Interview with Mabogo P. More

Editor’s note:  Professor More uses “black” and “Black” in this interview.  He uses the former when he is speaking specifically to the racial term as ordinarily used in racialist societies.  The capitalized “B” in “Black” is for the version affirming agency and humanness.  He does not, by this, mean that the lower-case version is not human but instead that an antiblack racist society locks people designated as such in a web of stereotypes and discriminatory practices.  The upper-case version, although facing discrimination, is a more active term.  The interview poses her questions adhering to this use of the terms.

ROSEMERE FERREIRA DA SILVA: Your memoir Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a detailed narrative about your work as a Black philosopher in South Africa. Is there any personal fact that you did not include but would like to add to the discussion of this narrative, one that might be crucial to the work of a Black philosopher today?

MABOGO P. MORE: Well, I think that one of the most important worrying issues I did not seriously confront in the text is the question of Black women philosophers in my country, South Africa. Let me be specific, by “Black” I mean “African.” I say this because the concept “black” has seriously been problematic in South Africa and often contradicts the view of the Black Consciousness philosophy of the 70s and 80s according to which “Black” meant Africans, Indians, and Colored (mixed-race, primarily those of Indigenous Africans and Afrikaner) people. In the “Post-apartheid” era, East Indians, Chinese, and Coloreds embrace blackness only as an economic identity while otherwise identifying themselves as “Indians,” “East Asians,” and “Brown people” respectively—different from Black Africans. 

The issue of Black (African) women philosophers is a serious one, considering that they constitute two-thirds of the total women population of South Africa. Some African countries, for example, have sizeable numbers of women professional philosophers—even though still very few—such as Sophie B. Oluwole, Marie Pauline Eboh, Pauline Ogho Oweto (Nigeria), Pamela A. Abuya and Helen Oduk (Kenya), but South Africa has just recently (2018) produced the first African woman with a PhD in philosophy.  I have for over forty years taught philosophy at Historically Black Universities in the country, but I haven’t supervised the thesis of a single M.A. or PhD African woman philosopher. Shall I say this is my greatest regret? Failure, maybe? I don’t think so. I’d rather say misfortune precisely because I’ve been more than willing to have an African woman as a graduate student, unfortunately none came by. Philosophy in South Africa has historically been pure white and predominantly male.  There are several reasons why I missed the opportunity to supervise the thesis of a Black (African) woman PhD in philosophy. 

First, we have to ask the question, as Anita L. Allen did: What does philosophy offer Black women that would make it attractive to them in comparison to the financial and social status benefits afforded by medicine, law, economics, or politics?  It seems philosophy in an antiblack society cannot compete at all in attracting not only Black men, but also Black women in particular. As I mentioned in my book, academic philosophy itself is, in its whiteness, alienating to Black students. Their lived experiences are not reflected in academic philosophy qua Western philosophy, which they are coerced, by so many visible and invisible means, to master. Beside this alienation, academic philosophy, especially of a certain persuasion, is indifferent to the issues of the day, issues of ethical, political, social and existential concern that matter to most students.    

Second, for students coming out of poorly resourced Bantu education schools of the urban townships and rural villages designed to produce manual cheap labor rather than thinkers, taught in a second or even third language, philosophy becomes a no-go area of academic endeavor. Add to this the economics of philosophy as a job-providing discipline in an antiblack world, then the problem becomes even greater. Put differently, when one is personally, economically insecure and thus destitute, and comes from a family and history of poverty, one normally does not see something like philosophy as a viable option, unless, as it was in my case, philosophy finds you and does not let go. This means that there are those who go against the grain in the face of numerous obstacles, something most people’s circumstances do not allow, or they cannot do.    

Third and most importantly, maybe, just maybe, I did not try hard enough to encourage Black women into philosophy. Maybe the problem is fundamentally with me in the sense that I did not provide enough encouragement, incentive, and exemplary attitude to draw Black women into the discipline from undergrad to graduate programs. As Cornel West would put it, I simply did not make philosophy attractive enough for Black women.  

As a matter of fact, one Black woman who was my undergrad student and subsequently received a scholarship to Belgium and ended up in Germany, did return back to South Africa. When I was the head of the department of philosophy at the University of Durban-Westville, I pushed against serious resistance from my white colleagues to hire her in the department of philosophy as a lecturer. Unbeknownst to me and embarrassingly, she had become an alcoholic and could not function within the department within a few months.

