By Professor Artwell Nhemachena
HISTORY has shown that research can be conducted unethically, and even unlawfully such that some sections of humanity are, and have been, actually harmed.
But then, the danger is that once relational ontologies displace the primacy of the human entities in research, then it follows that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to hold any substantive human entities accountable for harmful, unethical or even illegal research.
In the research that harmed the German Jews, it was possible to identify and hold substantive humans accountable, including in the Nuremburg Trials.
Yet a relational ontological transformation of research promises to deconstruct accountability mechanisms in research.
Similarly, in other researches, including the Tuskegee experiments in the US, it was possible to identify and hold substantive human entities accountable.
Yet a relational transformation of research threatens to destroy the accountability mechanism in research because such relational ontologies put primacy on relations rather than on substantive entities.
If coloniality can, as it should, be understood as lack of accountability and responsibility, then it means the ontological turn in research threatens to replicate colonial forms of research by decentring substantive human entities.
The point that I am making here is that decentring substantive human entities in research does not amount to decolonising research.
Decentring substantive human entities in ways that enable some humans to escape accountability and responsibility for (possibly) harmful, unethical and unlawful research is not synonymous with decolonisation of research.
In order to decolonise research, it is necessary to ensure more, and not less, accountability and responsibility.
While it is often argued by relational ontologists that indigenous people live within relational ontologies that do not have distinctions between entities whether human or nonhuman, the Shona people of Zimbabwe’s saying that: ‘Ngoma inorira ichiti kwangu kwangu’ indicates that these people place emphasis not on relations but on substantive entities.
‘Ngoma inorira ichiti kwangu kwangu’ translates to the fact that individuals emphasise what benefits them.
It speaks to the self-centredness of individuals who try to maximise benefits for themselves, including benefits from researches whose agendas may be couched as communal, for purposes of offshoring costs.
Of course, there are other Shona aphorisms that are often deployed to neutralise or balance the saying ‘ngoma inorira ichiti kwangu kwangu’.
But my point here is to show that the Shona people do not put primacy on relations as contended in relational ontologies that argue for posthumanist flat ontologies or object-oriented ontologies.
In other worlds, the Shona people do not decentre the humans but they seek to hold humans accountable and responsible for any harm that ensues from their actions.
For this reason, decentring the human does not translate to decolonising research for the Shona people.
For the Shona people, it is substantive human entities that set the research agendas and execute the research processes in terms of the saying ‘ngoma inorira ichiti kwangu kwangu’.
And so, it is substantive human entities that should be accountable and responsible for any research that is harmful, unethical or unlawful.
The point I am making here is that decentring the human in research dissipates accountability such that substantive human entities begin to do research without worrying about accountability and responsibility — much as happened during the colonial era.
The question then is: If global capital offshores the costs of its agendas by unethically depicting such agendas as communal or as public agendas, how then might contemporary researchers forbid capital from privatising profits while offshoring such costs to the public?
Put succinctly, the ethics of (global) research must begin earnestly with questions of agenda setting. Coloniality begins with agenda setting followed by the offshoring of costs to the public while ironically privatising the profits.
A child may become the agenda of the community but the benefits may still be privatised.
Global capital has its children that it defines as an agenda of the (global) community but the benefits deriving from the costs of taking care of the children are invariably privatised.
Indeed, the ‘global’ agenda may be so privatised that the ‘global’ research agendas are not really communal in the sense of being global.
