By Professor Artwell Nhemachena
INDEED, much like nuclear bombs, ignorance is a weapon of mass destruction when it is strategically manufactured and cast to enslave the minds of others.
Billions of minds in the 21st Century have stopped dreaming because the masters of ignorance have cultured them to only slavishly follow the dreams of others who make huge profits out of the spells of ignorance they cast in the world.
Many of our universities can no longer dream of inventing anything because slavishly following the dreams of others has become the ingrained culture in many of them, where to follow others has become essential to be counted as a ‘knower’.
If there is one good thing that one learns from sociology and anthropology, it is that nothing in this world should be taken for granted, but should be subjected to very critical scrutiny and unpacking to disclose its manifest and latent functions, its underside and overside.
The idea here is to be deliberatively intellectually provocative so that we push one another out of our comfort zones.
Indeed, to reside in a comfort zone is an apology for the dereliction of the duty to critically think.
A slavish mind is one that is deliberately anaesthetised by spells of strategically manufactured ignorance, much of which often masquerades as ‘knowledge’.
The term geopolitics of ignorance, which I use herein, is intended to deliberately invoke and connect to special operations, some of them declared and others undeclared, that are executed in the world in efforts to defeat the minds of others when ignorance is deliberately socially created.
With new technologies, including brain-net or cerebral internet which connects human brains to the internet of things, it would become extremely difficult to retain the independence of mind that is essential for activist politics.
In fact, once human minds are connected, using brain nanorobots, to the brain-net or cerebral internet, it becomes possible to read the human minds and engage in what is called preventive policing wherein actions are prevented before they are performed or executed.
But who says there will also not be preventive knowing, like what is being addressed as preventive policing today?
In other words, a world in which the brain-net or cerebral internet has set in is a world of post-politics, post-knowledge and a realm of post-activism in so far as the new technologies to read and understand the human brain make it possible to pre-empt actions of political opponents.
Indeed, we are being told that the future of warfare is in the form of neuro-warfare which is fought directly in the human minds once the neuroscience of brain nanorobotic implants, Brain Computer Interfaces and Brain Cloud Interfaces, has matured.
In the light of the foregoing, it is exceedingly important to do what is called horizon scanning to see where the world is going and how geopolitics of ignorance is playing out with emergent technologies, the post-Enlightenment and the post-Cartesianism which attend the 21st Century.
To deal with emerging technologies which can be used for both beneficial and harmful purposes, the WHO has recently drafted some regulations to govern what is called responsible use of life sciences research and dual-use research of concern.
The document, which is online, attempts to regulate for responsible use of life sciences research which emanates from the emergent 21st Century revolutionary research, including in neuroscience, neuro-technologies, neuro-nanorobotics, synthetic biology and so on.
But, as we already know, transnational corporations, including global pharmaceutical corporations, are not easy to govern because they are often more powerful than African governments.
Armin Krishnan, for instance, tells us that, “…neuroweapons are intended to influence, direct, weaken, suppress, or neutralise human thought, brainwave functions, perception, interpretation, and behaviours to the extent that the target of such weaponry is either temporarily or permanently disabled, mentally compromised, or unable to function normally.”
In other words, the ongoing Russian special military operation in Ukraine is not the only one we should count because there are also special ignorance operations designed to anaesthetise and paralyse the minds of other humans in the geopolitics of ignorance which I speak about.
The emerging neuroscience innovations are just one instance of how the emerging technologies can be used to control humanity, in the sense of controlling and manipulating the human minds.
For this reason, they can be understood as special operation to manipulate the human minds.
Using foresight studies, the anthropology and sociology of anticipation, I wish to argue decolonial thinkers need to not only seek to decolonise the past, and the present – but that they must also endeavour to decolonise the future on the basis of imaginaries enabled by developments in technoscience.
Sadly, many Africans are increasingly outsourcing their thinking to new technologies without caring to ask what happens to the human mind when it becomes cultured to outsourcing its business of thinking.
Besides, Africans are increasingly cognitively offloading their memories to new technological devices without asking what happens to the human memories when they are cultured to offload their business of retaining archives of human experiences.
And imperialism is delegating its tasks to algorithms such that we are increasingly witnessing algorithmic racism.
Much as they have pleaded ignorance for the crimes of enslaving and colonising Africans, imperialists of the 21st Century will again plead ignorance of algorithmic racism because such racism is committed by algorithms which are deemed to be autonomous.
Put differently, we are living in a century where humanity continues to suffer the spells of ignorance in Pignarre and Stengers’s sense of Western capitalists committing sorcery through their apparatuses of capture which explain the present-day ‘geographies of ignorance’ in the world.
If sorcery is defined in terms of cannibalism, physically, remotely and invisibly controlling other human beings against their wishes, then one would agree with Bruno Latour that even the Westerners have never been modern, precisely because humanity has never been able to overcome the drive to cannibalise others.
While geopolitics more conventionally may be understood in terms of the spatial distribution of bodies that are killable, the geopolitics of ignorance should be understood in terms of cartographies of strategically manufactured ignorance which explains the connections between ignorance and colonised geographies in the world.
