ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the Southern African “liberation script” from Mozambique’s armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism and South Africa’s liberation struggle over white-minority rule as a way to reconsider the contributions from peripheral politics to global knowledge production. The chapter gives particular attention to the political thought of Samora Machel and Steve Biko as empirical examples on how colonized people interpellated and challenged Eurocentric thought. The central argument is that life under colonialism created the conditions for the colonial subject to interpellate critically Western epistemes in two ways. First, by stating that empirical context and practice preceded theorization. This was done, for instance, by bringing to the surface as an empirical validation the daily lives of the black subject living under colonial oppression, exploitation, and racism. The claiming of the pre-eminence of practice over theorization was done also by stating that popular resistance and the armed struggle were a kind of epistemic weapon against not only the imperial political/white dominance, but also against imperial epistemes. Second, it argues that these colonial conditions made nonetheless resistance dependent on waking up to a coherent theoretical account of that same practice.
