The limits of intercultural translation and modern scientific thought in building ecologies of knowledge for epistemological reconstruction

Submitted in response to the essay question: 

Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ book, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, is built on three founding principles. (i) What are these principles/ ideas, (ii) related to these principles, what are the key arguments made in support of these claims, (iii) what are the shortcoming of these arguments and how would you improve on them, and finally, (iv) locate Santos’ contribution in broader scholarship about epistemic justice and epistemologies of the South. 

Module 2, SOC5059F Theorising Justice From the South, Sociology Department, University of Cape Town

Abstract

Ujamaa was relegated to the annals of failed decolonisation experiments as a postcolonial theory propagating an alternative developmental trajectory for newly independent Tanzania. On the left, it was widely castigated for being unscientific, lacking basis in material reality, and suggesting the existence of a form of socialism peculiar to Africa. Part 1 of this essay adopts Santos’ foundational three-fold premise connected by the need for global cognitive justice to achieve global social justice, to illustrate that the broad translation of Ujamaa as “African socialism” was an impossibility in relation to the language of scientific socialism; and that the dominance of this paradigm makes it an impossibility to exist equally in an ecology of knowledge which would validate and recognise Ujamaa’s novel contribution to emancipatory politics. Part 2 of the essay aims to locate the significance of Santos argument for an epistemological reconstruction by breaking from the Western Critical theoretical tradition through a juxtaposition with Samir Amin’s concept of delinking in Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World in thinking through ecologies of knowledge, alternative ways to think about emancipatory politics and development. The essay concludes by briefly situating Nkrumah’s Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution in relation to Santos’ epistemological reconstruction to consider which approach best serves epistemic justice, that is to say, against epistemicide.

Introduction

In trying to provide an alternative to the universalism grounding of Western-centric critical theory underpinned by modern scientific thought (de Sousa Santos, 2014:334), Santos turns to intercultural translation as a vehicle to question various kinds of knowledge typically dichotomised as indigenous or scientific (de Sousa Santos, 2014:12) and further regarded as incommensurable. As an unintended consequence, it then appears that this drive towards intercultural translation becomes Euro-centric in framing the relationship between the two systems of knowledge as typified by Western modernity and non-Western cultures (Mudimbe, 1988), that is, with the implication being that the indigenous is non-Western whilst the scientific is Western (Cooper, 2005; Chakrabarty, 1992; Abu-Lughod, 1991). Ironically then, intercultural translation seemingly and dominantly becomes a function for the West’s hegemonic critical tradition so that “to decolonise itself it must go to the South and learn from the South” (de Sousa Santos, 2014:71).

The essay has two central aims. Part 1 aims to establish the discursive framework within which Santos arrives at the conclusion which states the need for an epistemological break with Western critical theory. The essay adopts Santos’ foundational three-fold premise undergirded by the need for global cognitive justice in order to achieve global social justice (de Sousa Santos, 2014:8). Using the remaining two premises which posit that the understanding of the world far exceeds that of the West, and that emancipatory politics and transformation may follow grammars and scripts other than those developed by Western-centric critical theory (de Sousa Santos, 2014:8), the essay hopes to illustrate that the broad translation of Ujamaa as “African socialism” was an impossibility in relation to the language of scientific socialism; and, that the dominance of this paradigm makes it an impossibility for it to exist equally in an ecology of knowledge which would validate and recognise Ujamaa’s novel contribution to emancipatory politics.

In this regard, the essay uses Santos’ argument for an ecology of knowledge in chapter 7, read together with the dominance of the scientific paradigm vis-à-vis orthopedic thinking in chapter 3 “Is there a non-occidentalist west” and situates them within the case of Ujamaa – roughly translated as African Socialism, to illustrate the key argument de Sousa Santos makes in arriving at the need for maintaining distance with Western critical theory, by showing how the translation of Ujamaa was received. Part 1 concludes by employing the concept of delinking in relation to development strategy (Amin, 1985), to illustrate the significance of Santos’ notion of epistemological distance vis-à-vis western critical theory, by applying it to Ujamaa as a philosophy propagating an alternative developmental strategy.

