Sustainability Education for Ontological Re/Configuration: COVID-19 as a Pointer to the Ailing World Asili

Introduction

This paper draws on some key global examples, to argue that the emergence of COVID-19 has illuminated the urgency to replace the established ailing unsustainable global modernity order with more humane and sustainable ones. First it articulates and critiques the established Eurocentric-modernist world order, and in the process reflects critically on the education system, and its potential to attain a more sustainable and economically just world, by drawing on Afrocentric and decolonial theories. This thread of argument runs throughout the paper under different themes. “Subjugation and Ontological Strangulation” theme illustrates the aggressive nature of the established order, as a strategy it employs to sustain itself and strangulate sustainable possibilities. On engaging with the “Failing Modernity Ontology and Concealment of Anomalies,” I draw on some key global examples to illustrate the economic failures of the stablished order, further exposed, and heightened by COVID-19, and argue for alternative economies underpinned by tenets of Afrocentricity and decoloniality. The paper further elucidates the problematic nature of the utamawazo of the established order, as expressed in the notion of conspiracy theory, and agues for education that reconfigures the underpinning asili. A solution is proposed that we need to transcend the current global initiatives that focus on methodological level, such as global promulgation of Sustainable Development Goals delivery of food parcels to the poor, COVID-19 related online learning, and aggressively explore education that engenders a holistic, humane and economically just asili, as an educational response to the pandemic. The paper concludes by proposing some features of the proposed new and sustainable world order.

Understanding the Established Order and Educational Implications

The epistemic context of this essay is that of a history of “coloniality” which involved a particular engagement of knowledge and power, steeped in imperialist cultural ideologies of Euro-modernity. Modernity in this paper is construed as “. . .a European narrative that hides its darker side, coloniality” (Mignolo, 2011, p.39). This is the geo-political milieu that shaped my area of educational specialism in science and environmental education, and my scholarship interests in sustainability education discourse. Thus my attempt to dis-entangle from and critique the system that shaped and formed may own cognition and worldview may reflect wired contractions, blind spots and even hypocrisy, in light of the “benefits” I might have derived from it, cognitively, and otherwise. Yet it is these mental conflicts, amplified by COVID-19, that necessitated the writing of this paper. Western modernity has been marked by a distinctly dominant thinking, functioning to change rules of reason, standards of logic and rationality, underpinned by Eurocentric logic, authority, control, and credibility. Aspects if this argument are well reflected in my own country, Lesotho, which was under the British colonial rule in the period 1868 to 1966, but still maintains epistemic ties with its colonizer, which accredits its basic education disciplines at a heavy cost; while Higher Education institutions strive to mimic and replicate Western curricula, and academics looks up to Eurocentric institutions for excellence. Political freedom, in this context has been for more than half a century but cognitive and epistemic colonization remain tenacious. From a sustainability viewpoint, the dawn of COVID-19 pandemic shed light on some striking anomalies in the established order, that call into question the dominant macro-narrative of Western modernity, where a “colonial-modernity” dialectic (Mignolo, 2007) continues to suppress and deny the ontologies, epistemologies, “world senses” and life visions of Black/African, Indigenous, racialized, and colonized peoples, thereby universalizing the White, Western liberal subject, and experience as representative of all humanity. In accounting for the failure of modernity, COVID-19 revelations of systemic health and economic disparities and institutional failures of lack of educational resources, race, anti-Black racism, conspiracies and mistrust, aggressive nationalism all point to the imperative to subvert a dominant Euro-exclusive claim of modernity. Against this backdrop, the essay will explore, what different readings of COVID-19, in relation to sustainability education, can be offered working with indigenous knowledge systems, decoloniality discourse and Afrocentricity. From this perspective “decoloniality” critique is “not as a new universal that presents itself as the right one that supersedes all the previous and existing ones, but as an option. By presenting itself as option, the decolonial opens up a way of thinking. . .” (Mignolo, 2009, pp. 130–131).

