Decolonisation as Democratisation: Global Insights into the South African Experience 9780796926166

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures and table
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Acronyms
1 Educational desire as the South African epistemic decolonial turn
Part I – Concerns of and approaches to decolonial agendas
2 How to decolonise knowledge without too much relativism
3 Complexities and challenges of decolonising higher education: Lessons from Canada
4 Beyond possession: De/colonisation the educational relationship in higher education
Part II – Philosophical contextuality, pedagogies and decoloniality
5 Socratic Social Criticism in higher education
6 The anatomy of epistemicide and the search for epistemic justice: Towards a relevant education
7 Embracing an ethical epistemological approach in African higher education
8 Decolonisation and displacement: Mbembe and decolonising the University
9 Funda-mentalities: Twists and turns in South African philosophy (of education)
10 Futurity, decolonisation and the academy – where to from here?
Afterword
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

edited by Siseko H Kumalo

Global Insights into the South African Experience

NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2021 ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2600-5 ISBN (PDF) 978-0-7969-2601-2 © 2021 Human Sciences Research Council This publication was made possible through a grant received from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (the Council) and the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (the Institute) or indicate that either the Council or the Institute endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to either the Council or the Institute. The publishers have no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party websites referred to in this book and do not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover design by HotHouse South Africa Copyedited by Jacqui Baumgardt Typeset by HotHouse South Africa Printed by [Name of printer, city, country] Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax Local: +27 (0) 21 701 7302; Fax International: 0927865242139 www.blueweaver.co.za Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 17 6760 4972; Fax: +44 (0) 17 6760 1640 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in United States, Canada and Asia except China, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Tel: +1 303 444-6684; Fax: +001 303 444-0824; Email: [email protected] www.rienner.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission from the copyright owner. To copy any part of this publication, you may contact DALRO for information and copyright clearance. Tel: 086 12 DALRO (or 086 12 3256 from within South Africa); +27 (0)11 712 8000 Fax: +27 (0)11 403 9094 Postal Address: P O Box 31627, Braamfontein 2017, South Africa www.dalro.co.za Any unauthorised copying could lead to civil liability and/or criminal sanctions. Suggested citation: Siseko H Kumalo (Ed.) (2021) Decolonisation as Democratisation: Global insights into the South African experience. Cape Town: HSRC Press

Contents

Figures and table v Acknowledgements vii Foreword ix Walter D. Mignolo Acronyms xv 1 Educational desire as the South African epistemic decolonial turn 1 Introduction – Siseko H Kumalo

Part I – Concerns of and approaches to decolonial agendas 2 How to decolonise knowledge without too much relativism 24 Veli Mitova 3 Complexities and challenges of decolonising higher education: Lessons from Canada 48 Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt and Cash Ahenakew 4

Beyond possession: De/colonisation the educational relationship in higher education 66 Fatima Pirbhai-Illich and Fran Martin

Part II – Philosophical contextuality, pedagogies and decoloniality 5 Socratic Social Criticism in higher education 90 Siseko H Kumalo 6

The anatomy of epistemicide and the search for epistemic justice: Towards a relevant education 114 Teboho J Lebakeng

7 Embracing an ethical epistemological approach in African higher education 127 Yvette Freter and Björn Freter 8 Decolonisation and displacement: Mbembe and decolonising the University 151 Abraham Olivier

9

Funda-mentalities: Twists and turns in South African philosophy (of education) 173 Ulrike Kistner

10 Futurity, decolonisation and the academy – where to from here? 196 Conclusion – Siseko H Kumalo Afterword 206 Siphamandla Zondi List of Contributors 215 Index 218

Figures and table

Figure 2.1 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 3.4 Figure 3.5 Figure 3.6

Kinds of relativism and their implications for epistemic decolonisation 38 The house modernity built 50 The hidden costs of the house modernity built 51 Fears, desires, and entitlements cultivated by the house modernity built 53 Different interpretations of decolonisation 55 Looking for decolonisation in all the wrong places 57 Structural damage to the house modernity built 59

Table 3.1

Modern promises and colonial processes of the house modernity built 51

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Dedication

To my unborn daughters – those yet to be born – uNomalungelo kanye noNonkululeko, ngithi anoqaphela; ifa lenu (ifa lesizwe) ningaliphathisi okweziwula. Anoliphathisa okwezikhali zamaNtungwa ikhona lingeke lishabalale ngenxa yezihlakani ezasephuca umhlaba wobab’mkhulu. For as Letta Mbulu advises, Qhawula Amakhamandela – Not Yet Uhuru!