Part 2 of the essay aims to locate the significance of Santos argument for an epistemological reconstruction by breaking from the Western Critical theoretical tradition, through a juxtaposition with Samir Amin’s concept of delinking in Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World in thinking through ecologies of knowledge, alternative ways to think about emancipatory politics and development. The essay concludes by briefly situating Nkrumah’s Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution in relation to Santos’ epistemological reconstruction to consider which approach best serves epistemic justice vis-à-vis epistemology of seeing.

In this regard, part 2 of this essay consider a south-south intercultural translation of Ujamaa in chapter 8 and situates this in conversation with Nuestra America in Chapter 1, through a juxtaposition of Nkrumah’s Consciencism (Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation with particular reference to the African Revoution, 1964) and Nyerere’s Ujamaa, in order to think through the impossibility highlighted in the introduction, of decolonising hegemonic Eurocentric critical theory via forming an ecology of knowledge.

Part I. Creating a Distance in Relation to Western Centric-Political Imagination and Critical Theory

Global cognitive justice and the limits of intercultural translation

A central critique within African socialism of European socialism, is the fact that the latter cannot think of socialism without capitalism (Nyerere, 1968:11). For, without capitalism, there can be no class conflict, the means by which the end result of socialism is inseparable from. In other words, without capitalism and the crises it creates, there can be no socialism (Nyerere, 1968).

Ujamaa – the basis of African Socialism, was first published by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) as a pamphlet in April 1962 (Nyerere, 1968:vii), a year after securing independence from Britain. On 5 February 1967, in his first year as president, Julius Nyerere promulgated Ujamaa in what came to be known as the Arusha Declaration (Nyerere, 1968:13), and it was adopted by TANU as the basis of social and economic development policies in Tanzania (Nyerere, 1968:15).

The Swahili meaning of Ujamaa is familyhood. Indeed, through the official TANU policy document, and in its own 1962 pamphlet (Nyerere, 1968:11) its commitment to socialism is outlined saying:

• The foundation, and objective of African socialism is the extended family. Ujamaa then, or ‘Familyhood’, describes our socialism. We in Africa have no more need of being ‘converted’ to socialism than we have of being taught democracy. Both are rooted in our past.

For some, the late 1960s moment of Ujamaa held the promise of a distinctive form of socialism beyond the trappings of neo-colonialism and false decolonisation (Saul, 2011:29).

This definition was quickly derided by some of Nyerere’s interlocutors, and for this essay, by fellow Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah, who expressly disregarded any form of socialism that was not scientific in nature (Nkrumah, 1968:445) and said (Nkrumha, 1966):

• There is no such thing as ‘African Socialism’. The term has come to be employed as proof of the existence of brands of socialism peculiar to Africa, such as Arab socialism, pragmatic socialism, and this or that socialism, when in fact there is only one true socialism: scientific socialism.

Santos dedicates the first part of the book Epistemologies of the South to illustrating the impotence of Western-critical thought, in its ability to move beyond its own epistemological foundation (de Sousa Santos, 2014:38), to learn; because after five centuries of teaching the rest of the world viz. (Mudimbe, 1988), the global North seems to have lost the capacity to learn from the experiences of the world (de Sousa Santos, 2014:38):

• Colonialism has disabled the global north from learning in non-colonial terms, terms that allow for the existence of histories of the world other than the universal history of the west.

Evidently, this results in the stagnation, inadequacy and paralysis. For Santos (2014:38), this is more distressing because ‘we live in a world in which much needs to be critiqued, but it has become difficult to build convincing, widely shared powerful critical theories which give rise to effective and powerful transformative practices”.  

