Treating Colonial Hangovers In Education: Decolonizing Mathematics – with C. K Raju.

If a certain chance alignment of solar system planets – with respect to the earth – omened
an arson experience when you were, say, 35 days old, you can expect that 35 years late, on
your way from work, your Ford Kuga family SUV may burst into flames whilst you are
trapped inside.

Western metaphysics in mathematics (and other hard-sciences) echoes the kind of logical-
cousins to deductive astrological claims made by the above sentence. Preposterous!

On the basis of such colonial hangover ignorance, Prof C.K Raju – who helped build India’s
first Super Computer, has taken it on his stride to unearth colonial Cultural Foundations of
Mathematics. This function to weed out foundations of coloniality in mathematics also serves
as a book title to one of many books he has authored. Raju finds that these excluded
cultures, like African and Indian, are not only originators of a mathematics stolen and
misunderstood by the West, but he goes further to demonstrate in his work that these stolen
scientific concepts predate the Western scholarly archive by hundreds of years.

Arguing that a theology penetrated sciences – penetrated through times of conquest that
have adapted into current inequitable politics – Raju notes: “the postulates of formal
mathematics, say, set theory, cannot be empirically checked (they are accepted by faith). So
formal mathematics is pure metaphysics. The only way to check its assumptions is to rely on
authority – and in practice we teach only those postulates approved by Western authority.”

Raju goes on to adduce evidence to support his critique of Western limitations that pervade
our education system: “For example, calculus is done with formal real numbers (and not
Indian non-Archimedean arithmetic, or floating point numbers used in computer arithmetic).
School geometry is taught using Hilbert’s far-fetched synthetic postulates, not Indo-Egyptian
cord geometry.” He says.

Mysteries that our ancestors (in Km.t, Mali, Indus Valley, Mapungubwe, Nubia, Ethiopia)
never found unsettling beyond denoting them as regularities of nature, in Euro-modern
domination-driven culture became a serious cause for anxiety. What began as regularities of
nature from which Afrikan postulated a situated science, in European records transformed
(by theology) into claims of ‘Laws’ of science. For instance, Newtonian mechanics
regularities became generalized as ‘Laws of Motion’. Regularities observed in nature – such
as the conservation of momentum energy – were punted by the West as the ‘Law of Energy’.
There is no ‘Law of Energy’, by the way. There are, however, regularities that we have come
to trust, like we reasonably trust that the sun will be up in the morning.
Set Theory makes for an interesting case regarding bad Western generalizations, punted as
exhaustive science. Especially when one considers how the othering gaze of racism is a
generalizing one too. One that during slavery said we have no soul. One that during
colonization claimed we are uncivilized. One that under apartheid appealed that God made
whites to rule over blacks. Everywhere one goes, a constant in all relations of white with their
different-other, is the fact that whites never interrogate their presumptive epistemic closures.
Never, not once, do they pause to think about the ontological wastelands they drive black
people to. Never, not once, do they pause to ponder the unthought of the world’s ethical
dilemmas in the presence of blacks. To whites, blacks (and our knowledge systems) are
characterized by a kind of perverse anonymity. White views towards blacks is possessed of
a generalization whose preconceptions destroy the necessary schism wedged (by existence
itself) between being and identity (Gordon, L. 2015. What Fanon Said).

That sort of ‘mind-made-up’ and ‘spoken for’ optimal rationality attitude towards us, is West’s
unspoken grammar. It is a grammar that has become the unconscious normative state of
existence, the missing (missing individuals of history) whose absence don’t seem to cause
any panic in the world, whatsoever. This is a character of the unconscious of the world we
live in, an unconscious common both in hard sciences (mathematics) and the racist sociality
of everyday life. In the hard-sciences, of set theory for instance, this foreclosing normative
tendency manifests itself thus:– the phenomenon that constitutes the ‘oneness’ of number
‘one’ is true and exhaustively holds for all scenarios where ‘one’ appears. Yet the truth, later
stumbled upon by mathematician characters like Kurt Gödel, contradicts that postulate. It
became evident much later in mathematics circles of set theory that, the founding postulates
pf set theory cannot, cannot, as they claim, exhaust the situatedness of ‘1+1’ for all cases
This would means ‘1+1 = 2’, is not a reliable universal fact as we might like to believe. A
simple fact that is impossible to overlook provided one doesn’t come too ‘mind-made-up’ to
each unique ‘1+1 ‘ situation. Further, this situatedness is something that every scenarios of
‘oneness’ makes simple within best practice of regularities.

