I’d really like to visit a Millennium Village. I’d like to see what it looks like, experience its people and their ambitions. I’d like to feel it. I’d like also to visit those families 20 years from now, when today’s children are hypothetical university graduates. I’d like to see how this village, one whose success is defined by checking off a poverty list (the MDGs), is different to the villages that have bred the rest of us, surviving Africans.
There’s nothing particularly original about my perspective on aid or Jeffrey Sachs. To those for whom my perspective does not resonate, my views straddle the categories of conspiracy theory, pessimism and unsubstantiated cliché. That’s okay. Those who agree with me might see this as the incessant chant of an ongoing struggle- gaining momentum at times, waning at times, subject to the many forces that masquerade as power throughout history. This struggle is inevitably waged by those whose idealism leads them to believe that justice is worth the fight. So I merrily rant against Development, big ‘D’ development.
This is the development that believes it can operate on a large, dare I say, global scale without being political (this is an effect of the intention to mislead rather than naïveté). Big ‘D’ development claims to have only one constituency, the poor, and thus as a function of reducing the condition of poverty to a few indicators, believes a single (error-fraught) dimension of its constituency to be its only relevant dimension. Development relies on the assumption of a homogenous poor in much the same way as economics relies on homo-economicus to justify its prescriptions. Development is necessarily run by Westerners who make all their important decisions about the poor from the ‘developed’ world. They, Developers, have not experienced poverty first hand, but have spent significant chunks of their lives in ‘villages’. This means that unlike the educated African or the upper caste Indian and the rest of the ‘Southern Elite’, they know better what the interests of ‘the locals’ are. Big D development, knows and therefore truly cares about the meek, hungry and humble. Development is omniscient and if you live in a developing country you’ll agree that it’s omnipresent. Therefore if we’re to save ourselves the effort of further descriptors, we can conclude that big ‘D’ development is a self-styled god figure of our time. Sachs, Bono and Kofi Annan are the faces that feature most prominently in my head when I imagine Development. Needless to say, I shun Development and other claims to relevance preceded by capital letters.
Let me talk from my experience as an African who comes from a poor-ish country and a poor-ish family, let’s call it a ‘developing’ background. Neither of my parents went to university. Thanks to the abolition of one of the last remaining remnants of White hate, apartheid, I managed to find my way into higher education. As a result, I’m part of a global minority that has been able to capitalise on its education by finding commensurate work. Me and many of my cousins, alike. But let me tell you what else has happened to us in the interim. Between learning to speak English better than our parents; being more connected to the global, mainly American, world; working for corporations and thus making money (after all, isn’t that the ultimate marker of the non-poor?)- in the midst of all this, life has also happened. Some of us, despite our families’ values (laden with hypocrisy as is always the case), managed to become parents before our 21st birthdays. This wasn’t due to a lack of contraceptives in our ‘local’ clinics or the absence of sex education in schools. Despite all this, we still became curious adolescents and sh*t happened. Some of us experimented with marijuana and never made it back to the land of functional adults. Some of us, determined to wrench ourselves out of the misery of township life, opted to buy houses in suburbia and thanks to university loans, interest rate hikes and all manner of financial drama, we’re heavily indebted. Some of us have Aids because as Romeo and Juliet prove, love happens and inexplicable injustices lead to tragic endings. Life happens. Some of us, well-paid government bureaucrats and the like, can only afford to take our children to public schools. Given that roughly 16% of children who started school 12 years ago passed matric in 2009, we know how that cookie crumbles. Given that our lives are dominated by debt and the cost of funerals, basically, day to day stuff, we’re unable to give our parents the things that might have greater ‘developmental’ value: homes with running water, medical insurance etc. And as life happens, our media gives more and more airtime to girls in weaves bickering over sugar daddies. Newspapers, TV and radio, the easiest kinds of mental consumption, provide a diet that’s high in low self esteem and low in inspiration. These things happen, because life happens and as such, history unfolds.
