Zimbabwe, the nation-state I come from, has never known peace.  Various institutionalised forms of violence were practised on black bodies by white bodies in Zimbabwe when British settlers arrived to occupy the land.  Officials of the British South Africa Charter Company, the private company founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1889, whose members were outriders of the British Empire, used brutal tactics to bring the local people to heel.

Cecil Rhodes‘ Pioneer column of 500 men armed with an assortment of weapons that included Maxim guns, marched into the area that is now Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, to annexe the land formally for the British Empire in 1893.  Ensuing economic violence saw black bodies being taxed in money for the houses they lived in when the invaders arrived.  The population did not utilise a money economy at the time, thus the requirement for money forced the population into labour for the settler community on the terms the settler community offered, in order to obtain the money required to comply with the taxation system.  Other forms of economic violence included different rates of payment for the same agricultural products, depending on the skin colour of the producer, with black producers being paid less than white producers.  There were also restrictions on the goods black people could trade.  Nutritional violence was practised by settler authorities through side-lining traditional small grains commercially in favour of less nutritious maize that had been introduced by European settlers.  Metaphysical violence included the denigration of pre-colonial belief and other symbolic systems, such as religious, political, knowledge, legal and language systems.  This metaphysical violence was part of a deliberate British strategy to create a metaphysical empire.

Black agitation for majority rule continued in Rhodesia after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the white settlers in 1965.  New forms of racialised violence were practised.  For example, the settler state, fearing being swamped by a rapidly increasing black population, secretly instituted policies for black population control that included tubal ligation of fertile black women without their consent.  At the same time, efforts to retain its white population prompted the settler state to institute repressive regulations designed to prevent its white citizens from emigrating.  Zimbabwe has always been a violent and repressive state.

As a result of this history, at independence in 1980 Zimbabwe had a violent outgoing settler state.  Being born through a brutal liberation struggle in which atrocities that I cannot go into here were committed on both sides, the incoming nationalist state was just as violent.  Its military rhetoric focused on conflict, antagonism and enmity, and this is the philosophy that holds sway amongst Zimbabwean authorities to this day.  The antagonists and enemies are any entities, including citizens of Zimbabwe and their organisations, that do not comply with the military rulers‘ wishes.  Complaints of intimidation and torture by the ZanuPf authorities began as early as 1980, the year of independence.  A whole genocide was overlooked by the rest of the world a few years later.  Since then violence that uses the atrocious tactics of the liberation struggle has flared up whenever power is contested, usually at election time, but also on other occasions.

Obviously, peace cannot thrive under these conditions.  Only violence thrives in conditions of violence.  It is a well-known fact that violence begets violence and we see this all over the world today, even in the various homes of empire.  Imperial violence created conditions that caused many people to leave their homes and migrate to imperial countries.  Citizens of the imperial countries resent this and mete out violence onto the bodies of the immigrants in various ways, including through institutional violence that is justified as an administrative necessity, a justification that was also given during the colonial era.  At the same time, nationals of imperial nations who have a more developed sense of peace and justice take on their country mates who mete out violence to immigrants and conflict results in the imperial heartland.  It is clearly a no-win situation.  What are we to do, then, to foster peace?  Clearly the world structure that ushered in the specific kinds of violence of our era cannot easily be undone.  The more than seven billion of us human residents of this planet are today all connected to and embedded in that global system.

Here is an answer, and I personally believe that this answer is simpler than we might think.  The violent world order we live in now was brought about by certain hierarchical modes of thinking.  The solution is to undo the racialised and other hierarchical modes of thinking based on demographics such as gender, sex, religion, nationality and class, and any other, that were and continue to be the building blocks of empire throughout history, throughout the world.

A little less than four hundred years ago, a Frenchman wrote a long paragraph on the nature of certainty, that is the nature of knowledge without doubt.  One phrase of this long paragraph has come down to us.  This is the phrase „I think therefore I am“, now one of the most famous and well-known phrases of western philosophy.  In this conceptualisation of the world, „I think“ is the only direct, irrefutable evidence a person has of their existence.  All other evidence could be false.  „I think“ was said to indicate „I am“ or a person’s being, and this position came to be formulated as „I think therefore I am“.