Of course, ignorance differs in its density between different regions of the world with some occupying regions of high density of ignorance, medium and low densities of ignorance.
Perhaps, Africans must begin to seriously ask themselves in which densities of ignorance they reside, beyond physical residential ones conventionally categorised as high density, medium density and low density residential areas.
Residence is not only a matter of geographical or physical locations; it is also a matter of densities of ignorance which may not be visible to the naked eye because one may reside in a low density geographical area but nevertheless occupy high density of ignorance and vice-versa.
The enslaved and colonised peoples have historically occupied regions of high-density of ignorance, not because they could not innovate and create knowledge but because it was strategic for slaveholders and colonisers to manufacture ignorance in those regions.
Although slave owners described enslaved African-Americans as disingenuous, uncreative, and ignorant, the same slave owners patented inventions by the enslaved African-Americans in their own names, arguing since they owned the slaves, they, therefore, also owned the inventions by the slaves.
Fast-forward to the 21st Century, a map of the countries which produced COVID-19 vaccines, and those which didn’t do so, would show what I mean by geographies of ignorance in the world.
There is a fundamental difference between knowing how to use and knowing how to invent – and it is knowing how to invent which counts in a world of patents and intellectual property rights.
Knowing only how to use inventions is inconsequential and would fall into the realm of ignorance.
The offhanded dismissals of African ‘cures’ for COVID-19 indicate what I call the geopolitics of ignorance wherein, for purposes of monopolising profits from vaccines and other medicines, some regions of the world are quick to dismiss alternative medicines and vaccines from other parts of the world.
Of course, Africans have had the equivalence of vaccines in precolonial times, but in the 21st Century, we are made to believe that there are no African alternatives to vaccines produced in the global north.
We are told that Western science is always in the service of humanity, in spite of the evidence that such science was also used to eliminate anti-apartheid activists as reflected in ‘Operation Project Coast’ which was a top secret chemical and biological weapons programme of the 1980s, instituted by the South African apartheid government (about which Gould reports).
The point here is that we are unfortunately advised to forget the crimes of Western science – and only remember the good things which such science does for humanity.
This is part of what I mean by geopolitics of ignorance.
As part of geopolitics of ignorance, the colonial government in the then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, ordered archaeologists to state that the great precolonial architectural feat at Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians rather than by indigenous Zimbabweans.
This is what I mean by geopolitics of ignorance.
Also, as part of the geopolitics of ignorance, colonialists ignored the feats of irrigation engineering by precolonial Africans, including in Nyanga.
Instead, colonialists chose to describe the precolonial Africans as illiterate, irrational, illogical, prelogical; as without science, without jurisprudence, without laws, without courts, without history, without civilisations and without notions and practices of ownership of resources.
Indeed, colonised peoples were also described as indistinct from nonhumans, and Western writers, including Pliny, described some of the colonised peoples as having no heads, as having eyes on their chests; others were described as having one big foot each, which also served as an umbrella when it was hot or raining.
For Pliny, the hapless creatures which the colonised people were would supposedly simply sit down and raise the big foot for an umbrella when it was too hot or raining. (Sciapod from the Nuremburg Chronicle 1493)
Indeed, other Western writers described the colonised as having tails, and as cannibalists who could not distinguish between human flesh and beef, for instance.
This is part of what I mean by geopolitics of ignorance when, for strategic reasons, colonialists cast some regions of the world as ignorant.
The geopolitics of ignorance plays strategic functions for colonialists and capitalists because a person who is described as irrational cannot, by extension, own, control and possess resources which are then deemed up for grabs by the colonisers.
Similarly, a person who is depicted as illogical cannot, by extension, own, control and possess resources which are then deemed up for grabs by the colonialists.
Besides, a person who is depicted as indistinct from a non-human animal cannot, by extension, own, control and possess resources which are then deemed to be up for grabs by the colonialists.
And a person who is depicted as illiterate cannot, by extension, take stock of that which is stolen from him or her because he supposedly neither count nor read.
In other words, geopolitics of ignorance refer to attributions of ignorance, for strategic reasons, to other people living in other regions of the world.
It also involves actively manipulating the minds of the targeted people such that they begin to believe they are, or they actually become, ignorant.
Colonialists devised many ways, including education and religion that were used to colonise the minds, to make Africans believe that they were ignorant, and to socially create ignorance among the colonised peoples.
And today, we are told that there are new commercial technoscientific innovations to delete and edit human memories such that it will increasingly be easy ‘to forget supposedly unpleasant memories’.
But we are never told anything about the implications of such technologies for the geopolitics of ignorance wherein the emergent mind control, memory editing and memory deletion technologies are also used to socially create ignorance in some regions of the world.
In any case, colonialists have historically dispossessed Africans of material resources and with the emergent mind control, memory editing and deleting technologies, it would be easy to similarly dispossess other people of their minds and memories.
We are also told that there are technoscientific innovations to edit and delete human genes such that ‘we end up with better breeds of humans’, in the order of what is being called new eugenics.
But we are never told anything about the implications of such technologies for the social production of ignorance and the attendant geopolitics of ignorance which I am talking about.