I recently had the opportunity to supervise for a PhD a Black woman who had registered at the University of Pretoria.  Her name is Keolebogile Mbebe.  She had read my work and wanted me to be her supervisor but, unfortunately, because she was already a lecturer at that university, she had to register there for economic reasons.  According to the policy of that university, she couldn’t have me as her supervisor because I was not a member of staff there. She was forced to look for a supervisor within her university. But I had, in the meantime, encouraged her not only to present a paper at the Caribbean Philosophical Association Conference in 2016 at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, which she did, but also to have that paper published. It was subsequently published in Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory (2018).

All this failure on my part to supervise the thesis of a Black woman PhD in philosophy during my career notwithstanding, I was thrilled when I learned  Dr. Mpho Tshivhase became the first Black (African) woman to obtain a PhD in philosophy in 2018.  Mbebe and Tshivhase both now teach philosophy at the University of Pretoria.   

You are a member of the Tswana ethnic group or nation. Are there dimensions of the experiential knowledge of being and becoming Tswana that inform and are relevant to your philosophical work?

I have never considered myself in ethnic terms. As a matter of fact, because I, like so many of the people in similar circumstances having been born in apartheid urban townships, lost a lot of our ethnic sensibilities and affiliation. We brewed a township culture which approximates what in the Caribbeans societies can be called creole culture. That is a mixture of African languages such as Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa etc., English, Afrikaans, Spanish—languages to constitute what we called “Fly-taal”—that is, a language of the townships, the attempt by the Apartheid regime to separate Black people into ethnic enclaves (Soth section, Zulu, Xhosa, Tshangaan, sections) in the townships notwithstanding. If, as Fanon says, speaking a language means taking the culture of that language, then the language we spoke in the townships, a patois kind of language, created a distinctly township culture. I think that when one philosophizes, one does not do this outside of history and culture. Philosophy, as Nkrumah believes, and I agree with him, is always done within a social and political context. So, my work is informed by my existential reality, my everyday encounter with oppression, be it racial or gender oppression. It was and still is informed by my condition in the most racist of racist societies on earth, a situation which always demanded that I should justify my existence; that I have no right to exist; a condition which always put my humanity into serious question. So, my being a Tswana did not really influence the way I do philosophy. 

This, however, does not mean that I do not subscribe to certain aspects of African culture, be it Zulu, Xhosa, or Tswana culture. I have lived for a considerable length of time among the Pedis, the Tshangaans, Vendas, Xhosas and, for over twenty years now, among the Zulus. These cultures have, to a certain extent, influenced my philosophizing projects. I have, for example, written a number of articles on African philosophy and the cultural implications of African philosophical worldview. For example, the concept of “Ubuntu” (Zulu) or “Botho” (SeSotho) features a great deal in my writings on African ethics and metaphysics and African political philosophy. This is a founding concept of what throughout Africa is called “African humanism.”  By African humanism I mean that for Africans it is the human being that has value, that human fellowship is the most important of human needs, and that all values derive from human beings.

Why did you decide to offer your philosophical reflections in the form of a memoir? Do you consider your book a narrative that has previously been untold by Black philosophers?

To answer this important question, let me say that, first and foremost, my book is an attempt—to use Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase—”to conserve, to save the past.” After all, the narrative in my book is spread out over a lot of years, approximating over forty years. I sought to recount my past. But I have also attempted, in what I considered to be simple language divorced from heavy sounding philosophical jargon, to describe the society in which many others and I lived as Black people, a society around and outside of me; in other words, to give a phenomenological description of how things were, how they have changed and how they still are in the present. Put differently, the memoirs were an attempt to describe the world as I see it, as I grasped it. In this way I hoped that the text would provide Black people with a mirror in which they could look at themselves and hopefully change their perspectives by opening their minds to the realities of our situation.

The idea of writing my memoirs was initially as a narrative specifically intended for my daughter, who, because she was brought up without me in the immediacy of her life, did not, in my view, have sufficient knowledge of who I was as a person. I initially wrote a twenty-page narrative for her, which with time gradually took on a life of its own. It progressively grew under my pen as I searched the depth of my memory for the significant events in my life that would be of value to her.  Another method I resorted to in an attempt to let her in my life was to have her accompany me to overseas conferences of philosophy I attended. As the story to her grew, becoming a narrative about philosophy itself, especially philosophy in South Africa, I realized that given the paucity of Black philosophers in the country, young Black women and men aspiring to become future philosophers, or those who had no intentions for that, could be persuaded to follow that path.  Because many young people are persuaded to take disciplines that guarantee them economic security and often celebrity status, part of my choice of memoirs was to indicate that philosophy can also be counted among those disciplines that can guarantee that sought-after—shall I say—“high-status” life.     

