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Beyond the coloniser’s model of the world:

towards reworlding from the Global South

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

To cite this article: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2023) Beyond the coloniser’s model of the
world: towards reworlding from the Global South, Third World Quarterly, 44:10, 2246-2262,
DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2023.2171389

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Third World Quarterly
2023, VOL. 44, NO. 10, 2246–2262
https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2171389

Beyond the coloniser’s model of the world: towards

reworlding from the Global South
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The reworlding of the world from the Global South directly challenges Received 17 December 2021
the resilient coloniser’s model of the world. The coloniser’s model of the Accepted 18 January 2023
world sustains the contemporary hierarchical and asymmetrical modern
KEYWORDS
world system with Europe and North America at its apex of power. Black radical tradition
Consequently, reworlding from the Global South materialised as a coloniser’s model of the
counter-hegemonic initiative driven by struggles of the wretched of world
the earth for re-existence, liberation and freedom. The epic Haitian Haitian Revolution
Revolution (1791–1804), which embraced ‘Black’ as an identity of a sov- Global South
ereign people opposed to racism, enslavement and colonialism, forms reworlding
an ideal genealogy of reworlding from the Global South. This article re-existence
reflects on evolving ideological, identitarian, cultural, intellectual and
pan-African formations and initiatives of resisting empire and remaking
the world after the empire. What is highlighted are freedom dreams,
self-definition initiatives, critiques of the asymmetrically structured
modern world and struggles and visions of re-membering and re-hu-
manisation of the dismembered and dehumanised. The Black Lives
Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements, among many other initiatives
and formations, have carried over the struggles for reworlding the world
from the Global South.

Introduction
European imperialists, colonialists and capitalists made the modern world in their favour.
They ‘timed’ the modern world at the Greenwich meridian. They cartographed and re-named
it. They fought viciously to own the modern world and its resources. At the centre of colo-
nialism and imperialism were imperatives of conquest and ownership of the modern world.
However, the other inhabitants of the world did not succumb to this European hegemony
and aggrandisement. They resisted and set in motion counter-hegemonic re-worlding of
the world. Reworlding the world from the Global South is composed of two overlapping
initiatives. The first is the struggles against the empire in the service of the wretched on the
earth. It began with anti-slavery revolts and stretches right up to the current Black Lives
Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements. The comprador-bourgeois of the Global South
have been both spoilers and allies in the reworlding the world from the Global South. The

CONTACT Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni sabelo.ndlovu-gatsheni@uni-bayreuth.de, sjndlovugatsheni@gmail.com

© 2023 Global South Ltd
 Third World Quarterly 2247

second is what Lee (2019a) framed as ‘making a world after empire’ (remaking it in such a
way that it embraces the concerns of the people of the Global South). At the centre of this
reworlding from the Global South are the complex struggles, initiatives and revolutions as
well as imaginations, dreams, ideologies, summits and conferences ranged against imperi-
alism and gesturing towards freedom and self-determination spread across geospatial con-
texts (Kelley 2002; Prashad 2007; Getachew 2019).
Unlike the influential works of such scholars as Prashad (2007) that highlighted summitry
and conferences as the driving forces if not methodologies of advancing the ‘Third World
Project’, this article provides a conceptual contribution to the theme of reworlding the world
from the Global South focussing on the multifaceted Black Radical Tradition.1 Its entry point
is a critique of the coloniser’s model of the world – a model that continues to underpin and
sustain the hierarchical and asymmetrical modern world system with Europe and North
America at its apex of power. The critique entails outlining contours of the counter-hege-
monic reworlding from the Global South, beginning with a re-consideration of the founda-
tional significance of the epic Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). It was the Republic of Haiti
that embraced ‘Black’ as an identity of a sovereign people. Therefore, an overarching Black
Radical Tradition as defined by Cedric J. Robinson (2000) is adopted as a leitmotif of decol-
onisation as a framing for the multifaceted ideological, identitarian, cultural, intellectual and
diplomatic formations and initiatives driving reworlding from the Global South.
The decolonisation invoked here is that of ‘a project of reordering the world that sought
to create a domination-free and egalitarian international order’ (Getachew 2019, 2). This is
a long-standing and on-going decolonisation struggle and the decoloniality project as artic-
ulated by the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality project (Quijano 2000a; Mignolo 2000).
At its centre are converging existential and epistemic issues concerning those peoples who
had been subjected to racism, enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and heter-
onormative-patriarchal sexism. The operational strategy of analysis of this article is under-
pinned by a decolonial paradigm of connections rather than the colonial paradigm difference,
which enables a fresh re-reading of the history and politics of reworlding the world from
the Global South across space and time.
The paradigm of connections was defined by Bhambra (2014, 117) as ‘connected sociol-
ogies’ and it enables the piecing together of diverse iterations of reworlding from the Global
South as it challenges the insularity of intellectual, ideological and liberatory traditions. The
joints and connections include the common agendas and dreams of re-membering the
dismembered peoples, re-existence and self-determination cutting across generations, space
and time. The connections are also identified by Nimako (2014) in terms of common social
thought within the ‘Africana Intellectual Tradition’ mediated by ‘parallel lives and entwined
belongings’, which led him to conclude that ‘Africana intellectuals do not only draw resources
from each other but also they have travelled and lived in different locations Africa, the
Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe’ (Nimako 2014, 53).
Organisationally, the article is divided into five sections. The first section briefly makes a
case for reworlding from the Global South by distilling key modern problems bequeathed
to the contemporary world by the coloniser’s model of the world. The second section briefly
provides a conceptual framing of world and reworlding in general. The third section examines
the Haitian Revolution as a foundation of counter-hegemonic reworlding. The fourth section
turns to other initiatives informed and framed by Black Radical Tradition, which contributed
to the project of reworlding from the Global South. The fifth section is the conclusion, which
2248 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

pulls together the issues emerging from this article and underscores the fact that the strug-
gles for reworlding from the Global South remain unfinished.

