 I just want to welcome everyone who has arrived so far and it's really delightful to see Adam for the first time since he's arrived at SOAS in my case. So good morning and really to thank Angelica and Mahesh for a most extraordinary collaboration which we're really looking forward to engaging with all of you today. This is our launch event for a new partnership between UKZN and SOAS and it's been a team effort all the way through and the engagement and participation is really just inspiring so we're looking forward to talking to you all later today. I can only echo what Kaya said and Kaya said it was a team effort and it certainly was but it was not an equal team effort I think we all have to say that the great bulk of the work was done by Angelica so this really wouldn't have happened without Angelica's input and just to say that I'm really very pleased that we have this collaboration with our colleagues in South Africa. I forget when it was when we first met Mahesh a couple of years ago and she came to us and we met on campus and Mahesh spoke to us about putting forward or creating some kind of collaboration between ourselves and the University of KZN and at the time we certainly didn't kind of know you know where it would go and exactly what we had in mind and we spoke about doing student and staff exchanges and so forth but we decided on this format to launch our collaboration we certainly hope that this is the first of many. So welcome everybody. Thank you Wayne and Kai. I would now like to formally open the symposium and welcome our director and deputy vice chancellor to start off. We're starting with professor Adam Abib from SOAS who's going to say a few words of welcome. Thank you Adam and over to you. All right well thank you very much Angelica it's really lovely coming to South Africa from London. It's one of my first public engagements at least or at least by second with colleagues at the African continent. You know when when kind of directors of vice-chancellors are invited to open symposiums they often have a scripted brief and that scripted brief is often done by organisers and Angelica has has done so very carefully and I'm going to formally say that it's important to recognise that this conference which I'm welcoming all of you to in un contested spaces epistemic symmetries mobility and identity really emerges out of an MOU between SOAS and UKZN. But I'm going to go off script once I've said that so forgive me Angelica and say for me that it's a particularly special occasion. You know UKZN is an alma mater in many ways. It is the institution that I studied my undergraduates in Petermaritzburg and my masters and it is also the institution ironically that I did started my academic career at the University of Dublin-Westmore and I launched the Centre for Civil Society some 20 years ago at UKZN. So it is an institution with particular attachment to me. I was a union activist there as a political activist and so in many ways it's a very special institution and I cannot think of a better institution to have one of my early engagements with in South Africa. So thank you Angelica and Kai and Mahesh and Vivian and Warren and Wayne and all of you for facilitating this. I also want to say a second thing which I think is important and that is that I think we're in a new historical moment and in this new historical moment in a way more profound than any other our challenges are all transnational in character. I think this this pandemic demonstrates this more than anything else but it doesn't matter what you take whether this pandemic or climate change or energy or inequality or social and political polarization those are transnational challenges and they require transnational solutions and to be able to have transnational solutions you need institutional capacity and human capabilities across the world and the fear I have is that our partnerships for many years 20 30 years we've got many global partnerships but in effect those global partnerships have undermined the development of institutional capacities and human capabilities those have been profoundly unequal partnerships and more importantly what they really worry about was identifying and I know there's an irony in Adam Habib saying this there's it was about identifying talent student talent and bringing them to London and New York and Beijing and Berlin and weakening institutional capacities in that regard and it seems to me that we've got to reimagine in this historical moment not a completely high education the digitized technologies enable us but we need the political will in universities to enable us and so we've just launched a new strategic plan at SOS and it's just been or at least the first elements have been and been through its board of trustees and at the heart of the strategic plan is a new internationalization strategy and that internationalization strategy says this it says our challenges are transnational and we need to move to co-curriculation co-credentialing co-teaching and so as once to pioneer this model in a financially sustainable way but we're also quite keen on establishing research centers that and we're arguing that some of that will be in you in London but you can't you can't think through and write about and reflect on and understand the planetary questions about time through the lens of Africa Asia and the Middle East from only London and so we're thinking about partnering institutions in South Africa and the rest of the continent and in Asia and in the Middle East five six seven selected partnerships to build co-finance co-build research institutions that teach our students both in UK Zedden and in in SOAS that do joint research in a real sense that co-partner and co-organize and ironically it allows institutions in these countries to compete for UKRI grants through the SOAS link because you will be co-owned in co-partner so it's a fundamental rethink of how we're going to do partnerships and in part we think partly because we're small partly because we're London partly because we've got a mandate that speaks to SOAS I mean to Africa Asia and the Middle East we can be a progressive influence for higher education in the UK and the world and it's something that we we're thinking