In the South or the developing world or the third world, wherever we reside these days, life happens. Teenagers experiment. University graduates struggle to find employment. Systems fail hardworking parents. Debt is real and unlike the dream microfinance attempts to sell, it can amount to an elected form of prison for an income-earning person. This happens everywhere. And so even as less of our children die at birth and more of our homes are lit with electricity, we still struggle to ensure that other family members do not die of treatable diseases. And true to the nature of life, we don’t always win. And this is okay. It’s okay because we’re people, who are trying and failing, driven by a sense of both the past and the future. We’re human and the only thing that denies us our humanism is the notion of our states and ourselves as ‘developing’. Unlike the word and attendant industry suggest, we are not a people that will one day begin. We won’t begin when meet all HDI indicators. Our pasts won’t gain relevance once we’ve ‘overcome’ them. This is a construct of Development- a construct that leads to things like Millennium Villages and Africa’s Green Revolution. This development awaits a moment, ‘the end of poverty’. However, as our experiences make evident, getting out of the grip of oppression, injustice and inhumanness, is a process, one which I might argue, is life, everywhere and for everyone.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Friday, November 6, 2009
Freedom as Rupture and Justice
We know history to be real because of the very unescapable character of the present. As such, many have asserted that history itself is unescapable. History, necessarily a human phenomenon, is thus about how we’ve co-constructed ourselves. Even climate change, although framed in terms of a nature that is outside of us, is fundamentally about us. This is why it matters. So here is how I understand our dilemma: We lost our humanity when we dehumanised ourselves through the oppression, subjugation and violation of other humans. The quest to save the environment is not about saving that which makes us human, but rather, that which makes us living beings. I therefore see the climate change concerns as ‘next generation’ concerns about our survival, but not of fundamental importance to the meaning of our existence. To my mind, our existence is meaningless without resolution of the existential crisis. I use the word resolution tentatively because I don’t really intend to suggest that there can ever be finality to existentialism. However, I do think that there are key elements of this dilemma that must be overcome in order for us to make it beyond the dehumanised condition that typifies the era which gave birth to both climate change and unprecedented human suffering.
I therefore proceed in a manner of postulation. I can’t know definitively what’s required, but I have an idea: rupture with justice. Both are attempts at freeing the elements of ourselves and the elements in society that are both oppressive and oppressed. If we’re going to move beyond oppression and its dehumanising effects, then all that is oppressive requires the space to break free of itself. I think here of both grand systems of oppression: colonisation, genocides, sexism and everyday forms of oppression: consumption decisions that enslave labourers; insecurity and fear. Indeed, we need to break out of the grander forms of oppression more definitively and continue always to challenge that which masquerades as our constitution in its oppressiveness. But crucially, there is no way forward unless we allow the oppressor the opportunity of rupture- to truly confront their history and abandon that which defines their condition as an oppressor, fundamentally, the warped view of all others as inhuman.
Attendant to rupture, is justice. The oppressed and exploited, the victimised and violated, can only realise the truth of their own history and the validity of their experiences, through justice. In this way then, they are freed from thinking that their salvation will come as a function of beating the oppressor at his own game: dehumanising. There is no number of women that can be raped in civil wars to restore the sense of humanity that was denied by colonisers. Oppression can’t be returned, because rather than resulting in liberation, it oppresses further. Such is the nature of de-humanisation. And indeed, why do people fly planes through towers? My view is that it stems out of the desire to be recognised as human and therefore as historically valid beings. Justice is therefore a progressive way of restoring the humanity of the historically subjugated.
I say all this to argue that the fundamental collapse of development is owing to the failure to move the founding structures of human relations. For as long as we aren’t moving for a global dialogue in which the perpetrators see themselves as such and rather than signing philanthropic cheques, seek true rupture from the oppressive systems that continue to feed their disingenuous philanthropy, there will be no development. For as long as development is reduced to nominal technical acts that seek to move people out of income poverty then the justice that liberates people to realise themselves as human, will always elude us. Development, as Sen has already articulated, is freedom. Freedom for the oppressor will come as a function of rupture. Freedom for the oppressed will come as a function of justice.
I therefore proceed in a manner of postulation. I can’t know definitively what’s required, but I have an idea: rupture with justice. Both are attempts at freeing the elements of ourselves and the elements in society that are both oppressive and oppressed. If we’re going to move beyond oppression and its dehumanising effects, then all that is oppressive requires the space to break free of itself. I think here of both grand systems of oppression: colonisation, genocides, sexism and everyday forms of oppression: consumption decisions that enslave labourers; insecurity and fear. Indeed, we need to break out of the grander forms of oppression more definitively and continue always to challenge that which masquerades as our constitution in its oppressiveness. But crucially, there is no way forward unless we allow the oppressor the opportunity of rupture- to truly confront their history and abandon that which defines their condition as an oppressor, fundamentally, the warped view of all others as inhuman.
