This piece was sent to me by Johan Thom. ArtHeat is, as always, proud to publish any ideas anyone wishes to share. (Clarification: This piece is by Johan Thom, performance artist, not Johan Thom, university lecturer.)

Today there seems to me a huge problem that appears the moment one actually suggests that contemporary Africa, despite all that has gone wrong there, is actually a place where one can really learn something about humanity.
For one thing, there now exists a host of professional idiots who call themselves 'postcolonial scholars'. These leeches have made their careers based on the fact that contemporary Africa exists only as the bastardized, silent horror that cannot speak of anything but Europe's ongoing failure to deal with its 'others'. These so-called theorists have forgotten that postcolonialism actually starts on the street - that it does not only belong to them and their highfalutin, moral ideas and neat categories but to the people who actually live, work, love, laugh, die and generally have to make sense of these contexts in real time.

These 'theorists' are a bunch of miserable monks who actually have no love or any real hope for Africa to rise from the ashes and say anything of real value (other than regularly reporting the shitty news from the margins). Stuck as they are in their oh-so postmodern discursive frameworks where everything is relative and ultimately disempowering (like the very halls of dis-empowerment they traverse on a daily basis), they simply cannot allow Africa to speak itself as anything more than this. They base this idea on the certainty that the west has in its failed attempt to find something of universal value exhausted all the avenues whilst consciously shitting all over Africa and its people.

Yup, these fuckers will spend their careers in European art, philosophy or literary departments without ever 'setting foot' in Africa again. There they will have stellar careers telling westerners how fucked up they all are and how they have fucked up Africa beyond repair. And pity the poor arsehole that dare challenge this depraved, perverse vision of Africa with something positive. For to do so, to think of contemporary Africa in positive terms and discover something of real human value there today, would mean:
1. they lose the moral right to claim this suffering as uniquely theirs (to speak on behalf of...to represent)
2. and they lose their miserable fucking jobs (who the hell are you representing?)

There are of course people who realize this.
Just take a look at anything the photographer Santu Mofokeng has produced and allow yourself a moment to consider his artworks outside the complacent postcolonial and neo-colonial western framework of Africa-as-godverlate-fuck-all. Mofokeng's work touches a raw nerve left exposed and under-explored by most contemporary theory. That is to say, it cuts through all the bullshit and reminds you of the simple fact that human beings are fallible, vulnerable, hopeful, surprising material creatures that can on the rare occasion also rise above the limited expectations much contemporary discourse has of them.
To make of these rare occasions something more commonplace would require real hope and commitment to something bigger than your own personal ambitions and misery. Hope is of course the something which I would suggest is exactly what most contemporary postcolonial scholars and African politicians no longer have. In a nutshell they are committed without hope: After all, to have hope is to seriously entertain the notion of change (whereas one may be seriously committed to just keeping your kak, hopeless job).

So what I am suggesting is that the most urgent project today is not to ‘re-claim’ knowledge through the ceaseless deconstruction of the west, but rather to claim contemporary Africa in all its diversity as a vibrant space of knowledge production. The former still tacitly acknowledges the west as the sole referent whereas the latter simply views the west as a relational framework - as one amongst many. In short, I am sick and tired of seeing a hand go up every time one speaks about humanity in Africa..."Yes BUT humanity is a 'western construct' and Africa was never included in its scope". I get ok. But to deny that Africans have any concept of humanity by suggesting that it is only through the west that contemporary Africans can understand this idea is tantamount to telling a horse it does not know what a horse is. Kiss my horsey ass.
Also, I should mention that there are a number of African theorists/ scholars/ curators that are addressing the issue with real insight and clarity - Achille Mbembe immediately comes to mind but there are many others.
And no, I will not publish a list of names shaming said miserable monks - it is counterproductive as it will only make them more defensive and stale than they already are.