In her critique of the dominant world order, Ani (1994) coined the concepts of asili, utamawazo and utamaroho to articulate an alternative African-centered worldview, and counter the dominant Eurocentric thought and culture. Asili is the insignia of a culture or the developmental seed of a culture. It constitutes the essence, the ideology, the matrix of a culture; which combined give the culture an identity and to make sense of the collective creations of its members. Utamawazo involves a structured thought, within a culture. It is the cognition of a culture, and is both a product and expression of the asili. Utamaroho is the driving energy of a culture, but emanates from the asili; it gives a culture its emotional tone and stimulates the collective behavior of its members. Both the utamawazo and the utamaroho emerge from the asili and in turn, manifest and sustain it. Ani (1994) illustrates that the established world order is characterized by Euro-American asili, typically framed in binary and control terms. Unlike the Afro-centric asili, which is distinctively a nexus of the body, mind, soul and spirit it its knowledge generation, the Eurocentric asili tends to separate “thought” and “emotion,” “man” from “nature,” the “European” from the “other” people, and thus creates a basis for domination and control of the “other.” The “control” is further cryptically manifested in “universalism” of a particular European cultural thought and behavior or utamawazo. Thus disciplines in the African educational institutions are replicas of Western curricula, and often watered down and irrelevant to the local realities of ever growing socio-economic inequalities, widespread poverty and environmental crisis. The utamaroho that emerges from this asili is epitomized by domination and subjugation of others’ forms of knowledge and cultures, in the name of “progress.” Relating these concepts to the work of Andreotti et al. (2018), we begin to get a clearer picture of the nature of the established order.

Andreotti et al. (2018) use a “metaphor of an olive tree,” to illuminate the nature and workings of our society: The leaves and the flowers represent the methodological layer, or cultural practices, the branches represent the epistemological layer, while the roots and the trunk symbolize the ontological layer (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 23). Based on this metaphor, the dominant capitalist modernist system, is like a tree anchored by a particular ontology or cultural asili. Thus any attempts to bring about changes to it, that focus on leaves and branches imply an assumption that the accentuation of growth of the existing systems would result in better lives for all, and that the capitalist system is not efficiently and optimally operating as it should be (Andreotti et al., 2018). In terms of education, a focus on “leaves and flowers approaches” are attempts to “ensure continuity, rather than a more fundamental transformation” and these are usually institutional reforms (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 25). A concentration on the branches or epistemology, on the other hand, involves preoccupation with “exploring different directions and angles of growth that would help the tree produce a broader range of better and more diverse outputs” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 23). Attempts to critique the established order, from the epistemological perspective, have not gone beyond raising questions on “. . .the role of knowledge in historical and ongoing slavery, colonialism, imperialism, racism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism. . .” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 27). In terms of education, epistemological critique, is concerned with educational interventions that “focus on inclusion of perspectives that have been excluded and encourage learners to make the unknown known in order to increase the range of options. . .” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 27). As such these changes resonate with utamawazo, in terms for their search for a new alternative “cognition,” yet they ignore the asili within which the thought structures are rooted.

The trunk and the roots of the tree, are the ontology or the cultural asili, and reflect both the visible and the invisible basis upon which the branches, the leaves and the flowers are grounded. The dominant ontology has been described as typically de-spiritualized, dualistic, reductionist, competitive and aggressive (Ani, 1994; Mokuku & Mokuku, 2004; Hoppers, 2002; Morgan, 2003), and negates fundamental existence questions, from an Afrocentric perspective, of who really owns the world and who we really are as humanity. A focus on these parts of the tree is a focus on its very existence, in terms of its “life cycle,” “ecological metabolism” and its “inevitable death” (Andreotti et al., 2018). From the ontological critique viewpoint, the recurring global socio-economic and political problems are generated by the very modernist capitalist system, that has been “subsidized by the violence of exploitation, ecocide, and genocide” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 28). Thus a lasting solution to the current problems, including health and education, would not occur “until this system is dismantled, or collapses on its own, as we learn from its mistakes, mourn its decline, and create different possibilities in its place” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 29). Ontological critique, is concerned with reconfiguration of our world order, by interrogating its roots, and asking “who and what we (think) we are, the conditions for us to be, and to understand being that way, the nature of reality (time, space, conscience, being), and how you could experience existence substantially differently” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 29). These questions are commensurate with Ani’s (1994) concept of asili. The search is to create a new system, through our re-imagination of our existence; only a different tree trunk and roots will give rise to different branches, leaves and flowers. The ontological educational project is to “pluralize possibilities of co-existence in a fragile planet” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 29). In terms of “development” this perspective questions the narrative of “progress,” and is concerned with not just “alternative forms of development, but alternatives to development” in light of the existing unsustainable Western development model “which has led us dangerously close to the limit of our planetary capacity” (Andreotti et al., 2018, pp. 29–30). The decolonization of the education system discourse and the associated indigenous knowledge systems (e.g., Bantu, 2013; Braun et al., 2014; Mignolo, 2009; Ngcoza, 2019; Sithole, 2020; Styres et al., 2010), that are gaining ground in the educational field, offer a real possibility of saving humanity and the planet, in their attempts to interrogate the “roots” of the tree or the Eurocentric knowledge base, anchored in the history of colonialism.

COVID-19 has accentuated the nature of the established global order. In terms of education, in southern Africa we have seen efforts to promote online teaching and other innovative learning strategies, as a prime response to the emerging educational limitations (e.g., Mukute et al., 2020) . Yet, this is a watershed moment for scholars to interrogate and revisit the meaning of education itself in light of its apparent contribution to COVID-19 amplified crises of local and global inequalities, unemployment, lack of resources, and unsustainable development. The efforts to maintain “business as usual” in education, through a flurry of online teaching approaches and the associated distribution of “COVID-19 prevention resources” and “food parcels” to the unemployed in many countries, is a typical superficial methodological-based solution that de-links COVID-19 crisis from the utamawazo and asili that found the education systems. COVID-19, has glaringly magnified symptoms of the ailing modernist capitalist system, and illuminated a sick tree at the ontological level. An education system with potency to usher a sustainable world, requires new epistemologies informed by a sustainable “asili” or “cultural DNA.” Such an asili, necessitates COVID-19 educational responses that go beyond the parochial “electronification” of the disciplines, with focus on the same methodological and epistemological content.

Asante’s (2003) theory of “Afrocentricity” opens up an alternative envisioning of a more sustainable world. In recognition of the Eurocentric nature of the dominant world order, its universal impositions and its devastating impact on the socio-economic and cultural lives of Africans, due to colonialism and slavery, Afrocentricity is defined as “a mode of thought and action in which the centrality of African interests, values, and perspectives predominate. . .it is the placing of African in the centre of any analysis of African phenomena” (Asante, 2003, p. 2).

Asante (2003) further posits that Afrocentricity, is the “enterprise of human regeneration,” and that “(i)t challenges and takes to task the perpetuation of white racial supremacist ideas in the imagination of the African world, and by extension the entire world” (pp. 2-3). Thus the theory engages the dominant “Eurocentric rationalism and empiricism” (Asante, 2003, pp. 2–3) and enables re-imagination and reconstruction of a new and economically just world order. In conceptualizing Afrocentricity as a “practice” Asante (2003) asserts that it is a “transforming agent in which all things that were old become new and a transformation in people’s lives of attitudes, beliefs, values and behavior create, inter alia, a revolutionary perspective on all facts” (p. 3). Afrocentricity is thus “only superficially related to color, it is more accurately a philosophical outlook determined by history” of the victims of the dominant order (Asante, 2003, p. 37).

COVID-19 has amplified a global order characterized by risks, narrow national interests; suspicions, mistrust and wrangling across nations triggered by and associated with the increasingly unsustainable capitalism dominated world. In COVID-19, we have seen a risk of an infectious diseases capable of wiping out hundreds in no time; selfish national interests of states to protect their own citizens; suspicions and mistrust among nations concerning the origins of the disease and unprecedented bickering concerning possible covert missions to use the virus for world de-population. These are all pointers to a global order that is in utter crisis. On the other hand, COVID-19, has shaken us to appreciate our intricate inter-connectedness, and that we are under one roof in Lehae-la-Rona (“Our Home”) (Mokuku, 2012), and our survival and security are only possible in collective. The contribution of decoloniality, indigenous knowledge systems and Afrocentricity towards education for a sustainable Lehae-La-Rona in the current global crisis is in their cultivation of an asili that engenders, “. . .emphasis on interconnectedness, harmony, balance, holism, and revealed knowledge” (Mokuku, 2012, p. 170).

Subjugation and Ontological Strangulation

COVID-19 intensified violence and crimes of all kinds, particularly among the weak and vulnerable (Mlambo-Ngcuka, 2020). Police brutality on the other hand, took disproportionate forms as people violated the COVID-19 lockdown rules, in their attempt to make ends meet (Farge, 2020). These crimes and state repressions, only allude to the fragility and vulnerability of of the current world socio-economic structures and systems, and the aggression it takes to sustain it. Andreotti et al. (2018) argue that the established capitalism order, uses violent means to defend and sustain itself, and that the weak are squashed in the process:

“need to defend and protect the system by any means possible”. . .it projects the source of all systemic problems onto the most vulnerable populations who are already marginalized. Further, it justifies the intensification of the securitization, at, within, and beyond the borders of the states in the name of protecting state sovereignty, private property and conservative humanist values. The analysis emanating from this response often rationalizes racist rhetoric and physical violence, intensified immigration restrictions, blatant discrimination, and expanded power of the police, military and intelligence agencies. (p. 32)

