these frameworks. For Okoth-Ogendo (2008), meta ethical explorations allow planners to understand not only how individuals or groups relate to each other, but also how relationships to land activate, foster, and nourish nonhuman life forms. What this onto-ethical meaning of land then establishes is not a property right over a specific parcel of land, but rather a set of reciprocal rights and obligations that are empowered via continuous performances that celebrate—and mourn—how ancestors, animals, plants, insects, rivers, forests, thunderstorms, droughts, mountains, and all nonhuman entities equally enact performances on humans. A continuous performance of reciprocal and obligatory rights that are bestowed not only on humas but also on nonhuman worlds resembles aspects of decoloniality in praxis, where ways of knowing, doing, and being are utterly de-linked from Western codified land laws, ethical values, and onto-epistemologies. Such performances also resemble Wynter’s (2001) epistemic disobedience found in resistant texts.

Furthermore, continuous performances of reciprocal and obligatory rights establish who has access to communal landholdings, and who is responsible for sustaining natural resources. But environmental resources are not understood from an occidental extractivist standpoint. Rather, these resources are sustained and cared for by all, since the governance of communal landholdings is segmented both vertically and horizontally, even if traditional leaders are endowed with the overall responsibility of looking after peoples and lands (Okoth-Ogendo, 1989; 2008). Access to land, in turn, is ‘essentially a function of membership in the family, clan, lineage or wider community, and it is available to any individual on account of that membership’ (Okoth-Ogendo, 2008: 100). Membership-based rights are maintained through active participation in the spiritual, socio-political, economic, environmental, and spatial activities of the community as a whole. And since individuals and groups engage in a range of community-based activities, they ‘simultaneously hold a bundle of access rights’ that are embedded and overlapping in nature (Okoth-Ogendo, 2008: 100). African indigenous land laws are also conceptualised to secure individuals’ tenure rights by virtue of their communal membership (Alden Wily, 2018). However, and importantly, ‘no person or group has the exclusive dominion over access to, and control over, land’, thereby challenging not only occidental logics of absolute ownership, but also some critics’ assumptions that residents of communal landholdings are excluded from participating in political decision-making processes (Okoth-Ogendo, 2008: 101; see also Winkler, 2021). Systems of governance grounded in reciprocity, relationalities, multi-directional obligations, and embeddedness are then profoundly non-authoritarian, non-dominating, and non-exploitive, as argued by Coulthard and Simpson (2016).

Yet while the idea of a continuous performance of reciprocal and obligatory rights, coupled with embedded and overlapping rights, is acknowledged by many post-colonial African states, communal landholdings, as previously mentioned, are defenceless against free-market forces. Land reforms espouse preferences for predatory accumulation and individual property rights even though there is now sufficient evidence to demonstrate that individual land titling fails to secure reciprocal, obligatory, embedded and overlapping rights, and that individual property ownership undermines residents’ subsistence livelihood strategies (Obeng-Odoom, 2012; Simbizi et al., 2014). Regardless then of a collectivisation rhetoric, land continues to be viewed by national government authorities as a commodity that can be traded or used as collateral (Alden Wily, 2018). Of further concern, communal landholdings are beset by problems, including poverty, land degradation, limited economic opportunities, and inadequate or non-existent municipal services—including access to clean water, reliable electricity, health care, education, and public transportation (Winkler, 2019). Entrenched patriarchal practices also exclude women from decision making processes in some contexts (Budlender et al., 2011; Sigwela, 2020); while some traditional leaders abuse their power by selling or leasing potions of communal land without formal rights or residents’ consent to do so (Dlamini, 2021; Peters and Kambewa, 2007). On the African continent, a misguided or misunderstood embrace of pluriversality has led post-colonial states down a legal plurality path that serves to advance corruption and land grabs, while fuelling land-related conflicts (Deininger et al., 2008; Peters and Kambewa, 2007). The origin of many of these problems can be traced to colonialism’s establishment of citizen/subject divides, as argued by Mamdani (2017).

In response to these seemingly irretractable problems, land-rights activists are feverishly campaigning for the transfer of all communal landholdings to democratically elected institutions (Kepe and Hall, 2018; Ntsebeza, 2005; Walker, 2005). For these activists, kingdoms and chieftaincies are inherently undemocratic, thereby depriving rural residents from choosing their own leaders (Ntsebeza, 2005). Furthermore, and in the South African context specifically, traditional leaders were paid by the apartheid state to “control” rural residents (Wotshela, 2018). Traditional leaders who rejected the apartheid state’s dispensation were simply replaced by government appointed traditional leaders regardless of their lineage (van Kessel and Oomen, 1997). Appointees needed merely to conform to the apartheid government’s manipulation of traditional practices, and it is this reality that prompts activists to question traditional leaders’ continued legitimacy (Kepe and Hall, 2018; Ntsebeza, 2005; Walker, 2005). It is also worth noting that South Africa’s traditional leaders continue to receive a stipend from the state, thereby undermining their power to challenge state policies and land reforms (Winkler, 2021).

Yet despite these multiple and complex problems, countless numbers of residents across southern Africa have lost confidence in democratic state structures and are opting, instead, to realign themselves with traditional leaders (Ainslie and Kepe, 2016). This realignment has resulted in in a demonstrable resurgence of traditional leaders’ functions and roles over the past two decades (Winkler, 2021). Traditional leaders are often seen to perform land administration and welfare functions abandoned by dysfunctional state agencies (Winkler, 2019), and, arguably, any attempt by national governments to relinquish traditional leaders’ functions and roles would result not only in heightened hardships on communal landholdings, but also in wide-spread revolts.