Since memoir as a genre is not a search for or a portrait of the deep inner self of the author but simply the record or description of what happened to and around the self, I found it appropriate as a means of communicating not only with my daughter but also with a greater number of young Black women and men who wished to take philosophy as a career.  I was not searching for an inner self at all. I was merely recording what happened to me and around me. In that way, I hoped to reach those who also shared these experiences and recognized the events that happened around them. Without indulging in the self-portrait of autobiography, I simply tried to present a story so that the reader may come to her or his own interpretations of the person I am. There are many young men and women who will be seduced by philosophy as an academic discipline. My book is intended to cast some light to what it means to be a Black philosopher in South Africa, yesterday, today and possibly tomorrow if things do not radically change.

In putting my philosophical reflections in the form of a memoir, I was motivated by the desire to put my ideas within the grasp of a wider audience than one solely of philosophers and intellectuals. The aim here, given that the book was part biography and part philosophy, was to avoid speaking with the abstract voice of speculative philosophy.  As an out of the closet existentialist in an age in which this tradition is considered passé, I tried to bring out the concrete situation of lived experiences. Most existentialists have used literary imagination as a tool to expound their ideas.

As a Black writer with existentialist commitments, I also decided to follow in the footsteps of leading European existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and Black philosophers such as Lucius Outlaw, George Yancy, and Lewis Gordon. For example, Beauvoir articulated her existentialist categories and theories through the medium of autobiography and memoirs, for example, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, The Force of Circumstance, She Came to Stay, All Said and Done. Sartre did the same in his classic texts The Words and Nausea.

To answer the second part of your question, let me say that as a matter of fact, a large number of Black philosophers have written narratives about their lives. I think here of George Yancy’s two books, African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (1998) and to an extent his The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy (2002). Black philosophers have also written about their personal lives in the prefaces of their books; for example, Lucius Outlaw Jr. in his book On Race and Philosophy (1996), Lewis Gordon’s introduction in his Her Majesty’s Other Children (1997) and Charles W Mills’s Preface in his Radical Theory; Caribbean Reality (2010). So, my narrative in my book is not unique or something that has not be done by other Black philosophers before. What is unique, though, is the fact that no Black philosopher from South Africa has ever done this kind of project.  In this sense, my book is a narrative that has not been told by any other Black philosopher in my country. 

How were your options and the resulting narrative of your life as a Black person and Black philosopher limited by being in a white dominant world? 

Race has always been a deep, characteristically South African problem, and I am a product of that racist environment. In a race conscious society such as South Africa—Brazil and the USA as well—it is difficult if not impossible, as Chabani Manganyi observed, for individuals and groups to develop ways of action, feeling and thinking which transcend the categorical relationships involved in the “Us”  and “Them” groups.  Like Biko and many others of my age, I lived and still live all my life conscious of my racial situation. My friendships, my education, my thinking, my relations with other people, as a matter of fact, every facet of my life has been carved and shaped within the context of apartheid racial existence.  

Apartheid as an oppressive system was predicated on the number of options it made available to whites and Blacks. As Lewis Gordon agues, if a set of options is considered necessary for social well-being in a society, trouble starts when such options are denied a section of the society as such. What becomes available to one if the options are limited then what one chooses is affected and restricted by those very options available.  As a Black philosopher in an antiblack society, my options were curtailed by my situation and had a tremendous impact on what I can and cannot achieve. 

Given the myriad of disenabling conditions under which I grew up and lived, I think I have done pretty well for myself considering that a lot of Black people much more intelligent than myself have not survived the realities of being-Black-in-apartheid South Africa. Every moment of my life in South Africa and elsewhere has been penetrated by the social, economic, political, and intellectual consciousness of being Black, by a consciousness of a white world whose leitmotif is not only to question my humanity but also to demand that I justify my very existence. Having said this, I cannot help thinking how I would have turned out had the conditions been like those enjoyed by some African American philosophers, let alone white philosophers globally. When I read the autobiographies and narratives of some Black philosophers in the United State, I wondered how I would have turned out if I had some of the relatively different conditions and options they had. For example, Angela Davis, Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, Lucius Outlaw, etc. all started reading philosophy even before they went to college and had mentors and enjoyed, even though limited, exposure to fantastic resources. These are some of the options Apartheid South Africa denied me; the privilege to have mentors, to have libraries where I could have access to philosophical literature, to read philosophical texts in my mother tongue, to be taught philosophy by people who are prominent philosophers in their own right and who were not racists, to have my life-world not invisible, etc. Yet, through the love of philosophy and what it offered me intellectually, and through resilience and purposefulness, I continued on the philosophical path in the heart of the apartheid nihilism and oppression.   

