2025-2026 COOP study group ~ Native, Primitive, Insurgent – Arrows of God
Tutor team:
Guests:
tba
Partner Institution:
Student participants:
Anahi Saravia Herrera, Dana Andrei, Despina Sanida-Krezia, Egle A. Benkunskytė, Fagner Lima, Gianfranco Colla, Muyang Teng, Nanna Stigsdatter Mathiassen, Ratri Notosudirdjo, Zhuang Leng
Student led reflection:
Chronicles
Program:
Native, Primitive, Insurgent – Arrows of God
Introduction:
“A Christian with a gun in the armed forces is one thing–he might end up with a spear in his back; but a missionary with a bible and a well-meaning smile who speaks of “eternal love” is wholly different. It takes a great deal of political sophistication to recognize him as a potential menace." Marimba Ani
Our Claim
We begin this COOP study group from the premise that the primary violence of the colonial regime is the violence that sustains. It is the imposition of the colonisers mode of relations, the religious mythology, the imposed reordering of relations between humans and nature, between humans and one another–the severance of the relationship between a people and the sacred. This persists as the superstructure which in fact, must precede the militarist encounter with the colonial regime and which also serves as the moral and logical justification for the conditions which we are forced to encounter first and foremost on the plane of material reality.
Marimba Ani, a scholar whose pre-eminent study titled Yurugu, showed us the role of Judeo-Christian cosmology in shaping the terrain and serving as the ideological pillars of the expansion of western empire. Judeo-Christian cosmology is a dominant functionary in the West’s attempt at exporting its own particularities of interrelation as a universal, civilised and humanitarian ideal. In Yurugu, Ani cautioned us against the duplicitous nature of the Judeo-Christian rhetoric and urged us to always be alert to the fact that the distance between the rhetoric and the behaviour we observed was never a failure, but the intended consequence. As Africans, we have dealt with the material as well as immaterial consequences of the imposition of this cosmology. Our material predicament is inherited from our ancestors–exile, police violence, labour exploitation and land theft are underpinned by an immaterial superstructure–the cultural and spiritual domination of Judeo-Christian universalism, which systematically severs indigenous relationships with the earth, community, and the sacred and imposes its cultural embarrassments; primitive, heathen, criminal, pagan.
David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary who is credited as the first European to cross Central-South Africa and hailed as the man who opened up the continent is also famous for his decree to bring the dignity of the three ‘C’s to the savages of the African continent–”Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation”. For the objects of Livingstone’s saviorism, a different trinity was to be employed. Chinua Achebe, in his most famous work, Things Fall Apart, bears witness to the superstructure of violence and the subtle infrastructures of domination which are set into place at the initial point of encounter with the logics and machinations that bring Livingstone’s three C’s to his fictional village of Umuofia. Livingstone’s three C’s are delivered through the trinity of the “Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”, but in Achebe’s words:
“... there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye,Okonkwo's first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul-the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikernefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth.”
Things Fall Apart presents to us a conflict, a collision course which is situated not at the point of encounter with the forces of the occupation’s soldiers. In fact, it presents a study of the failures of force and the binaries of understanding that it inevitably falls into. While wielding poetry, Achebe also cautions us against its precision and its seductiveness. He situates the conflict upon the plane of the conscious and begs us to ask the question: what happens when the militant sets down their weapon? Does the underlying violence of the colonial regime abate? What happens when your own people take up the uniform of the regime’s police? What happens when the missionaries are black? Inadvertently, he provides a response to Ho Chi Minh’s claim that “the poet must also know how to lead an attack.”
We argue that the primary violence of colonialism is the violence of ideological domination and the destruction of the consciousness of a people. It is the violence that persists and that which ruptures the pre-existing set of relations. As a consequence, the work we must do is to contend with the sequence of material injustices that are set into motion while simultaneously doing the work of attempting to restitute cosmologies, belief systems and forms of relation that precede this primary violence and reconstituting them within an understanding that is understanding of the dynamism of our times and resists tendencies to reify and to fetishise what is lost. Fanon said it best when he warned colonised people to avoid the “mummified fragments of the past which hypnotise us” and instead to “look to the past as a way of opening up the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope”.
As SAVVY Contemporary, a migrant led cultural organisation, this is the dialectic upon which our call to action rests. It is in this vein that we study the work of those who come before us in order to better understand the circumstances of the world we inhabit such that we might make sense of our own place in it and sharpen the weapons at our disposal. We previously studied the Medu Art Ensemble, an organisation of cultural workers and militants, who, from a position of exile, fought to overthrow apartheid regime of South Africa. We undertook a materialist analysis of Medu's anti-apartheid struggle–their posters, the newsletters, the exiled cultural worker and the aesthetic/stylistic demands of socialist-realism and internationalist solidarity. We looked to them as a mirror to understand how best to wield our own pillars at SAVVY, from publishing, to community centred programming, from film (United Screens), to radio (SAVVY ZAAR).
This study group builds on our previous focus on the material and also looks at the immaterial, the surreal, the fantastic and the magical in anti-colonial and black liberation movements. We will study artistic and cultural attempts to address that primary epistemological and superstructural violence of the colonial encounter. As an inquiry into possibilities of epistemological and cosmological restitution, we will engage the following points of interest:
The Quilombos and the Palenques: As societies of fugitive resistance that re-established African social and spiritual structures on new soil.
The Black Panther Party: For their focus on the material needs of the people as a means to consciousness building. Free breakfast programs alongside political education, and cultural pride alongside self-defense.
The Zapatistas: For their ongoing integration of Indigenous Mayan speech, imagery and cosmology in their struggle for land and autonomy.
Medu Art Ensemble: For their exile work using art as a weapon against the cultural and spiritual domination of apartheid.
Methodologically, we will follow the logic of Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney’s reading camp - we will read together, we will read to each other - slowly. We will study film, music, theatre and literature. We will create and we will look where others might not be looking.
We will also engage the following questions and more:
Primary Violence
How are the mechanisms of Judeo-Christian universalism (demonisation of animism, impositions of property regimes, creation of linear time, individual salvation versus communal well being) employed aesthetically, spiritually and materially?
The poem and the arrow
What does it mean for the artist or cultural worker to "lead an attack" on an epistemological plane? If the primary violence is against consciousness, then the primary resistance must be a battle for consciousness.
Cultural hypnosis
What are the mummified fragments of culture that Fanon speaks of and how do we avoid the hypnosis of a sterile and politically detached engagement?
*Hồ, Chí Minh. The Prison Diary. Translated by Aileen Palmer, 3rd ed., Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1972.
** Thompson, Tonika Sealy, and Stefano Harney. “Ground Provisions.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, vol. 45, Mar. 2018, pp. 120–125, https://doi.org/10.1086/698401. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.
