South-South, North-South or North-North?

Let us set aside the person briefly, and deal in abstraction. Why valorise the idea of South-South dialogue? Why turn to that? I suspect that the answer is that there are problems with the current configuration of what we can provisionally call North–South dialogue, as it typically stands. It occurs on an uneven playing field. One plays the role of big brother, or master. The other is subservient. One speaks. The other, Spivak (Reference Spivak, Nelson and Grossberg1988) has told us, cannot. And yet we sense an imperative that the other who cannot speak, speak. Mungwini (Reference Mungwini2015) casts what is at stake powerfully, and his position warrants careful consideration:

What is at stake therefore, if Mungwini is correct, is emancipation and redemption. Descartes (Reference Descartes, Nottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch1984) has the privilege of beginning his Meditations in a study, in a dressing gown, sitting by a fire, preoccupied by questions of whether one can tell the difference between sleep, madness and wakefulness; what one can grasp by means of the ‘natural light’ that is reason; the status of the body; and the immortality of the soul. Mungwini (Reference Mungwini2015), writing primarily for an African audience, begins with rage and in a state of humiliation. His preoccupation is with arresting harm and promoting dialogue that is reparative. Similar concerns are expressed by Nakata (Reference Nakata2007) in the introduction to his Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines:

Nakata here illustrates the dangers in ‘the seductive lure of universalism’ to which Mungwini refers. Failure to take the particularity of those who do not belong to the hegemonic, colonial culture seriously is tantamount to the negation, denial and alienation of the colonised. South-South dialogue, or dialogue with the South, offers the promise of repair and healing. Reflecting on Comités de Tierra Urbana (Urban Land Committees, CTUs) in Venezuela, Motta (Reference Motta, Motta and Gunvald Nilsen2011) notes the promise of what we can call the South-South, or more accurately the intra-South dialogues that constitute these committees. I realise that ‘South-South’ typically refers to some interaction between two geographically and probably culturally distinct populations, for example the exchanges described by Heyman and Stronza (Reference Heyman and Stronza2011) between Caribbean and Central American fishers on one hand, and Indigenous ecotourism operators in the Amazon on the other; or the kind of interaction between nation-states described by Sridharan (Reference Sridharan1998). However, it seems to me that there is no sensible way of limiting the distance between the populations in question, or the number of participants necessary for something to qualify for South-South status (see for instance ‘South-South Dialogue’ (Reference Warnke1979). I therefore take a dialogue between members of the same or of proximal communities in the South, such as ‘intra-South’ dialogues within CTUs, as a subset of South-South dialogue.

Motta (Reference Motta, Motta and Gunvald Nilsen2011) notes ‘the attempt by the CTUs to develop collective knowledge-forming processes through which to forge the movement's strategy, identity and analysis’. This stands in contrast to traditional Venezuelan politics, and Motta will argue, traditional academic practice in the process of researching and producing knowledge out of this type of social movement. The CTUs, she claims,

Mungwini, Nakata and Motta all argue persuasively for the importance of dialogue, for the importance of taking seriously who is taking part in that dialogue, and for the importance of knowledge that is produced dialogically. It is worth tarrying on this point and quoting Motta at some length before moving on:

Here, we see the reparative aspect of South-South dialogue in operation. Knowledge is reconceptualised in a way that leads to a more democratic, and one assumes a more just state of affairs. But what of understanding? I take Motta in the last sentence of the quotation above to have meant to say ‘a more fluid and open understanding’ of knowledge. She does not go on to address understanding itself, which is unfortunate because while I agree with her and see great promise in the model that she puts forward, doubt arises when I think about understanding. That is, on what grounds do the interactions that Motta describes take place? How do participants understand each other? In which, or better still, according to whose conceptual system is meaning shared and mutual intelligibility achieved? The challenge here has to do with movement, and movement not only along an epistemological plane, but the sort of ontological movement which renders previously held epistemological lines not applicable, void, nonsensical, or even incommensurable with newly established ones. That is, if I am situated in a particular tradition, what movement is demanded of whom for the achievement of understanding that allows for shared meaning with someone situated in a different tradition?