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Acknowledgements

This book found its initial inspiration in a paper delivered by Veli Mitova at the Rhodes University Annual Philosophy Graduation Day event of 2017. As the keynote speaker at the event, Mitova presented an elegant analysis entitled Epistemic Injustice, Reasons, Power. Her compelling argument for a reconsideration of our epistemic practices resonated well with the need to reconsider the broader functions of epistemic practices as they play out in the academe, but, more specifically, in the South African academe. The success of this project is also owed to my dear colleagues in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria – and I would like to give special thanks to two colleagues who have been teachers, mentors and have consistently provided guidance as I worked on putting this project together, Maxi Schoeman and Gerhard Wolmarans. I owe a great deal of gratitude to you both for the consistent guidance and patience in helping me think through my ideas and fanning the fires of my fervent intellectual curiosity. I am incredibly thankful to Teboho J. Lebakeng for the care taken in the systematic reading of the first draft of this manuscript. As the younger generation of intellectuals, we owe our success to older scholars like yourself, who are generous, both with your ideas and time. I am also deeply grateful to our commissioning editor – Mthunzi Nxawe – for his patience and generosity in seeing this project to completion and production. Finally, and most importantly, I am most grateful to the two womxn who were and continue to be burdened with the task of being my critical readers (on every project), my mother Phindile (maDzanibe) Kumalo and my sister, Zenande. I owe my success to you both, and the generosity you continuously show in listening to and correcting my ideas with a kindness that I could never find elsewhere. I can only hope that my humble intellectual pursuits do the work of honouring you both.

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Foreword Exiting from the excesses of western epistemic hegemony

The introduction to this volume and the collection of essays gathered are an exemplar and a specific contribution to the geo- and body-politics of knowing and knowledges, grounded in the history of South Africa (which was 'tangled' with western expansion in 1652 when the Dutch were 'passing' en route to the Indian Ocean). The title and subtitle underscore that the decolonial turn in South Africa is not local tokenism but an argument that shifts the geographies of knowing and the known. This move highlights the ways the global knowledge economy is perceived through the lens of the local southern Africa, rather than from the local LondonParis-Berlin-New York axis. The global knowledge economy can only be looked at from the local; there cannot be global and abstract enunciations; one cannot look at the global (the known) from the local (the knowers) perspective. That belief is what this volume is rejecting and disengaging from. All histories are local. The trick was that western localities were disguised and presented themselves as a global perspective, that was itself local. The trick was successful because western knowledge blocked its own local enunciation. Think of Hegel’s lesson in the philosophy of history, for example. Hegel assumed that Germany was the centre of Europe and Europe the centre of the world. This volume is a signal contribution to turn the tables, but not just to dispute the content. What is turning is the enunciation, displaced from the North Atlantic to South and southern Africa. It addresses the geo-body political grounding of a long colonial history of foreign settlers and, for South Africa, a shorter history (since 1948) of internal colonialism. As stated in the introduction, the main thrust of the volume is that the aim of decolonisation today is to democratise knowledge creation and world-making. Decolonisation in Africa and South Africa is not recent. It goes as far back as the Cold War years (politically) and, in South Africa (conceptually), dates back even further to the nineteenth century. In this articulation, it is epitomised by the thinking and writings of WW Gqoba – thinking that was revived by the political activism of Steve Biko.1 Consequently, some chapters in this book explicitly recognise the contributions made by Indigenous intellectuals who were writing in the nineteenth century and whose work still resonates with the experiences of the Indigene in the country. From the Cold War and apartheid, to the end of both – three years apart – the social and subjective configuration of the country turned the tables on maintaining the capitalist economy, which – at this point – is difficult to alter. It can