Whether COVID-19 had any bearing to the murder of George Floyd in the US or not, on the 25th May 2020, it became a major global event, that shook the world, amidst the advent of COVID-19 lockdowns. Multitudes around the world, violated, government lockdown measures, to express disgust at the gruesome murder of the 46-year-old, African-American, by a police officer in the US, by kneeling on his neck for about nine and half minutes, after he was handcuffed, lying face down. Two other officers helped restrain Floyd, while another officer prevented bystanders from interfering. His deviation from the rules of the established order, by use of a counterfeit bill, triggered such a “disproportionate” aggression from the law and order enforcement officials, that cost him his life. This event resulted in the use of the “Knee on the Neck” metaphor to refer to the rife systemic subjugation and killing of African-Americans in the US In Floyed, the world was reminded of the ugly history of slavery and anti-Back racism: the exploited labor of his ancestry that built the world renowned capitalist state, and the socio-economic deprivation of the African-Americans (Rev, 2020) Drawing on Ani’s (1994) concept, the ghastliness of the killing, could only emanate from the asili or ontology that thrives on “strangulation.”

Locally, COVID-19 restrictions resulted in much suffering as large numbers of people in our communities in Lesotho and other southern African countries, experienced severe shortages of water and food. Estimates are that as a result of COVID-19, nearly 800,000 people (about half the population of Lesotho) will be experiencing a serious food shortage (Radebe, 2020). On the other hand, schools are struggling to reopen due to lack of necessary resources they require to operate under COVID-19 lockdown conditions. Use of online learning was particularly challenging for schools, even at Higher Education Institutions where bandwidth is low and internet connectivity poor. The only National University of Lesotho has been characterized by ongoing students’ unrests and upheavals due to official imposition of online learning in a university with poor internet connectivity. Only a few “private schools” that could afford the costs of running online teaching and learning were meaningfully operational. Educational outlook in this context has been methodologically focused, with the aim to “continue teaching virtually,” to overcome COVID-19 limitations. It can be argued that while COVID-19 exposed and accentuated much of the already existing hardships and risks among the vulnerable populations in Lesotho, and other Southern African countries, the state machinery has not been openly aggressive in its maintenance of order. The populace acquiescence was solicited by means of school-closure and sporadic food parcel distribution, for hunger alleviation.

The educational response of these COVID-19 heightened crimes, state aggression on the weak and vulnerable, racism, institutional deficiencies and the tacit smothering of potential social upheavals in Lesotho, and elsewhere, using short-term tactics such as online learning, should be to design curricular and disciplines that interrogate the sustainability of the established Western modernity, its apparent aggressive tendencies and underpinning asili. Such epistemic experience should further raise the learners” awareness of the fragility and anomalies of Western modernity, so that they can explore more inclusive, humane, non-racial, robust and sustainable economies.

The Failing Modernity Ontology and Concealment of Anomalies

Lesotho, and several other southern African countries are still reeling in endless economic hardships, which is now exacerbated by COVID-19. In Lesotho, the political landscape has been characterized by unending political instability, sometimes violent, and short-term government tenures (Monyake, 2020). Basotho, could do better, but greater invisible forces tend to override in shaping the turn of events. The attribution for the unequal world and African poverty, on the other hand, to the “choices made” by the African leadership and citizens (Mills, 2010) on the other hand is shallow, and focuses on epistemological methods, rather than on the asili of modernity. In Why Africa is Poor Mills (2010) argues, for instance, that:

The Rwanda genocide is one of the obvious cases, where after the end of the Cold War, African choices resulted in a massive loss of lives. To this event can be added Robert Mugabe’s wanton destruction of Zimbabwe’s economy in the name of land redistribution, if with the aim of retaining political control; Thabo Mbeki’s refusal to acknowledge the link between HIV and AIDS, and the estimated 365,000 deaths that have ensued; the 2005 famine in Niger, the war in Darfur, which cost around 300,000 lives, and the fighting in Somalia, Guinea, Angola, Congo and elsewhere. (2010, pp. 4–5)