‘The great challenge of the coming century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other’, claims Taylor (Reference Taylor and Dostal2002, p. 126). According to Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004), it is our ‘presuppositions’ or ‘prejudices’ which determine our understanding. That is, we are all ‘situated’. As Warnke (Reference Warnke and Dostal2002) puts it, ‘not only are we always deciphering the story or stories in that we are a part so we know how to go on, but also we are always already in the process of going on’ (p. 80). We are, in a particular context, a place and a time, and it is from that vantage that we make sense of the other. As such, Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall2004) suggests that ‘we imagine [our understanding] is so innocent because the results seem so self-evident, the other presents itself so much in terms of our own selves that there is no longer a question of self and other’ (p. 300). That is to say that there is a ‘horizon’ along which our understanding takes place by virtue of our situation. While Gadamer notes that this horizon is not static, but fluid, or changing, the very ‘concept of “horizon” suggests itself because it expresses the superior breadth of vision that the person who is trying to understand must have’ (p. 304). Understanding then occurs by virtue of ‘a fusion of these horizons’ (p. 305).

All of this is promising, especially in light of the dialogic practice that Motta presents. Caution, however, is called for when one reads the following against Mungwini's comments above:

Mungwini warned against ‘the seductive lure of universalism’, which many who bear the marks of colonialism know only too well. Chalmers (Reference Chalmers2014), for instance, arguing for the decolonisation of Australia's legal system, warns that hidden beneath the seemingly benevolent gesture that is the current proposed constitutional recognition of Australia's First Nations Peoples, which can be cast as a call to Australians to ‘rise to a higher universality’, ‘is a reaffirmation of the colonial subordination and erasure of the several hundred original nations’ peoples and ways of being’ (p. 27). Is not therefore this idea of the fusion of horizons as the attainment of ‘a higher universality’ a manifestation of understanding's semblance of innocence, about which Gadamer warned? Taylor (Reference Taylor and Dostal2002) seems to think that it is. Thinking through the mechanics of the fusion of horizons, he notes that the powerful, when in dialogue with those less powerful, tend not to need to do very much of the work required to come to an understanding:

There is a cost to understanding that is borne in terms of identity, and it tends to be borne by the less powerful party. Before the issue of epistemology arises, before debates about conceptual frameworks or methods for gathering the views of the marginalised, there is the question of the horizon from which understanding will take place — about who will have to shift, ontologically; who must bear the burden of the price of mutual intelligibility; who must do the work, must perform the labour necessary for the realisation of understanding. This, it seems to me, is what is most striking about Valentin Mudimbe's Parables and Fables.

Mudimbe (Reference Mudimbe1991) situates himself at the outset, noting in the preface his hope that the book ‘bears witness to . . . and provides insight into the unfolding of an intellectual odyssey that began in the academic year 1968–1969’ (ix). Part of the Faculty of the University of Paris-Nanterre, which was the epicentre of the May 1968 ‘revolution’; commuting to Louvain, Belgium, where he read ancient Greek, Latin and French works; in the process of writing a dissertation in comparative philology and a thesis on political philosopher Ber Borochov; in an intellectual atmosphere that featured the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan; Mudimbe describes his situation thus:

In which language did this polyglot ask himself these questions? Mudimbe is a polyglot in a linguistic sense, but horizonally, situationally, can there be any polyglots? Can one stand on multiple grounds and inhabit multiple horizons? Is it surprising that he came to ask himself the following:

Could not these be questions raised by an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Australian of the Australian context? It is not surprising that Mudimbe questions the possibility of grasping Africaneity, or identity more broadly, in noncolonial, nonimperial terms. Nor is his horizon surprising, even if his depth of insight is:

Parables and Fables is on the surface a South-South dialogue par excellence: the child of a Luba-Lulua mother and Songye father who received his primary education in a ‘Swahili cultural context’ and his secondary one in a ‘Sanga milieu’ (p. 125), meditating on Luba and Songye traditions and stories, ostensibly primarily for the benefit of Central African philosophers and theologians. One might even be tempted to call this a South-South-South dialogue (Mudimbe-stories-scholars). But is it? Mudimbe himself, reflecting on anthropological accounts of Central African traditions and stories, writes that the ‘myth becomes anthropological knowledge in the ambiguous exchange which unites the politics of an informer and those of an anthropologist’ (p. 81). What of the ambiguous exchange between the child removed from his context, acculturated into a Western one, become Western philosopher, reflecting on ‘texts’ that could not have gone untouched by colonialism, for the primary benefit of Western educated African scholars? Mudimbe (Reference Mudimbe1991), in an account that may resonate with those of Australia's Stolen Generations, writes that at the age of ten years, he entered a seminary which attempted

