African cosmic complexity, food production and the situation of (meta-)polycrisis

Abstract

The Industrial Agricultural Complex (IAC) and its impact on soil agroecosystems is generally underexplored in the literature on environmental ethics, but specifically underexplored from an African thought perspective, raising the question: How could we justify and then defend the moral value of microcosmic life in relation to other- than-human Life from an African thought perspective? Using a Bricolage method constellated between (Post-)Interdisciplinarity, Conversationalism, Critical Complexity Theory, Afrocentricity, Decoloniality and Engaged Philosophy, this thesis posits and defends an apparent moral obligation to abandon the IAC in favour of transitioning towards an agroecological food system. After reaching this seemingly (im)possible conclusion, which calls for a radical transformation of our food systems on a scale without meaningful or practical precedent, this thesis then raises the prospect of a future South African society that is agroecologically sustained in a way that is equally beautiful, just, and good. By exploring the insights and implications of said transition related to aesthetics, political ontology, and the question of order, the analysis reveals a key set of insights termed ‘Afrignosis’ that frame certain African thought perspectives as inherently sensitive to Cosmos and Complexity, as a view on ontology giving way to a notion of Being-Becoming as cosmic unfoldment. In doing so, this work interrogates the dominant Eurocentric instantiations of order that create and perpetuate the IAC as a matter of urgent Situational politics by (re)articulating alternative mythocentric forms of order from Africa to provoke (re)generative thinking about the (im)possibility of societal (re)orientation.