Decolonisation: ‘Who we are and from where we speak’

The decolonisation of higher education remains topical. It has been featured prominently in the titles of events hosted by universities and organisations working in the field of higher education around the globe. In light of its increasing prominence, have you considered what decolonisation means to you? In this article, I offer some reflections on how it relates to my personal and professional lives.

At the 9th African Network for Internationalization of Education (ANIE) conference held in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2019, I delivered a paper entitled, ‘Making North-South higher education partnerships work: a perspective from South Africa’.

In this presentation, I shared findings from my PhD study, which considers North-South partnerships in higher education from a decolonial lens, particularly regarding the challenges these partnerships pose due to their imbalanced nature.

After the session, a delegate approached me and said that he could relate to what I had presented. However, what he was grappling with was the question of what decolonisation had to do with him, personally.

In the closing session of the conference, I picked up on his question. As an immediate example of how decolonisation speaks to our everyday lives and experiences, I directed the audience’s attention to the conference evaluation form that had just been distributed to the delegates.

On it, it stated ANIE’s address as The Margaret Thatcher Library at Moi University. The fact that a library at a public university in Kenya is named after a British prime minister speaks directly to issues of decolonisation.

Renaming spaces and buildings that symbolise the legacy of colonialism on university campuses in Africa is a key component of the decolonisation project in higher education.

Decolonising the self

Since that first instance in Nairobi, the question of what decolonisation means to us as individuals has been posed to me many times. The best response I can offer at this point is to highlight that decolonisation comes from within.

Issues of positionality, which I dealt with during my doctoral research, were recently affirmed by an observation made by Professor Rozena Maart, a South African writer, academic and critical race scholar.

In a webinar tackling issues of race, racism and coloniality hosted by the University of Cape Town in February 2021, she pointed out that consciousness – of self, of one’s surroundings and of history – is the prerequisite for any anti-racism or decolonial work. In other words, such work starts from within.

In the sections that follow, I reflect on what starting from within means to me as an international education practitioner, scholar and facilitator who has extensive experience in working in North-South and South-North contexts.

Sharing some of my thinking will, I hope, inspire others to find their personal entry point to decolonisation, which can be seen as an overwhelming topic and a daunting task.

Starting with ‘within’, I recognise that North-South and South-North issues have literally been with me from the cradle, as I am of both European and African parentage.

Such lineage brings with it many complexities. In Germany, the country of my birth, I am easily and readily identified as black. However, in South Africa, my country of residence, that same blackness is denied by those who insist that I am not black but coloured, using the terminology of racial classification that was a cornerstone of segregation and discrimination in apartheid South Africa.

Moreover, I have, on several occasions, been referred to as a white woman, where white does not denote the colour of my skin but serves as a synonym for European or coloniser. Whiteness, understood in that way, manifests differently. To illustrate this further, I will share three examples from my personal and professional contexts.

Connecting the personal, social and historical

Firstly, whiteness finds expression in how I was educated, generally shaping a Northern outlook on the world. It is safe to say that my school and university education did not adequately address Germany’s colonial history, particularly in terms of perspectives of the colonised.

For me, a more nuanced understanding of history was facilitated, among others, by literary works. To this day, I remember quite vividly the anguish I felt while reading The Other Side of Silence by South African writer Andre Brink, a book that helped open my eyes to the horrors of colonialism in German South West Africa.

Only last week, on 28 May 2021, Germany’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement regarding the “events of the German colonial period in what is now Namibia and in particular the atrocities between 1904 and 1908”.

It took the country more than 100 years to resolve to “now officially call these events what they are from today’s perspective: a genocide”.

Whiteness also manifests in the languages I speak most proficiently, German and English. As a mother tongue speaker of German, I acknowledge that, even though Germany and South Africa do not have a shared colonial history, my native language enjoys the privilege of being promoted and respected in the South African Constitution.

As a member of the German-speaking community in South Africa, I am able to use German, not only as a home language but as a language of teaching and learning in schools and universities as well as a language of work in numerous German companies and other organisations based in the country.

Lastly, whiteness is even reflected in my food choices. As a self-proclaimed chocoholic, my preference for Swiss and Belgian brands reinforces the colonial model of chocolate production, which is typically based on the extraction of raw cocoa from Africa to production sites in Europe and then the import of the finished products back to the country of origin.

Working in the youth entrepreneurship space, I came across young African chocolatiers who are actively challenging this practice and started their businesses to dispel the commonly held assumption that good quality chocolate can only be produced in Northern countries, relegating countries like Ghana and Kenya to the status of providers of raw materials.

For me, this is an example of what the American sociologist CW Mills refers to as understanding “personal troubles” in terms of “public issues” and “problems of history-making”.

Using a decolonial lens allows me to connect the personal, the social and the historical.

Decolonising partnerships

Regarding North-South partnerships in higher education, I am concerned with challenging dominant perspectives and with dispelling beliefs and practices that relegate Southern universities to the status of junior partners, receivers of knowledge and providers of talent or data.

I am interested in changing the traditional partnerships paradigm, which is generally characterised by the dominance of Northern institutions, towards more equitable and inclusive engagements. In this endeavour, I am not alone.

Recognition of imbalances in North-South partnerships seems to have increased in recent times, facilitated by a greater awareness of global inequalities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I have been encouraged by events signalling the possibility of a different future for North-South and South-North partnerships. I will illustrate this with the help of three examples of engagements I have had with like-minded colleagues around the world over the past 10 months alone.

Firstly, in October 2020, a webinar entitled ‘Decolonising International Partnerships’ hosted by the International Relations Professional Learning Community of the Canadian Bureau for International Education.

It invited international relations practitioners to critically examine their own practice and approach to international partnerships through a decolonial lens and encouraged them to become agents of change in creating mutually beneficial international partnerships.

Secondly, with specific reference to Africa, the Global Africa Group (GAG) of the Worldwide Universities Network is currently hosting a series of internal workshops that started with a conversation on ‘Re-thinking North-South cooperation and knowledge production for SDGs’ in December 2020.

These workshops are organised in support of GAG’s endeavours to “challenge, explicitly, the historically rooted inequities and existing orthodoxies in the global field of knowledge production” and to develop new epistemological and methodological approaches for research collaboration with African partners that enable equitable knowledge production and innovation.

Finally, the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC) established in 2020, focuses on transforming research and partnerships with Africa to advance the achievement of the continent’s own aspirations.

At the launch of the centre in April 2021, panellists addressed three key questions in that regard. They discussed the importance of centring the African Union’s Agenda 2063 as a frame of reference and of recognising the need for radical change as well as of identifying the role PARC can play in advancing the incremental change that is required for transformation in Global North-Africa research and partnerships.

These three events mentioned here are but a few examples of how decolonisation is addressed in the context of international higher education and partnerships. The decolonisation project is multi-faceted, ongoing and open to everyone to join.

As we do so, we must ask ourselves where we are decolonising from. In other words, we have to understand ‘Who We Are and From Where We Speak’, as per the title of an article by Paula Moya.

Our own biographies, experiences and histories inform and shape the contributions we are able to make. While we come to decolonisation in different ways, it is a project that we can all be part of, working together towards a more inclusive and socially just world.

Dr Samia Chasi is an international education practitioner, researcher and facilitator with more than 20 years of experience in this field. She currently serves as strategic adviser for the International Education Association of South Africa or IEASA. The views expressed in this article are her own.