RACIAL EPISTEMOLOGY AT A TIME OF A PANDEMIC: A SYNOPSIS OF SOUTH AFRICA’S PERSISTING INEQUALITIES THROUGH THE LENS OF ‘#FEESMUSTFALL’ AND ‘#FREEDECOLONISEDEDUCATION’ (original) (raw)
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Editorial Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World
Alternation, 2020
The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and participants of the UNISA Decolonial Summer School of 2019 beyond the content that was presented. UNISA, referring to the University of South Africa, was established in 1873 and is South Africa's foremost distance learning university. UNISA is situated in Pretoria in the province of Gauteng, which is one of South Africa's three capital cities where the executive branch of government is located, with over 400,000 registered students, including its international student population that come from 130 countries around the world. UNISA's Decolonial Summer School commenced in 2013 for the first time, under the direction of the School of Humanities, and has thus far run every year except for 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, colonisercolonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection. Not only are we confronted with the overwhelming critique of colonial pedagogies, we are also confronted with an ongoing critique of teaching and learning practices within the university system that almost all of the contributors draw attention to. Some authors utilise the terms, Black and White when referring to racialised identity, with capitalisation, and some do notthose who write Afrika in its newly adopted form within the
'Free, decolonised education': a lesson from the South African student struggle
This commentary places British geography within transnational currents of student-focused decolonisation movements. In October 2015, the author travelled to South Africa for the first time, visiting Witwatersrand University (Johannesburg), University of Cape Town (UCT) and Rhodes University in Grahamstown. This paper draws on historical accounts of the British colonisation of what is now South Africa, contextualising both the domestic and global inequalities which it's students are currently challenging. British imperial history also provides a basis for understanding the roots of British geography, offering the campaigns to decolonise the South African university as an opportunity to critically reflect on how our own discipline produces knowledge. The commentary asks this timely question: as geographers, particularly those based in the old centre of Empire, how can our work be used to dismantle the colonialism our discipline has been implicated in since its formal inception?
Racialization and Resistance in South African Education
In the World Yearbook of Education 2023: Racialization and Educational Inequality in Global Perspective. Edited By Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj, published November 7, 2022, by Routledge. ISBN 9781032148434. Chapter 11, pp 189-203., 2023
This chapter begins with an overview of the genesis and history of racialization in education in South Africa before discussing contemporary forms of "race" and class stratification in education. The chapter argues that present-day educational segregation in post-apartheid South Africa must be examined with reference to the history of racial capitalism and to contemporary socioeconomic and political disadvantage and patterns of inequality in society. The chapter asserts that racism in education does not constitute an autonomous form of oppression but is inextricably linked to power relations and reproduced in conjunction with class, gender, and other inequalities. Education is embedded in social class relations and largely reflects and reinforces the inequalities in a racial capitalist society. The chapter also documents resistance in South African education by focusing on the "Fees Must Fall" protests by university students.
THE EDUCATION CRISIS AND THE STRUGGLE TO ACHIEVE QUALITY PUBLIC EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
This is a transcript of the Strini Moodley Memorial Lecture organised by the Umtapo Centre and delivered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on the 22nd of May, 2015. I was asked to speak to the theme of education and to acknowledge the prodigious legacy to educational praxis of two other close comrades who passed away recently, Professor Mbulelo Mzamane, an Umtapo Board member, and Professor Neville Alexander, an Umtapo patron. The lecture begins by addressing the appalling xenophobic violence that occurred in the city of Durban before discussing some of the egregious problems in education, youth struggles and what matters toward changing the education system. It is easy to become despondent about the state of education when we read about practices such as unions selling teacher and principal posts, rampant cronyism, the dismal state of infrastructure and facilities in our schools and the abysmal performance of our learners in international benchmark tests. Over two decades since the first democratic elections in South Africa, the combined weight of apartheid’s legacy exacerbated by neo-liberal policies over the past twenty years has meant that the promise of a quality public education system remains a chimera. While a mélange of new official policies on every conceivable aspect of education exists and racially based laws have been removed from the statutes, the education system as a whole reflects and reproduces the wider inequalities in society. Above all we need to understand that education is embedded in social class relations and largely reflects, reinforces and reproduces