Much of Parables and Fables is the apposition of Central African stories to Christian and psychoanalytic ones, along a horizon which one could call a twentieth century French philosophical horizon. It is not only he who finds himself along the horizon of the North as, in arriving at understanding, at a fusion of horizons, it is the South that must do the work or pay the price of intelligibility, and that by ceding something of the South's identity, even if the price to be paid is not always as explicit as that extorted from the young Mudimbe. Yet even if it is not always this explicit, is it not a price that we all have to pay in some form? Is colonialism, or more accurately coloniality, not inescapable? While I have argued that colonialism is ‘inescapable’, and specifically that ‘the colonised cannot escape colonialism’ (Mukandi, Reference Mukandi2015, p. 530), Maldonado-Torres’ (Reference Maldonado-Torres2007) distinction between colonialism and coloniality in his account of ‘the coloniality of being’ provides a clearer, fuller picture of the state of affairs. Coloniality, Maldonado-Torres explains:

What looked like a South-South dialogue turns out to be a North-South, perhaps a North-North dialogue, depending on whether one holds the idea that Central African stories today can take a form that allows them to maintain the designation ‘South’. I confess to being skeptical. This skepticism is augmented by Maldonado-Torres’ (Reference Maldonado-Torres2007) elaboration of the anteriority of the ego conquiro over the ego cogito, in which he suggests that Cartesian dualism ‘is preceded and even, one has the temptation to say, to some extent built upon an anthropological colonial difference between the ego conquistador and ego conquistado’ (p. 245). If the subaltern cannot speak, which is to say that the subaltern is unintelligible along the horizon of the North in the subaltern's own terms; and if what there is, prior to Cartesian questions around subjectivity is the conqueror and the conquered; if these structure our understanding, ‘our’ referring to we who are enfolded within, or who are in or in dialogue with the North; if dialogue with the North comes at an identity cost in which those in the South are only intelligible along the horizon of the North; can that which we apprehend as Central African stories be anything but something translated into the terms of the North?

As for the concept of South-South dialogue, consider academia. There are valid political and ethical reasons for maintaining something like a predisposition towards reading, grappling with and citing the works of scholars who belong to or identify with groups that are underrepresented in the academy. Andreotti (Reference Andreotti and Duarte2016a) demonstrates this wonderfully when she notes the following:

It is along parallel lines that while I hope that it is useful, I am nevertheless doubtful that my engagement with African, Latin American, Asian or Indigenous scholars is tantamount to participation in South-South dialogues. My position is perhaps best understood by paying heed to the following passage from Adichie's (Reference Adichie2007) Half of a Yellow Sun:

My point is that the ‘South’ is as much an abstraction, and an abstraction along the horizon of the North, as is the cogito, or as Adichie observed, pan-Africanism, the nation, the tribe, white and black. Furthermore, the valorisation of South-South dialogue understood as the work of academics from ‘the South’ engaging with that of other scholars from other parts of ‘the South’ is predicated upon the idea that ‘we all have white oppression in common’. Be that as it may, such a conception of South-South relations is, as Adichie shows, a construction of the North. Half of a Yellow Sun is instructive in that it tells the story of the violent repression of an attempt to secede; the disciplining of the other; the reduction of the Biafran other into the Nigerian same. The deployment of another ‘other’ into the same — the reduction of alterity into a political same — is both at play in the refusal to grant Biafra its independence, and the reduction of alterity into the homogenous abstraction ‘South’. This is not a claim of equivalence but the demonstration of a similar logical process at work.

Can there be South-South dialogue given our global political, socioeconomic and cultural configuration? Not one in which I can participate. Like Mudimbe, my situation is such that whoever I am in dialogue with, that dialogue occurs with my feet planted firmly along the horizon of the North. When Motta (Reference Motta, Motta and Gunvald Nilsen2011) writes about ‘researchers attempting to participate in the co-construction of prefigurative epistemologies with movements in the global South to deconstruct our epistemic privilege and blur the boundaries between research and politics, public and private, subject and community’ (p. 194), my response is to ask her to look at the ground on which the researcher as well as the participants in those movements are standing. It is not incidental that she is putting forward a challenge to critical realism as a methodology, and calling for a rethink. I can conceive of a more just academic practice, but I cannot see how an epistemic change leads to a different ways of being, in the most fundamental sense. But supposing I were simply being myopic, I cannot understand how, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how ethically I wanted to interact with others, I could will myself into understanding in terms other than those that are hegemonic. If movement is possible, if a shift from my current situation can take place, I do not understand how that is so.

