ABSTRACT
How is reparation in the epistemic domain to be effected? Even more fundamentally, how are historical epistemic injustices—e.g. settler colonialism's suppression of local people's concepts, values, and beliefs—to be conceptualized?
These theoretical questions now receive close attention worldwide. But this chapter argues that a neglected intellectual source from the Global South can illuminate them further: the writings of theorists from twentieth-century South African liberation movements. Specifically, writings by the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) intellectuals (especially Barney Pityana and Steve Biko) from the early 1970s contain invaluable reflections on cultural suppression and its remedies.
Like the Unity Movement (e.g. Neville Alexander), the BCM intellectuals rejected the category of race. But in addition, the BCM theorists explicitly emphasized the need to overcome cultural and epistemic injustice, as well as material inequalities and racist laws. More adeptly than the Pan-Africanist Congress theorists (e.g. Robert Sobukwe), and without falling back upon an ethno-relativism like some ‘Decoloniality' writers today, the BCM intellectuals show us how to take the epistemic dimension of colonialism and white supremacy seriously, while detaching culture, values and beliefs from any putative inherent identities—all with an eye to beliefs' and values' intrinsic corrigibility and orientation towards truth.