Santos attributes this to a shrinking political imagination in western-centric critical theory. This is echoed by Nyerere’s (1968) critique of what he terms European socialism when he highlights the undue prominence given to capitalism in the imaginative generation of scientific socialism (Nyerere, 1968:11). In this respect, African socialism asserts the strength of its political imagination in so far as it is unconstrained by defining it solely in relation to capitalism.

On the other hand, though widely disputed viz (Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation with particular reference to the African Revoution, 1964), the TANU Ujamaa policy document (1962: 11) asserts that African socialism did not start from the existence of conflicting classes. Instead, it was rooted in ‘familyhood’.

Ujamaa and African Socialism: the limits of intercultural translation

To illustrate what Santos refers to as epistemicide and the wasting of experiences, the essay considers the premise of global cognitive justice as a precondition to global social justice (de Sousa Santos, 2014:8). In this respect, intercultural translation is offered as a pathway particularly for those terms traditionally held to be incomparable across different traditions and cultures (de Sousa Santos, 2014).

However, from the previous section, it is clear that there were proponents of African socialism who were not necessarily engaged in the work of translating Ujamaa for the sake of making it understandable in the tradition associated with scientific socialism (Ngombale-Mwiru, 1973). If we refer to Santos’ question on who should translate (de Sousa Santos, 2014:359), we find that this task is assigned to what he terms the rear-guard intellectual in part 1 of Epistemologies of the South. Whilst philosophically lucid, this is one of the less cogent aspects of Santos’ text especially when weighed against the materialist approach in Nkrumah’s Consciencism.

Furthermore, Santos does not seem to really grapple with the problems of translation, and this is based on a number of assumptions with respect to pre-existing conditions (de Sousa Santos, 2014:354) which come across as far too optimistic. Indeed, he admits that “the work of translation is based on the idea of a general theory”.

In any event, in considering how one would evaluate Ujamaa were such an intercultural translation possible, one is further stumped by some of the original questions Santos leaves unanswered. In this regard, akin to Ujamaa or African Socialism, Santos poses questions which make us consider how do you translate revolution to a culture without such a term, but where they might have for example another term like freedom. Or instead of socialism, familyhood. Therefore, an epistemological reconstruction would be necessary, which would equally test the validity of each framework without imposing orthopedic thinking in relation to making the knowledge subordinated to the scientific method as the sole arbiter of truth.

Immediately evident in the articulation of Ujamaa and the scientific universalist response by Nkrumah, are two threads connecting to Santos’ Epistemologies of the South:

1. Borrowing from Is there a Non-Occidentalist West in Santos’ use of Jack Goody’s (2006) Theft of History, there is the immediate assumption that socialist ideas started with scientific socialism (Ngombale-Mwiru, 1973) and by extension viz Goody Europe’s theft of history, in the West as the originator of scientific thought. Not only has this been illustrated to be ahistorical in relation to the emergence of socialist theory (Robinson, 1983), but it is based on Western imperialism in dominating and conquering “the south” and thus having the power to form discourses about those societies as unscientific (Said, 1978), or as the ‘other’ through the use of time and temporality (Fabian, 1983); painting them as primitive and backward, and we see this play out in relation to the tropes of African socialism (Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation with particular reference to the African Revolution, 1964:63);
2. However, in Nkrumah’s response, we also see the totalising universalising nature of Western-critical theory grounded in modern science (de Sousa Santos, 2014; Feyerabend, 1975). This in turn leads to what Santo’s refers to as the waste of experience.

Nkrumah in his 1967 essay goes on to say that it is the elimination of fancifulness from socialist action that makes socialism scientific. Santos in turn aims to illustrate how such ‘fancifulness’ is a component which must be incorporated in emancipatory political imaginatons of freedom and justice. Therefore, the question before the essay, is the extent to which intercultural translation towards an ecology of knowledge might result in an epistemologically just framework, which would fairly evaluate Ujamaa and not erase or waste the experiences African socialism draws from, or result in what Santos terms epistemicide.

