Knowledges and cultures are not European peculiarities.

There is no doubt that Africa has produced knowledges.

She has cultures. Traditions. Languages. Music. Art.

She has compassionate human beings who have always had the capacity to think, to theorise, to make sense of what they populate.

Although not all written down, and therefore primitive in the eyes of those who want to modernise us away from ourselves, Africa has shown a devotion to ideas and a dissemination of such ideas among its people, such that it was possible to lead a normal life even before colonialism.

And so I find it odd that Black people in general, but Black intellectuals specifically, are quick to look to the West in order to theorise. They seek, read, and rely on the likes of Socrates, Plato, Noam Chomsky, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, etc., in an attempt to philosophise and conceptualise solutions for contemporary complications.

Don’t get me wrong. These thinkers from Europe are undoubtedly necessary. Blacks should know what the world thinks about itself. Blacks should know what the world thinks about Africa. I simply think that it is woefully inadequate to give consideration only to European thinkers when we philosophise, or to look to the US and Europe for artistic and cultural inquiry and pleasure. It is as if our own possibility to theorise and create is an exogenous phenomenon needing validation from elsewhere.

It is obvious that we are somehow determined to overlook the role played by our own. Otherwise why are we not concerned about the intellectual and cultural contributions of Ladysmith Black Mambazo? Why are we not talking about Vonani Bila and Lesego Rampolokeng to enrich our theories? Do we even listen to Makhafula Vilakazi? Tutu Puoane? Jonas Gwangwa? There are many others in South Africa, and in all of Africa and the Diaspora. Why are they not our point of reference in our thought construction and philosophical trajectory? Their legacy - which, properly understood, should influence current and future generations, is ignored.

To keep Black thinkers at the fringes of philosophy is not only to privilege that which has always minimised us to nothing but subjects and consumers of knowledges and cultures, but it is also to entrench the nonsensical partiality that Africa’s role in the geopolitics of knowledge and culture production is irrelevant, at once sustaining the long-held prejudice that we are a people without knowledges, without cultures, a people that would have otherwise stayed in the dark had the settler-colonialists not made a stop here.

Our automatic reverence for the so-called European fathers (where are the mothers?) of thought renders the works of our own intellectuals and creatives inconsequential. Our exigent duty is therefore to infuse the works and thinking of our own theorists and creatives into our struggle to defy stereotypes, to critique white supremacy, to investigate the intricacies of what makes Africa work, and what makes her fail.

The works of Black intellectuals and cultural authorities must continue to influence today’s artistry and thinking, so that all of us Blacks in this white world are aware of the possibility to become modern without renouncing what is ours, so that it is possible for our children to participate in modernity without relegating to uselessness our own cultures, traditions, languages, and our being.

But broadly, Black intellectuals should help us understand that Blacks are not a race existing merely to clean toilets, to cook and care for white families. They should help us understand that Blacks do not exist merely to be hungry and dirty and uneducated and poor.

Black intellectuals should insist on discovering how those who came before us understood and navigated the spaces they peopled, and how our knowledges and cultures spread and altered, and be shameless purveyors of such insights.

Black intellectuals should go to the villages and listen to the elders. They should archive those knowledges and sciences and cultures, so that the current generation and those that follow should have a place to go to in order to find themselves, for buried in our traditions and cultures is intellect which, read with patience, may humanise us all again.

Let us urgently examine our intellectual obedience to the West and the colonial superstructure. Let us examine our own participation in the denigration of African thought to the realm of the uncivilised. Let us examine our culpability in denying ourselves the possibility of intellectual participation and leadership.

Like Steve Biko, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has taught us that the most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. It would the height of passionate folly if any Black person anywhere in the world thought this teaching was without interest to them.

I am not saying Black people should uncritically agree with Steve Biko (even though I feel sure all Blacks must necessarily agree with him), neither am I saying Black people should without question love Miriam Makeba and her music (although I don’t know how any African can listen to Makeba and not be moved). I am saying acknowledge Steve Biko and Miriam Makeba (and all our intellectual and cultural luminaries) like you acknowledge Kierkegaard and Bob Dylan. Explore and critique Biko and Makeba (as intellectuals and cultural authorities in their own right) with the same intensity, with the same respect, as you do Kant and Nietzsche. That’s all.