What does it mean to be an intellectual and an intellectual engaged with the lived realities of the poor and the oppressed in South Africa and the rest of the world?

Let me immediately declare that I do not consider myself as purely an intellectual and/or public intellectual, for that matter.  If I am considered an intellectual at all, by virtue of using my intellectual capacities to engage and understand the world, I’d rather see myself as an academic intellectual. To be a Black academic intellectual in a country such as South Africa is wrought with social expectations and involves the experience of intense anguish. Let me explain this anguish in terms of the geography of apartheid and the leitmotif of every attempt at political liberation: land. Black and white South Africans in particular (as a matter of fact, all South Africans—Black, white, Indian, and Colored peoples) live in four completely different worlds.  Apartheid geography (“apartheid” means “apartness”) consists of separate everything—most importantly, separate residential areas enforced by legislation such as “Group Areas Act” or the policy of “separate development.” According to this ideology which dates back to British colonization of South Africa, Blacks were restricted residentially to “locations” or “townships” at the urban edge, areas “reserved” for us as reservoirs of guaranteed cheap labor. According to the fundamental principles of apartheid, the culture, customs, values, purity of blood and daily life of the white race must be protected and preserved against contamination from African people who are believed to be alien savages, biologically and mentally inferior, undeveloped, and dangerous. In his first visit to South Africa, Cornel West made the following observation about apartheid South Africa’s residential areas: “The pretty green grass in front of the spacious homes with luxurious swimming pools in the white urban areas appear like a fantasy against the backdrop of dirt and mud surrounding the tiny boxlike houses in the overcrowded black townships” (Prophetic Fragments, 1988). This observation echoes Frantz Fanon’s assertion that “The colonial world is a world cut into two” in The Wretched of the Earth.

When the Mandela government took over, the Group Areas Act was repealed, allowing Blacks to reside wherever we wanted. This then brings me to the dilemma of the committed Black intellectual in “post-apartheid” South Africa. The issues became and still are: Post-apartheid South Africa did not abolish the structural geography of apartheid. The white suburbs remain and are accessible to those of the middle class who have economic wherewithal. Since most intellectuals basically belong to the middle class, the dilemma is whether to move to the well-taken-care-of previously white suburbs or stay with the poor in the dungeons of township geography and existence.  To migrate to the formerly white suburbs would mean abandoning the poor black working class and thereby depriving them of people with the knowhow and ability to fight for better living conditions and improvement of the necessary resources such as better schools, parks for children to play, public swimming pools, better tarred roads, improved service delivery processes, libraries, etc. 

On the other hand, by opting to stay in the townships, refusing to relocate to the former white suburbs would be to cement and reproduce apartheid ideology of separate areas, thereby in effect saying certain parts of the country fundamentally belong only to certain racial groups and not others. But also, by refusing to occupy those spaces previously reserved for whites, one would be risking the imminent possibility of endangering not only one’s life but also one’s family in the violence of township conditions. As Steve Biko had remarked: “Township life alone makes it a miracle for anyone to live up to adulthood” (I Write What I Like, 2002). 

The question then becomes: Where would one be more effective in the attempt to fight continuing “post-apartheid” neoliberal injustices? In one’s hazardous and dangerous township environment with an internal relation to the Black community but possibly end up prematurely dead or in the far-off safety of formerly white secure suburbs with an external relation to the poor Black community? This is the uniqueness of the Black intellectual predicament in “post-apartheid” South Africa.

Apartheid education for Blacks was meant not to produce intellectuals or critical thinkers but cheap manual laborers. Unfortunately, in post-apartheid South Africa, a growing anti-intellectualism under the presidency of Jacob Zuma took root. Within this scenario, to be an intellectual engaged with lived realities of the poor and oppressed in post-apartheid, “New Apartheid” South Africa means annoying those in power. Those who, impatient to be in government, abandoned or conveniently ignored the most important issue of all political revolutions—the land question. The ruling party in South Africa adopted a constitution which, all things being equal, would have been an ideal constitution but which, because things were not and still are not equal, robbed Black people of the very means through which they could bring about some semblance of freedom. The Bill of Rights enshrined in the South African Constitution guaranteed 87% of the land to whites and denied Blacks the opportunity to own land as a means of production, the 87% which was originally stolen by white colonialists from Black people. The land issue for the poor is one of the main issues that has preoccupied my intellectual work. I have as a consequence written extensively on the land question applying the insights of Frantz Fanon to articulate the idea that without land there is simply no real freedom from apartheid but simply “Flag Freedom.” 

