CAS MT Seminar Series: Panashe Chigumadzi, Department of African and African American Studies, Brandeis University, USA - 'Conquer and Incorporate: Ubuntu as an ethics of war and conquest under the Nine Wars of Dispossession, 1779-1878'

Please join us for a talk by Dr Panashe Chigumadzi with discussants Dr Ayesha Omar and Prof Thulasizwe Simpson

Abstract

The idea of Ubuntu as an ethics of war and conquest would be jarring to South Africans who have lived through the post-apartheid era in which the likes of Mandela — who established the ANC's military wing —deployed Ubuntu as an official post-apartheid ideology of non-racial pacifism and amnesty to avoid civil war between black and white. Yet this is what isiXhosa-speaking military leaders and intellectuals articulated and demonstrated as they lived through the Nine Wars of Dispossession (1779-1878), in which British and Boer settlers waged war for the land, labour and cattle of Khoe and isiXhosa-speaking peoples. In this lecture, Chigumadzi argues that, amongst indigenous peoples of Southern Africa, Ubuntu provided an ethical grounding for war conduct and conquest—what she calls an indigenous ethics of “conquest and incorporation”. To do so, Chigumadzi examines isiXhosa-speakers’ invocations of Ubuntu in their written and oral responses to the material and metaphysical crises precipitated by settler colonial conquest’s “logic of elimination” and the British introduction of the ideology of total war to the Cape during the Wars of Dispossession. 

All are welcome to attend. This event will be followed by an informal drinks reception.