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be argued that such alterations, while needed, are difficult in one particular nationstate that depends on larger economies, not only western but also eastern. Capitalism today dominates the global economy, but neoliberalism and western epistemology and aesthetics are no longer dictating the ways of knowing and sensing. The decolonial politics of investigation grounded in local needs, sensibilities and nonmodern knowledge, ways of knowing and praxis of living are on the rise. As I see it, from outside Africa, the radical turnaround of social-subjective configuration for the four major ethnic substrata of South Africa is of paramount significance to address the legacies of undemocratic institutions, along with aiming for and re-orienting knowledge and the regulation of knowledge-making. To democratise knowledge couldn’t just be conceived as a democratic distribution of the known, but ought to be taken as a replacement of what knowledge is needed, by whom, and for what purpose. I would think that the main thrust of decolonisation in the sphere of higher education, and the impact higher education has at all levels – from primary to secondary schools – will not be limited to the distribution of the known (world-made) but rather should focus on the foundation of knowing (world-making). Coloniality of the known and of knowing, in South Africa as well as in the rest of the world, manifested as western theological paradigms that were complemented first by the development of secular scientific and philosophical (cum theological) modes of knowing during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Theological and secular education controlled and managed the paths, orientations and regulations of knowing, which, of course, ends up regulating the known and the not-to-be known. This approach prevails today. For 500 years, there has been an entanglement between the local-metropolis and the local-colonial. In the colonies, the natives’ knowing and knowledges were impoverished. In the metropole, what was, in turn, impoverished were the metropoles’ own 'traditions' that were cumbersome to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and their aftermath. By reading the introduction and the chapters of this volume, I came to understand that democratisation of knowing and the known implies that the major demographic constituencies would be seated at the table to redesign the role of the University, the aims of education and the paths to eliminate the power differential by means of epistemological reconstitutions, necessary for reinscribing and restituting what western modernity destituted. Modifying the curriculum would no doubt be important, albeit, in the process, a more radical question ought to be asked: why do we need a curriculum, what for, for whom, to what end? Changing the content of the curriculum is no doubt important, but more important is to address the very substance, potential and limits of the curriculum. Asking these questions would prevent the possibility that a proposal aiming at the decolonial democratisation of knowledge could end up being absorbed and diluted into reigning liberal ideology by neoliberal ideologues who frame themselves as eager to promote democracy. The question that emerges from this consideration – and that the volume provides ample scenarios of – is to what degree and to what extent are decolonisation and democracy compatible? If then, at some point, democracy and decolonisation turn out to be x

incompatible, what should the decolonial political, ethical, epistemic and aesthetical horizons be? One of the strengths of the volume is to strip the ground and to call into question the major assumptions of western knowledge, knowing, education and their colonial legacies. I am writing this foreword in full awareness of the connecting undercurrents, since the 1960s, that put African and Latin American philosophers in conversation. The concern was formulated in a common question: Is there an African Philosophy? Is there a Latin American philosophy?2 The questions are not explicitly asked today – or at least are not a major concern – but there is a reason for that: both in Africa and Latin America, we have overcome the sense of epistemic dependency/ deficiency and subjective incapacity/inferiority to think on our own terms and from our own vantage points. This volume is one of the growing examples of rejecting and delinking from the epistemic, aesthetic and theological excess of western modernity. Today, stating in France that we never have been modern may be relevant for French and Europeans but it has become irrelevant beyond the North Atlantic. The aberrant pretence to universality has run its course. That is why – in Africa – the force of embodied memories that the restitution of Ubuntu carry, are resurfacing. The equivalents in South America are Sumak Kawsay (Kichwa language in Ecuador) and Suma Qamaña (Kechwa and Aymara languages in Bolivia and Peru), generally translated as 'buen vivir' Their more specific meaning is that, as a people, we strive towards 'living in harmony and plenitude, and restituting the communal between human beings and the forces and energies of life on planet earth and their/our cosmic interweaving'.3 Democratic creation and circulation of knowledge could be handled at two distinct, although entangled, levels: the creation and circulation of knowledge (i.e. the content of what is and/or becomes known, the said) and the assumptions and principles that motivate and sustain the creation and circulation of the known (the terms by which the epistemic contract is established, the enunciation, the saying). Reconstitution (and a variety of key words of the 're-' family – resurgence, re-emergence, re-existence, restitution) have already been established as key orientations and anchors of decolonial thinking, doing, investigating and acting. At stake is the decolonial politics of investigation. Who is investigating what and what for are three basic issues for the decolonial option. The fourth one, how, depends on the answers given to the previous three. If you do not know who, what and what for, you do not need a method. However, the modern/colonial politics of investigation suggests putting the how first.4 If you do not know what and why knowledge-making and world-making are desired and needed, and who5 is doing and acting, the how (the method) is not necessary. Why would you need a method if you do not have an orientation to your research, thinking and doing? Methodology is indeed a disciplinary trap, a request to obey disciplinary regulations. Decoloniality demands epistemic and disciplinary disobedience, in-disciplinarity rather than inter- or trans-disciplinarity. Yes, undoubtedly, there are distinct ways of knowing and distinct world-made modes xi

