Dismantling colonisation’s ‘pedagogy of big lies’

More than two decades after the end of apartheid, historical and structural inequalities, rooted in the racist colonial and apartheid oppression and dispossession, remain part and parcel of the South Africa’s social fabric. The country’s higher education institutions are no exception.

Since 2015, young black students have been demanding fundamental transformation at South African universities. They have campaigned to remove colonial and racist symbols, dismantle oppressive institutional cultures, end epistemic violence and decolonise the curriculum.

Decolonisation of the curriculum was supposed to be one of the key priorities after 1994 if higher education were to contribute to fundamental transformation, social cohesion and addressing the difficult past. However, this never happened.

Conforming to white spaces

The most significant transformation in higher education has been the change in student demographics, with black students and women being the majority of the student body today. However, transformation in academia has lagged behind, with white academics still being in the majority.

Another failure has been the lack of curriculum transformation. Curricula at universities remain Eurocentric, rooted in colonial and apartheid knowledge systems and disconnected from the realities and lived experiences of black South Africans.

At historically white universities, whiteness – defined by George Sefa Dei as a “system of domination and structure of privilege” – continues to dominate institutional cultures. After 1994, black students and staff were allowed to enter ‘white’ spaces, but they have been expected to conform and not question or disrupt the status quo.

This has had a profoundly negative impact on curriculum transformation as the curriculum “is intertwined with the institutional culture” and, given that the latter remains white and Eurocentric at the historically white institutions, the institutional environment is not conducive to ‘curriculum transformation’.

Don’t rock the boat

The lack of fundamental epistemological and curriculum change was not accidental. The discussions about the transformation of higher education after 1994 did not include any significant deliberations about the curriculum and Eurocentric hegemony.

In January 2017, Ahmed Bawa, the CEO of Universities South Africa, told University World News that “in the mid-1990s, we were in the throes of a negotiated settlement, and there was a strong view that we should not rock the boat and especially not damage confidence in the historically white universities”.

These universities were basically allowed to continue with ‘business as usual’ when it came to the maintenance of whiteness, hegemonic institutional cultures and degradation and dehumanisation of black South Africans through the Eurocentric curriculum.

Thus, it should not come as a surprise that South African academia continues to reproduce and propagate worldviews, stereotypes, prejudices and patronising views about Africa and its people. Much of academia still assumes that Western knowledge systems are the “only basis for higher forms of thinking”.

As Mahmood Mamdani highlighted in 1998, students in South Africa “are being taught a curriculum which presumes that … Africa has no intelligentsia worth reading”. To a large extent, this remains the norm at many South African universities.

The universities and academia have also failed to engage with what Donaldo Macedo – writing about similar failures of education in the United States – calls the “intricate interplay of race, ethics and ideology”. For him, this “serious omission is, by its very nature, ideological and constitutes the foundation for … the pedagogy of big lies”.

Many in South African academia have neglected to critically reflect on the country’s history of oppression and their own role in the maintenance of white supremacy, whiteness, domination, dehumanisation and past and present injustices and inequalities. This way they keep reproducing power asymmetries along racial and class lines.

As Tebello Letsekha points out, the curriculum at South African universities continues to be a “source of alienation” for the majority of students as it does not speak to their experiences and needs or “reflect the philosophical, social realities of their communities”.

The existing curriculum at South African universities does not contribute to a much-needed fundamental transformation and social justice in a deeply unequal society where inequality is rooted in centuries of racist oppression.

The dominant and hegemonic colonial and apartheid-era knowledges, which continue to shape the ways of knowing and understanding of social, political, economic and other relations continue to construct everyday realities in the country. This is what the decolonisation project aims to address and rectify.

Reconstructing Africa

Decolonisation is about reconstructing Africa from the historical, civilisational, political economy and political standpoint perspectives. It aims to engage with the “plurality of experience and perspective” in each and every culture and part of the world instead of blindly following the Western universalism and the notion that Europe and the West are the centre of the globe and the source of all global knowledge.

The dismantling of the ‘pedagogy of big lies’ rooted in colonialism and apartheid will require a complete reconstruction of everything that universities do and stand for – from institutional cultures to epistemology and curriculum. Transforming apartheid-era institutional cultures at historically white institutions is key if genuine change and decolonisation of the curriculum are to take place.

The new pedagogy and curriculum must engage in critical epistemic questioning of all knowledge while placing South Africa and Africa at the centre. The decolonised curriculum must be relevant, appropriate and meaningful for local, national and continental settings as well as for functioning in a complex, interconnected and unjust world.

The curriculum must strike the right balance, one that considers the past and current injustices, structural domination, oppression and exploitation in South Africa, Africa and the world, as well as the skills and knowledge needed to overcome these in the future.

None of this will be easy, as resistance to change is immense. The students, activists and progressive academics and staff at universities will have to continue with critical engagement and activism until institutional cultures and curriculum at universities are fundamentally transformed and decolonised.

The struggle will be a long and arduous one. But however difficult the road ahead, there are no alternatives if the South African higher education sector is to be relevant.

Dr Savo Heleta is a researcher at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. This is a short version of his paper titled Decolonizing Knowledge in South Africa: Dismantling the ‘pedagogy of big lies’, published recently in Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, Volume 40, No. 2. (open access).