To me, a person who has had the good fortune to access another knowledge system besides the western, experientially rather than intellectually, since childhood, the dangers of such an epistemology are glaring.  Firstly, as is well recognised, the famous phrase is only a short version of what was originally expressed.  The original expression included the useful nature of doubt in ascertaining knowledge: I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.  But those very thought processes said to obtain knowledge through doubt refused to doubt and instead opted for the certainty of „I think therefore I am“, the version that has now become common philosophical currency.

What are the effects of such a common philosophical currency?  To think is to conduct an inner narrative.  This process of inner narrative is composed of process on one hand – how we narrate to ourselves; and content on another hand – what we narrate to ourselves.  Equating the process of one’s, or the „I’s“, thinking or inner narrative with being results in multiple errors in our knowledge.  Allow me to mention two, that are particularly relevant to my feeling like Jonah inside the whale.  Both of these errors refer to difference.

The knowledges of yesteryear and yester-century do not suffice.  They did not save us.  In my part of the world, our philosophy of living was encapsulated in the idea „I am because you are“ now recognised as the philosophy of ubuntu.  This philosophy is still expressed in greetings such as „I am well if you are well too“, but this philosophy did not save us.  We must invent new thought, drag it out from where it is nascent in the folds of the universe to effect the paradigm shift in our ways of knowing and valuing and ascribing meaning that is necessary for our survival as we see oceans polluted, ozone depleted, climate changing, temperatures and shorelines rising, diseases ravaging in spite of science, hunger proliferating, and black bodies drowning in oceans on their way to join those who first sailed to join them, becoming this epoch’s most enduring sacrifice to what it calls progress.

There will be no miracle cures for our errors of thought.  What we can look to is to change our thought patterns word by word, consciously and consistently over time, and to persevere until results are seen in the way we do things and in the outcomes of our actions.  I would like to suggest that one way in which the human community in Germany may contribute to do this is through changing thinking around the N-word.  I have heard that there is an ongoing dispute here about the nature of the N-word and whether it is inherently violent, with some arguing that it is not, so that those who choose to use it are not choosing to use a violent, but only a factual content.  At the same time, those who are the object of those who use the N-word to refer to them, and their allies in the country, testify to the N-word’s violent nature.  In such cases, the choice is ours, whether to valourise the „I“ of „I think“ or to look beyond this „I“ to „We“ in our choice of the contents we entertain in our minds.  To look beyond the „I“ to the „We“ could lead to mind-expanding reformulations of the Frenchman’s phrase, to, for example, „We think, therefore we are“; or even to „We are, therefore we think“, thereby, with this latter, changing the location of valourisation from the rational „think“ to the experiential „are“

She cancelled her participation in an event at the book fair and called on other participants to do the same. Some authors followed her example; others demanded to participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair for this very reason: in order to show their face there and stand up for diversity and against racism. While the traditional media such as print, TV and radio took a differentiated view of the issue, a wave of indignation broke out on social media. On the one hand, this helped that right-wing publishing house to receive a great deal of attention, whose content would otherwise hardly have been disseminated at the book fair. On the other hand, it overlapped the reporting and discussion of other topics at the book fair, leaving little room for a diverse range of topics.

It also became clear during those days in October 2021 that the limits of freedom of expression that apply to our society must be constantly re-discussed.

The Corona crisis also reinforced existing divisive tendencies in our society. During the pandemic, society’s ability to discourse was under particularly high pressure. Expressions of opinion that, under certain circumstances, deviated from the unanimous majority view or ran counter to a vocal minority provoked an aggressive backlash. Riots at demonstrations and physical attacks on reporters in public spaces were just as alarming as the hate and incitement to violence on social media. Germany moved down two places in the 2021 press freedom ranking.

The Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers and Booksellers Association) and its business enterprises are united in their support for a culture of open debate and create offerings to strengthen the freedom of expression. In doing so, they make a significant contribution to social participation. After all, in order to emerge stronger from a crisis—in line with the Renaissance 4.0 and to enter a new era together with innovative ideas—the Börsenverein group believes that responsible citizens and readers are needed who identify reliable sources, recognise fake news as such, and want to live in an open culture of debate. Everyone should have the opportunity to play a part in tackling our collective challenges in a goal-oriented way. For the word and freedom.