ABSTRACT

South Africa comes into being a polity as a result of a reconciliatory pact between the Dutch/Afrikaner settlers and their erstwhile counterparts the British, after violent confrontations known as the two Anglo-Boer wars or what has recently been referred to as ‘the South African war’/ ‘the war for South Africa’. South Africa then is a child of the 1909 act of the British parliament, which created the Union of South Africa from the British colonies of Natal and the Cape of Goodhope together with the two Afrikaner republics: the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The indigenous people conquered in the unjust wars of colonisation were considered to be no significant actors and were relegated to the status of ‘non-beings’ in such a political formation. It is no surprise then that South Africa exists in the minds of the indigenous people always as a philosophical problem: as an existence that denies fundamentally their Being as human beings second to none, and as Africans in this territory of theirs which has become ‘the white man’s land’. This paper grapples with this philosophical problem from the perspective of the indigenous people and articulates an Azanian liberatory philosophy following Mogobe Ramose, Ndumiso Dladla and Joel Modiri. It is important to note that these reflections transpire during a time when South African academics and the academy at large are grappling with the ‘decolonisation’ of the curriculum or knowledge production, which have reduced decolonisation to diversification of knowledge production at the expense of addressing the colonial problem that is South Africa. This paper elucidates an Azanian Social and political philosophy to counteract such discourses that have diluted decolonisation as a radical project aimed at undoing the colonial order of things.

SPEAKER BIO

Born and raised in Soweto, Thabang Dladla is a founding member of the Azanian Philosophical Society (APS) a multi-disciplinary social sciences and humanities association. He is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of South Africa and teaches Philosophy at the University of Limpopo. His research interests are African Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Black Radical Historiography.

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