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Student Senzeni Majola SOCIETY AND SOCIAL

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TOPIC Coloniality and

Decoloniality in the
Global South

COURSE SOCIOLOGY 301

Due Date 25.03.2022

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The essay below will critically discuss coloniality and decoloniality in South Africa and explain how it
brought a change to what we have now as a country due to decoloniality and coloniality also discuss how the
black people were treated due to apartheid that South Africa experienced and how that is affecting present
South Africa, furthermore, explain how inequality determined the lives of black people, how they were made
inferior, how different races were separated the blacks being poorer and the white achieving more money and
wealth. Then outline how they used coloniality of being, knowledge, and power to gain ownership over them
as well as the resources that the country has.

The coloniality of power is a naturalized understanding of inferiority and superiority that replaces the relations
of superiority and inferiority formed via dominance as the fundamental and universal social classification of
the world's population in terms of race (Lugones, 2007). The term "coloniality of power" was developed by A.
Quijano in 2000 to emphasize the crucial role that a specific type of power and the racial hierarchies that it is
associated with play in the development of capitalism and European modernity. By a pattern of power that is
recognized as colonial, it seeks to express how closely metropolises and colonies are interwoven. It is also
essential for the coloniality of power perspective to emphasize the key signs that social relations and the social
system of dominance, particularly their racialized and racializing logic, play in the functioning of capitalism. It
is about the crucial part that hierarchized distinctions play in the growth of capital (Çağlar, 2022).

The idea of coloniality of Being places the effects of colonialism not only on "areas of authority, sexuality,
knowledge, and the economy but also on the broader conception of being." This idea suggests that there are
multiple modalities of being connected by "relations of power" based on factors such as race, class, gender,
and sex (Melgoza, 2015). The idea of ontological difference should be unimaginable outside of a confrontation
with its material circumstances of possibility and impossibility, which include the slave ship, the plantation,
the reserve, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp. These physical
aspects of the "coloniality of being" necessitate a political rather than an ethical examination of Being (Castro
& Fabián, 2021)

The term coloniality of knowledge describes how colonizers and imperialists denied the colonized knowledge
freedom and the right to knowledge while granting themselves a false sense of knowledge and power. The
coloniality of knowledge involves the manipulation of language and the twisting of terminology. Facts are
either ignored or distorted by knowledge colonialism. Several books of history written from a Eurocentric
perspective state that regions and lands in the global South were "discovered" by explorers and missionaries,
even though people had lived there and were familiar with the area for centuries prior to colonization and
imperialism. The coloniality of knowledge also employs the methods of distortion, suppression, and erasure.

One of the major turning moments in the history of the post-war world was the decolonization of South Africa.
It sparked the imagination of a new generation of idealists who fervently professed their support for personal
freedom and racial equality. The oppressed and exploited people of South Africa were subjected to heavy
requests from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including a request for them to pardon their
oppressors. The lack of structural initiatives with adequate width and extent to address the fundamental living
conditions of those made destitute by centuries of exploitation, forced displacement, forced labour, and other
crimes against humanity complicates the job of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC's peaceful
transition, which was marked by the ritual of forgiveness, created a sense of moral community and
responsibility in post-apartheid South Africa. After the victory of other colonies over European domination
came the liberation of South Africa. The South African people's fight for political freedom paved the ground
for the North American civil rights movement. A long process of political transformation that affected the
entire continent of Africa, from Cairo to the Cape, and lasted throughout the twentieth century culminated in
the 1960 explosion of decolonization.

Free immigrants who fled from Europe in pursuit of less expensive land comprised a quite distinct kind of
colonizer that came to South Africa. In South Africa, the ruling party's approach to land policy is reproducing
paternalistic relations that echo apartheid practices and symbolize the "colonial present," in contrast to populist
political discourses. This reality contrasts sharply with the original intent of land reform, which was designed
as a component of a larger decolonization endeavour. The most recent land redistribution plan, the Proactive
Land Acquisition Strategy, in which the state retains ownership of the land, is no longer in line with the
decolonization project. This is the case because South Africa's land redistribution has strayed from the ideal of
social justice and is increasingly exhibiting signs of the "colonial present" and "recolonization (Kepe & Hall,
2018)."

Given the growing diversity of many modern nations' ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural makeup and the fact
that colonial ideology was built on this perception, philosophers have advanced post-modernism as a means of
challenging the structural paradigms that guided that dominant reality. Multiculturalism and hybridity are
concepts that have helped to reshape the postcolonial world and demolish the absolutist universe of the master
in ways that encourage everyone to practice their human rights freely and equally (Eze, 2018). There are still
questions about whether these ideas have united people of different ethnic backgrounds in ways that offer
better alternatives to the existing order, even though they have been successful in challenging the
metanarrative of the empire and thus contributed to the restructuring of political and cultural discourse about
the new world. It is questionable if multiculturalism has benefited the lives of those within the groups it was
intended to empower, for instance, even though it has successfully stopped dominant cultures from eradicating
minority cultures. It frequently sparks a counterattack of rabid metanarratives that cause unwarranted misery.
South Africa stays away from the typical post-colonial path characterized by diametrically opposed self-
conceptions.