the inequalities in a racial capitalist society. This does not mean that resistance and counter-hegemonic efforts are fruitless, but that in doing so we must be cognisant of the combined impact of social class, gender and a racist history. A bland consensus-seeking constitutionalism often serves as a barrier to social analysis and the assumptions it makes about rights. Sixteen campaigning issues to turn public education around are identified, necessary to revive the ideas, strategies and passions that informed the struggles against apartheid education in line with Alexander’s view as expressed in his essay, ‘Some are more equal than others’, that “it is no longer disputed that in education, as in every other major sphere of society, the interests and the ideas of the ruling class(es) and ruling strata are the dominant ones. They tend to shape and to limit the processes and practices that are possible at any given time. Of course, we know, from both theory and practice, that particularly in the sphere of education, the control of the rulers is not absolute: counter-hegemonic practices and mobilisations are possible. They are the lifeblood of struggle …”
Cambridge Journal of Education Anti‐racism and the 'New' South African Educational Order
This article traces the desegregation of South African schools, particularly within the Gauteng region, from 1990Gauteng region, from to 1996. It argues that there is a discernible shift from 'race' to ethnicity in the educational discourses of South Africa and that at school level the response to ethnicity has been predominantly assimilationist. Attempts to move towards a more multicultural way of operating are affected by conceptions of identity as stereotyped, homogenised and generalised, leading to 'bad' multicultural approaches being adopted. Simultaneously, within official enunciations at national level, a consistent anti-racist stance is emphasised in order to 'redress' apartheid's legacies. I argue that such initiatives are limited due to their structurally functionalist underpinnings and their failure to address the complexity of identities contained within the classifications of 'black' and 'white'. I argue that, on both the macro and the micro level, questions of identity and difference are central in developing a school (and societal) environment that is not only free from racism, but other forms of discrimination too.
Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020
The article discusses the complexities of decolonising curricula and humanising pedagogy in South Africa's Higher education. It is based on the secondary data source and empirical evidence of existing researches that have focused on the decolonisation of higher education. Since knowledge is produced in higher education where teachers are trained to develop the curriculum for the whole education system, decolonisation of the curriculum requires the system to consider the important role played by the teacher. The article examines decolonisation as a theory, concept, and pedagogical practices. The main argument herein is that since decolonisation has proliferated at a theoretical level, its operationalisation at higher education is just beginning. There is no theorist best known to the writers who have adequately provided the theoretical meaning of decolonisation for South Africa's higher education pedagogy and praxis. As such, the article lays the theoretical groundwork that brings decolonial theory into concrete engagement with pedagogic practice. The Freirean humanising pedagogy was used in an attempt to explore the relationship between humanisation and decolonisation of higher education in South Africa. To this effect, the main argument advanced in this section is that decolonial thinking of higher education in South Africa requires the development of pedagogical and intellectual spaces that respect Freirean problem-posing philosophy. The initial part of the article discusses the historical view of decolonial thinking and the theoretical gist of Complexities of Decolonising Curricula and Humanising Pedagogy 419 the article. The penultimate part of the article discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the decolonisation project. It unpacks the complexities of decolonising curricula and pedagogy in South Africa's Higher education as set against the background of COVID-19.
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2019
The embodied reading strategy I develop in this article provides us with an alternative to the large literature that reads #RMF from the global North. My argument is that this approach is crucial if we are to understand the South African student movements from locations elsewhere across Africa. This highlights the connections and disconnections between the many histories of decolonisation across the African continent. The attention to the geo-historical positioning of the body of the black students in these protest movements shows the nuances around the historical impossibility of the Fallist movements to accommodate the body of the African Other, whose presence remains unintelligible in the spaces between the two geo-historical spaces. This disjuncture of the body is evident in the discord that was the violence of xenophobia. The Fallist movements showed that knowledge production takes place within a space of racial violence, a form of violence that is provoked by the marginality produced by high theory on the one side and xenophobia on the other. The article suggests how an embodied understanding of the archives of violence and agency propose 'continued' disruption as a meaningful way to challenge a colonial approach to knowledge production.