Attendant to rupture, is justice. The oppressed and exploited, the victimised and violated, can only realise the truth of their own history and the validity of their experiences, through justice. In this way then, they are freed from thinking that their salvation will come as a function of beating the oppressor at his own game: dehumanising. There is no number of women that can be raped in civil wars to restore the sense of humanity that was denied by colonisers. Oppression can’t be returned, because rather than resulting in liberation, it oppresses further. Such is the nature of de-humanisation. And indeed, why do people fly planes through towers? My view is that it stems out of the desire to be recognised as human and therefore as historically valid beings. Justice is therefore a progressive way of restoring the humanity of the historically subjugated.
I say all this to argue that the fundamental collapse of development is owing to the failure to move the founding structures of human relations. For as long as we aren’t moving for a global dialogue in which the perpetrators see themselves as such and rather than signing philanthropic cheques, seek true rupture from the oppressive systems that continue to feed their disingenuous philanthropy, there will be no development. For as long as development is reduced to nominal technical acts that seek to move people out of income poverty then the justice that liberates people to realise themselves as human, will always elude us. Development, as Sen has already articulated, is freedom. Freedom for the oppressor will come as a function of rupture. Freedom for the oppressed will come as a function of justice.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Complexity is the Problematique - Musing on Fumani's Developmental Thoughts
Complexity... indeed. This word is certainly the best shorthand that I can come up with in order to capture the ever unravelling dynamic of social, economic and political phenomena we're faced with in an attempt to alter an unjust world.
Just last night I watched a documentary entitled "Life and Debt". It's intention is to shed light on how, since the '73 oil crisis, the IMF has used conditionalities to bankrupt and cripple the Jamaican state and in turn its society.
A refreshing aspect of the film was the juxtapositioning of a high level IMF offical justifiying IMF policies and a former Jamaican Prime Minister shedding light on the back room machavellian machinations of the loan agreements. In their own way, both sounded equally reasonable. (The IMF official looking worse for wear by the end - inevitably, if not justifiably.) I figure the reason the IMF official could sound reasonable to my ears is either due to a healthy serving of the dodgy educational koolaid served at the bastion of African neoliberal education (read: UCT) or simply that there may an empirical case to be made in favour of certain classical neoliberal policies - my qualification being: "under certain circumstances and with certain complimentary policies."
For example, ensuring that a state reduce subsidies or tariffs in order to boost exports may not be so reprehensible a condition. Say for instance, if due attention is paid to the sequencing of tariff reductions within the context of a broader scheme for boosting productive capacity or if the welfare gain for the rest of society as a result of lower prices on basic imported goods will allow the poor to stretch their incomes further.
The catch here though is the underlying motivation behind the condition to reduce subsidies or tariffs. That is, so long as the intention behind such action is to actually strengthen the long term developmental prospects of a nation, such a policy could be reasonable.
However, the documentary did a sterling job in exposing the real underlying motivations of the IMF. Which of course aren't really "underlying" at all if one understands the governance structure of the IMF and the World Bank.
This then led me to question the usefulness of a global trade and financial system where the perversity of unbridled competition, which is restrained within sovereign nations through various policy measures, is left to flourish and run rough shod over the weak(ly competitive). This is hardly a new insight. But what was different for me was to then really question the usefulness of the implicit value system of competition i.e. winners, losers, us and them, and even the values underpinning the supposed fruits of competition i.e. more innovation, more technology, more comfort and convenience, more consumer choice, more consumption,... Which seems all just a recipe for more, more, more, more, and more...
These are just a few tentative paths for inquiry that surfaced. And so somehow, a film about debt in Jamaica led me to pull, however gently, at the seams of an entire paradigm that defines and reproduces our current understanding of socioeconomic value.
And so even if a coherent theory of how to possibly get the downtrodden out of the gutter and finally deliver deserved justice emerges from these few strands of enquiry, an explanation is ultimately still just an explanation. The prescriptions and recommendations it might make, if any, will inevitably generate a new set of unknown and unpredictable social, political and economic phenomena to frustrate or aid the problematique. So finally, what is already and always has been complex will remain just as complex as ever. And ever amen.