Weeping

Fanon (Reference Fanon and Philcox2008) concludes his ‘The Lived Experience of the Black’, the central chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, as follows:

I could so relate to his description of the pain of contorting oneself in order to be understood that I too wept, and was deeply troubled, when I read that chapter carefully for the first time. But my grandmother wouldn't understand it — not at a linguistic nor at a conceptual level; not without translation, both linguistic and conceptual. Fanon resonates because when Fanon says ‘I am a Frenchman,’ I know that if I am honest with myself, I have to echo that, “I am an Englishman”, “I am Australian,” “I am of the North”.Footnote ^I Tragically, I may understand my grandmother to the extent to which we are both European, or we both ‘speak’ European or can translate things into European. Weeping seems an appropriate response to this tragedy. Weeping as a means of sitting, or grappling, or coming to terms with the tragic. Weeping such as I have experienced in Shona households, where a community of the bereaved gathers for days, and those who constitute it allow themselves to be affected by their loss, and grieve together, weeping intermittently, attending to practical matters that demand attention, remembering, laughing, persisting, teaching and learning from each other how to bear grief. The place of weeping as a station of paramount importance in colonial meditations; a stage as important to the way of the colonised's life as are Søren Kierkegaard's (Reference Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong1988) aesthetic, ethical and religious to the coloniser's life's way.

What does this tragedy mean for the concept of South-South dialogue, this abstraction of Cartesian proportions, this fiction? The Cartesian fiction that is the cogito has been productive for Western thought. What kind of fiction is South-South dialogue? It is a fiction that has the power to open or create spaces in which we, like Nietzsche's (Reference Nietzsche and Nauckhoff2001) madman, as a prelude to tending to each other's wounds, ask each other if we realise the gravity of our situation, and if we understand the catastrophe that has taken place.

This European, this madman, found that those around him were not willing to face their situation. We find ourselves in a similar situation, where there is an unwillingness on the part of many of those who consider themselves members of the South, because we do not care to come to terms with just how much our intelligibility has cost us, or just how lamentable our situation is, even here, where I find myself conjuring dead Germans in order to communicate the distress of the suspicion that dead Shona may be out of my reach. One of the most powerful expressions of this distress of which I am aware comes from a dead Shona hero of many, writer Marechera (Reference Marechera1993):

As if he were in conversation with Marechera; as if he were trying to ward off the former's distress, or grappling with a similar ailment, here is Nietzsche (Reference Nietzsche and Nauckhoff2001):

Why South-South dialogues? Because we need to light lanterns. We can learn from each other's attempts to light lanterns, and from each other's comportment in the darkness of this cold morning. We can learn how to mitigate the excesses of coloniality from each other (Motta, Reference Motta, Motta and Gunvald Nilsen2011). We can laugh at and with each other about the paradoxes, the entanglements, the complicities and struggles of attempting to get beyond the limitations of coloniality by means of colonial tools in colonial institutions through colonial communities of practice. We can in short, attempt to make things better — better in the sense in which Derrida (Reference Derrida and Bass1978) wrote of opting for a lesser violence by ‘avoiding the worst violence, the violence of the night which precedes or represses discourse’ (p. 117) — and discuss with each other what better might look like. Most of all, we can attempt to create spaces in which the unquestioned humanity of the other, and the manifestation of one's own humanity, make up the backdrop against which we grapple.