through quite profoundly we're right at the beginning stages of it and so in a sense what is happening Mahesh and Vivian and Wayne and God and Angelica you pioneers if you like in imagining a new partnership in imagining a reimagination of higher education itself in many ways and we I must say I'm quite keen on this and I'm particularly keen and attracted to the fact that it's happening in conversation with UK Zedden where I began my academic trajectory and I began my student life so I tend to go on a colleague so I'm going to shut up at that point and give inshamsla an opportunity to speak I wish I will listen to inshamsla but at some point I might have to speak up so forgive me for that I wish you all of the best in this deliberation and hopefully at some point we can do this face to face perhaps in South Africa and hopefully in London thank you very much you know I wish you the best of deliberations in the coming days thank you many thanks many thanks professor abib very inspiring welcome thank you and I pass now to professor he said to say he's welcome from UK Zedden thank you thank you very much program director and also thank you very much prof adam abib for those good words of introduction I would like to begin by addressing prof adam abib the director of the school of oriental and african studies of the universe of London and of course our friend and his entire delegation from source our keynote speakers and friends professors and member yam joe louis Hamilton and rasul professors ojong and nidu in their respective capacities in the school of social sciences members of the university management of both institutions members of the academic community the student representative council fellow academic students and all lifelong learners globally ladies and gentlemen all protocol observed I welcome you all on behalf of the vice chancellor professor nanapogo and his executive the theme of this symposium is decolonizing knowledge a timely and necessary but also a complex undertaking how can we restore marginalized ways of seeing and knowing without taking cognizance of the biological interpenetration incompletion and indeed the interaction of all knowledges throughout human history for some the endeavor will be a form of restorative justice for others perhaps a means of enriching our lives akin to restoring ecosystem diversity still others believe that decolonizing knowledge will enable new and more beneficent forms of social economic and political organization the potential is vast but we can only realize it through painstaking work it will of course include the slow the liberative process of reckoning with our past and what we have come to accept as our histories predictably it will also open up debates about what comes as knowledge and how we communicate and work with the rest of the human community and the rest of creation and other life forms we might also have powerful insights into other ways of apprehending the physical and social worlds with a bearing on how we begin to address the perennial question how shall we live and what is the relationship between us beings presumably endowed with superior intelligence and other life forms but there are risks as well it can be quite difficult to tease apart and excise the pernicious and limiting elements of legacies from those that have demonstrable benefits it would for example be perverse not to upload the astonishingly rapid development of vaccines against the COVID-19 virus to which UKZN has made a substantial contribution I have in mind as well the unfortunate and ideological positioning and distortions of the great knowledge traditions that we inherited from the Nile Valley civilizations as part of the African and human community to further some myopic patriarchal interests at the heart of all of this therefore is our positionality the telling of this great human story and the vantage from position from which this narrative is told above I have referred to the sterling role that has been played by UKZN and South Africa in general in mapping the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic we should be mindful as well that there is a vast repository of medical and other forms of knowledge that remain at the periphery of the academy and it is about time that the logic of scientific analysis as it was developed by ancient sages such as Emotep of Kermit amongst others is also applied to establish the efficacy of these traditional medicines I do not think we can delve into these questions without addressing the philosophy of science the history of humanity and human ideas in general for me the heart of the decolonization of knowledge challenge which has placed universities at its center is this can we deploy the tools of evidentiary exploration and logical analysis to interrogate those very tools as well as the other ways in which knowledge is generated and validated and how do we factor in different ecologies of knowledge and epistemologies as we do so I believe we can do this and I say so for two reasons first we and our sister universities throughout the continent and indeed throughout the world are committed to the truth that is to expanding understanding of the physical and human worlds I believe that initiatives to decolonize knowledge will open up interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary avenues of inquiry thus helping us to read ourselves of the illusion of the separation between the natural and human worlds pursuing knowledge in this manner will also facilitate creative and enabling insights into the human condition secondly decolonizing knowledge is not nearly a local or a national concern my point is not only that we in South Africa have much to learn from our counterparts in Latin America and Asia but that's the institutions in what we have come to call the west have their own reckoning to undertake now widely acknowledged we have a great deal of thinking and feeling to work our way through and we can best undertake it in good faith and with a school class care with as many of our fellow academics and scholars as possible so in the furtherance of that work and more it is my pleasure to announce that the University of Guazulunatal has signed the memorandum of understanding which