Almost all my work directly or indirectly deals with the problem of racism, a defining feature of the South African landscape, before and after Mandela. The leitmotif of my intellectual and academic work is to engage the suffering brought about by apartheid racism and the consequent misery and wretchedness it visited on Black people in my country and the world. In other words, my aim, as the Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement would say, is to “conscientize” Black people about their condition or bring to critical consciousness the hidden truth of their wretched condition. Since Brazil, in my opinion, is in almost every way similar to Apartheid South Africa, I think the same may be true of Brazilian activists such as React or Die! co-founder Hamilton Borges dos Santos or academic intellectuals such as Abdias do Nascimento. Their aim, as Paulo Freire had advised, is to “conscientize” Black people to the truth of their oppressed, or, as Bob Marley would say, “Downpressed,” condition. 

In my book Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation (2017), I discuss how Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy influenced the philosophy of Black Consciousness led by Steve Biko.  I personally have drawn inspiration from Freire’s book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, originally published in 1968, which was, incidentally, banned during Apartheid South Africa. I constantly consciously tried to employ his pedagogical methodology in my teaching career. 

One last observation which some may consider involvement in the life of a public intellectual. I have over the years been involved in workers’ struggle as an instructor at the Workers’ College in Durban, South Africa. South Africa has a vibrant working-class trade unionism. My participation in the Workers’ College (without remuneration) involved, as I always do in my formal academic practices, the conscientization of the workers about trade unionism, working class theories such as Marxism and capitalist theories such as colonialism, liberalism and economic theories that constitute the foundations of capitalism. Not only did I participate in the worker’s struggle, I also participated in community projects teaching critical thinking skills to NGOs and community organizations such as the shack dwellers and rural projects.

How are the dilemmas faced by a Black philosopher in an antiblack world different from the dilemmas that tend to preoccupy white philosophers?

I think the answer to this question requires asking a prior question: “Is there a Black mode of being-in-the-world?” Put differently: “Is being-black-in-the-world different in fundamental respects to being-white-in-the-world?” I think we have to recognize that philosophers are first and foremost human beings before they become philosophers. This means black and white philosophers are fundamentally human beings before being philosophers.  This is true at the pre-reflective level of consciousness. 

However, things take a different turn when we move from the pre-reflective consciousness of being-in-the-world to a reflective or positional consciousness of being-in-the-world. At this level, we begin to reflect on our consciousness qua being-white-in-the-world consciousness and being-black-in-the-world consciousness. Put differently, qua human beings, our reality or mode of being, is that of being-in-the-world, of existing. However, existence is simply not mere existence in abstraction. To use the metaphysical “Law of essence” one could say: A being cannot be without being a particular kind of being. Inversely, the “Law of existence” holds that a being cannot be a particular kind of being without existing.  To exist is to exist as something, that is, for human reality, to be is to-be-there, “there in the classroom,” “there next to the car,” etc. Being-there can thus only be possible through bodily presence. 

The body is the original medium through which we are present to and engaged in the world. It bestows upon each one of us, our existential identity. Since whiteness and blackness are essentially characteristics belonging to corporeality, the body therefore assumes a primary role in the determination of being-white-in-the-world or being-black-in-the-world. In short, the body constitutes our primary relation with each other in the world. 

Arising from this existential phenomenology are two primary human modes of being-in-the-world—what Fanon calls “the immense difference of ways of life”—fashioned by the contingency of our bodies that are products of being-white-in-the-world (white consciousness) and being-Black-in-the-world (Black consciousness). But what constitutes these distinct perspectives, what makes these different experiences possible? These two modes or “ways of life” are fundamentally products of the antiblack racist worlds constituted by historical phenomena of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. 

In such worlds, the body always provided a splendid medium for the development of the “us” and “them” categories. Insofar as I exist my body as a black bodily presence in the world, my consciousness of myself is conditioned by a world which is at heart antiblack bodies. Therefore, there is a way in which one exists one’s black bodily being or white bodily being in an antiblack compartmentalized world. Being-black-in-the-world or being-white-in-the-world signifies a mode of being constituted by a black or white intentionality whose ontological status is a consequence of a situatedness in history. A black intentionality, within the context of an antiblack world, indicates what it is like to experience things, oneself, others, events, or nature—in short, the world—out of the historical location of blackness produced by race formation. 