The issue of humanity is raised towards the end of Dangarembga's (Reference Dangarembga2001) Nervous Conditions:

Nervous Conditions is a work of fiction. That does not mean that it is not a true account, and it is here that I part ways with Mudimbe. For someone who has written several works of fiction and takes stories seriously, Mudimbe has a surprising lack of faith in the power of fiction, or at least he seems not to take fiction sufficiently seriously. In what for me is a painful conversation to witness, Boaventura de Sousa Santos repeatedly asks his interlocutor, Mudimbe, about the possibility that, reversing Hegel's formulation, Europe no longer has much to contribute to global discourse and that it is time to pay attention to Africa, and other parts of the global South (Mudimbe & de Sousa Santos, Reference Mudimbe and de Sousa Santos2014). Either seeing more clearly than I, which may very well be the case, or wedded too strongly to Cartesian abstraction, Mudimbe is unable to bring himself to say that Africa has a unique philosophical contribution to make. He sees no way out of coloniality, and the only gesture that he is willing to make is to expand the concept of Africa to the point where Sartre is included in the conceptual category ‘African’. Only a European Africa can speak. And while I agree with the first gesture, with the idea of inescapable coloniality, I also see the potential of the colonised, the power of even the shackled to act. This, it seems to me, is the import of a the depiction of slaves who are full persons, who plot and act, and love and live, as in a film like Gerima's (Reference Gerima1993) Sankofa or Chamoiseau's (Reference Chamoiseau, Réjouis and Vinokurov1997) novel, Texaco. Interestingly, Levinas (Reference Levinas and Lingis1969) comes to a not too distant position meditating on, and in agreement with Descartes’ position in the latter's third meditation: ‘[t]he body indigent and naked is this very changing of sense. This is the profound insight Descartes had when he refused to sense data the status of clear and distinct ideas, ascribed them to the body, and relegated them to the useful’ (pp. 129–30). It bears noting that the French sens, refers to both meaning and sense.

Once one leaves the realm of abstraction, of ‘clear and distinct ideas’; once we allow our conceptions to be affected by people, by others, our concepts as Descartes supposed and Levinas affirmed, are muddied. The fictitious, even the absurd, becomes credible. And it is in this muddy light, rather than in Cartesian clarity, that the distribution of the burden of understanding can be more just — a phenomenon to which I can attest, having experienced for myself an academic gathering in which there were no implicit questions posed about the status of my humanity, the gathering in which these reflections first saw the light of day.

I have no doubt that the concept of South-South dialogue is a fiction. In relation with other ‘others’ however, one can perhaps begin to catch a glimpse of the task to which this fiction may be deployed. As Sara Motta explained (Reference Motta, Motta and Gunvald Nilsen2011):

Funkadelic (2005) titled their 1970 album Free Your Mind . . . And Your Ass Will Follow. Bracketing questions of mind–body dualism, or entertaining the fiction that is Cartesian dualism for the moment, I do not hold much hope for my mind. I wonder though, if contrary to Funkadelic's proposition, creating a little space, finding a decent seat on which to plonk my ass for some time with others, with other ‘others’, and human non-‘other’ others, may not lead my mind, and yours, to greater degrees of freedom.Footnote ^II If not freedom, then less restraint perhaps. This, it seems to me, is in line with the ‘prefigurative post-representational politics’ that Motta presents. Motta's work therefore represents an opening for me — it is a provocation to grapple with the relationship between the affective and ontological movement; affection and the inclination or predisposition towards carrying a more just portion of the burden of understanding; affection and cognition.

A closing thought. Dangarembga tells us that the psychiatrist who finally attends to Nyasha is human. In Shona, the language in which the story takes place, albeit rendered to us in English, one would most likely say of the psychiatrist, ane hunhu. Kuva nehunhu is to have, to incarnate, to express, to have (already) taken up one's humanity. In having taken up their humanity, the psychiatrist in question allowed for the emergence of a space in which Nyasha could begin to heal. Fiction or otherwise, South-South dialogue's potential lies in its ability to foster spaces in which people manifest hunhu, or ubuntu as it is called south of where I grew up. This is important because, to quote Ramose (Reference Ramose1999), ‘to be a human be-ing is to affirm one's humanity by recognising the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them. Ubuntu understood as be-ing human (human-ness); a humane, respectful and polite attitude towards others’. In fact, as Ramose goes on to note, ‘be-ing human is not enough. One is enjoined, yes, commanded as it were, to actually become a human being’ (p. 52). South-South dialogue can be a space in which the imperative that each become a human being is taken seriously; where those partaking in the dialogue are orientated towards that end.

The promise of South-South dialogues, the hope in service of which I am willing to employ this fiction, is the creation of spaces in which one is more likely to find a human interlocutor than not. The hope of being in dialogue with someone ane hunhu.