Just last night I watched a documentary entitled "Life and Debt". It's intention is to shed light on how, since the '73 oil crisis, the IMF has used conditionalities to bankrupt and cripple the Jamaican state and in turn its society.
A refreshing aspect of the film was the juxtapositioning of a high level IMF offical justifiying IMF policies and a former Jamaican Prime Minister shedding light on the back room machavellian machinations of the loan agreements. In their own way, both sounded equally reasonable. (The IMF official looking worse for wear by the end - inevitably, if not justifiably.) I figure the reason the IMF official could sound reasonable to my ears is either due to a healthy serving of the dodgy educational koolaid served at the bastion of African neoliberal education (read: UCT) or simply that there may an empirical case to be made in favour of certain classical neoliberal policies - my qualification being: "under certain circumstances and with certain complimentary policies."
For example, ensuring that a state reduce subsidies or tariffs in order to boost exports may not be so reprehensible a condition. Say for instance, if due attention is paid to the sequencing of tariff reductions within the context of a broader scheme for boosting productive capacity or if the welfare gain for the rest of society as a result of lower prices on basic imported goods will allow the poor to stretch their incomes further.
The catch here though is the underlying motivation behind the condition to reduce subsidies or tariffs. That is, so long as the intention behind such action is to actually strengthen the long term developmental prospects of a nation, such a policy could be reasonable.
However, the documentary did a sterling job in exposing the real underlying motivations of the IMF. Which of course aren't really "underlying" at all if one understands the governance structure of the IMF and the World Bank.
This then led me to question the usefulness of a global trade and financial system where the perversity of unbridled competition, which is restrained within sovereign nations through various policy measures, is left to flourish and run rough shod over the weak(ly competitive). This is hardly a new insight. But what was different for me was to then really question the usefulness of the implicit value system of competition i.e. winners, losers, us and them, and even the values underpinning the supposed fruits of competition i.e. more innovation, more technology, more comfort and convenience, more consumer choice, more consumption,... Which seems all just a recipe for more, more, more, more, and more...
These are just a few tentative paths for inquiry that surfaced. And so somehow, a film about debt in Jamaica led me to pull, however gently, at the seams of an entire paradigm that defines and reproduces our current understanding of socioeconomic value.
And so even if a coherent theory of how to possibly get the downtrodden out of the gutter and finally deliver deserved justice emerges from these few strands of enquiry, an explanation is ultimately still just an explanation. The prescriptions and recommendations it might make, if any, will inevitably generate a new set of unknown and unpredictable social, political and economic phenomena to frustrate or aid the problematique. So finally, what is already and always has been complex will remain just as complex as ever. And ever amen.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Developing Thoughts on Development
Now that I’ve completed the first term of my masters degree, I think I’ve earned my reflection stripes. The very nature of my studies leads me to conclude that my life, studies and the general project of building a better world are very complex topics. Yes, after 12 years of school, 3 years of undergrad, 1 year of honours and 3 months of masters, the best I can offer is a sophisticated appreciation of how monstrous the problems are. Of course as an HIV research fellow was quick to point out to me, complexity is not the same thing as complication. Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to say whether my particular strain of complexity disorder is the complicated or simple kind. To my mind, it’s bad enough dealing with the fact that it’s complex in the first place! As I see it, true delusion is the very attempt to offer a solution. Breathe.
The complexity I speak of is primarily comprised of the following words/terms/theories: development; developing world; positionality; discourse; hegemony; science and Africa. This concoction is sure to motivate the most determined of individuals to stay in bed for eternity or alternatively, to jump in front of the gautrain and end it all (assuming the gautrain happens in our lifetimes). It only stands to reason that I had a burning desire to find myself in this quandary given that I left the security, warmth and comfort of South Africa to pursue a degree in development studies in grey England. But how was a well-intentioned 23 year old dedicated to the stability and prosperity of her country and continent supposed to know what was lurking on the other side of a thing as harmless and virtuous as postgraduate study?