saw us at the University of London this framework will facilitate mutually beneficial opportunities for our students and staff from scholarly exchanges to research collaborations and community engagement for all of the universities that are facing for all that universities are facing under the shade of this global pandemic they are vital research and levels to be undertaken made more intellectually challenging and rewarding by our shared growing awareness that the pursuit of knowledge is never free from the weight of human history it is my firm believe that this awareness will enrich rather than inhibit our work and it is both an honor and a pleasure to welcome the members of source into closer working relationships with the members of the University of Guazulunatal in conclusion Thank you very much Professor Mkisei thank you so much for your welcome and thank you again Professor Abid and we are now moving to the keynote we are very pleased to have Professor Kilimbenben here with us today you know we are all very very thrilled about that and it's going to be in conversation with our academic doctor Amina Yakin thank you so much Amina I will now pass on to Amina to take over the session and introduce Kilimbenben and also a little bit more about herself thank you Amina over to you thank you Angelica good morning all and it's such an honor and a pleasure to be here this morning as Angelica just mentioned I'm Amina Yakin and I'm a post-colonialist myself and chair of this decolonizing working group and so as festival of ideas and Center for the Study of Pakistan so it's lots of things that connect with global connections and ideas and I'm would like first of all to begin by thanking Professor Mkisei Professor Habib my colleagues Kai, Wayne and also Mahesh and send greetings to everyone at KwaZulu Natal it's this is such an amazing collaboration and the start of new journeys for us at a time in which there's not been much to look forward to so you really have given us something to look forward to in these very challenging times it's my also great honor and pleasure as a post-colonialist to be in this conversation with Professor Ashil Mbembe and I'll give you an introduction to him and I hope I can do justice in the introduction and I'm very much looking forward to our conversation. Professor Ashil Mbembe was born in Cameroon he obtained his PhD in history at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and he has lots of accolades he's been many places he's been at Columbia University as assistant professor of history a senior research fellow at Brookings Institute in Washington DC and again at Pennsylvania in history at the University of Pennsylvania he's been an executive secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Dakar and he was also a visiting professor at the University of California at Yale University and what I love about Ashil's work is that it's also connected with the university with public policy and with social science research and he's the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris and also Belgium he has also held the Albert Great Chair at the University of Cohn but let me talk to he's been awarded numerous awards and including the 2018 Gerda Henkel award and the 2018 Ernst Bloch award and what we know him the most for in postcolonial studies is as a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory who has written extensively on contemporary politics and philosophy including on the postcolony which was a kind of groundbreaking book followed by a critique of black reason necropolitics and out of the dark night there've been numerous essays also and including essays on decolonization his books originally written in French and numerous articles are translated in 13 languages and I think as as to really be on a global stage that is something that is very very important and necessary and he so I again to say as a postcolonialist to have this opportunity to be in conversation with Ashil on the theme of today's these two days this two-day symposium of contested spaces epistemic asymmetries mobilities identities is is a huge kind of canvas to chart an obvious and a little bit like Adam we might steer off territory sometimes but we'll we'll try and focus our conversation as much as possible around the task that we've been given of decolonizing knowledge production so I think already what's been mentioned are transnational solutions digitized technologies and internationalization the strategies within the institutions and Ashil perhaps we I'd like you to start before I ask you to start I'd also like to draw your attention to something that we did here at SOAS that really connects quite deeply with your work I was involved with putting together the festival on the theme of decolonizing knowledge which we felt was it was really inspired by your series of lectures and conversation with the roads must fall movement and in in those lectures you spoke about several things from demythologizing whiteness to reinventing a classroom without walls and the necessity of reevaluating a Eurocentric canon so that we may open the door to a variety of knowledges rather than universalizing one particular truth and we dug deep into our institutional kind of work that we do and also the work that I do you know what does this mean for postcolonial studies for the research at SOAS our teaching what kind of real and our sort of engagement our public engagement and what kind in those relationships what kind of real world values do we offer the kind of space you envisage in your lectures on the archive is a very open one that celebrates difference bringing together a variety of publics in the act of co-learning your vision speaks to the kind of that kind of work that we are very keen to connect with and that we do quite a bit of as well so essentially I mean I'm sort of probably saying things that you've um repeating yourself to you but just to kind of reiterate this that decolonizing knowledge is about the acknowledgement and reordering our world from a global south perspective to critically analyze the movement of capital enslavement ownership of land migration and trying to understand the epistemic violence of history so I just wanted to put that on the