Key to African deprivation and poverty is the asili that informed acts of exploitation and brutality, and which has ostensibly remained reinforced rather than transformed by the world education systems. Exploitation of the other and world inequalities are driven by the capitalist tenets of individualism, racism, aggressive competition and postures to outcompete and squash rivals in order to lead the world, all of which are underpinned by an asili of domination, control and supremacy. While the Belgian colonialism policies of 1932 that created an ethnic divide between the Hutu and the Tutsi, which resulted in the Rwanda genocide of 1994, might be seen as the thing of the past, the ontology that gave rise to the policies is still pervasive. Thabo Mbeki’s widely repudiated “denialism” of HIV and AIDS in South Africa on the other hand, is ironically never linked with the shocking fact that the disease coincided with the end of apartheid regime, and that it was spread militarily by the “South African Institute of Maritime Research,” to “eradicate black people” (Ankomah, 2019). The illusive nature of the established ontology and its epistemological modus operandi, is perhaps reflected in the dismissal of the New York Times of the HIV and AIDS brutality revelation in Africa, as a “conspiracy theory” that first “. . .appeared as part of disinformation campaigns from the Soviet Union during the Cold War” (Ankomah, 2019). The media manipulation and control in this case express a cultural utamaroho, (a common driving energy), applied to safeguard and sustain the asili that serves racist, unequal and exploitative interests, even to a point of destruction of life. Thus the concept of modern day media, as disinformation machinery, may be seen as an important aspect of the dominant Eurocentric utamawazo or cognition, and as a product of an asili that promotes inequalities and exploitation. It is in fact the propagation of incomplete narrative about HIV and AIDS problem in South Africa, that reinforces and sustains the dominant destructive and unsustainable ontology. HIV pandemic in southern Africa was a product of the racist capitalist system’s resistance to change. Similarly, it can be argued that COVID-19 is an ontological creation of the dominant “de-spiritualized” modernity order (Ani, 1994). Apartheid regime methods and epistemology were critiqued and demolished, but the ontology that created apartheid, and destroyed life remains un-interrogated and untransformed. Education systems in southern Africa, a region impacted by colonialism, apartheid and HIV and AIDS, continue to tacitly sustain the dominant asili in their pre-occupation with methodological and epistemological transformation rather than focus on the underlying ontology. Sustainability education in this context requires that educators go beyond online pedagogical transformations, and relate COVID-19 to the recent devastating HIV & AIDS pandemic, and design curricula that expose learners to the root causes of such pandemics and to interrogate their associated ontology, contestations about the pandemic origins, how and why the tenets of modernity drive their spread and impact on human life globally, and Africa in particular. This knowledge base would form a basis for exposure of learners to content and learning experiences that develop their cognitive capacity to conceptualize a more humane, non-racial, spiritualized, and holistic ontology, with a potential to create a sustainable world characterized by reverence for all of humanity and other life forms.

The presentation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, at the UN, in New York, on November 7, 2019, Year 61 of the Resolution, further refutes Mills’ (2010) argument, and clearly depicts the real impact of the capitalist system on a nation perceived as world number one economy:

The deaths of civilians caused by the US troops in various latitudes, and the use of torture merit condemnation; as well as the murder of African-Americans by police and the migrants by border patrols; the deaths of unaccompanied minors in immigration detention, and the abusive and racially disproportionate use of death penalty, applicable to minors and the mentally handicapped. . . In the United States, there are 2.3. million individuals incarcerated, a quarter of the planet’s prison population, and in one year 10.5 million arrests are made. . .Repression and police surveillance of immigrants, the separation of families, the separation of parents and indefinite detention of more than 2500 children, and the deportation of 21,000, and the brutal measures that threaten the children of illegal immigrants who are raised and educated in the United States are abhorrent. . .In the richest country, 40 million US residents live in poverty, 18.5 million of them in extreme poverty. 25.7% of those with disability lived in poverty at the end of last year. More than half a million of its citizens sleep on the streets. . .At the end of 2018, there were 6.6 million unemployed in the United States. . .There are 28.5 million without medical insurance. . .Quality education is not accessible to the majority. Half of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level. Equal opportunity in the United states is a chimera. . . The average wealth of white families is seven times greater than of Afro-descendant families. The death rate of children under one year of age and mothers in childbirth is twice that of whites (Granma International, 2019, pp. 2–3).

These economic conditions are not a result of mis-governance that could be corrected by change of a president or more of the same thing, but are symptoms of a dysfunctional economy, underpinned by an ailing asili. This is an economy, “premised on a regime of perpetual capital accumulation. . .which exploits human labor, expropriates land and lives through processes of slavery and colonization, and treats other-than-human beings as natural resources to be extracted, all for the creation of profit for a very few” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 22). This is an economy underpinned by “foundational set of categories that are just not epistemological (related to knowing) but ontological (related to being), which enable certain possibilities of existence, and foreclose others” (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 20).

From this perspective, the recent World Bank assertion that poverty is on the decline and that it is COVID-19 that will regress our trajectory to eradicate poverty, is a blatant failure to grasp the limitations of the established capitalist system, and the ontology that informs it. For the World Bank,

There has been marked progress on reducing poverty—the first of the world’s Sustainable Development Goals—over the past decades. According to the most recent estimates, in 2015, 10% of the world’s population or 734 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day. That’s down from nearly 36% or 1.9 billion people in 1990. However, due to the COVID-19 crisis as well as the oil price drop, this trend probably will reverse in 2020. The COVID-19 crisis will have a disproportionate impact on the poor, through job loss, loss of remittances, rising prices, and disruptions in services such as education and health care. For the first time since 1998, poverty rates will go up as the global economy falls into recession and there is a sharp drop in GDP per capita (The World Bank, 2020).