From a planning perspective geared towards decoloniality, it is vitally important to recognise and respect the choice to realign oneself with traditional leaders, since in doing so, residents of communal landholdings are, in fact, reproducing themselves as autonomous political citizens without becoming possessive subjects (Winkler, 2019, 2021). Let me explain, as this explanation might serve not only to nuance the land dispossession literature and activists’ anxieties, but also Mamdani’s (2017) citizen/subject argument.

Much of the land dispossession literature galvanises around Franz Fanon’s (1961; 1967) thesis that one cannot move from being a colonized subject to a liberal subject without surrendering to the colonial schema (see, for example, Barker, 2015; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Nichols, 2019; Simpson, 2014). This involves becoming a possessive subject who claims property rights and occidental ways of being (Reid, 2018). However, by resisting the occidental logic of possession and the liberal conceptualisation of citizenship, residents of communal landholding refrain from becoming possessive subjects whilst destabilizing coloniality’s power. Political praxes on communal landholdings then resemble a form of resistant text that is invaluable to planning praxis, because it teaches us how the communal enables autonomy through a double movement involving both de-subjugation/self-making and collective mobilization that is utterly de-linked from occidental traditions of practicing politics. This double movement exemplifies Escobar’s (2019: 138; 133) ‘idioms of autonomy and community’ that contribute to a collective sense of power, whilst enabling residents to simultaneously assert themselves as autonomous political citizens. So, while alignments with traditional leaders might seem puzzling to occidental thinkers (for they undermine Western understandings of democracy), and while such alignments derail Mamdani’s (1998: 8) call for a ‘single political community’, something altogether different and powerful is taking place on southern Africa’s communal landholdings. Ignoring or misunderstanding this resistant text would be an irrevocable mistake for planning praxis.

Concluding remarks

Decoloniality in praxis on the African continent is undoubtably complex, contradictory, fractured, multi-directional, messy, and open to manipulation by self-serving ruling elites. Yet despite these complexities and vulnerabilities, decoloniality in praxis presents planners who are hoping to learn from, work with—or who already belong to and in—communities residing on communal landholdings with an altogether different onto-epistemological and ethical option than relying only on universal knowledge claims, codified settler land laws, and occidental modes of practicing planning. Here, on communal landholdings—that comprise as much as seventy-eight percent of Africa’s total land mass—we find individuals and groups who are active agents for themselves by mobilizing a politics of de-subjugation and self-making that refutes the occidental logic of possession and the liberal conceptualisation of citizenship. Recognising, respecting, and incorporating this resistant text into planning praxis necessitates nuanced understandings of how the communal enables autonomy, in addition to supporting residents’ and traditional leaders’ spatial outcomes that value pre-colonial land laws and relational ontologies. In the present, ‘when it is clear that liberal freedoms, misnamed democracy, fail to halt the expropriation of collective life, it is critical to turn our attention to ongoing praxes that build capacities for relationality’ (Byrd et al., 2018: 12). Yet, occidental approaches to planning, including approaches employed in southern Africa’s communal landholdings, eschew modes of living and being based on radical interdependence (Escobar, 2019). Decoloniality in praxis, by contrast, allows us to embrace grounded normativity and grounded relationality as conceptual frameworks, and it enables us to engage with meta ethical questions and re-earthing praxes that reject unidimensional and extractivist understandings of land. Said differently, decoloniality in praxis teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other human and nonhuman life forces in profoundly non-authoritarian, non-dominating, and non-exploitive ways (Coulthard and Simpson, 2016). It also allows planners to move beyond liberalism, Maxims, and other dominant onto-epistemologies and axiologies that ‘leave intact the logic of coloniality’ (Mignolo, 2011: 49). And since decoloniality in praxis is neither reducible to one approach of knowing or doing, nor to one historical perspective, it presents us with opportunities beyond its Latin American origins.

However, the aim of this article is not to romanticise southern Africa’s communal landholdings. Rather, it aims to demonstrate decoloniality’s political and spatial outcomes from the vantagepoint of one geopolitical region where extreme poverty, inadequate or non-existent access to municipal services, food insecurity, land degradation, gender inequalities, and abuses of power co-exist with continuous performances of reciprocal, obligatory, embedded and overlapping land rights; and where nonhuman actants are valued and respected. Decoloniality in praxis is then not a neat-and-tidy political or spatial outcome. But planning’s desire for neat-and-tidy outcomes has always been questionable. Regardless, decoloniality in praxis from the perspective of the African continent presents us not only with optimistic possibilities. It also presents us with a sobering wake-up call, in that it fails to address the reality of stolen lands (Tuck and Yang, 2012), and it fails to establish ‘genuine post-settler passages’ (Veracini, 2007: 1337), even if residents of communal landholdings are asserting themselves as autonomous political citizens. These sobering realities require urgent redress. But on the African continent, ruling elites presume that this redress is to be found in uncritical adoptions of neoliberal forms of governance and free-market land rights, thereby rapidly eroding opportunities to learn from African indigenous land laws and epidemically de-linked praxes that reorientate how we know, what we do, and what we value as planners.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) (132046).

ORCID iD

Tanja Winkler

Notes

Author biography

Tanja Winkler is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her pedagogical approach is geared towards engaged scholarship, while her research interests include spatial justice, planning ethics and decoloniality.

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What might decoloniality look like in praxis?

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Establishing the value of decoloniality for planning theory

Deepening our understanding of alternative onto-ethical standpoints that inform decoloniality

Setting the scene to explore decoloniality in praxis

Exploring what decoloniality might resemble in praxis

Concluding remarks

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References