As I mentioned in my book, black bodied philosophers, within the context of worldwide white supremacy, often share a certain Othered experiential reality, or social and intellectual ontology that shapes aspects of their being-philosophically-in-the-world. This means that even if one chooses to be a philosopher, one’s choice within certain contexts is affected and influenced by one’s existential or social situation in which one finds oneself. A close look at George Yancy’s African-American Philosophers, 17 Conversations, reveals how the majority of the Black philosophers interviewed considered how their situatedness within the American racial hierarchy had an effect on their philosophizing endeavors vis-à-vis their white counterparts. 

Furthermore, if the dilemmas of Black philosophers were the same as the dilemmas of white philosophers, organizations addressing our situation—such as Philosophy Born of Struggle, The Society of Young Black Philosophers (USA), Caribbean Philosophical Association (Caribbean Islands and USA), Azanian Philosophical Society (South Africa), The APA Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers, The Collegium of Black Women Philosophers; The APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, blogs such as Black Issues in Philosophy; movements such as #BlackLivesMatter (USA), Movimento Negro Unificado, Reaja ou Serẩ Morta campaign (Brazil), #RhodesMustFall, #FeesMustFall (South Africa), etc.—would definitely not be necessary. The fact that we have all these organizations, committees, associations, movements, newsletters, blogs and so on, unmistakably indicates the different life-worlds not only of Black and white philosophers but also black and white people generally in antiblack societies.

In a race conscious society, one’s racial characteristics may determine to a large extent the kind of philosopher one becomes and the kind of problematics one deals with in one’s philosophizing endeavors qua philosopher. As a consequence, the kinds of problems experienced by Black philosophers may dramatically be different from those experienced by white philosophers. If your daily existence is largely defined by oppression or antiblack racism, by forced intercourse with a hostile world, then your philosophical preoccupation would, to a large extent, be determined by these conditions of oppression that limit one’s options. Philosophical problems regarded as important to white philosophers may understandably not be serious or pressing philosophical problems to a Black philosopher. For instance, whether the concept “good” is definable or indefinable may be of minor consequence to a Black philosopher than the fact that she or he is treated humanely and in a good way by everybody. For example, Black philosophers have regularly been admonished for giving pride of place to social and political issues of the day.

Speaking about the African-American novelist Richard Wright’s work, Sartre in his What is Literature and Other Essays, indicates that as a black man from Louisiana, Wright could not afford to pass his life in the contemplation of “eternal True, Good, and Beautiful” when Blacks in the South were lynched and denied the right to vote. As Charles Mills argues, Black philosophers can ill-afford to engage in metaphysical or epistemological questions and problems such as universal or global skepticism precisely because qua subordinated people they cannot doubt the existence of the world of oppression and their oppressors. The primary concern of the Black philosopher is the relations of human beings in society as opposed to the place of the human being in the universe. This, however, does not mean that metaphysical or epistemological concerns don’t deeply interest Black philosophers; rather it is that the social and human questions tend to be predominant concerns. The dilemmas of a Black philosopher are in a significant way different from the dilemmas of a white philosopher. Within the context of racialized antiblack reality, therefore, it is possible to talk of “Black philosophy” and a “White philosophy.”  Put differently, it is possible to exist as “Being-a-Black-philosopher-in-the-world” as opposed to “Being-a-white-philosopher-in-the-world.”

Is it possible to produce knowledge aimed at contributing to social transformation as a Black philosopher in a world which frequently denies the reality and importance of black lived experience?

Of course! There are many ways in which I as a Black philosopher can and have contributed to social transformation. By its very nature, Africana existential philosophy, of which I consider myself a practitioner, is actional and liberatory. My text Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation speaks to the transformative nature of the Black Consciousness philosophy advocated by students during the early 70s, of which I was part. 

The emergence and formation of a Black philosophical society, using the word “Azania” as its defining identity, signaled an intellectual, political, and social transformative intention to contribute to transformation through conscientization and decolonization of philosophy in South Africa.   