This assertion may be regarded as a concealment of the realities of the present economic system, by overstressing its benefits and using COVID-19 as a scapegoat for its failures. Vast and persistent inequalities have been in existence in countries around the world, long before COVID-19. COVID-19 magnified these systemic contradictions around the world, which took racial lines in the US and UK where hundreds of people of African origin succumbed to the disease, due to socio-economic backgrounds of deprivation and poverty. From an Afrocentric perspective (Ani, 1994; Asante, 2003; Mokuku, 2012) the Western epistemology and ontology are de-spiritualized and devoid of botho; and are founded on fabricated Grand narratives of success, subjugation, strangulation and concealment of anomalies. In terms of botho, all humanity deserves a decent life, because “motho ke motho ka batho”/ “my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours” (Tutu, 2011, p. 22). COVID-19 educational responses ought to reconstitute disciplines so that they engage learners at the asili and utamawazo levels with the aim to re-engineer “the epistemological and ontological categories” (Andreotti et al., 2018), of our modernity contaminated cultures. Contrary to Afrocentricity, the capitalist economy cultures are typically premised on living being “autonomous” and on a view of separations and hierarchy, underpinning all forms of dominances: sexist, racial, national etc. Within this paradigm, the education system is designed to promote, one universally relevant truth and moral code that qualifies and empowers people to describe, predict, and control the world and engineer the future. It is presumed that any flaws can be addressed through internal critique to ensure that human understanding progresses towards greater perfection, certainty, objectivity, and mastery. Meanwhile, this knowledge system enacts the erasure of other value systems and ways of knowing and the suppression of epistemic uncertainties and contradictions (Andreotti et al., 2018, p. 21).

The notion of Conspiracy Theory: Utamawazo of Fear, Fabrications and Suspicions

The dominant ontology, has given birth to the construct of “conspiracy theory.” In an attempt to counter this increasingly pervasive phenomenon, Lewandowsky & Cook (2020) published “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook,” wherein they provide guidelines to distinguish between “real conspiracies” and “conspiracy theories.” In trying to achieve this, the utamawazo, or the driving energy, of the established order becomes evident. In one example they explain:

Real conspiracies exist. Volkswagen conspired to cheat emissions tests for their diesel engines. The US National Security Agency secretly spied on civilian internet users. The tobacco industry deceived the public about the harmful effects of smoking. We know about these conspiracies through internal industry documents, government investigations, or whistle-blowers.

Conspiracy theories, by contrast, tend to persist for a long time even when there is no evidence for them. Those conspiracy theories are based on a variety of thinking patterns that are known to be unreliable tools for tracking reality. Typically, conspiracy theories are not supported by evidence that withstands scrutiny but this doesn’t stop them from blossoming. For example, the widespread belief that the 9/11terrorist attacks were an “inside job” has persisted for many years after the event (Lewandowsky & Cook, 2020, p. 3)

The significance of the above thesis is not in the distinction of between “real conspiracy” and “conspiracy” theories, but in its reflection of the nature of the established order, which is characterized by the utamawazo of fabrications, suspicion, deception, competition and profiteering. Such handbooks only provide a superficial solution to the prevailing decadence, as they merely operate at the methodological level rather than address the ailing “botho-devoid” ontology that underlies the utamawazo. COVID-19 conspiracies, on the other hand, have been numerous, further pointing to the ferocity of suspicions and mistrust. Knowles’s (2020) account of some of the conspiracy theories associated with COVID-19, depicts a world in aggressive competition and set apart by mistrust and suspicion. Knowles (2020) describes several narratives of “rumors and disinformation” spread by the political leaders. These concern the American millionaires and the two “leading economies” in the world, United States and China. In a narrative concerning Bill Gates, he is accused of using COVID-19 to enrich himself, and to advance a covert mission to control world population through coronavirus vaccine. In another, the new G5 cell phone towers are said to cause COVID-19, and consequently 60 towers were torched in the UK. One other story is about the Chinese Foreign Minister accusation of the US troops for introducing coronavirus in China, and Venezuela President claimed that the virus was created by the US as a biological weapon to attack, its competitor, China. A US billionaire and philanthropist, George Soros, was also accused by, as Knowles puts it, “some of his enemies” of somehow spreading the virus through a pharmaceutical company that operates a laboratory in Wuhan, China. These claims of suspicion and mistrust, are only reflective of an economic system that has set people and nations apart, and created rifts, and fueled aggressive competitions and strives for supremacy and domination, rather than co-existence. This is an order devoid of botho. The values developed by the dominant Eurocentric education systems, in our contexts, are largely congruent with the depicted competitive and aggressive global economic landscape. Sustainability education systems requires that educators design and develop curricula and disciplines that construct mindsets that can uncover and interrogate the nature of the established utamawazo and its underpinning asili, and explore strategies of re-configuring it in order to create a more humane world, where societies co-exist in trust, peace and harmony. Handbooks, and similar methods, that provide guidelines or content to distinguish between “scientifically rational from irrational” thinking only reflect a logic trapped within the modernity order, which it re-inforces and sustains, rather than re-construct a sustainable world asili, with a new value system.