of existence; distinct gnoseologies (ways of knowing, in the sense that Valentin Y Mudimbe framed African ancestral knowledges and knowing praxis)6 that create distinct and distinctive ontologies (the known). Consequently, there are divergent configurations of what there is and the modulation of sensing and emotioning. Here I can risk a generalisation: the diversality and pluriversality of knowing and sensing have in common the gnoseological modulation (world-making) of ontologies (worlds-made). The politics of decolonial investigations (crucial to any process to decolonise western hegemonic knowledge and build decolonial knowing) starts at the moment of our awareness that the coloniality of knowing is what modernity schooled us to take for granted. We can dispute content (for example, the conflict of interpretations); indeed, disputes are encouraged under the heading of critical thinking and the modern myth of change, innovation and novelty. All of this is good and permitted as long as you do not touch the regulation of knowing, the enunciations that keep the image of modernity, modernisation, development, growth, democracy alive. The decolonial politics of investigations began with the awareness of the coloniality of knowing and its double and simultaneous movement: the constitutive affirmation of western modernity in all its rainbow colours and the simultaneous negation and destitution of all that western modernity rejects. At this junction, the decolonial politics of investigation assumes the necessity (motivation and desire) to reconstitute what has been destituted that is relevant today. I understand that the word 'reconstitution', the subtitle of Ogude’s edited book on Ubuntu (note 2), is not just a happenstance: I suspect that it was consciously chosen, in my reading of it. 'Reconstitution' was also the key word in Anibal Quijano’s re-orientation of decolonial tasks when he introduced the concept of 'coloniality' and distinguished it from colonialism. Up to that point, colonialism was perceived as an unwanted consequence of modernity. But modernity was not questioned. Since the contribution made by Quijano, we have better understood coloniality as constitutive of modernity. The question was no longer to be (for many) an undesirable aspect of modernity, but that coloniality is embedded in modernity. It is its darker side. The formation of a nationstate run by natives was, during the Cold War, the main goal of decolonisation. However, the very foundations of western knowledge (political theory, political economy, the discipline and culture in general) was not called into question. It was acceptable to take all these principles and paradigms of western modernity and have them managed by the natives who run the state after liberation. Quijano stated without equivocation that decolonisation must engage in epistemological reconstitution. Over the years, several of us, Quijano’s followers, expanded the task to epistemological and aesthetic reconstitutions. Ours has been to reconstitute epistemology (which is limited to the institutional regulation of knowing, theological and secular). As I mentioned above, Mudimbe restituted a sidelined word of the western vocabulary, gnoseology, which for him was more adequate than philosophy to describe ancestral

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African knowledge and ways of knowing. Hence, Ubuntu enters into this arena, as do Sumak Kawsay and Suma Qamaña. If epistemology were called into question, aesthetic(s) could not have been left alone. Since Kant and Hegel, the category of aesthetic(s) was limited to the sphere of art, which, by the same token, mutated the meaning of art (skill) into the art-work of 'man', of genius endowed with the ability to materialise (manifest) the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthesis, from where aesthetic originated and that refers to the general domain of the senses, was destituted in the same move in which philosophy destituted gnoseology. Now the time has arrived to reconstitute aesthetic(s) and to restitute aesthesis; to reconstitute epistemology and to restitute gnoseology – two basic moves towards democratisation/decolonisation of knowledge-making and the regulation and conceptualisation of knowing. Hence, this volume, which calls for the democratisation of knowledge and implicitly of knowing, confronts head-on the assumptions and taken-for-granted positions and paradigms upon which western modernity – over the past 500 years – built and managed knowledge and the known through the implementation and management of epistemic and ontological differences. That period is closing. Under the ruins of the modern/colonial world order that is experienced all over the planet, pluriversality is emerging. The thrusts of epistemic and ontological differences are the substance and the substratum of racism. Racism is the consequence of the control and management of epistemic classifications. Europeans, since the sixteenth century, were self-appointed in the project of classifying and ranking humanity. They decided that those that they came to oppress and colonise were ontologically inferior (according to European made-up ontology) and epistemically deficient (by the same logic). Being ontologically inferior was a consequence of being epistemically deficient; and being epistemically deficient was a consequence of being ontologically inferior. Frantz Fanon clearly understood that, decolonially thinking, Aristotelian logic doesn’t work: In the colonies, the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue.7 The volume opens up a vast horizon in which the power differential that regulated knowledges and knowing and, although it has the right to exist, the aberration of the pretended universality (of the known and the methods of knowing) is no longer acceptable. Professor Walter D Mignolo Department of Romance Studies Duke University, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences

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Notes 1

My thanks to Siseko H Kumalo for calling my attention to Biko’s intellectual ancestors. This is to say that I am grateful to learn of the longstanding intellectual traditions that define the locales of the global south – more specifically – South Africa; a sure measure of this collection as it facilitates such excavatory and learning processes.