You would think that earlier experiences would have taught me something. I went to UCT thinking that studying economics would imply understanding economic history and philosophy. I thought I would walk away with the ability to enlighten the masses about the macro economy over lunch. Instead, I graduated uncertain of Marx’s real contribution to economic thought: was it that workers would be separate from the products of their labour? Was such a concept really enough to spark a whole school of thought and the Soviet project? I’m also technically inept- I couldn’t construct a lagrangian function if you paid me- okay, depends on the price. Is it about maximising utility or productivity given certain supply side constraints…? Sounds right-ish. And then there was politics, the other component of my undergraduate studies. Again I thought I’d learn about important political developments that lead up to this moment in history. Quite honestly, I remember learning mostly about systems of governance and voter patterns. I could never have an informed debate about the failure of African sates in the post-colonial era without resorting to rhetoric about structural adjustment programmes and ‘colonisation of the mind’ ala Fanon. I won’t even mention what I got from my one philosophy course which stands loud and proud as a whole major on my degree certificate. The point of this is that I left UCT after 3 years with a respectable degree and not much in the way of coherent, cohesive knowledge. I used to excuse this by saying that my degree was about learning to think critically rather than learning a specific skill. In retrospect, I think I learnt to recognise terminology not necessarily to engage with its implications in a very critical way.
So I did what most insecure graduates do, I pursued an honours degree. This time, I was going to leave the mainstream enclave of UCT and head for student-rioting, radical WITS. Anyone who’s made the unlikely leap will agree that WITS offers a more critical and theoretically sound politics education. We considered the state as both a system and an ideological construct. South Africa’s liberation was assessed in terms of geopolitics and the internal political economy. For the first time, the social sciences became dynamic- I was learning to locate political ideas in the broad intellectual expanse, spanning as far as linguistics. On the dodgy side, I went from being a very ordinary student at UCT to graduating with distinction at WITS. Now I’m not downplaying my effort but something seemed slightly amiss…
I took a break from studying to engage in the most banal of human activities: a 9-5 job. 18 months was all I could handle and off I was, on a new mission to feed my insecurities. As I write, I’ve just completed my first term of a masters degree in science, society and development. The reason I chose to pursue this degree was to investigate the politics of knowledge. And herein come all the words/terms/theories that leave me in complexity paralysis.
My ‘positionality’ can be explained in terms of my background: my family, where I grew up, what I chose to study, my ambitions etc. Before embarking on the latest study adventure, I interpreted my past as one of extreme fortune. Although far from wealthy, I had the privilege of attending a good school, which set me on a different trajectory to my peers growing up in the same neighbourhood as me in Daveyton. Living in two worlds, one of deprivation and another, of global opportunity and abundance convinced me that there was deep injustice in the world. And so I set about to make things right.
The first port of call was a ménage à trois with Foucault and Gramsci. They were going to give me the language of modern political enquiry. I was going to prove that indeed, certain rules govern the production of knowledge and that even more scandalously; that some rules dominate others. In other words, I would prove that the current way of understanding the world is simply a reflection of the dominant or ‘hegemonic discourse’. Of course, I was equating discourse dominance with economic dominance. It’s kind of like equating globalisation to Americanisation. If only I could make this case emphatically, I thought, I would be able to prove that the African way of understanding was present and valid but hard to decipher under the current knowledge system. Eureka. But then, to what end? How would this contribute to Africa’s development? Would more children be rid of the insecurity that comes from perpetual war? Would less people die from lack of access to curable or manageable diseases? Would South Africa’s society become less unequal? How would the recognition and dare I say, definition of this African knowledge system make the lived reality of the homogenised African any better? I don’t know.
What I can say is that these issues are complex. Just because we can recognise that knowledge comes out of a context, doesn’t mean that context is singular or exclusive and non-dynamic. This means that there is nothing to say that what we consider to be the scientism of the West today is not the result of knowledge gathered from colonial conquests all over the world. An error I commonly make is ‘otherising’ ideas, people and cultures that I view as problematic. The struggle therefore becomes one for liberation, justice and humanism in the broad sense, but more personally, a struggle to continually purge myself of those very problematic traits that I assign to The West, Power, Global Capital, Malema et al. Not quite the ending I envisaged for this juvenile memoir, but it does signify the beginning…
The complexity I speak of is primarily comprised of the following words/terms/theories: development; developing world; positionality; discourse; hegemony; science and Africa. This concoction is sure to motivate the most determined of individuals to stay in bed for eternity or alternatively, to jump in front of the gautrain and end it all (assuming the gautrain happens in our lifetimes). It only stands to reason that I had a burning desire to find myself in this quandary given that I left the security, warmth and comfort of South Africa to pursue a degree in development studies in grey England. But how was a well-intentioned 23 year old dedicated to the stability and prosperity of her country and continent supposed to know what was lurking on the other side of a thing as harmless and virtuous as postgraduate study?