The modern world at a crossroads

Knowledge and power play a central role in the making of the world (worlding). Resistance,
struggles and dreams of freedom also play a major role in remaking of the world (reworlding).
This is why we currently live in a modern world configured by a coloniser’s model and sus-
tained by coloniality of knowledge. An elaborate cognitive empire that survives through
invading mental universes of its targets reproduces it across epochs. The result is an episte-
mologically colonised modern world. Four realities provoke the urgent need to revisit the
very processes of worlding and reworlding the world. The first reality is that of systemic,
structural and institutional crisis in which the ‘coloniser’s model of the world’ has delivered
the earth and its inhabitants (Blaut 1993). The signature of all this is the current ecological
crisis. This reality is well captured by Chakrabarty (2021, 7–8) in terms of the passage of ‘the
planet’ through ‘the threshold of the Holocene’ and resulting in its definitive entry into ‘a
new geological epoch’ known as the ‘Anthropocene’, characterised by the collapsing into
each other of ‘human and nonhuman scales’. It is a reality that has seen even self-confessed
atheists betraying their own beliefs and harking back to ecclesiastical eschatological con-
cepts of ‘the end of times’, ‘Armageddon’ and ‘horses of the apocalypse’ as they try to make
sense of the murky current conjuncture and project into the mysterious future (Zizek 2011).
Even the leading world-systems theorist Wallerstein (1999, 1) postulated that the ‘world-sys-
tem’ as a ‘historical system’, ‘like all systems, [has] finite lives’ and concluded that it ‘has entered
into a terminal crisis’. This challenge is picked up by Mbembe and Sarr (2023, x), who highlight
‘two forms of disenchanted thinking’, namely ‘apocalyptic thinking’ and ‘technological mes-
sianism’ (technolatry).
Neocosmos (2016, viii) captures the second contemporary problem of exhaustion of
visions of liberation:

How are we to begin to think human emancipation in Africa after the collapse of the Marxist,
the Third World nationalist as well as the neoliberal visions of freedom? How are we to concep-
tualise an emancipatory future governed by a fidelity to the idea of a universal humanity in a
context where humanity no longer features within the ambit of thought and when previous
ways of thinking emancipation have become obsolete?

This point is also raised by Santos (2018, vii), who describes the present conjuncture as
characterised by acceptance of ‘the most morally repugnant forms of social inequality and
social discrimination’ on the one hand, and on the other by the fact that ‘the social and
political forces that used to challenge this state of affairs in the name of possible social and
political alternatives seem to be losing steam and, in general, appear to be everywhere on
the defensive’, resulting in ‘Modern ideologies of political contestation [being] largely
co-opted by neoliberalism’.
The third reality is that of epistemic crisis. Wallerstein (2004a, 58) rendered it as ‘uncer-
tainties of knowledge’ characterised by reopening of the ‘basic epistemological questions’
at ‘this turning point in our structures of knowledge’. This reality is very important and con-
cerning because knowledge plays a key role in the processes of worlding and reworlding,
with ‘ontology’ being made of ‘epistemology’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 135). The epistemic
 Third World Quarterly 2249

crisis is also highlighted by Santos (2014) in terms of exhaustion of what he terms the ‘north-
ern epistemologies’ signified by their loss of critical nouns. This failure to generate new nouns
has produced a problematic scholarship propelled by a methodology of addition of adjec-
tives to existing nouns, for example ‘rural development’ and ‘popular democracy’ (Santos
2014, 33–34). The fourth reality is well captured by Arturo Escobar (2004) in terms of a moder-
nity that has created a plethora of modern problems and is incapable of offering modern
solutions. It is within this context that the subject of reworlding the world beyond what the
coloniser’s model of the world delivered becomes urgent.

Politics of worlding and reworlding

Reworlding is about re-creating/remaking/reconstituting after centuries of de-constitution/
dismemberment and destitution of the other worlds and other lives of those who were
subjected to genocide, enslavement, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and heteropatri-
archal sexism. Mignolo (2021, 488) introduced the concepts of ‘constitution’ (Eurocentric
making of the second nomos of the earth) on the one hand, and ‘destitution’ (destroying
the first nomos of the earth) on the other. The economic destitution of the other parts of
the world is what led Rodney (1972) to formulate a thesis about how Europe underdevel-
oped Africa. Underdevelopment is a form of imposed destitution. This fundamentally meant
that the worlding of the world from a Eurocentric colonial/imperial vantage point entailed
looting of human and natural resources in the very making of what would become the
Global North characterised by opulence and the Global South defined by poverty.
It was the controversial Carl Schmitt (2006) who termed what was emerging from the col-
oniser’s model of the world ‘the second nomos of the earth’. The specific characteristics included
repopulation and re-territorialisation of the earth itself, which began with the invasion and
invention of the Americas as the ‘New World’. By ‘nomos’, Schmitt meant what Europeans
imposed on the earth as ‘international law’ together with modernist institutions and values.
Attesting to the modern Eurocentric process of worlding the world, Hopkins and Wallerstein
(1996, 2) delineated six ‘vectors of the world-system’, namely: ‘the interstate system, the struc-
ture of world production, the structure of the world labour force, the patterns of world human
welfare, the social cohesion of states, and the structures of knowledge’.
Such values and logics as the will to power, paradigm of difference, paradigm of war and
survival of the fittest underpinned the making of the modern world from a colonial/imperial
vantage point (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2022). A cognitive empire as an invader of the mental uni-
verse of its targets gives credence to the notion of the making the modern world as an
epistemic creation in the first instance (Thiong’o 1986). Empirically, Lowe (2015) posited that
at the centre of the making of the modern world was ‘the intimacies of four continents’ – that
is, the interlocking relationships of histories of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas – con-
stituted by racism, enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism and Western
liberalism.
Materially, the modern world is made of the ‘world economy’. Andre Gunder Frank (1998,
xxvi) described the ‘world economy’ as having
a skeleton and other structures; it has organs that are vital to its survival but whose ‘function’ is
also determined; it has cells that live and die and are replaced by others; it has daily, monthly,
and other short and long cycles (indeed, a life cycle); and it seems to be part of an evolutionary
(albeit not predetermined) scheme of things.
2250 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