Decolonization of knowledge is vital to rewrite history, affirm the dignity of the oppressed, and reorient
knowledge production and worldviews for the sake of the nation and its people, as well as for the rest of the
African continent. The colonizers were fully aware that "knowledge is power. The promotion and imposition
of Eurocentric worldviews, as well as the elimination and suppression of indigenous memories, knowledge,
and worldviews, were major outcomes of colonial education and knowledge systems. The purpose of colonial
education was to sabotage the future and distort the past of the colonized.
South Africa was a major "civilizing effect" in southern Africa during the colonial era and was
"conceptualized as a white man's country." Even after the British lost control of South Africa to the Afrikaners
in 1948, the idea of a white nation at the southern tip of Africa persisted unabatedly. Whilst there were
significant differences between British colonialism and apartheid, their ultimate objectives remained the same:
to uphold white supremacy, exploit the nation for the advantage of whites, and subjugate the black majority.
Apartheid was a "colonialist, capitalist, religious, and racial ideology intended to ensure most black people
would be under the control of the minority of white European settlers.

White settlers in South Africa founded colonial institutions and universities because they "considered them as
both symbols and disseminators of European civilization." These organizations have historically modelled
themselves after European colleges. They had a responsibility to produce white young and advance white
supremacy in order to uphold and advance settler society. The Christian missionaries also ran a variety of
institutions where black South Africans might receive an education, but as compared to the education provided
by white colleges and universities, the education they provided was poor.

With the higher education system "deeply ingrained in apartheid," In 1994, South Africa ended generations of
racial apartheid rule and isolation as well as social, economic, and political persecution of the black
population. The change in student demographics, with black students and women now making up most of the
student body, has been the biggest change in higher education to date. Nonetheless, academic reform has
stalled, and white academics continue to make up the majority. The absence of curriculum change has been
another failure. University curricula continue to be Eurocentric, based on knowledge systems from colonialism
and apartheid, and disengaged from the reality and lived experiences of black South Africans (Heleta, 2018)

By leveraging colonial matrices of power, coloniality of power serves as a fundamental structuring process
within global imperial schemes, maintaining the supremacy of the Global North and assuring the Global
South's ongoing subalternity. Colonial matrices of power are a collection of four different subjectivation
mechanisms. The first is economic domination, which takes the form of forced evictions, land appropriations,
labour exploitation, and management of Africa's natural resources. The second is the exercise of authority,
which includes maintaining military dominance and controlling the use of force. The third is the management
of gender and sexuality, which entails the introduction of Western-centric education that replaces indigenous
knowledge and the reimagining of "family" in Western bourgeois terms (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). The current
global power structure is fundamentally based on colonialism, and conceptions of development nicely fit into a
genealogy of discourses that depicted Africans as beings defined by negations and lacks, including a lack of
writing, history, civilization, development, democracy, and human rights. While this is going on, the human
population is being socially classified into developed racial categories such as inferior/superior,
primitive/civilized, rational/irrational, traditional/modern, and developed/underdeveloped. Coloniality of
power was able to make them take our natural resources gold, diamonds, copper, and palm oil. This caused a
lot of strain on the resources of South Africa. Colonizers even enslaved those whom they considered fit and
export them,
When the definition of human alterity is violated to the extent that the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter, this is
referred to as coloniality of being. The belief that certain individuals do not belong in history and are non-
beings is the sole result of the coloniality of being. As a result, beneath the European myth of discovery lie the
histories, experiences, and conceptual narratives of people who were rejected as human beings, historical
players, and beings capable of thinking and understanding. When "man" is placed against conquered
populations as the referent to move away from, the coloniality of emphasizing not recognition but rather the
overrepresentation of "man." Specifically, the black man who must feel like the flaw of the white man, Frantz
Fanon describes the ontogenic racial negation and nonbeing of the colonized.

The essay above has discussed coloniality and decoloniality in South Africa and furthermore, outlined how
apartheid affected or resulted in the current South Africa that we have, and the inequality that black people
continue to have even now through the curriculum that we have at schools. Also explained how the South
African government has been trying to reduce this gap between these races or reduce inequality.
 Bibliography
Çağlar, A. (2022). Reorganization of borders, migrant workers, and the coloniality of power. Citizenship
Studies, 401-410.
Castro, H., & Fabián, A. (2021). Toward a Black Radical Deconstruction of Being. differences. Ontological
Captivity, 85–113.
Eze, C. (2018). Race, decolonization, and global citizenship in South Africa. Rochester: University of
Rochester Press.
Heleta, S. (2018). Decolonizing knowledge in South Africa: Dismantling the ‘pedagogy of big lies’. A Journal
of African Studies, 40.
Kepe, T., & Hall, R. (2018). Land Redistribution in South Africa: Towards Decolonisation or Recolonisation?
Politikon, 128-137.
Lugones. (2007). Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System. Hypatia, 186-219.
Melgoza, R. (2015). A Decoloniality of Becoming: Cherríe Moraga’s Coloniality of Being in A Xicana Codex.
Califonia State: California State University.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (2013). Coloniality of Power in Development Studies and the Impact of Global.
Development Studies, 1-24.