For instance, no-one needs volume of mathematical postulates by Bertrand Russel to put
‘fish’ and ‘fish’ together, so to say. Take for an example three unique situations that deal with
adding up different fish: 1) over the fishmarket counter the ‘oneness’ of 1big fish +1 small
fish is best approximated by weight (that’s the regularity of trading in fish over the counter);
2) in the deep blue sea 1big fish + 1 small fish = big fish swallows small fish (that’s the
regularity of the food-chain underwater); in a hydroponic pond 1 big fish and 1 small fish
combine to fertilize plants growing in water (that’s the regularity of fish in a fishpond).
Pondering on those varied situational scenarios it is no wonder that Daniel Dennett cautions
in his book –Darwin’s Dangerous Ideas (1995) saying: “there is no such thing as philosophy-
free science; there is [evidently] science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board
without examination.” Too much baggage of Western metaphysics, myths and fables, has
been taken on board with little or no examination.

In the third week of Juanuary 2017, Proff Raju, who was hosted by Blackhouse Kollective
(BHK) during its pubic philosophy dialogues in Soweto, demonstrated his dedication as a
leading voice of epistemic dissent. He pledged that so long as he breathes, writes and
speaks, he will examine unexamined Western claims, especially in Mathematics – his field of
expertise. In professor Raju’s mission BHK finds synergistic links to advance our own work
in decolonization.

It is in keeping with our work to highlight not only ills of coloniality pertaining unjust military
conquest, regarding administrative conquest and economic conquest. But it is our place to
attend too, among those highlighted ills of coloniality, to one (ill) far more damaging in its
impact. That lasting damaging ill of colonial conquest is the conquest of knowledge. Our
knowledge systems remain conquered long after the military and white governing
administrators wielded their visible power.

Hence it is advisable that in order to arrest the tendency of our people to fawn at the feet of
colonial authority, we are required to expose the myth of the enemy’s superior thoughts.
Both in the battle field, so to say, and in the field of mathematics – the soft and so-called
hard sciences.

The rush by the west to generalize, say, by colour, and their hurry to occlude (seal-off) from
thought (or knowing), the knowing-modes of others, typifies a predilection towards optimal
rationality. It typifies a leaning towards a theodicy that is not only found in the battlelines of
physical war, but is indicative of an exclusionary stubbornness too, exclusions of the other
that are observed in the pages of Western mathematics. The entire occidental decadence for
that matter. Such optimal rationality, as we encounter in set theory’s postulates, comes
undone under scrutiny of scientific rigor just the same way racism’s bad faith becomes
exposed when one reveals the hidden history of black intellectual contribution to
development of science, engineering, medicine, architecture etc. long before what is now
known as Western civilization.

It is well and good to be invested in certain consistencies, but we are perfectly human even
more when we keep a healthy contradiction with set and rigid boundary. This tension of
bounded reasoning between the permeable and impermeable boundary is, and has always
been, the West’s Achilles tandem. As axiomatic premise of ‘one’ (in 1+1 = 2), in set
postulates, was revealed to be intricately imbricated to its underlying situational ‘oneness’,
for purposes of consistency and completeness, it similarly holds that if one (western norm)
seeks to diminish or swallow whole the ‘oneness’ (or uniqueness) of others, one ( read
eurocentricity) is bound to make a mockery of its own purported universals.

When we pay attention to contingency (as propounded by Sartre’s existentialist philosophy),

one notices that the othering gaze of the West, its racist dogma and bad faith, has its
inceptions in attempts to close the incompleteness and situatedness of existence by
inserting an ‘ought’ in the open/contingent lacuna of being’s ‘may’, being’s ‘balance’, being’s
‘justice’, being’s ‘righteousness’ being’s ‘ma’at principles’.

It is the character of Euro-modernity, both in the domain of the inanimate (mathematical

sets) and the living (black people, in our instance) to shun the situational. In other words, the
West is well adept at cutting the man to fit the cloth. The initial thrust and legacy of western
conquest is and has been tainted by the desire to homogenize, rather than synthesize. And
those who refuse to fit into a preconceived mould become thrown by the way side – thrown
into the ontological wasteland: just as West’s racist dogma gave marching orders to our
humanity; orders to, a priori, leave the table of Cartesian categories.

Now faced with the task to effect change from bottom up, professor Raju pledges the
support of his work. He pledges his time and expertise to use to weed out inferior traits of
coloniality deeply embedded in hard sciences.

In August, 2017, we expect a second leg visit that will see decolonial mathematics spread its
reach across the length and breadth of the land – a project that will help restore mathematics
to its originators (our people), bend it and make it speak the language of the people. Make
mathematics reflecting our genius by highlighting plurality of sciences and forms of hard
sciences our people have contributed and continue to contribute. This project of mathematic
from below, planned for August, is not the only decolonization intervention lined up in our
calendar of events. We are also planning a decolonial summer school in Soweto. The said
summer school is planned in collaboration with US based decolonial scholar, activist and
thoughtleader in the field.

Your revolutionary support to sustain the work of BHK financially and through human
resource will be greatly appreciated. Your contributions can be made into the following bank
account details:
Comrades and friends who bear testimony to our work by following our campaigns and
activities in person shall be reached by email communique for further detals.