Wallerstein (2004b, 23) elaborated on the ‘capitalist world-economy’ and explained that
‘it is a large geographic zone within which there is a division of labour and hence significant
internal exchange of basic or essential goods as well as flows of capital and labor’. This ‘cap-
italist world economy’ is part of what is called the ‘modern world-system’. While the concept
originally came from the work of Caribbean scholar Oliver C. Cox2 and was popularised by
Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989), its best articulation from the Global South comes from Ramon
Grosfoguel (2007, 2011), who distilled 16 constitutive hetararchies of power, which enabled
every aspect of human life to be subjected to it, be it sexuality, gender, spirituality, knowl-
edge, economy, authority or language.
Architecturally, the modern world is made of the world system and its ‘world orders’.
Kissinger (2014, 2) highlighted that ‘What passes for order in our time was devised in Western
Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia,
conducted without the involvement or even awareness of most other continents or civili-
zations’. He elaborated that ‘World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization
about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable
to the entire world’ (Kissinger 2014, 9). The key function of the world orders is to always give
the world system a new lease of life, shielding it from anti-systemic forces and counter-re-
worlding initiatives. Two examples of world orders will suffice. The first is the Westphalian
world order that gifted Europe with modern sovereign nation-states in 1648, after the Thirty
Years’ War. The other example is what Nandita Sharma (2020) depicted as the ‘Postcolonial
New World Order’, which emerged after 1945 as the modern world shifted its configuration
from empire to modern nation-states, including those of Africa.
The other important concept is what is known as the ‘colonial matrix of power’, which is
built on the concept of coloniality of power that was coined by Quijano (2000b). Mignolo
and Walsh (2018, 142) explained that the colonial matrix of power constitutes ‘a complex
structure of management and controls composed of domains, levels, and flows’ that sustains
a coloniser’s model of the world. All aspects of human life are subjected to the colonial matrix
of power in its hierarchies and hetararchies. But what must not be forgotten is that at the
centre of this colonial worlding were and are always on-going contestations, struggles, and
ructions as the targets of racism, colonisation, capitalism and heteropatriarchal sexism
resisted all forms of subjection.
Considering the realities of contestations and forces of reworlding from the Global South,
Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2022) distilled ‘three contending internationalisms’ as leitmotifs of world
and reworlding processes at a planetary scale. The first is ‘the imperial/colonial/liberal bour-
geois-inspired internationalism’, which forms the spine of the coloniser’s model of the world.
The second is the Marxist/socialist counter-hegemonic reworlding, which put the working
class at its centre and introduced the notion of a proletarian revolution as a counter to
bourgeois-centric order. The third is decolonisation internationalism, which foregrounded
the ‘wretched of the earth’ and envisioned a world freed from racism, enslavement, imperi-
alism, colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2022, 89–92).
The Marxist and decolonial initiatives and struggles have been contesting, collaborating
and complementing each other in laying the foundation of what is here defined as reworld-
ing from the Global South. Such Black figures as Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar
Cabral and others creatively embraced both Marxism and decolonisation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni
2022). The Marxist-decolonial collaborations were reflected not only in Black Radical Tradition
but also in the unfolding of the ‘Third World Project’ (Prashad 2007). The ‘Third World Project’
 Third World Quarterly 2251

itself unfolded in terms of Pan-African Congresses that began in 1900 as well as conferences
such as the League Against Imperialism Conference held in Brussels, Belgium, in 1927; the
Bandung Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955; the All African Conference held
in Accra, Ghana, in 1958; the Non-Aligned Movement Conference held in Belgrade, Yugoslavia,
in 1961; the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana, Cuba, in 1966, and many others where
re-worlding from the Global South was discussed (Prashad 2007).
Concretely, the Global South project of reworlding consists of multiple projects that were
mediated by both collaboration and contestations. The issues ranged from world peace to
disarmament, self-determination, development and diplomacy (non-alignment). Summitry
and conferences were part of the methodology of deliberation in the course of reworlding
from the Global South as well as ‘emplotting a universal history of the Global South’ (Lee
2019b, xxi). Therefore, the Global South invoked here is not a geographical one. It is better
defined by Santos (2018, vii) as ‘the anti-imperialist South’, which is ‘an epistemological, non-
geographical South, composed of many epistemological souths having in common the fact
that they are all knowledges born in struggles against capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy’.
The concept of the Global South is a successor to the outdated ‘Third World’ that domi-
nated during the course of the Cold War (1945–1989), whereby there was the ‘First World’
(Western democracies), the ‘Second World’ (Eastern socialist regimes) and the ‘Third World’
(colonies and postcolonies) (Prashad 2007; Ballestrin 2020). The Global South invoked here
is a political and epistemic project rich in alternatives to the coloniser’s model of the world
and committed to continue the unfinished decolonisation struggles for reworlding from a
subaltern locus of enunciation. Prashad (2007, xv) correctly posited that ‘The Third World
was not a place. It was a project’; and, by extension, the Global South is not a place – it is a
project of liberation.