Part II. Amin’s Delinking and Santos’ Epistemological Distance as Decolonial Approaches

Inferred by the opening paragraph of this essay, the primary contradiction in Santos’ Epistemologies of the South is that whilst illustrating and providing a possible framework around which Epistemologies of the South may be created through maintaining distance and establishing an epistemological break with the Western Critical tradition, he does this in such a way that the end result may not be Epistemologies for the South.

This is important because, in approaching the topic of this essay in relation to the translation of Ujamaa as African socialism, one is reminded of Santos’ reflection on the emergence of the World Social Forum (de Sousa Santos, 2014:68) in the global South, based on cultural and political premises that defied hegemonic traditions of the Eurocentric left most associated with Marxism (de Sousa Santos, 2014:70). And, that is important because in this reflection leading to his pronouncement of the need of an epistemological break and distancing from the Western critical tradition, Santos (2014:71) proclaims:

• An epistemological reconstruction needs to start from the idea that hegemonic left thinking and the hegemonic critical tradition, in addition to being (or precisely because they are) North-centric, are colonialist, sexist, and racist as well.

With this in mind, the proposed approach to decolonise this Eurocentric critical tradition and maintain epistemological distance, is to situate the same hegemonic colonialist, sexist and racist thinking in dialogue with epistemologies from the South through “intercultural translation” and an “ecology of knowledge” (de Sousa Santos, 2014:14). This, of course, immediately makes one ask whether such an approach is appropriate for decolonising hegemonic eurocentrism; indeed, if it even is decolonising, and what decolonising ought to do, if such thinking and theory can exist and remain side by side through an ecology of knowledge. But in Santos’ own words, the book is soaked in tragic optimism.

Contrary to Santos, Amin proposes a break too, except juxtaposed to Santos it appears to be a rather radical distancing in relation to the West (Amin, 1985) by delinking the economies of the global South from the empire of capital that otherwise hold the South in its sway  (Saul, 2011) .Though Amin’s delinking is with reference to the hegemonic hold of the West in terms of development efforts, he holds the position that “this is the only realistic alternative since reform of the world system is utopian”. Amin’s comment seems like an apt critique of Santos’ ecologies of knowledge via intercultural translation, as the latter seems more like a reconstruction and reformation of Western epistemologies through the use of Epistemologies of the South. The critique therefore, is this reconstruction seemingly occurs at the expense of epistemologies for the South.

Conclusion

The essay had two central aims. Part 1 established the discursive framework within which Santos’ arrives at the conclusion of the need for an epistemological break with Western critical theory, and thus used Santos’ foundational three-fold premise connected by the need for global cognitive justice to achieve global social justice (de Sousa Santos, 2014:8). The essay using the broad translation of Ujamaa as “African socialism” (Ngombale-Mwiru, 1973), illustrated the limits of intercultural translation as an impossibility in relation to the language of scientific socialism; and that the dominance of this paradigm makes it an impossibility to exist equally in an ecology of knowledge which would validate and recognise Ujamaa’s novel contribution to emancipatory politics.

Part 2 of the essay aimed to locate the significance of Santos argument for an epistemological reconstruction by breaking from the Western Critical theoretical tradition through a juxtaposition with Samir Amin’s concept of delinking in Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World in thinking through ecologies of knowledge, alternative ways to think about emancipatory politics and development. The essay concludes by exploring the internal contradiction in Santos’ argument in creating Epistemologies of the South but not for the south. This was illustrated by unpacking some of the foundational premises behind the need to establish epistemological distance for epistemological reconstruction, and, by assessing the limits of the tools used in that reconstruction and maintaining that distance. ‘

The essay concludes that Santos’ approach comes across as utopic (Amin, 1985), juxtaposed against similar thinkers in his field vis-à-vis Amin as it tends to a reformist and not radical break in line with the epistemological distance required given the colonialist, sexist and racist being of Western critical theory (de Sousa Santos, 2014).

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