table as a conversation that we've been having quite a lot of in the autumn and I hope that this conversation is an opportunity to reconnect to it and also to continue in new directions so I thought the first question that I would ask you that is both topical and necessary is what is the impact of the pandemic in South Africa and what are our life futures and also thank you very much for being here and a warm welcome to you thank you Amina you asked me what is the impact of the pandemic in I mean I imagine on intellectual life in South Africa and in our universities I'll just give you one small example yesterday we meaning the Vitz Institute for Social and Economic Research organized launched in fact it's 2021 public positions series it's a series where people take position on a number of what they consider to be key issues of our times so it was launched yesterday this year it has been decided that the public positions series would focus on France Fanon the title of the series is Fanon after Fanon Fanon after Fanon in a context in which on the one hand finally we have the totality of his work what he has written about his very short life not only political writings but also a psychiatric writing his literary work he was also a play writer we finally have all of that Fanon also at a time when we know what's going on in terms of the resurgence of racism worldwide racism in this age of covid since you mentioned covid which means in this age when the distribution of risks in this case mortal risks is unequal and risks affect all certain categories of people are more exposed to them than others so Fanon is topical in that sense we put up using digital technologies a webinar which attracted 600 scholars people from all over the world this we didn't do before covid i want to draw the attention to the kinds of new possibilities which are suddenly at reach at our reach which allow us in fact to begin thinking about how we could expand the boundaries of the intellectual common let's just give it that name the intellectual common which i hear meaning what adam was sharing with us a moment ago was talking about in terms of a new model of international internationalization i would call it a new model of how we constitute a global intellectual common professor Landla also evoked it so it seems to me that in the midst of the tragedy that is going on there are a number of possibilities which are abetted by the technological capacities we now have which are understand not at everyone's not everyone has access to them in equally but in any case they are there and they allow us to rethink the world and reorganize intellectual work in ways that can really make make a difference and in ways that are it's in a way that is urgent it is urgent because there are a number of global developments going on which the concept of decolonization or the project of decolonization has to take up if it is to to remain pertinent if it is to be more than just a slogan so so look that's one way of entering into the conversation you're inviting me to enter into okay thank you thank you if i may pick you up on the the the question of Fanon as you as you brought him up and the you mentioned the totality of his work and Franz Fanon after Fanon and i'm i'm thinking of the need and the necessity in these times of radical thought and what you think is your engagement with Franz Fanon has been a major part of your work and where do you think that what kind of challenges are present in this current moment around radical thought you know what are your thoughts on this and the question of community and the concept this kind of goes back to your work on the post colony as well and i have a connected question to that which i'll ask you after that but if i can just sort of first ask you to to come in on on Fanon radical thought and where we are in in sort of postcolonial studies in african studies what do you think is the future for this but i mean there's so many things first of all a paradox that seems to me to be going on on the one hand there is an injunction to decolonize which is coming from almost all over the world and if you google the term decolonize or decolonization it will be astonished at what might come up so there is a global injunction to decolonize which manifests itself in every single discipline it's not one single discipline in the broad field of knowledge that is not facing interpolated as we speak at the same time especially in most uh some important countries in the north there is a huge anxiety emerging in relation to a number of currents of thoughts thought traditions of thought postcolonial studies decolonial studies gender studies uh critical race studies uh debates surrounding the question of intersectionality most of these currents of thought or subfields are under assault they are under assault by not only right wing forces but by democratic liberal governments as i speak such is the case for instance in France in all countries in the world such is the case of course in Hungary and the kind of my friend Arjuna Padurai calls it the fear of small disciplines you see it in India too so that's part of the the paradox but i would really like to put on the table a number of key developments i think we have to attend we cannot not attend the first one i would argue has to do with a changing epistemological landscape a changing epistemological landscape which itself i believe is um uh the result of technological innovations um it is the result of epistemic reconfigurations or shifts which are underway in various disciplines and sub-disciplines um there are underway debates going on in terms of i mean what is data how do we harness new kinds of data how do we reshape what constitutes a unit of analysis that new bodies of thought i think which are increasingly involved in rethinking the nature of knowledge itself we're no longer sure what is knowledge and what is not what is true and what and what is what is not um the nature of of matter for instance um the degrees of agency and the way in which they are distributed across human agents non-human agents there are a whole set of debates of this nature which are unfolding and if we want to be serious about decolonization we have to be part of those those