Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive

by Achille Mbembe

In his lecture “Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive”, Achille Mbembe, gives insight into his understanding of the concept of “decolonization” with respect to higher education and the universities in post-Apartheid South Africa. This document was deliberately written as a spoken text. It forms the basis of a series of public lectures given at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), at conversations with the Rhodes Must Fall Movement at the University of Cape Town and the Indexing the Human Project, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch.

Mbembe convincingly sets forth the necessity of a complete political, economic, social and intellectual change of higher education elaborating on the notions of “De-Westernization” and “Africanization” with reference to the thought of Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong’o promoting the idea of a non-racial “pluriversity” as a common good. But for Mbembe it is crucial to expand this necessity for change and “an entirely new struggle” beyond the boundaries of the South-African education system towards Africa herself, the whole world, and to humanity as such and, thus, to challenge the fundaments of neo-liberalism and financialized economy, national-chauvinism, anthropocentrism and humanism, technology and science, and new forms of racism, because “true decolonization necessarily centers on ‘the destiny of humankind’ (Dubois, 1919) and not of one race, color or ethnos” (Mbembe). Living in the ‘Anthropocene’ the need for a whole new perspective on humanity and its relation to the non-human world becomes pressing when we want to prevent our own extinction.

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About the author

Joseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe (born 1957), is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual.

He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.

Reviews

[Flora Mutere · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extracted Annotations (9/3/2020, 9:19:08 PM)
"Yet, a museum properly understood is not a dumping place. It is not a place where we recycle history's waste. It is first and foremost an epistemic space." (Mbembe :32)