My work on Steve Biko, Frantz Fanon, and the “Land Question” has resonated with the students’ movements for decolonizing the curriculum and South African life in general and some political organizations. It has given impetus to “the “Fallist” movements such as “#RhodesMustFall,” “#FeesMustFall” students’ radicalism, which attempted to make sense of their experiences in predominantly white universities by de-linking from these universities’ dominant model of Euro-American epistemology and substituting them with their own decolonial framework comprising of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, and Black radical feminism. The rise of the fallist movements has truly made a radical impact in terms of changing South Africa’s political, social, and educational landscapes and has reverberated way beyond the boundaries of South Africa into England. For example, in May 2015 students at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, inspired by the Fallist movement, created a #RhodesMustFall Oxford movement and in 2017 the University of London students called for the decolonization of the philosophy curriculum. Political organizations such as Black First Land First (BLF) and the Economic Freedom Front (EFF) consider themselves as Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanist political movements.  

How have your experiences as a Black philosopher guided your concerns about the existential dimensions of racism?

This question relates to the earlier question about the dilemmas faced by a Black philosopher vis-à-vis those encountered by a white philosopher. I pointed out earlier that in a race conscious society one’s racial characteristics may determine to a large extent the kind of philosopher one becomes and the kind of problematics one deals with in one’s philosophizing endeavors qua philosopher. If one’s situation is infested and defined by antiblack racism, then one’s options within that situation are almost to a large extent defined by that situation. But this racist situation, I would argue, while defining my situation, should not be interpreted as saying that I am determined by my situation. As a matter of fact, it is within a situation that freedom reveals itself. Put differently, it is I who give my situation its meaning and sense for me by choosing to be whatever I want to be in and through that situation. 

Be that as it may, the fact that I was born and lived my life in one of the most racist of racist countries accounts for the fact that my philosophical orientation has to a large extent been guided by my existential condition. Kwame Nkrumah’s assertion that philosophy always arises from a social milieu which in turn affects the content of philosophy made me see philosophical theories, traditions, and methodologies in the social, political, and economic context in which I exist.   

Racism is one of those phenomena a Black philosopher qua human being experiences almost every day in her lived experience. Racism does not distinguish one Black person from another in terms of class, intelligence, wealth, or religiosity. “All niggers look alike,” the racist saying goes.  It does not matter whether you have a doctorate in Philosophy, Chemistry, or Physics. In an antiblack world, there are PhDs in Chemistry, Mathematics, or Philosophy, medical doctors, engineers, millionaires, women, men, etc.; and there are also Black PhDs in Chemistry, Mathematics, or Philosophy, Black medical doctors, Black engineers, Black millionaires, Black women, Black men, etc. As a norm, whiteness is not mentioned; only blackness and Blackness, which is the absolute Other to whiteness (the norm, the standard, the benchmark), that must be identified. So, Black philosophers qua Black human beings do not escape the viciousness of racism in our lives. Cornel West, the internationally renowned philosopher who was a professor at Princeton and Harvard universities, in his popular book Race Matters, recounts a number of incidents where his class location did not protect him against white racism—in other words, incidents in which his blackness and Blackness were more important than his status as a philosophy professor of a prestigious university.

Could you comment on how the language of jazz influenced the language of your work as a philosopher or your philosophical language?

I wouldn’t say that I have consciously used the language of jazz to articulate my philosophical language in the same manner in which, for example, philosophers such as Lewis Gordon and, possibly, Tommy Lott, or Albert Mosley do. There is some rhythmic flow in Lewis’s language that is jazzy when you read it. I guess part of the reason is that he is a jazz musician himself. He plays drums and piano and he is currently a member of an outfit called ThreeGeneration. I, on the contrary, have never played any jazz instrument at all because there were none within my immediate environment in which I grew up. Jazz for me has strictly been listening and appreciation. But this shortcoming does not mean that my writing has not been inspired by the jazz I listened to. When I listen to jazz—Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Stanley Turrentine, Shirley Scott, Max Roach, Keith Jarrett, Cassandra Wilson, Abbey Lincoln, Mirriam Makeba, or Hugh Masekela, etc.—and especially the blues—Buddy Guy, B.B King, Joe Williams, Joe Turner—I go through a certain emotional state that propels me to want to put that feeling and mood into words. 

Before I write something or before I go to bed, I normally listen to any jazz or blues CD or a musician such as Curtis Mayfield, Bob Marley, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Gil Scott Heron, and of course Aretha Franklin—all the musicians whose songs and lyrics have social and political relevance to Black people. Albums such as There’s No Place Like America Today, Curtis Live (Curtis Mayfield), Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, Zombie, Sorrow Tear and Blood, Zombie, Shakara, etc. (Fela Kuti), Reflections, Winter in America, Pieces of a Man, RealEyes, of course, The Revolution Will Not be Televised and From South Africa to South Carolina (Gil Scott Heron), Exodus, Rastaman Vibration, Natty Dread, etc., and, of course, the almost Black national anthem of James Brown’s funkadelic political song, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud!” It is this music that taught Black people how to make a difference which inspired my philosophical approach and writing.

