The Aporias of Decolonisation in the South African Academy (original) (raw)
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Education As Change, 2018
The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada's commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of " de-mythologising " decolonisation, by first exposing and tracing how decolonising claims both reinforce and recite the racial and colonial terms under which Indigeneity and Blackness are " integrated " in the academy. From our respective contexts, we trace how white, western ownership of space and knowledge in the academy is reaffirmed through processes of invitation, commodification, and erasure of Indigenous/Black bodies and identities. However, we also suggest that the invitation and presence of Indigenous and Black bodies and identities in both academic contexts are necessary to the reproduction and survival of decolonising claims, which allows us to begin to interrogate how, why, and under what terms bodies and identities come to be " included " in the academy. We conclude by proposing that the efficacy of decoloniality lies in paradigmatic and epistemic shifts which begin to unearth and then unsettle white supremacy in both contexts, in order to proceed with aims of reconciliation and reclamation.
SUBSEQUENT CALL OF DECOLONISATION AT ONE UNIVERSITY IN SOUTH AFRICA
Conference Paper, 2021
(RMF) protest spiralled at one University of South Africa in Cape Town. Still, this protest has been considered as the reason for the subsequent call of decolonisation. It is presumed that the key motivation of decolonisation at the Universities are the issue of whiteness, inequality, and public culture which is presently at some universities. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to critique literature and contrast how students, personnel, and academics figure out and understand decolonisation, in addition to how they predict the future at one of the decolonised universities. However, a qualitative methodology is then applied in execution of the study. Thus, an in-depth interview is conducted in relation to research questions as identified. Nonetheless, the study obtained that amongst the groups participated, student and support stuff attain a minimal knowledge, faculty administrators attain at least moderate knowledge, and student representatives and academics attain the highest level of knowledge concerning decolonisation. These show that, the intellectual capacity amongst candidates participated in the study depends on the level of education they have attained. The limitation to this study is due to the way data is collected and analysed irrelative to its broader scope.
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
Decolonising The University In South Africa : A Precondition for Liberation
2012
The essay itself means to treat the way in which the general suppression and marginalisation of the African perspective in South African Education is an affirmation of an age-old philosophic racism and a confirmation of the pre-dominance of the white-supremacist power structure in South Africa. Our method will be to briefly treat the general history of racism with specific reference to the contact between Europeans and Africans, more specifically indigenous South Africans some time after the expeditions of conquest and settlement of the European invaders. We will then focus on this racism in the domain of education, focusing particularly on higher education and using the discipline of philosophy as a case study both because it is the area of training of the present author as well as because philosophy pervades all other disciplines and so our focus should have a specific as well as a general appeal. After arguing that very little has changed in the culture and practice of universities in South Africa since 1994, we will finally show how this condition of our universities, presents a serious obstacle to both Historical Justice and true liberation for the indigenous African people of the country.
Education as Change, 2018
The ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation in the South African academy have been framed and carried out have been called into question over the past several years, most notably in relation to modes of silencing and epistemic negation, which have been explicitly challenged through the student actions. In a similar vein, Canada’s commitments to decolonising its university spaces and pedagogies have been the subject of extensive critique, informed by (still unmet) claims to land, space, knowledge, and identity. Despite extensive critique, policies and practices in both South African and Canadian academic spaces remain largely unchanged, yet continue to stand as evidence that decolonisation is underway. In our paper, we begin to carefully articulate an understanding of decolonisation in the academy as one which continues to carry out historical relations of colonialism and race. Following the work of Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2012), we begin the process of “de-mythologising...
