Culture, crisis and pistemicide: what can Southern African communities teach the world about living in an age of crisis?

Abstract

Modern human beings (homo sapiens) are the last extant species of the genius homo and as such have been on the planet for some 350,000 years or more. Unlike other animal systems, humans have been able to live in many different environments. One key way in which that is done is through the creation of knowledge systems. Different communities have different knowledge systems. When communities with different knowledge systems interact with one another there have historically been a number of possible group to group relations, grouped into the following categories: conflict/domination, tolerance (separation) and syncretism (the coming together of two or more communities to form a new community). At the present mo-ment one knowledge system – the European Colonial Knowledge System (CKS) – has come to dominate all others. This knowledge system has also caused extreme depravation (measured in terms of absolute poverty, food insecurity and other metrics). Simultaneously it has created extreme wealth for a few elites. While these defects are not unique to the dominant knowledge system, the scale and universality of these problems suggests that there may be something unique about the problems incurred by this particular knowledge system. By learn-ing from elders in the Southern African community often known as “Khoi-San”, this disserta-tion documents that there are other ways of understanding land tenure, property rights and human relations. The European Colonial Knowledge System (CKS) has as its core the value of “hyper-commodification”, which is the value that drives it towards crisis. By learning from the Southern African Knowledge System (SAKS) progressive people can propose and implement reforms to the CKS which would ultimately result in world where human rights are not just rhetoric but are part of a universal social contract.