A major influence though came also from the liner notes at the back of the Long Playing (LP) jazz albums produced by jazz labels such as Blue Note, Atlantic, Arista, Columbia, Impulse, ECM, etc. written by such jazz critics as Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather, or Ralph Gleason. What was impressive about liner notes on the back of the covers of LP albums was the style of writing, which was so lucid, creative and rhythmical that it put one in the right frame of mind and prepared the reader for what was to come from the music. I used to love reading these liner notes and perhaps my writing style was in a way influence by them.

Since I am retired now, I have been considering getting piano lessons, maybe that will unleash new horizons for my writings. 

As a Black intellectual and philosopher, how do you diagnose and explain the changes that are happening in the world today? Are people becoming less human or does the world still not understand what humanity is?

The issue here is whether we have resolved the question of what it means to be human.  This is an old philosophical question made relevant by Fanon’s inquiry, “Who am I?” and “What am I?” Since antiblack racism is a form of misanthropy, that is, it questions and/or denies the humanity of Black people, and since antiblack racism is still thriving enormously, as evidenced, for example, by the recent spade of antiblack monkey chants and racist abuse of Black soccer players in Europe, the profiling of Black people by police everywhere in the world, including Africa, then the question of who is a human being has not been resolved. 

That being said, I think we are heading towards—if not already there—the Hobbesian state of nature, a state in which one human being is a wolf to another human being, a state characterized by a war of all against all. Consider how both at international and national level people are driven by the impulse to satisfy their own selfish desires. We live in a world driven by capitalist, neoliberal greed and market forces very hostile to over eighty percent of the world population, the poor. Our neoliberalism world favors the few.  As a result, we find ourselves in a Hobbesian state of nature in which the scarcity of resources brings about a war of all against all. 

According to UN statistics, 7.4 million are displaced by conflict raging in the world. It seems that we have come to the edge of the precipice which could be triggered by any of a number of factors, but mainly the impulse to dominate. For example, we have enough technological power to get rid of humanity quickly. Almost over fifty percent of the world’s nations are, in one way or another—driven by greed, narcissism, selfishness, corruption and so on—consumed by war in the form of so-called terrorist attacks, protesters’ violence, Police heavy-handedness in dealing with anti-government policy and austerity measures protests.  

We are at the moment faced with the destruction of Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, which have cost millions of lives. There are civil unrests and protest against the ruling elites in countries such as Chile, Lebanon, Haiti, Venezuela, Catalonia, and Hong Kong.  Anti-government, anti-imperialist and religious groups such as Sufi fighters in Somalia, Al-Shabab in Kenya, Boko Haram in Nigeria, ISIS in Syria and Yemen, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Houthis in Yemen; Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the help of the US, are at each other’s throats; India and Pakistan are involved in a dangerous dispute over Kashmir. At the present time, Turkey has invaded the Syrian Kurdish army. The USA under Donald Trump is threatening everyone around, provoking the possibility of nuclear war with North Korea and Iran and starving people to death in Zimbabwe, Latin America, especially Venezuela, and Cuba through sanctions.  

The world’s powerful leaders are prepared to risk going to war in order to secure re-election in their countries. The resurgence of the far-right hate groups, fueled by racist rhetoric from some western powerful leaders, is alarming.

In antiblack societies such as the USA, Brazil, and South Africa, genocide against the youth of African descent by police is on the rise. For example, official statistics in Brazil indicate that the police there kill an average of six Black youths per day, totaling to 11,197 from 2009–2014. This despite the popularized myth of Brazil’s “racial democracy.” In the USA the Trayvon Martins, the Michael Browns of American Black experiences with the police continue to be everyday occurrences, let alone lives lost from gun violence.

Human trafficking, child soldiers, child trafficking, sex trafficking, forced labor trafficking, bondage trafficking and debt bondage, and forced migration are on the rise at an alarming pace propelled by greed, profit, narcissism, power, and money. Jane Anna Gordon’s recent book Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement demonstrates how Euromodernity has produced stateless and slavery of more than half the population of the world.    

What is however re-assuring and providing hope for the future of humanity is the enormous resistance to this kind of condition we find ourselves in. There is a glimpse of hope when one thinks of the wonderful work humanitarian organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, the International Red Cross, CARE International, International Rescue Committee, Action Against Hunger, do.

Email: rosemere.ferreira_da_silva@uconn.edu.