DECOLONISING THE SOUTH AFRICAN UNIVERSITY: A SOCIAL REALIST STUDY
Thesis, 2020
This research is a case study that investigates the demand for decolonisation at the University of Cape Town (UCT). UCT is an institution that was reserved for white South Africans under the Apartheid system, until the formal abolition of Apartheid in 1994. Between 2015 and 2017 the university faced disruptive and violent student protests which halted the academic programme on several occasions. The demands of black students were centered on the legacy of economic and cultural exclusion which they still felt at UCT, 20 years after Apartheid. These charges of exclusion eventually became bundled within the general demand for the total decolonisation of UCT. The aim of this research was to understand the charge that UCT remained colonial, for the purpose of helping the institution chart an emancipatory course of action. The research therefore sought to investigate the exact nature of coloniality at UCT, as well as offer some practical suggestions for it to overcome the problem. In contrast to many research projects in this field, this investigation was conducted from the paradigm of critical realism, meaning that an objective and holistic problem analysis was attempted, with the hope of it leading to a more coherent and unifying change strategy. The research was designed as a single organisational case study, with data for the research coming mainly from open source documentary data. To augment the documentary data, a series of interviews with members of the university community was also conducted. Documentary data included official university publications, video and audio material, minutes of meetings and other material which related to the protests and to the call for decolonisation. The interviews comprised seven unstructured interviews; two with senior executives, one with a recently retired professor and four with students. The qualitative data analysis drew on recognised methods of documentary analysis, including textual analysis and critical discourse analysis. Using the lens of social realism, the central focus of the analysis was reaching an understanding of the dynamics between Structure and Agency, where Structure refers to the historically established cultural and material structure and Agency the actions of the people in response to it. The first of two key findings that were made was that the legacy of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past persists on campus, in the form of the cognitive and emotional pressure that it places on black students, thereby adversely affecting the exercise of Agency. Whereas social and economic deprivation can be quantified, and structurally addressed, the research found that the emotional and cognitive effects on Agency remain more complex and worthy of greater attention. Theorising such complexity as Student Secureness, the research goes on to identify practical approaches to ameliorate the effects of this form of coloniality. The second important outcome of the study was confirming that coloniality continued to be felt in the cultural and intellectual plane - which manifested in the form of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, the domain of research as well as in the classroom and campus milieu. Going beyond this however, and in applying a social realism lens, the study infers a further and novel causal structure termed Intellectual and Cultural Solipsism (ICS). ICS is theorised as a more complex and broader explanation of coloniality, which transcends race and nationality. It is theorised as a condition in which the agents, being colonially conditioned, are unable to make sense of knowledge that emanates from epistemic pathways outside of their ingrained sensemaking faculties, thereby resulting in a constricted reflexivity and the formulation of an unproductive agentic stance and leading eventually to organisational stasis and socio-cultural schism. In addressing the problem of ICS, the thesis argues for the conceptualisation of an expanded institutional identity that can generate broad commitment and institutional cohesion. A transcendent, globally relevant African identity is proposed, built on the common legacy of colonialism and the goal of an emancipated Africa, to which the entire university community can commit to, and to which the entire academic project can be directed.
Alternations Journal, UKZN, 2021
This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, 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, coloniser – colonised 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.
Critical African Studies
In this introduction to the special issue on decolonizing African Studies, we discuss some of the epicolonial dynamics that characterize much of higher education and knowledge production in, of, with, and for Africa. Decolonizing, we argue, is best understood as a verb that entails a political and normative ethic and practice of resistance and intentional undoingunlearning and dismantling unjust practices, assumptions, and institutionsas well as persistent positive action to create and build alternative spaces and ways of knowing. We present four dimesions of decolonizing work: structural, epistemic, personal, and relational, which are entangled and equally necessary. We offer the Black Academic Caucus at the University of Cape Town as an example of how these dimensions can come to life, and introduce the contributions in this special issue (the first of a two-part series) that illuminate other sites and dimensions of decolonizing.
Jonathan D. Jansen (ed): Decolonisation in universities: the politics of recognition
Higher Education, 2020
While the South African student protests demanding "free decolonised education" have since calmed, intellectual engagement with this rallying call continues. This edited volume interrogates decolonization as an epistemic project in relation to university curricula. Comprising 12 chapters divided across four sections, it responds to three main questions: what (a) is the imperative to decolonize (part I)? (b) are the problems with how decolonization gets articulated (part II); (c) constitutes a praxis of decolonization both in relation to curricula and the inheritances of the past? (parts III and IV). Regarding (a), Mamdani posits that when we interrogate their "institutional form" and "curricula content," universities in Africa take their inspiration from a Eurocentric modernity largely through histories of colonialism. Le Grange provides a more general argument about the curriculum as a site of power. What is included, excluded, and hidden is often implicated in assumptions around the biography and geography of authoritative knowledge. On the problems within decolonization discourse(s), a key contribution of this book is in fact to address the absence of curriculum theory. This absence, Hoadley and Galant contend, often translates into a gap between substantive curriculum change and "meta-epistemological debates." Lange contrasts the "academic" and "institutional" curriculum, criticizing a failure to appreciate the resilience of the latter, which is often an obstacle to the former. Jansen introduces the notion of "knowledge regimes" to caution against reducing complex problems to a single knowledge regime (colonial). This relies on an assumption of colonialism and apartheid as distinct knowledge regimes. Noting Mamdani's (1996: 8) insistence that apartheid is the "generic form of the colonial state in Africa," I am surprised this assumption was not debated further. Reading decolonization as a politics of recognition, Lange contrasts epistemic and ontological recognition, criticizing their conflation in student discourses on decolonization. This conflation manifests in a politically and epistemically isolating discourse of Africanization. This, however, is insufficiently demonstrated considering that (a) the epistemic and ontological Higher Education