Unsustainable Solutions for Self-made Problems

The current UN global initiatives to resolve inequalities, protect the planet and create sustainable livelihoods for all, by adoption of 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 (United Nations, 2015, 2021) only affirm the crisis that our world is faced with, despite some gains that modernity might have brought. This, and similar initiatives, further makes apparent the superfluous analysis of the environmental crisis by attributing the catastrophe to the methodological and epistemological issues, without any regard of the dominant cultural asili. COVID-19 has exposed the prevailing national and global inequalities, and easily eroded the Africa aided “developmental” gains. Concomitant, to the dawn of COVID-19, was charity food parcels distributions in many southern African countries, which achieved acquiescence and quelled upheavals amongst the populace. Prior to 2015, the UN Summit held in New York, had set out to achieve global development through eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in 2000. In the same year, in 2000, United National Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) called for replication of aid to Africa, with some advising that Africa combined aid with mobilization and investment of domestic resources, and to opt for an “appropriate development strategy” (Mills, 2010). These modernist epistemological descriptors and constructs of “aid,” “millennium development goals” “sustainable development goals” have not been able to meaningfully interrogate the ontology or the asili that shapes the unequal world order. The developmental issues in Africa (Mills, 2010) cannot find sustainable solutions within the epistemologies and ontologies that created them in the first place: extreme poverty and hunger; diseases such as HIV-AIDS and malaria, gender inequalities, child mortality and poor maternal health cannot be eradicated by mere methodological alterations or rearrangement of the same epistemological content in the education systems. The ontological defects that gave rise to the stated developmental problems, remain elusive and unresolved. It is thus not surprising that MDGs, did not eradicate poverty, and the SDGs initiative is similarly unlikely to unravel the targeted challenges of poverty, zero hunger, good health and wellbeing, quality education, gender inequalities, affordable and clean energy, and climate action, among others; all of which are ontological modernist problems. These problems can be met by the emergence of education systems and curricula that stimulate imagination and reconstruction of a new epistemologies and world cultural asili, that go beyond the current methodologically focused discourse (Andreotti et al., 2018) of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) (UNESCO, 2002, 2014, 2021) In the midst of the pandemic, the transformational potency of ESD has been laid bare. ESD is itself a victim of COVID-19; it is a discourse entangled in and “locked-down” by educational and societal inequalities that it is incapable of unravelling.

A New and Sustainable Asili

The global socio-economic and political crises, uncovered and magnified by COVID-19 call for a new social order. It can be argued that such a world order can be engendered by education systems that are rooted in a new global cultural asili. The apparent scramble within education systems to use online platforms as a response to COVID-19 crisis, superficially focuses on the methodology and reflects scholarship and measures that are oblivious of the workings of the established order. From an Afro-centric perspective, the education system that has potency to reconfigure and shape the asili or ontology that promote sustainability, must connect our physical existence with the spiritual being, and recognise the deep spiritual connectedness of all humans with all of existence, and with the Creator. Denial of spiritual dimension of all of life, is the denial of the value and sacredness of life, and creates a basis for its destruction. Within this established paradigm, just as AIDS was spread to destroy life, COVID-19 too could easily be used to achieve inhuman ends. The kind of consciousness, or utamaroho, that the education should engender is well articulated by Ani (1994), as one in which,

The universe to which (people). . . relate is sacred in origin, is organic, and is a true “cosmos.” Human beings are part of the cosmos, and as such, relate intimately with other cosmic beings. Knowledge of the universe comes through relationship with it and through perception of spirit in matter. The universe is one; spheres are joined because of a single unifying force that pervades all being. Meaningful reality ensues from this force. These worldviews are reasonable but not rationalistic: complex yet lived. They tend to be expressed through logic of metaphor and complex symbolism (p. 29).

