South Africa’s Enduring Colonial Nature and Universities

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.

Critical Studies in Education

The colonial nature of South African universities remains a source of debate among students and academics. Decolonization as rethinking academic institutional practices seems less controversial; the specificity of how to decolonize the academia is the core of divergent arguments and contesting ideologies. Consequently, many suggestions and methods for the decolonization of South African universities have been proffered. Although some of these suggestions are pertinent, a critical question aboutwhat should South African academe decolonize from needs to be engaged. This requires a critical, theoretical and intellectual discourse of coloniality in order to rethink the academia in South Africa. Drawing from Anibal Quijano’s critical discourse of coloniality of power, this paper (re)visits the nature of coloniality, explores approaches to decolonization and situates these understandings to the academia in postcolonial South Africa. A polycentric approach to decolonization is supported with a goal of decolonization as innovations.

From Ivory Towers to Ebony Towers - Transforming Humanities Curricula in South Africa, Africa and African-American Studies (Tella and Motala, eds), 2020

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.

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

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...

2022

This thesis explores the inherent complexities and contradictions embedded in the radical turn in South African historiography with regards to the decolonisation of the discipline of history in South African universities under apartheid from 1960 to 1991. By choosing to deconstruct radical history in a white liberal university, the study seeks to further demonstrate the limits of intellectual decolonisation and its underlying assumptions in the academic field during apartheid. It interrogates radical history as a form of academic resistance and leads a reflection on the political role of the intellectual in the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, asking more broadly: to what extent can radical academic history be considered "de/colonised knowledge"? Building on the links between ideology and curriculum, this study aimed to measure the coloniality of history using history examination questions as tools to investigate the methodological, theoretical and ideological assumptions of historians. Theoretically, the study relied on the role of the historian as a recontextualising agent of disciplinary knowledge taught and examined within a historically white higher education institution to study its concomitant underlying historiographical silences at the time. Methodologically, it deployed quantitative and qualitative research methods, using interviews and semi-structured questionnaires with a targeted cohort of authentic interlocutors to triangulate the discursive analysis of institutionalised "de/colonised" historical knowledge. This interdisciplinary study was thus inscribed in a critical deconstructionist approach to knowledge which contributed to a finer conceptual and empirical understanding of the coloniality of history as a discipline and its reproduction in the South African higher education context. The study hopes (1) to contribute to understanding the nuanced intersections between the history of intellectual colonisation and decolonisation and how these tensions impacted on history education in the apartheid university, (2) to provide an original interdisciplinary mixed method of analysis of institutionalised "de/colonised knowledge", and (3) to contribute new critical insights into blind spots in South African radical historiography in higher education during the period 1960 to 1991, which could shed light on the various understandings of the imperative for decolonisation today in the discipline.

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.

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.

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?