Decolonizing universities in South Africa: Backtracking and revisiting the debate

• In Event: Inequality, Decolonization, and Tensions in Higher Education

Proposal

DECOLONIZING UNIVERSITIES IN SOUTH AFRICA: BACKTRACKING AND REVISITING THE DEBATE
Intellectual formations rooted in social movements have played a central role in generating, shaping and normalizing new academic discourses in South African academia. Once again, as in the aftermath of the school crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, student protests have triggered a new intellectual movement striving for more nuanced approaches to education. This paper deals with the epistemological consequences of the 2014-15 student protests and their implications for the construction of new intellectual and political identities in higher education transformation scholarship.

The paper posits two interrelated claims with profound epistemological and theoretical implications for university transformation in South Africa. First, it shows how intellectual formations rooted in social movements have played a central role in generating, shaping and normalizing new academic discourses. While this is applicable to the intellectual formations connected to the liberation movements (e.g. the Freedom Charter Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement), I consider here more specifically student movements. Second, the paper holds that the new intellectual movement inaugurated by student protests points to the need to rethink the future of higher education within a horizon of possibilities different from the neo-liberal tradition that for many years dominated the transformation project.

While the 1976 Soweto uprising and its aftermath triggered epistemological breaks with nationalist and liberal discourses and their analytical traditions giving space to radical and neo-Marxist discourses in the 1970s and 1980s, current student movements have triggered profound review and revisiting of the discourses underpinning transformation strategies in higher education, which warrant a paradigm shift. Under fire was neoliberalism in academic scholarship, which came to be perceived as a discourse of identity construction or a voice of conscience rather than a mode of explanation: “the liberal tradition in general is long on morality and short on explanation” (Hughes, 1977, p. 47). Radical scholarship countered that such a view failed to recognize how economic and social self-interests rendered such evidence impotent, unless it took into account the dynamics of class, race and power in the apartheid architecture. Marking the intellectual change were a number of assumptions inter alia the assumption that “the categories in which social life is lived in a particular society – e.g. race, ethnicity, racism, nationalism, prejudice – are the correct categories in terms of which social life should be analyzed and explained” and the assumption that segregation/apartheid were incompatible with the modern industrial society. It endorsed the Marxist ‘conflict-model’ that considers class, race and gender as important analytical categories, particularly within the political economy framework.

More specifically, this paper argues that, like in the 1970s and the 1980s, the 2014-2015 student movement has laid the foundations for a particular social epistemology (a certain conception of knowledge and its relation to society) and political epistemology (conception of knowledge concerned with the interface of power, interest and knowledge in society), which are increasingly gaining momentum in South African universities. Characterizing this intellectual movement are three important aspects: (i) the emphasis on emancipatory ideals in all structural and cultural domains of university institutional life (‘Rhodes must fall’), (ii) the centrality of the poor and the working class as fundamental stakeholders in the transformation process (‘Fees must fall’ and ‘Stop outsourcing’); (iii) the conception of transformation as entailing decolonization. Thus, major assumptions underpinning this intellectual movement include: (i) the assumption that missing in the transformation discourse is the notion of 'decolonization'; (ii) the assumption that decolonization and transformation are not mutually exclusive or contradictory concepts, they can co-exist; and (iii) the assumption that without decolonization, social justice cannot be fully achieved. Efforts in this direction are well illustrated through the numerous scholarly research and debates on transformation, higher education summits, senate and faculty task teams on decolonization, student and staff academic work.

Author

• Michael Cross, University of Johannesburg