The Haitian Revolution as a foundational counter-worlding process

Reworlding from the Global South was and is a complex project mediated by struggles.
There is the Indigenous vision of the world predicated on the defence of what can be
termed ‘the first nomos of the earth’ as a basis for reworlding the world (that is, the pre-
1500 non-modern pluralistic world of everyone). The Indigenous Peoples suffered geno-
cide, dispossession and loss of sovereignty. Reclamation of land and self-determination
emerged as the vision and grammar of Indigenous liberation. There is the African Diaspora
vision of a people who were subjected to racism and enslavement as dismembering
processes. What Europe was doing from the fifteenth through to the nineteenth centuries
involved the kidnapping of men and women from Africa and reducing them ‘into
human-objects, human-commodities’, ‘human-money’ (Mbembe 2017, 2). Abolition has
emerged from this history as another popular grammar of liberation for a people strug-
gling to free themselves from enslavement and its afterlives. Robinson (2000) correctly
traced what he termed the Black Radical Tradition to the revolts by enslaved people who
never accepted being redefined and reduced to non-human status. This resistance fed
into making African Diaspora the centre of the rise of ‘revolutionary Black intelligentsia’
whose ideas consolidated the Black Radical Tradition as an anchor for reworlding from
the Global South.
While the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is the earliest expression of counter-reworlding
against racism, enslavement, capitalism, and domination, it has been open to various
2252 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

interpretations. For example, Gruner (2008, 1–2) defines it as a revolution that was ‘more
French than the French one’ and was spearheaded from a ‘periphery’ that was excluded from
the universal, and characterises it as ‘a complex and labyrinthine heterotopia’ predicted on
re-founding upon ‘counter-modern’ criteria (see also Gruner 2019). This is one reading of the
Haitian Revolution among many that locates it within ructions of modernity and
Enlightenment rather that the Black Radical Tradition. What emerges poignantly from this
analysis is that for those on forefront of reworlding from the Global South, appropriation of
modernist ideas for liberatory purposes was a deliberate strategy.
The Haitian Revolution is also widely invoked within Black Radical Tradition because Saint
Domingo was the first modern slave colony to fight for and win its independence. It occupies
a place of pride at the centre of Black people’s struggles and initiatives for ‘re-membering’
(Thiong’o 2009). Re-membering means picking up the pieces and reconstituting the lives
of the ‘dismembered’/dehumanised and is a ‘a quest for wholeness’ (Thiong’o 2009, 35). The
Haitian Revolution is one such ‘re-membering’ struggle. This is why Trouillot (1995, 82) under-
scored its revolutionary significance, distinguishing it from the French Revolution as it chal-
lenged ‘the iron bonds of the philosophical milieu in which it was born’ and subverted ‘the
ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment’.
Trouillot (1995, 88) highlighted that the Haitian Revolution constituted ‘the ultimate test to
the universalist pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions. And they both
failed’.
Casmir (2020) emphasises that the Haitian Revolution reflected the ‘power and beauty
of the sovereign people’ as makers of the world of themselves through a decolonial revolu-
tion. The concept of the ‘power and beauty of the sovereign people’ is deployed to capture
the fact that though the people were physically captured and enslaved they never surren-
dered to their redefinition as non-beings and they never lost the memory, knowledge, his-
tory, culture and ideology of life they carried from Africa as resources for struggle for
‘re-existence’ (Casmir 2020, 3). Casmir (2020, 4) defined

the Haitian Revolution as the destruction of a slave system through the creation of a national
community. Women played a fundamental role in the foundation of this new community,
which was based on a family structure embedded within a broader social environment created
precisely to ensure this structure could flourish.

Casmir (2020, 4) added that ‘This is the most beautiful Haitian creation: the simultaneous
invention of a nation, of the conditions of its social and economic existence, and of the
institutions that could guarantee its survival’. What is revolutionary and indeed decolonial
about Casmir’s intellectual interventions on the Haitian Revolution is that he distinguishes
reworlding as conceived by the elites who led the revolution but their mental universe and
consciousness were not delinked from the prevailing Euromodernist universe and that of
the sovereign people who did not want reconstitution of anything close to what they had
fought against including even the imperial language. ‘The nation appeared in opposition
to the colonial/modern state’, posited Casmir (2020, 322).
At the centre of the Haitian Revolution as a leitmotif of reworlding from the Global South
were people who ‘had passed through the screen of the concrete experiences of the plan-
tation and the wars of independence’ and ‘converged towards an oppressed culture that
was shared by the insurgent cultivators and offered the norms and principles necessary for
 Third World Quarterly 2253

