Territorial coloniality and deep sea colonization in Peru and South Africa versus Ubuntuism and Kuchamamism (the sea mother): societies movements from below

• In Event: Africa and Abya Yala at the end of the very large XX. Great capital reification projects and resistance strategies from below

Abstract

European colonization was an arrangement, which combined several exclusion categories to produce cartographies of marginalization. Colonialism in Abya Yala was based on an exclusionary land distribution (hacienda and encomienda) that guaranteed the best quality land and surplus for male-white settlers. In South Africa, under the form of apartheid, the best lands were granted to white foreigners secluding local communities to the “bantustanes”. This colonial land distribution (territorial coloniality) was not abolished neither by the national liberation movements in Abya Yala nor by the formal end of apartheid in South África. On the abyayalan side, after a successful peruvian land reform, Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) unleashed the so called “reform of land reform”: a bundle of neoliberal reforms that allowed the buying, selling and leasing of the lands. On the southafrican side, land question remains unsolved given the gradualistic neoliberal approach to land reform. (Moyo)

At the final phase of the very large 20th century, Peru and South Africa are still living under a global coloniality that has been operating more than 500 year and which steadily requires not only to produce-reproduce pathological cartographies but exploitative oceanographies which looks forward to exploring and commoditizing sea beads in peruvian and south african coasts. Societies know it and move on both sides of the atlantic raising ubuntu and kuchamama cosmogonies as utensils for assembling ancestral futures challenging the coloniality of territory and seas and defying the commoditization of life.

Author

• Marco Reyes, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa