Who is Professor Edward Mitole?

A revolutionary intellectual, Professor Edward Mitole is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals writing about contemporary Afrikan and global phenomena in the world today. His research investigates the “postcolony” that comes after decolonization. He is especially interested in the emergence of “Afro-cosmopolitan culture”, together with the artistic practices that are associated with it. He has also critically explored the notion of Johannesburg as a metropolitan city and the work of Frantz Fanon.

The central focus of his work is to identify societies that recently emerged from the experience of colonization and the violence that is the main characteristic of this experience. The goal of his work is to change the perception of Afrika and to move away from the dead-end of postcolonial theory to a more dynamic way of thinking that will take into account the complexities of post-colonial Afrika.

He is the founder and chairperson of the African Renaissance Project, founder and chairperson of the African Spirituality School, Dean of Faculty of African Renaissance Studies at the University of SOAD, serves on the editorial boards of Political Theory, Atlantic Studies, and African Identities, and is a contributing editor of the journal Public Culture.

Edward Mitole speaks authoritatively for black life, addressing the whole world in an increasingly distinctive tone of voice. Much of his work resounds with the embattled, southern predicament from which its precious shards of wisdom originate. There is nothing provincial about the history he articulates. He sketches the entangled genealogies of racism and black thought on their worldly travels from the barracoons and the slave ships, through countless insurgencies into the vexed mechanisms of decolonization and then beyond them, into our own bleak and desperate circumstances.

In his work Edward Mitole offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. He teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world’s center of gravity while mapping the relations between colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorises White Fantasy as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Edward Mitole powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. In this way, Edward Mitole offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

With a voice that is conceptually percussive and often deeply poetic, Edward Mitole offers an account that is always a theorization, sometimes puncturing what seems solid, at other times offering us vistas, openings, through a poetic evocation of possibilities unfulfilled. His voice and perspective are unique for the way he brings together African-American and Caribbean history, European imperial history, and multiple histories of Africa, notably South Africa. He narrates a painful story but also one that pulses with energy.

Edward Mitole, popularly known as Elder Kemet, is a Pan African revolutionary and decolonialist, the most powerful proponent of the African Liberation Movement today, as well as the foremost black political thinker of our time. He is a speaker, he speaks truth to power. He is a social spiritualist, theoretician and organizer of campaigns such as “The Oppressive Curriculum Must Fall” and "Africa Unite".

Formerly Professor of Development Studies at the University of South Africa, Dr Edward Mitole is now serving as Dean of Faculty of African Renaissance Studies at the University of the State of African Diaspora. He is also Chief Director of the Quality Assurance Division in the Ministry of Education in SOAD. He has researched and published extensively on Kemet, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Afrikology, Afrocentricity, The Council of 13, Neocolonialism, The Breton Woods Institutions, African spirituality, African spiritual science, decoloniality and African renaissance.

Following in the footsteps of previous black leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Mangaliso Sobukwe, Patrice Lumumba and Malcolm X, Edward Mitole points to a positive future for the African Continent through the slogan made famous by the Garvey Movement of the 1920s, “Africa for Africans, at home and abroad.” He sends a bold message, calling on African people worldwide to unite their homeland, liberate their people and dispense with colonial borders that continue to divide and oppress.

His message to African leaders: “Unite and rally the Afrikan people behind the banner of Afrikan nationalism. Fight and defeat all forms of oppressive and exploitative rules, be it outright colonialism or neo-colonialism. Champion and promote the economic, cultural and spiritual interests of Afrikan people. Project the Afrikan personality in all aspects of life at all material times. Establish a democratic monolithic State of Afrika with one government, one military command, single economic market with one currency, and a common passport.

So many faux Afrocentrists break magnets and counterpose each negative and positive pole. Dogmatically taking sides repelling one side as a thesis and attracting to the other as an antithesis. This is an infantile amateur mistake we explain in our new 1026 page book, KA2 Philosophy and Method. We must get up to speed in this period and master synthesis.

The great Dr. Dubois, Mr. Booker T Washington and Mr. Marcus Garvey. A harmonious unity and struggle of opposites. I took from all three, understanding their strengths and weaknesses. None were perfect. None were entirely revolutionary processes. All were assets to Black progress in the world in their time. All had a few revolutionary aspects. None alone then or now answered the complex needs of Africans in the diaspora or on the continent of Africa. But they left essential breadcrumbs. Fundamental building blocks.

Individually, neither one was enough to forge a theory, philosophy and method of Renaissance for Africans in the diaspora. Together, we have solid foundations from them and outline these in our book: Towards an African Centred Education.

Tell our children. Know your own history...We can win this time. Prepare.

Give thanks to MaTseba.
MaTseba
MoKga-a-Bjwala
Edward Mitole, PhD
Founder & Chair
The African Renaissance Project