Relational Dialectics in Eswatini

Abstract

It has become commonplace to dismiss African normative theorising as preoccupied with conceptual questions that, however philosophically significant, appear unlikely to yield substantive power for Africans globally, much less for those marginalised within African communities. Dr Gama argues that this dismissal registers a concern with the limited anti-systemic capacity of African normative theory. African philosophy has nevertheless performed an important anti-hegemonic task by unsettling the colonial bifurcation through which reality, difference, the self, and personhood have been constituted in oppositional and hierarchically valued terms. Yet the reconstruction of African metaphysics, the self, and personhood can become idealised when relationality is treated as straightforwardly complementary, harmonious, or egalitarian. If African relations are constituted through persistent tensions, those tensions cannot themselves establish the justice of the relations in which they occur. The existence of tension does not tell us whether those who inhabit a relation possess equal capacities to negotiate its terms. 

Reading relational dialectics theory (RDT) in a ontic political register, she argues that African relations are constituted through tensions internal to interdependence, obligation, authority, autonomy, and power, rather than through oppositional binaries. As such, on their own, alternative onto-epistemic normative theorizing on its own does not tell us how its operationalization distributes value on these relational lines. The alternative must therefore be operationalised and enacted as a counter-structure, particularly where care, kinship, reproduction, and feminised labour materially reproduce social relations and hegemonic power. Eswatini provides a paradigmatic site for analysing these dynamics because it allows relationality to be examined not as an abstract normative ideal but as an organisation of social life in which communal recognitions are materially consequential. It therefore makes visible the precise problem at stake: relations may be constitutive and mutually obligatory while the capacities to determine, contest, and transform their terms remain unequally distributed. 

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