discussions um so it seems to me that what we are witnessing we are in the midst of an intense period of i would say heightened curiosity and experimentation i don't believe like many that the humanities are in crisis maybe certain sectors of the humanities are in crisis but not all of them in in a number of others this is a amazing period of curiosity and an experiment mission um the second thing which we have to put on the table amina is the extent to which the historic antagonisms uh between the the sciences and the humanities the extent to which they are breaking down they are breaking down uh as a result of the the gradual recognition that we humans are not at all disentangled from other species and this is really an important uh uh let's say development uh so so we see a renewed dialogue between the social sciences science and technology studies for instance life and biological sciences philosophy uh renewed dialogue which is uh uh in in in the making uh for instance issues that have uh early uh been the object of the life and biological sciences are being or are becoming the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and vice versa and these raises all kinds of challenges for the so-called decolonial project i could go on and on but it seems to me that uh we have to bring those uh take them into account during these conversations no i think that that's really uh there's so many things that you've said there where i've wanted to jump in and say can i ask you to stop there and just um speak a little bit more about this so one of the things that i think is emerging from our conversation is that how do we think about decolonial studies and how do we think about postcolonial studies and the intersections and uh technologies and science and data and all those those conversations and dialogues which you mentioned are hold a lot of hope but at the same time they are also as you mentioned um in in the sort of background is is the challenge to democracy and how democracy is shaping itself for the future and if i can kind of take you back uh to that question of democratic liberal governments and ask you if where do you see uh how do you sort of see that in relation to africa and where do you see the precariousness and fishes of african life today and what can europe learn from this know what europe can learn from europe is is not that keen to learn from from anybody um which is which is a very serious problem um but europe will sort of by itself a hope and look i mean behind questions of democracy development quote unquote behind all of that lies and an even bigger preoccupation for for critical thought in these specific times um an even bigger question which has to do as far as i'm concerned with i just call it life futures the question of life futures and when i say life futures i simply mean the question of planetary habitability the question of our existence on earth and when i say our i mean the humans humans non-humans the entirety of the living if you want of course i take for granted the recognition that recognition of the the grounded of the the territorialized reality of our existence on earth we live on earth and nowhere else but we live on earth at a very specific moment a moment when i believe the the complex networks of relations that sustain life on earth these complex networks are in deep crisis and it is a crisis that is the result of a very specific set of events all of which have to do with our entry into what some have called a new climatic regime so the question of the conditions for life to be sustained is for me at the heart of almost everything else at the heart of the attempts for instance at expanding our concept of democracy because democracy as you know has been mostly imagined as democracy for the humans or in fact for certain categories of the human what would be a democracy that would be imagined as encompassing more than the human a democracy that encompasses for instance other living entities a maritime species kind of democracy if you want where questions of ecology environmental well-being the sustainability of our millions climate animals all of that is uh uh uh let's say taken into consideration and this is this not just an African question it's a planetary question so this question of planetarity is at the heart of whatever we might want to mean by the decolonial project a decolonial project that is nationalistic that is chauvinistic that is regional does not at all address the core of the issue first of all the fact that colonialism was a planetary enterprise and second the fact I have just spoken about that what is at stake now today is this issue of life futures of planetary habitability so that's how let's say this requires of course sort of new research agendas in line with what was the lander and Adam with uh voking a moment ago okay so thank you I think um the planetarity question in relation to the decolonial project is something that you've mentioned several times and I think I'm uh definitely getting uh a sense of the I think considerable amount of work that you've also and time that you've spent working with development studies as well and and work in the development field to that that's sort of it also uh I think informs your work uh quite a lot in terms of of thinking of the life futures and how life is to be sustained and then and then the challenges of of democracy you know that that we face here I mean in this country I suppose um I mean one of the biggest challenges right now we're facing right is how the vaccine is going to to be distributed to be shared to be um across the world and in you know is it going to be uh reiterate those differences of global north and global south um relationships and also the science behind it you know what are the ethics and protocols and we've got vaccines that have been produced in different parts of the world and there is um there are different ethical protocols for example with the Russian vaccine with the Chinese vaccine with a um Pfizer vaccine or a you know Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine there are lots and lots of questions connected that that come up in relation to those very things that you're talking about and and I'm not going to um sort of um