the unfolding of the social life characteristic of independent Haiti’ (Casmir 2020, 331).
Consequently, ‘A new world was built in Haiti after 1804’ and ‘The imperial West condemned
this universe. But gradually, the prisoners of the slave traders built their own social order,
their own world in the Americas’ (Casmir 2020, 331–332). One notices that in Casmir’s analysis
of the Haitian Revolution the premium is placed on ‘national sovereignty’ rather than ‘state
sovereignty’, with ‘the people’ drawing from their Indigenous knowledge coming from Africa
being deployed towards the liberatory agenda of ‘taking charge of oneself, and in this way,
toward the autonomy of the oppressed group’s community and family’ (Casmir 2020, 332).
Casmir drew a number of important conclusions on the Haitian Revolution which advance
the case for reworlding from the Global South. The first is that the foundation of the reworld-
ing from the Global South is the struggle for liberation by the oppressed people. The second
is that for a revolutionary reworlding to take place there must be a purposeful invention of
the people. This is why Casmir (2020, 350) posited that ‘The beauty of the Haitian Revolution
comes from its invention of a people’. What has to be added is that the very ‘concrete con-
ditions surrounding the formation of the Haitian people made the independent state of
Haiti unique’ (Casmir 2020, 437). The third conclusion is that a genuine revolutionary reworld-
ing has to be grounded in a particular epistemology and knowledge opposed to Eurocentric
epistemology which produced the second nomos of the earth. This is why Casmir empha-
sised that ‘The people anchored their sovereignty by exercising it locally’ and did not look
to imperial France for inspiration, and that ‘It was produced through local social relations
that were sufficiently cohesive to impose themselves on the external world’ (Casmir
2020, 351).
The fourth is that underpinned by the ‘oath at Bois Caiman’, that the Haitian Revolution,
unlike the French Revolution, delivered a decolonial sociality with rights of human beings
at its centre and never distinguished between citizens and non-citizens (Casmir 2020, 348).
This is why Casmir (2020, 348) concluded that ‘The revolution embraced the sovereignty of
the entire nation’. Even though the Haitian nation was born into a hostile colonial world and
has been besieged by a barrage of problems ranging from military coups and ‘natural disas-
ters’, which are never natural, it continues to exist because of its strong foundations in the
sovereign people. The Haitian Revolution inspired the emergence of the Black Radical
Tradition as an epistemic framework of reworlding from the Global South.

Black Radical Tradition in reworlding from the Global South

The Black Radical Tradition is the political and epistemic framework underpinning the ini-
tiatives and struggles for reworlding from the Global South. Robinson (2000) revealed how
at the centre of the Black Radical Tradition subsisted various intellectual-cum-cultural and
ideological productions and grammars of liberation including a particular version of Marxism
known as ‘Black Marxism’. The Black Radical Tradition exists as a long-standing overarching
grammar of liberation consisting of epistemic, existential, political, ethical and intellectual
formations and initiatives made of diverse but related responses, critiques and subversion
of Eurocentric epistemology and opposed to the coloniser’s model of the world. Lewis R.
Gordon (2009, 1) defined it from a philosophical vantage point as the ‘Africana philosophy
of existence’/’Existentia Africana’ – a reference to ‘the set of questions raised by the historical
project of conquest and colonization that has emerged since 1492 and the subsequent
struggles for emancipation that continue to this day’.
2254 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

At the centre of Black Radical Tradition one can include such re-membering initiatives as
Black feminist thought, decolonial feminism, Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism, Rastafarianism,
Ethiopianism, Negritude, African Personality, Pan-Africanism, African nationalism, African
humanism, African socialism, the Black Consciousness Movement, and the African
Renaissance as well as the most recent formations embodied by the Black Lives Matter and
Rhodes Must Fall movements (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021). The list includes both continental
and Diaspora re-membering initiatives. These initiatives and formations were interlinked
and overlapped because they were provoked by common existential questions to do with
dismemberment and dehumanisation of African/Black people. Thiong’o (2009, 5) used the
concept of dismemberment to depict the imperial/colonial ‘act of absolute social engineer-
ing’ as ‘the foundation, fuel, and consequence of Europe’s capitalist modernity’.
The first process of dismemberment that haunts those who have been subjected to racism,
genocide, colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchal sexism is that of questioned
humanity (‘coloniality of being’) (Wynter 2013; Maldonado-Torres 2007). It is a foundational
dismemberment that produced Whiteness as a badge of supremacy and Blackness as a sign
of deficiency. The second process of dismemberment is rendered by Thiong’o (2009, 5) in
terms of ‘the African personhood’ that was ‘divided into two halves: the continent and its
diaspora’ by enslavement. The enslaved Africans who were forcibly transported as cargo
across the Atlantic Ocean suffered a further dismemberment: ‘now separated not only from
his/her continent and his/her labour but also from his/her sovereign being’ (Thiong’o 2009, 6).
The third was the scrambling for and partitioning of Africa legitimised by the Berlin
Conference of 1884–1885, where the continent was ‘literally fragmented and reconstituted’
‘into British, French, Portuguese, German, Belgian, and Spanish Africa’ (Thiong’o 2009, 5).
This form of dismemberment opened the way for expropriation of land by colonial govern-
ments and the resultant dispossession of the Africans/Black of their means of livelihood,
especially in White settler colonies of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, Kenya, Algeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. It constituted another form of dismem-
berment. It is these dismemberments that provoked the decolonial initiatives and struggles
for ‘re-membering’ as a key leitmotif of reworlding from the Global South.
In the African Diaspora one finds a preoccupation with finding one’s roots and ancestry
as a common departure point in the ‘re-membering’ struggles. The popular Rastafarian music
is a testimony to this. The work of Edouard Glissant highlights the complex politics of the
search for identity within a context where the people had been separated from Africa by
the ocean (see Bongie 2009, 90–92). With regard to the Caribbean, Leservot (2009, 42–43)
noted the complexities of reworlding symbolised by ‘respective theories of antillanite and
creole’ which ‘seeks to free the Caribbean from ambiguous and difficult links with Europe,
Africa or Asia (the respective ancestral lands of the Caribbean whites, blacks, Hindus, Chinese
and Syro-Lebanese)[;] both theories also neglect the strong links between continental and
insular Americas’.
Within the United States of America one can identify the Harlem Renaissance as a re-re-
membering and reworlding struggle. Its vision as articulated by Burden-Stelly (2016, 3) was
‘a pronouncement of an alter[n]ative narrative of modernity from which Blacks had been
historically foreclosed … an enunciation of radicalism in the 1920s’. It was a means of har-
nessing race and culture (weapon of culture) for the purpose of achieving full equality and
combating discrimination, and of conveying ‘a modern, radical and internationalist image
of black masculine subjectivity’ (Burden-Stelly 2016, 3). The ‘dean’ of Harlem Renaissance
 Third World Quarterly 2255

was Alain Locke. The ironic part of the Harlem Renaissance is that it embraced lock, stock
and barrel the notion of race to the extent that Locke (1925, 23) stated that:

This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life. It seems to be the outcome
of the reaction to proscription and prejudice; an attempt, fairly successful on the whole, to
convert a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into an incentive. (Chad Williams
quoted in Burden-Stelly 2016, 3)

Locke and the Harlem Renaissance emphasised the need for ‘a full facelift and a complete
break with the enslaved past’ so as to claim modernity (Locke 1925, 15). What the Harlem
Renaissance underscored and asserted was Black presence in America not as an ‘Other’ but
as an authentic modern American located in universal subjectivity.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was one of the earliest advocates of mobilising Black people for
purposes of re-membering them into a transcendental identity called Africans covering the
continent and the Diaspora. His political imagination was fired by the injustices ‘done to my
race because it was black’; hence, he posed soul-searching questions:

Where is the black man’s government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his
President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs? I could not
find them, and then I declared I will help to make them. (quoted in Blaisdell 2004, 3)

Thiong’o (2009, 35–36) noted that at the centre of Garveyism lay ‘the quest for wholeness,
a quest that has underlain African struggles since the Atlantic slave trade’, and elaborated
that his vision was ‘embodied in the title of Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro
Improvement Association’, which sought to mobilise and empower Black people economi-
cally and consciously so that they claimed ‘Africa for Africans’.
Garveyism as a reworlding process was complicated and multi-faceted. Burden-Stelly
(2016, 5) understood Garveyism as ‘a radical articulation of nationalist and separatist ideology
that critiqued the ways in which white supremacy as a technology of coloniality, national
exclusion, and European imperialism precluded Black people from claiming their place in
modern civilization’. Unlike the Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism was not concerned with
integration into American White identity. Garvey’s strong belief in race purity and his agita-
tion for a separate and parallel Afro-modernity able to overcome imposed racial disabilities
became the most controversial part of his philosophy of re-membering (Garvey 1947). Garvey
strongly articulated the idea of a great Africa. To him, it was

by accident and unfavourable circumstances [that] the Negro lost hold of the glorious civiliza-
tion that he once dispensed, and in the process of time reverted into savagery, and subse-
quently became a slave, and even to those who he once enslaved, yet it does not follow that
the Negro must always remain backward. (Garvey 1913, 22)

In Garvey’s thinking, Black people had to be autonomous in a double sense. First, they
must free themselves from backwardness. Second, Africans have to rescue themselves from
European ‘unrighteousness’ (Garvey 1913, 29). Politically, the realisation of African freedom
would be symbolised by the establishment of ‘a black imperial state’ capable of rivalling and
combating European imperialism (Burden-Stelly 2016). To this trans-territorial ‘black imperial
state’ would belong all Black people scattered all over the world in unity. To achieve this
objective, Garvey strongly believed that violence would be the means of claiming the
‘Motherland’ (Jones 2013, 38). In terms of the location of the ‘black republic’, Africa as the
2256 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

original site of civilisation was the only space with the potential to offer real and genuine
freedom and self-determination. This is what Garvey said: ‘The Seat of Empire Northward
Moves was true to history and poetry during the period of Negro decline. But its Northern
limit has been reached and with the revival of Negro activity its path has again turned South.
For Empire has not only a Seat but a Home and Home is in Africa’ (quoted in Blaisdell 2004,
29). Garvey was critical of those who wasted time on pursuing the objective of integration
in Europe, America and West Indies, claiming such a belief was focussed on an impossible
goal. To him, White people would never concede equal rights to Blacks.
To realise his dream, Garvey evolved an economic strategy to realise what one could
call ‘black capitalism’. This involved laying a strong and autonomous economic foundation.
The Black Star Line Corporation founded in 1919 was the vehicle to realise economic
autonomy as a basis for political autonomy. Blacks dispersed across the world would be
connected through business and trade for them to be counted within the mercantile and
commercial world. However, the Black Star venture collapsed and Garvey considered the
dirty hands of European governments who were offended and opposed to the spirit of
Black racial consciousness and big American companies opposed to ‘Negro’ entrepreneur-
ship to be responsible (Garvey 1947, 145). Garveyism as a reworlding idea became a ‘trav-
elling’ theory of liberation. It reached all the corners of Africa and beyond. It laid a strong
foundation for Black consciousness and pan-Africanism. It galvanised other re-membering
initiatives.
Edward Wilmot Blyden was another active intellectual committed to reworlding from the
vantage point of Black experience and African location. One of his working concepts was
that of the ‘African Personality’, which emphasised the unique features of what he understood
as the ‘Black race’ (Blyden 1887). Those unique features would enable Africans to reconstitute
themselves after centuries of dismemberment. The features included communalism and
deep spirituality. Blyden (1887, 276) emphasised the distinctiveness of Africans from
Europeans, arguing that the ‘Negro’ is not the ‘European in embryo’. Like many others who
were actively involved in reworlding from the Global South, Blyden was caught up in what
Mudimbe (1998, 98) described as ‘the ambiguities of an ideological alternative’. Blyden is
also credited for laying the foundation for Negritude because he propounded a revolution
that emphasised African values, cultures and languages without necessarily discarding the
realities of mixing of cultures.
At another level, Blyden is also credited for introducing the idea of strategic synthesis of
Christian civilisation, African civilisation and Islamic civilisation in the reworlding process,
thus becoming the pioneer of the concept of ‘triple heritage’, which was coined by Mazrui
(2005). If one were to summarise Blyden’s ideas, they would fall into six broad categories.
The first is his strong concern about the common destiny of the ‘Negro race’. He shares this
concern with Garvey and many other advocates of Black liberation. The second concern was
about the uniqueness of the thinking (mentalities) of the African, and this one indeed made
Blyden a father of Negritude. The third concern related to the role of religion in the life of
African people. This was another aspect that Blyden thought distinguished Africans from
other races. The third idea propounded by Blyden was that of the inherent socialist character
of African societies. This thinking is a precursor to the ideologies of African socialism that
dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed forward by such African leaders as Julius Nyerere,
Leopold Sedar and many others. The fifth idea of remembering cascading from Blyden’s
writings was that of ‘Africa for Africans’, which directly resonated with Garveyist
 Third World Quarterly 2257