The features identified by Ani (1994) above are characteristic of many African and indigenous communities. The transmissibility and eradication realities of COVID-19 underscore the significance of interconnectedness of all humanity, and the futility of values of individualism, aggressive competition, domination and nationalism. The growing educational discourse on decoloniality (e.g., Kulundu-Bolus et al., 2020; Mignolo, 2009, 2001), and the associated indigenous philosophies, have a potential to usher new ontologies of holism, collaboration, co-existence in our education systems, if mainstreamed. A holistic worldview is engendered by education that focuses on and encounters the locale, rather than preoccupation with de-contextual, abstract and universal knowledge forms (Ani, 1994). Land and geographies of space constitute significant sites and sources for the development of onto-epistemologies of “scholarly inquiry” which can help counter the radical politics of new global futures. Specifically, “land” is more than a physical space; it is a site of knowing, inclusive of metaphors, ontologies, literacies of seas, waters, Earth and sky, and reclaiming our social, psychic, cultural & spiritual memories as “living forces” and literacies of healing we can learn from (Dei, 2010; Simpson, 2014; Wildcat et al., 2014). In response to COVID-19, sustainability education should explore teaching approaches that develop learners’ holistic ontologies in terms of the importance of the Land and Earthly teachings of relationality, sharing, reciprocity, connections, mutual interdependence, community building, social responsibility and accountability.

In a community case study in Lesotho on local nature conservation, we note the following botho attributes that could contribute towards a more sustainable living (Mokuku, 2016) (See Table 1 below). Contrarily, the botho antithetic values, reflected below, are consistent with modernity values. Botho philosophy (Le Grange, 2012; Letseka, 2012; Metz & Gaie, 2010; Mnyaka & Motlhabi, 2005; Mokuku, 2016; Tutu, 2011) could in fact be used as a counter-modernity standard of measurement of the worthiness of any form of developmental practice in the African setting and the world, in light of its underpinning asili of holism and connectedness.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Botho and Antithetic Attributes in Environmental & Sustainability Education.

Empirical traits				Metaphysical traits
Socio-economic pillar		Natural pillar		Holistic
Botho attributes	Antithetic attributes	Botho attributes	Antithetic attributes	Worldview attributes
Social • Coexistence with others • Active engagement in creating a harmonious relationship with others • Support & empathy towards others • Prevalence of peace • Respect & love of others • Advancement of a people Economic • Engagement in development work • Collaborative work • Unity through work • Protection of community valuables • Hard work • Participation in community decision making processes	Social • Lawlessness • Discourteousness • Crime • Conflicts • Dishonesty lack of accountability • Discordance • Disdain • Indifference • Disunity • Negligence • Amorality • Conceitedness • Societal disorientation Economic • Individualism • Indifference • Negligence • Disdain • Crime • Amorality	• Nature not hurt • Animals not persecuted • Protection of all other living things • Sustainable use of resources	• Deceipt • Duplicity • Individualism • Pursuit of individual interests	• A believe in: • Our own existence & identity as intricably bound with those of others’ • Harmonious & peaceful co-existence with others and nature • Knowledge of the creator as a basis for knowledge of others, & vice versa • Religious beliefs as media of expression of botho

Mokukur, 2016.

Botho philosophy is only proposed here as an aspects of a journey, or Njia (Asante, 2003), to reconstruction of a new world ontology or asili. Thus Njia, a Swahili word for “The Way,” “establishes a link to our fundamental, primordial truths,” by opening doors for new knowledge forms, grounded in the historical experiences of the subjugated Africans of the Diaspora and the continent (Asante, 2003, pp. 30–31). Fundamental to Njia is the rejection of Eurocentrism and its universal disciplines and curricula, and re-imagining of new disciplines with potency to recreate a new world and sustainable ontology. Asante’s (2003) invented discipline of “Africology or Afrology,” is exemplary to African scholars in pursuit of Njia, who are currently subservient recipients and reproducers of Eurocentric disciplines, within African universities. From this perspective, sustainability education and sustainable development, in the context of COVID-19, are not about methodological alteration, to overcome the physical limitations imposed the pandemic, but involve re-configuration of the ontology that gave rise to COVID-19 in the first place, and construction of the related epistemologies. Educators response to COVID-19, therefore, should be that of a collective commitment to Njia, with the primary goal to design curricula that promote a sustainable and economically just world, characterized by epistemological pluralism, disciplines informed by botho values, spiritualized and holistic universal asili. Africa with its rich history of resilience of slavery, colonialism, exploitation, manipulation, subjugation, epistemological, and ontological onslaught Africa can invent and contribute spiritually rich knowledge forms (Asante, 2003) with potency to re-configure a universal ontology of resilience, holism, love, and hope.