put you on the spot with that particular to kind of chart a way for us out of the vaccine equation but I'm just wondering what are the conversations that are happening in Africa um around this and in South Africa around this particular question of um moving forward out of the pandemic and how do you see the planetarity and the decolonial project making those possibilities more viable or do you see see it more of a kind of challenge that that is going to have to be thought of in different ways I mean do you think that that planetarity is going to be possible going forward or or is this kind of the science of the vaccine is that going to you know we're being led by this obviously a very important agenda of science that is necessary to our sustainability for the future as humans um and also we've got this this I mean in this country you know there's a big talk about the levelling agenda you know that we're kind of levelling across the country and class and that's going to be something that's going to be not a factor in in how this is kind of going to be a more democratized project but in reality you know when we kind of explore and see we've seen lots of uh issues being raised for example around the vaccine and the vulnerability of um uh black and asian populations around that in in these um situations but also the responses to that have been very um interesting and different and they keep recreating those very divisions or or leading us into those very divisions that nationalism has been very susceptible to in the past in terms of minoritization and an attack on the sort of vulnerable so I just wondered what what you thought about that you see I'm trying to stay away from the nitty gritty questions you're trying to get me to to address um um you see in some of the circles I interact with um what strikes me uh broadly speaking is the um the um the return to the return of big questions um which doesn't mean that uh quote unquote small questions are of the picture but but big questions in the sense that they almost every single uh issue we face today is transversal uh it doesn't belong to us it doesn't tp-pise us either in terms of location but but it is also faced by many others in many different other ways elsewhere uh this question of the overwhelming presence of the elsewhere in in our midst so the return of big uh questions but also the return of what historians have been calling of late deep time deep time at a at a moment when mean uh our levels of attention if they are more than 10 minutes I mean that's that's a not time is now uh calculated in minutes that because of the yeah as a result of technological escalation uh time itself has been uh um divided subdivided fractured uh to a point where uh uh it is uh increasingly measured um um let's see uh along the uh the axis of the instant that that the speed speed of time itself uh the speed in itself has is is um uh in danger of abolishing time if you want to to put it philosophically that time is uh in danger of being superseded and destroyed and abolished by speed that that huge war that is going on between time and speed so the return to deep time and the return of big questions most of which turn around the relation of human life to planetary life so when we bring in covid or vaccines in the midst of this broad picture what do we see first of all and this is something I've been uh debating with colleagues in the world bank who work on questions of African development first of all covid is not an accidental event covid is the result of the ways in which to put it very simply we have organized our relationship with nature and other species the way we have organized our interaction with other species has made it possible for this type of pandemic to emerge this pandemic has deep a deep genealogy even more and this genealogy itself is related to for instance put it simply the models of development we have been pursuing over uh the last few centuries since in any case the industrial revolution which have led to what the depletion of resources the extinction of multiple species terrible encroachment of human activities onto the activities of the of other species so so these issues are back on the table what model of development do we need um how can we building on our own history location in this place come up with new uh emancipatory narratives which uh might be of use uh for for the world at large so this question of the world at large is how do we reconstruct it is what is at stake in uh let's see the debates on the apartheid sanitary apartheid that is going on where pharmaceutical industries come here do all the tests use us our bodies our organisms as testing uh dispositives produce a vaccine which to which we have no access or can only have access at very very high prohibitive costs so how do we reconfigure such a world and imagine a world in which every single one has a place as opposed to a world where some have a place and others don't how do we share it now the sustainability of our planet will depend to a large extent on our capacity to remember the world meaning putting back together all its components and sharing it so look this is the way in which some of us are thinking about these issues or coming into these debates what is colonialism what is decolonization at a time when uh to old models of colonialism have been substituted new forms of techno molecular colonialism when is the living itself life itself that is the object of colonial sub subjugation or colonial forms of extraction and exploitation so is these kinds of shifts if you want that uh uh i personally am interested in in rethinking so when adam says uh i keep referring to adam because because he adam is he knows how to put on new new ideas when he when you guys at so as rethink what you call internationalization what are the epistemological foundations on the basis of which you want to push for this this new model so that it goes beyond the signing of memoranda of understanding which of course understand that they are important so it's these kinds of issues i am personally interested in okay thank you shell what nationalization mean in a time of as i was arguing incipient convergence between uh the social sciences the humanities life biological