pan-Africanism that privileged Africa as the only seat of African self-determination and self-
rule. The sixth was his agitation for African institutions of higher education with a curriculum
that was decoupled from the race-poison.
The other important epistemic, cultural and, indeed, ideological resource in the reworld-
ing from the Global South was offered by Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aime Cesaire and is
known as the Negritude movement. Negritude emerged at a time when those who had
bought into the French colonial ideology of assimilation realised that it was an illusion
informed by notions of denial of the existence of Black and African people. Senghor posited
that this Black and African awakening to the deceptions of French colonialism happened
between the two World Wars (see Ahluwalia 2001, 54). This awakening took the form of
searches for authentic Black identity within a context of dismemberment. This is why Thiam
(2014, 5) correctly understood Negritude as predicated in an ‘Afri-centred’ conception of the
human that was denied by colonialism. This is also why Cesaire, who became an active
member of the Negritude movement, posed the ‘tormenting questions, who am I? Who are
we? What are we in this world?’ (Thiam 2014, 2). Identitarianism was at the core of Negritude
as a reworlding formation from the Global South.
The reworlding elements of the Negritude movement are highlighted by Wilder (2015)
and involving rethinking Frenchness beyond its narrow colonial articulations. At the centre
of Negritude was a double agenda of affirmation of Africanity (Negrotude/return to the
source) and a critique of exclusionary Euromodernity as it undercut the planetary co-pres-
ence of diverse peoples (Wilder 2015, 8). Senghor as a leading advocate of Negritude evolved
a planetary vision of a way of out colonialism which included embracement of both partic-
ularism and universalism. He emphasised the contributions of Africa to universal civilisation,
particularly bringing in humanism. To Senghor, the universal was to be made of contributions
from all human civilisations (see Wilder 2015, 51–52).
Senghor, therefore, had a broader vision of decolonisation that far exceeded the African
nationalist search for national sovereignty. Decolonisation entailed reworlding the world
through rehumanisation and global restructuring to reflect and accommodate even those
who had been colonised as citizens (Wilder 2015, 59). The colonisers and colonised peoples
had to find each other across the racial divide so as to live together within a new inclusive
transnational democratic arrangement (Wilder 2015, 59).
The proposed rehumanisation agenda has to transcend the rationalist Eurocentric defi-
nitions of being human and tap into the African gift of a humanity where spirit, feeling and
other values of human warmth would be deployed (Wilder 2015, 61). This is why Senghor
envisaged a postcolonial world made of values from various civilisations and underwritten
by a democratic union of people irrespective of colour (Wilder 2015, 224). Senghor’s vision
of a re-worlded world consisted of diverse civilisations making donations to the universal
civilisation as a crucible (Wilder 2015, 142–143).
Consequently, Senghor was against racism and proposed a new humanism that was free
from both imposed superiority and inferiority complexes (Wilder 2015, 162). Only this way
would the colonised and coloniser be reborn, through a dialogical and dialectical decolo-
nisation process, as partners (Wilder 2015, 162). To Senghor, both colonisers and colonised
bore gifts for each other. Senghor also embraced Marxism, and this enabled him to interpret
decolonisation as a third revolution ranged against capitalism (Wilder 2015, 228). He saw
the possibility to combine Negritude and Socialism as building blocks in the creation of a
better world (Wilder 2015, 149). The human encounters enabled by colonialism for Senghor
2258 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