You would think that earlier experiences would have taught me something. I went to UCT thinking that studying economics would imply understanding economic history and philosophy. I thought I would walk away with the ability to enlighten the masses about the macro economy over lunch. Instead, I graduated uncertain of Marx’s real contribution to economic thought: was it that workers would be separate from the products of their labour? Was such a concept really enough to spark a whole school of thought and the Soviet project? I’m also technically inept- I couldn’t construct a lagrangian function if you paid me- okay, depends on the price. Is it about maximising utility or productivity given certain supply side constraints…? Sounds right-ish. And then there was politics, the other component of my undergraduate studies. Again I thought I’d learn about important political developments that lead up to this moment in history. Quite honestly, I remember learning mostly about systems of governance and voter patterns. I could never have an informed debate about the failure of African sates in the post-colonial era without resorting to rhetoric about structural adjustment programmes and ‘colonisation of the mind’ ala Fanon. I won’t even mention what I got from my one philosophy course which stands loud and proud as a whole major on my degree certificate. The point of this is that I left UCT after 3 years with a respectable degree and not much in the way of coherent, cohesive knowledge. I used to excuse this by saying that my degree was about learning to think critically rather than learning a specific skill. In retrospect, I think I learnt to recognise terminology not necessarily to engage with its implications in a very critical way.
So I did what most insecure graduates do, I pursued an honours degree. This time, I was going to leave the mainstream enclave of UCT and head for student-rioting, radical WITS. Anyone who’s made the unlikely leap will agree that WITS offers a more critical and theoretically sound politics education. We considered the state as both a system and an ideological construct. South Africa’s liberation was assessed in terms of geopolitics and the internal political economy. For the first time, the social sciences became dynamic- I was learning to locate political ideas in the broad intellectual expanse, spanning as far as linguistics. On the dodgy side, I went from being a very ordinary student at UCT to graduating with distinction at WITS. Now I’m not downplaying my effort but something seemed slightly amiss…
I took a break from studying to engage in the most banal of human activities: a 9-5 job. 18 months was all I could handle and off I was, on a new mission to feed my insecurities. As I write, I’ve just completed my first term of a masters degree in science, society and development. The reason I chose to pursue this degree was to investigate the politics of knowledge. And herein come all the words/terms/theories that leave me in complexity paralysis.
My ‘positionality’ can be explained in terms of my background: my family, where I grew up, what I chose to study, my ambitions etc. Before embarking on the latest study adventure, I interpreted my past as one of extreme fortune. Although far from wealthy, I had the privilege of attending a good school, which set me on a different trajectory to my peers growing up in the same neighbourhood as me in Daveyton. Living in two worlds, one of deprivation and another, of global opportunity and abundance convinced me that there was deep injustice in the world. And so I set about to make things right.
The first port of call was a ménage à trois with Foucault and Gramsci. They were going to give me the language of modern political enquiry. I was going to prove that indeed, certain rules govern the production of knowledge and that even more scandalously; that some rules dominate others. In other words, I would prove that the current way of understanding the world is simply a reflection of the dominant or ‘hegemonic discourse’. Of course, I was equating discourse dominance with economic dominance. It’s kind of like equating globalisation to Americanisation. If only I could make this case emphatically, I thought, I would be able to prove that the African way of understanding was present and valid but hard to decipher under the current knowledge system. Eureka. But then, to what end? How would this contribute to Africa’s development? Would more children be rid of the insecurity that comes from perpetual war? Would less people die from lack of access to curable or manageable diseases? Would South Africa’s society become less unequal? How would the recognition and dare I say, definition of this African knowledge system make the lived reality of the homogenised African any better? I don’t know.
What I can say is that these issues are complex. Just because we can recognise that knowledge comes out of a context, doesn’t mean that context is singular or exclusive and non-dynamic. This means that there is nothing to say that what we consider to be the scientism of the West today is not the result of knowledge gathered from colonial conquests all over the world. An error I commonly make is ‘otherising’ ideas, people and cultures that I view as problematic. The struggle therefore becomes one for liberation, justice and humanism in the broad sense, but more personally, a struggle to continually purge myself of those very problematic traits that I assign to The West, Power, Global Capital, Malema et al. Not quite the ending I envisaged for this juvenile memoir, but it does signify the beginning…
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