sciences technology studies and so forth and so on and if indeed it is true that we are witnessing a kind of incipient convergence between fields that were somewhat antagonistic how do we trigger then the development of new research agendas which uh might privilege the complex the uh the processional the non-linear the relational nature of phenomena mm-hmm which make it such that what's going on here speaks to an endless way mm-hmm okay so so i think what we're talking about what you are talking about very much then is the labor of um working our way out of the neoliberalism project through the question of being human and who who we are or re rethinking that question and i and i think what i'm really interesting interested also to to get more um to ask you more about and i know we're kind of almost at the end of our time in the q and a box is absolutely exploding with questions for you so i'm going to turn to that in a minute um are those that indeed colonial studies the emphasis on south connections and in post-colonial studies we are also talking about the global south and i um and i'm trying to understand my own kind of um way around this and i i just wondered what is it that we mean when we say south south connections in in terms of um and i know that this is also connects with some some of sort of adam's work and and you know is is also in in a sense embedded in this mo you and this relationship uh with um with with sort of these two universities and how um and if i may connect it to in a sense the the very um that that question again you know of of what can you learn from this in in terms of like how do we um how do you envisage the south south connection i mean i i think if it's possible just for you to just or do you think it's me it's the viable it does what sort of does it mean to you if that's a better way of asking you the question you see responses to questions such as the one you just asked also depend on one one's own experience i mean my experience has been one of being constantly in motion i mean i was born in cameroon i left when i was in my early 20s i never went back i went to france studied there for a number of years moved again to the u.s and then came back to the continent not in my own country but in sinigar and then from sinigar to south africa and from south africa i mean i have been uh it has been a life of permanent and settlement if you want and and uh permanent crossing of boundaries or attempts at crossing boundaries as they keep becoming ever more rigid talking about a sanitary passport in addition to uh so so that has been my experience that's how i think so categories such as south south of course they are they understand the importance and colleagues who are really working on these deliver men and for instance but not only him many many more but i'm more interested in what i would call triangulations because although i mean the not and we see those triangulations going on including in the actual experiments south south experiments which are also happening hopefully they are no longer only mediated by the north but a lot of them include those collaborations include the north in so far as there is a south in the north there are many souths in the north so so what are we talking about territories are we talking about geographies that are beyond territoriality or are we evoking imaginaries or a world in which networks are reshaped in in light of the for instance the current digitalization of our world and so far and so on so so those questions let's see i'm inhabit me and i don't have a response to them all i know and all i sense is that in an age which we have characterized as planetary we need we will increasingly need to draw from the archives of the world at large that we can depend solely on the archives of the north to account for the transformations we are witnessing or experimenting with and therefore some way of imagining what a global intellectual common could be is something we too in south africa in the continent have the responsibility to think about we cannot only leave it to others to think about what these global intellectual common which is in the making what it would look like and how we can make it such that it doesn't simply reproduce inequalities of of the past and okay thank you and i think that really responds to a question that i had planned on asking but i think you've already answered it so i won't ask but i'll just just for people's interest say that i had thought about this in relation to shill's work book necropolitics and the idea critical response to michelle foucault's idea of biopolitics and and a shill in the book you say where the human civilization can give rise to any form of political life at all is the problem of the 21st century and the book is very both pessimistic i thought and hopeful speaking of a planetary democracy and the demand for justice and reparation and and you've just i think given us a vision for how you are thinking about a global intellectual common as the kind of way forward from from that sort of direction that you left us with at that point so i'm going to kind of pause my speaking there and start picking up the q and a there are raised hands as well as questions in the q and a box so they're asking you to close the session okay okay sorry no they're asking me to close at 10 20 so we have 18 minutes for questions is that okay for us to today thank you you're not just saying you're i've tired you out at home so what i'll do is angelica can can we take questions live as well or do we is it just best to take the q and a box questions um and no we we prefer to take the q and a box session that's okay with you please we are not yeah okay i know there are a lot unfortunately of them all sure that's fine because i know some people had raised hands so if the raised hand people can then just stick their questions in the box we'll try and get through them so she'll if it's okay with you i'm going to read through your four questions at a time and uh some you may have answered already so please um bear with me as we kind of work our way through this there's a question from adrian watson i'm interested in the panelists views on the role indigenous knowledges might have to play in drawing on the