Book on decolonisation reflects on difference, oppression

The end of the colonial and apartheid regimes in South Africa and other African countries might have been a big step towards the liberation from slavery and other forms of human oppression, but what remains stubbornly in place is the organisation and systemic distribution of power and privileges through the control of access to knowledge, moral and artistic resources by colonial, neo-colonial and racist groups.

That is the central thesis of a new book, Decolonising the Human: Reflections from Africa on difference and oppression, that was launched on 26 August during a virtual event as part of the International Education Association of South Africa conference from 25-27 August.

The book was edited by Professor Melissa Steyn, the research chair in critical diversity studies at the University of the Witwatersrand under the South African Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation Research Chair Initiative, and Dr William Mpofu, a researcher at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies.

The book appears to be a strong statement on how internationalisation and higher education in South Africa and elsewhere could be decolonised and transformed in order to contribute to inclusion and social justice for a fairer world.

According to Steyn, the current global knowledge and education systems are still based on the classical ideas of conquest, whereby the conquered people are seen as docile and obedient and, in most instances, incapable of producing advanced knowledge and innovations.

In this regard, the indigenous knowledge, innovations and cultures of former colonised people, especially in Africa, have continued to be repressed while Western knowledge and rationality are endorsed through subtle neocolonialism or, sometimes, through brutal force.

“The paradox of Western modernity with its grand rhetoric of freedom, happiness, progress and development has marched hand in hand with the logic of coloniality,” said Steyn.

First step to decolonise the mind

Steyn and Mpofu defined coloniality as the state in which vestiges of colonialism have continued to survive long after attainment of independence by the previously oppressed and colonised people.

Calling on African universities to reject colonial legacy, Steyn said there is a need to decolonise higher education in Africa by building on the best knowledge, skills, beliefs, morals and traditions from any part of the world without projecting the myth of superiority of Western scholarship.

Quoting the Kenyan writer, Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mpofu described decolonisation of education as the first step towards decolonising the mind of the former oppressed and colonised people.

According to Mpofu, after the attainment of independence, leaders of liberation movements of the Global South became the new colonisers and oppressors of their own people.

Morgan Ndlovu, a professor of anthropology at the University of Zululand and one of the contributors to the book, said that, whereas colonisers have used education as a means to maintain control, the same weapon should be used against them.

In a presentation, ‘The Cultural Village and its Idea of the Human’, Ndlovu said indigenous knowledge and cultural differences are often manipulated by corporations for commercial gain.

He said cultural villages in South Africa and probably elsewhere in Africa are simulated complexes that reproduce colonial myths about aspects of the way of life of various cultural groupings, as it was at a specific period, or even over several periods of time.

“But the totality of the concept of the cultural village is a dehumanising project that is aimed at revealing more about the achievement of the project of modernity and more so promoting coloniality than about the backwardness of the indigenous subject,” said Ndlovu.

Decolonising the curriculum

Steyn, Mpofu, Ndlovu and other contributors to the book belong to an emerging group of academics and scholars from South African universities and elsewhere in the continent that have been undertaking research and calling for transformation of African higher education systems through the decolonisation of the curriculum.

The thrust of their argument is that African universities are still poor clones of Western higher education scholarship and have failed to focus first on African knowledge production systems and problems before reinforcing them with other global learning theories and traditions.

According to Dr Savo Heleta, a higher education researcher and one of the speakers at the IEASA 2021 conference, African universities have done very little to decolonise the curriculum or to open it up to different bodies and traditions of knowledge systems.

In a study, ‘Decolonizing Knowledge in South Africa: Dismantling the pedagogy of big lies’, Heleta argues that a decolonised curriculum must place South Africa and Africa at the centre of teaching, learning and research.

“Knowledge and thinking from the African continent and the Global South should be placed on an equal footing with the currently Eurocentric scholarship and learning theories,” said Heleta.

But, whereas some academics and university leaders may interpret decolonisation of higher education as a master plan to propel African universities to global isolation, Mpofu and Heleta argue that the idea is misplaced as decolonisation is not neglecting any form of knowledge but it is about bringing Africa and its people to the centre of everything that African universities will do.

“Decolonisation of education is not a process of localisation or Africanisation of the curriculum, as graduates from African universities will be expected to be capable of functioning in the complex and interconnected world,” pointed out Heleta.

In this regard, Decolonising the Human, is a social philosophical blueprint that is reminding the world that all communities create ideas and knowledge of their place but should on equal measure share those reflections with the rest of the world without having a hidden superiority agenda.

But one wonders as to whether the perceived superiority of Western scholarship and other facets of coloniality will just give way to the emerging demands of decolonising the curriculum in the African higher education systems without a concerted struggle.