formed a good basis to re-world the world away from the coloniser’s model. The re-worlded
world would be ‘a Métis world’ (Senghor quoted in Wilder 2015, 161).
Therefore, Senghor was critical of both European colonialism and African nationalism as
worlding processes. He envisioned a decolonisation that far transcended the notion of
national status in a small nation-state in a world where regional integrations such as pan-Eu-
ropeanism were emerging (Wilder 2015, 244). To him, small independent nation-states were
bound to fail – even though he ended up as the founding leader of independent Senegal.
Diagne (2023, 14) depicted Senghor as an advocate of an open definition of Africanity that
would include Arabs and that he appreciated hybridity as an essential ingredient of reworld-
ing the world.
Besides Negritude there was also pan-Africanism, which emerged as a major and influ-
ential reworlding initiative in the Diaspora. In 1897, as the colonialists were busy finalising
the partitioning of Africa amongst themselves, Henry William Sylvester from the West Indies
formed the African Association in London and three years later planned and hosted the first
Pan-African Congress in London (Adejumobi 2001; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2014). For the first time,
Black people who were on the receiving end of racism and colonialism gathered at the centre
of a leading colonial power (British empire) to discuss problems of enslavement of Black
people, socio-economic and political conditions of Blacks in the Diaspora and the question
of independent nations governed by Black people (Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia), as well as
the problems of imperialism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2014, 24). The result of this first pan-African
congress was that William E. B. Du Bois, the shinning intellectual light of Black radical tradition
and an indefatigable pan-Africanist, drafted an address ‘To the Nations of the World’ high-
lighting the problems of colonialism and demanding the ‘protections of rights and dignity
of Black people’ (Killingray 2011, 348).
Five more Pan-African Congresses were organised by Du Bois between 1919 and 1945,
with the most significant one being that held in Manchester in the United Kingdom in 1945,
as it attracted African leaders who were fighting against colonialism, such as Kwame Nkrumah
and Jomo Kenyatta (Adejumobi 2001). It marked a shift from demanding reforms of colo-
nialism to the open demand for decolonisation. Pan-Africanism intersected with anti-colonial
African nationalism to advance a vision of ‘worldmaking after empire’ (Getachew 2019). With
the attainment of political independence, the founding leaders of the newly independent
states in Africa, Asia and elsewhere intensified their struggles for reworlding from the Global
South, including forming federations and new formations like the Organisation of African
Unity (OAU) in 1963. The OAU agenda has been carried over by the African Union (AU),
launched in 2002.
The key signatures of these struggles included the Bandung Conference of 1955, which
brought Asians and Africans together to remake the world in their own interest while reject-
ing impositions of the superpowers (Soviet Union and United States); the Non-Aligned
Movement formed in 1961 as a concretisation of the desire for autonomous diplomatic space
by the smaller states; and the persistent demand for a New International Economic Order
(NIEO) was conducive and enabling for autonomous development of the Global South.
Considering all these initiatives and many others, it becomes clear why Getachew (2019, 2)
concluded that decolonisation was constituted by dual projects of ‘nation-building’ and
‘worldmaking’.
It is not possible to discuss all the initiatives and struggles that were and are concerned
with reworlding the world from the Global South in an article like this. Suffice it to say that
 Third World Quarterly 2259

such contemporary initiatives as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are part of
continuing struggles and formations carrying forward the agenda of contesting the hege-
mony of Europe and North America on the one hand and advancing the interests of the
Global South on the other. The establishment of an institution like the BRICS Bank is a direct
counter to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that are located in the Global
North and have been used as instruments to expand what Gildea (2019) termed the ‘global
financial republic’ that has kept the countries of the Global South entrapped in debt. While
this is a form of ‘dewesternization’, it indicates that reworlding the world from the Global
South is an on-going struggle characterised by trials and tribulations. The Black Lives Matter
and Rhodes Must Fall movements are another indicator of continuity in struggles of reworld-
ing the world from the vantage point of the wretched of the earth.

Conclusion: the on-going project of liberation

Hopefully this article has provided insights into the complex politics of the reworlding from
the Global South and has demonstrated its long pedigree in Black Radical Tradition. What
has poignantly emerged is that reworlding the world from the Global South remains a work
in progress mainly because of the resilience of the coloniser’s model of the world and its
mutating cognitive empire. The cognitive empire reproduces the coloniser’s model of the
world across space and time. This is why revisiting the project of reworlding from the Global
South is important to demonstrate that the bold and brave modern world that was set afoot
by Euromodernity from the fifteenth century, while being produced and reproduced, is
currently at a crossroads, besieged by systemic, ideological, institutional, normative and
epistemic crises. These crises make the reworlding from the Global South necessary as it
might offer alternatives as it tries to advance through a double move of critique and recon-
stitution of the destituted worlds.
At another level, the resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century, which
is very critical of the asymmetrically structured and configured modern world system, provided
the reworlding of the world from the Global South a renewed strength. Its signature formations
are the Black Lives Matter and the Rhodes Must Fall movements that have turned their fire on
the afterlives of racism, enslavement, colonialism, racial capitalism and heteropatriarchal sexism.
The problematic and limits of the oscillation of modern subjects between the world racism,
enslavement and colonialism enabled and the liberated world envisioned after colonialism and
imperialism has to be escalated to a rupture so as to enable the realisation of the reworlding of
the world from the Global South. Therefore, a second sight on the coloniser’s model of the world
has engulfed the planet Earth, pinpointing the problem of global coloniality as that which makes
it impossible for a postracial, post-capitalist, post-abyssal, postcolonial and post-heteropatriarchal
world to emerge. The reworlding of the world from the Global South carries the potential to
enable a new pluriversal world after the empire. Reconnecting the long-standing struggles and
the contemporary struggles across space and time has become urgent.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors of this special issue for their comments and encour-
agements, which enabled me to substantially improve this paper from its initial draft. But I take respon-
sibility for all the views expressed in this paper.
2260 S. J. NDLOVU-GATSHENI

Disclosure statement
The author declares no conflicts of interest with respect to research, authorship and publication of
this article.

Funding
This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number EXC 2052/
1-390713894).

Notes on contributor
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor/Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on
Africa and Vice-Dean of Research in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of
Bayreuth in Germany. He is Professor Extraordinary at the Centre of Gender and African Studies at the
University of the Free State in South Africa, Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Leadership
and Transformation at the University of South Africa, and Honorary Professor in the School of
Education (Education and Development Studies) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
His latest major publications include Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization
(Routledge, 2018); Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over A New Leaf
(Routledge, 2020); Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas
(Routledge, 2022), co-edited with Morgan Ndlovu; and Reworlding the World from the Global South:
Beyond Coloniality of Internationalism (CODESRIA Books, under review).

Notes
1. On this concept, cf. Robinson (2000) and Kelley (2002). It is deployed here as a reference to a wide
variety of initiatives and struggles across geospatial terrains of the Global South in search of
re-existence, against racism, enslavement, colonialism, capitalism and heteropatriarchal sexism.
2. Wallerstein (2000) acknowledged that the concept of the world system was coined by Oliver C.
Cox.

ORCID
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5477-607X

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