Liepollo Lebohang Pheko

I’m the Senior Research Fellow at an activist feminist think tank called the Trade Collective, which is situated in South Africa. Because of the nature of the work, we work both regionally and globally. Our work is at the intersection of decoloniality and its many manifestations in the areas of international trade, international economics, and international power relations. In the ways that globalization has impacted the movement of people - the movement of Black people in particular - and of ideas. The nub of it all is: Where has the Global South, or rather, the Majority World, particularly the African continent, been situated in the midst of all of these global conversations? Also, rethinking what we mean by “global” - that's very important, and centering the African continent, and Black and Brown people, in a new way in that globalism. I consider myself a decolonial Africanist feminist primarily. Adopting a decolonial lens is a way of assessing and analyzing how power works and how power is transacted between and amongst communities. It's also a way of critiquing the many manifestations, the many brutal, violent manifestations of white supremacy, some subtle, and some not so subtle.

I didn't start out per se as a race scholar. But my scholarship, like many other people’s, resides in lived experience. It is just so difficult to get away from the racism of economics, of economic policy, the racism of international relations, the racism that is constantly manifest and the violences that are constantly manifest in the ways in which people of the Majority World are still viewed as Other and peripheralized, the way we are viewed as guests on the global stage. 

I initially began as a lawyer, in public justice law, as a community lawyer. That’s when I was still in the diaspora; I spent 16 years living in the UK. Being an Other, being a “Third Culture Kid” of sorts, and also being the child of revolutionary dissidents who were activists, and who remain very committed to that, I was very much birthed into racial justice work. But  my circumstances in the UK meant that I always felt quite peripheralized. Being in a majority white world (culturally) also played an important role. Even though we lived in a community which was full of different Black and Brown people and different experiences, cultures, and different flavors of life, different forms of being, the majority narrative was still very much steeped in white supremacy, white masculinized supremacy. 

That led me, when I eventually made my way back to South Africa, to work in the public sector, in community development, community-based non governmental organizations, doing what we used to call “capacity building” - which is a problematic term; capacity strengthening is what it should be called. And that led me to ask other questions, questions other than how to logframe people's very complex, nuanced lived experiences into very neat “indices” and “key performance indicators” and measures of so-called success. These measures are done in a very colonized international development frame that is steeped in modernity and in the notion that African countries and the Majority World have to “catch up with something.” I am very cynical of this notion that we have to catch up with something. So that led me, about 20 years ago, into work that is more policy-centric. Development policy, public policy, national economic policy, and then international trade policy. In other words, my work is steeped in my experience as an African woman who has lived and worked in many places.

I’ve developed a deep interest in new forms of internationalism, for instance the study of the Bandung Project, as a majority-world, feminist project, an aspect of Bandung that many people have neglected. I’ve been juxtaposing that historical project in my analyses with what has become the BRICS [Brazil Russia India China South Africa] formation, the new manifestations of a multipolar world. These new configurations are steeped in a neoliberal market orthodox framing, which seems to be about Black and Brown people who want to imitate the mistakes, the excesses, the exclusivity of QUAD nations [a strategic formation including the USA, Australia, India, and Japan]. They are trying to be another America, another European Union, another Canada. And of course what's happened there is that the economic dogmas that they are reproducing are rooted in a history  of extraction, on settler colonialism, on genocide. That is not a model that we should ever aspire to. Nor could we ever. I don't think that as a moral ethic, people of the Majority World have the appetite to utilize that kind of brutal methodology of occupation, and claim that this is some form of a renaissance.

I believe it is imperative to center the Majority World as the real world, and, respectfully, to appreciate others (particularly those of the minority world) as the progeny of this world. We,  in fact, are the forebears. I take great confidence and great inspiration from the fact that the southern tip of the African continent, which I'm blessed to live in, and blessed to have heritage from, is, in fact, the cradle of all humanity. I believe that it's particularly urgent for us, for people from this region and from the Majority World, to re-center us as the real civilizational power. To show the rest of the world - which is actually the minority world, since most people in this world are not white, white men, or white able-bodied men. If we are going to survive the strange constellation of interests that is the present, it's particularly important for us to be the ones who are framing a world that is much more imbibed with communitarianism. 

Some people think that communitarianism equals communism; so be it. Socialism has to become fashionable again, as an important anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial construct. Because everything that is wrong with this world is as a result of the capitalist project, in all of its manifestations, whether it was through the act of carrying of enslaved African people to other worlds, through subjugating the ones who remained, or nullifying the humanity and the citizenship of Black women, African women, in particular, both on this continent and in the diaspora.

It's very important for us to maintain, as a personal ethic, not only a transdisciplinary, but always a Pan-African perspective. My perspective is that Africa is everywhere, in fact. My vision is for us to reclaim and to understand our own power. Once, we understand our own power, I think that as a people we will be absolutely unstoppable.