archives of the world to advance the project of decolonizing epistemology and building a planetary global collective common so that's that's one question there's another from ester ramani um and an apologies if i'm mispronouncing your name um i'm intrigued by ashile's idea that time itself is being overtaken by speed in academia has this not to do also with the pressure to publish quickly to move away from slow scholarship has this to do with the speed of technology the information and knowledge overload how can we do intellectual work that respects complexity and the need for more thoughtful ways of making and disseminating knowledge and sofi chohan's question which is connected what role do you imagine for the university in the future global intellectual common um and just one more cilia's s before i ask you to to kind of give us your thoughts ashile what is the role of the local and the rural in the global south in decolonizing knowledges acknowledging the difficulties added by the intersection with class poverty and the power hold it by european educated elites in the creation of knowledge how to include the local and the rural without patronizing um so would you like to comment on any of those questions ashile or respond very complex questions i will do my best um as far as the indigenous knowledges are concerned i can only come back to a point i was making early on that we we the the complexities of of our times um we we will have to draw uh from all the archives of the world and i use the term archive here in a very philosophical sense and we will have to to be multi-literate if if you want uh multi-literate in the sense uh that uh we we will have to know a bit more than what what we need we will have to be steeped in more than one tradition let me put it like that we'll have to be steeped in more than one language we'll have to become multilingual i use the term language here as a repository active repository of uh different forms of knowledge uh and different forms of imagining the world and inhabiting the world so that capacity for a multiplicity of forms of habitation that is it seems to me the function let's say the role of future knowledges so this question of future knowledges those knowledges which allow us to inhabit a world that is becoming more and more complex that is in which there's no here without an elsewhere that is a world of concatenations and entanglements those future knowledges require the um require us to indeed take seriously what the questioner calls indigenous knowledge but i prefer uh it's a matter uh that is not that important to terminate the archives of the world at large the same applies to um the last question on the local rural um and the decolonization of knowledge and so far as applies to to all of this here and in line in line with what i was trying to say early on this let's say there's no no local today that is not at the same time non-local i start from the assumption that all is entangled there's no city on one side and rural area on the other hand when we have to look at the passages the the forms of interlocking because a lot of what is going on let's say and which is really decisive for the future happens at the interfaces it helps that's where it happens it happens at the intersections if you want in these spaces of entanglement which many wants want to disentangle which in itself is part of the violence of of our times the drive to disentangle what in fact is is entangled so as far as i mean this local global thing is concerned uh rehabilitation of indigenous knowledge is uh it it requires a whole set of moves it requires the taking seriously of questions collective intelligence and the uh rehabilitation of local memories for instance and but but look all of these in the knowledge that these things are in of themselves the object of contestation there's no local that is not contested there's no um indigenous knowledge that is not itself the object of contestation contestation so there's a political dimension to all of this which is at the heart of precisely difficulties we we face okay thank you ashile we are um for a very comprehensive answer to those questions and i think very important questions of indigen indigenous knowledges and uh also the multi um lingual knowledges that you responded to and i kind of heard a connect synergies with gertry spivak's work and your work as well um uh there are some more questions i know you might not have time to answer them but it'll be good to hear other people's voices i mean i also have to rush to the airport okay oh okay so would you do are you taking your leave no i have to take kids to the airport okay of course in the next two minutes okay so i think okay all right so in that case i think we will um just wrap up by uh if i just by thank you very much the questions that are on the chat shall we send you the questions yes i will respond to the questions if you send me the question on the chat okay took you so i have to take two children to the airport i think that's um a responsibility that falls on all of us at many times in in life so it's it's good to you uh see you um taking charge of that and and who are we to stop you from your from taking your children to the airport i think that would be very unkind so um we will um i as ashile has said very kindly he will take the questions that are in the in the question and answer box in angelica we will forward them to ashile and ashile if you have the time and if you have the um capacity if you are able to send some responses then we will reach out to those people who have sent in the questions and and send them out so it remains for me to to thank you um and to say um that this has been an invigorating um and really um wide-ranging conversation we it it feels like we've touched the surface of things that we really need to get deeper and deeper into but this is only the beginning of this um kuzulu natal and so has relationship so we hope that we have you for much many more years ahead to continue these conversations and to continue these dialogues okay so thank you very much ashile um and and we so around a virtual around a virtual applause uh for our speaker and um thank you all very much and and uh safe journeys to the children