2

Olagoke, BE (1995) Is There an ‘African’ Philosophy? Africa Today 42/3:90–92; Bondy, AS (1968) ¿Existe una Filosofía de Nuestra América? México: Fondo de Cultura Económica; Mignolo, WD (2017) “The Advent of Black Thinkers and the Limits of Continental Philosophy' in A Afolayan and Folola T (Eds). The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy. New York: Palgrave, pp 287–302.

3

Graness, A (2019) “Ubuntu and Buen Vivir: A Comparative Approach,” in J. Ogude (Ed.). Ubuntu and the reconstitution of community. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

4

Maori educator and activist Linda Tihuwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. London: Blackwell, 1999) made the point over 20 years ago and the argument has gained traction. The reason is simple: the politics of decolonial investigation must delink from the politics of modern/colonial investigation that has been hegemonic, and is now turning to domination, since the sixteenth century, starting with the European expansion and colonisation of the Americas, and then Asia and Africa. Universities, convents, schools, actors, languages, knowledge and ways of knowing were 'transported' to European colonies as well as to regions that did not undergo settler colonialism, such as Japan, China and Russia.

5

I do not mean the individual (be it the subject of the Lacanian imaginary or the Ego of the Lacanian symbolic), but the webs in which every single person is interwoven (language, institutions, local memories and their imprint in the organism – the body – the social and earth/cosmos surrounding, etc.). The subject and the Ego are the consequences of forces that the individual does not control.

6

Mudimbe, V-Y (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

7

Fanon, F (2004/1961) The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

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Acronyms

HBU Historically Black University HEIs Higher Education Institutions HWIs Higher White Institutions HWU Historically White Universities IKS Indigenous Knowledge Systems UCT University of Cape Town UNISA University of South Africa UP University of Pretoria UWC University of the Western Cape VC Vice-Chancellor

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1

Educational desire as the South African epistemic decolonial turn Siseko H Kumalo

Introduction The aim of decolonisation in South Africa can be understood as rooted in the ideal of democratising the knowledge project. While this can be understood as the ultimate aim of decolonisation – with decolonisation the means to said end and not an end in and of itself – there are considerable challenges that abrogate this lofty objective. Thinking through these challenges becomes the purpose of this introductory essay. As detailed by the contributions that constitute this volume, we cannot ignore the political dynamics of power that define the knowledge-making project. By this is meant the idea that we cannot ignore the political contestations that compete to define the epistemic system that ought to be regarded as the most valuable within the University.1 To this effect, and as a way of addressing this first concern of decolonisation, I engage the arguments developed by Veli Mitova, Siseko Kumalo and Ulrike Kistner (Chapters 2, 5 and 9) respectively. While the first chapter deals with the concerns and approaches to decolonial agendas, the two subsequent chapters address the matter of this contestation as it relates to philosophical contextuality and pedagogies of decoloniality. Addressing the question of decolonisation from the perspective of approaches and concerns, as well as testing the pedagogical specificities of the South African context, aids in understanding and better articulating how these political contestations have played and continue to play out. This analysis, it is hoped, will inspire critical considerations of decolonisation in the respective locales where our readers find themselves. To consider this question in more detail then, it is useful to trace its historicity. Historically, this contestation has resulted in the University privileging knowledge that emanates from the north while displacing, occluding and erasing knowledge that is developed locally; importantly, it is useful to consider that this local displacement of knowledge has always been to the detriment of Black/Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS). This displacement, erasure and negation logically follows from the colonial systems that inaugurated this contestation in the first instance.2 In this respect, this chapter treats the question of the aims of decolonisation, as they are of necessity defined by these political contestations. Simply put, this essay considers whether the aim of decolonising knowledge for the purposes of democratisation is at all possible when one considers the politics that define the knowledge project. It is also useful to bear in mind the question posed by Walter Mignolo in the foreword when he inquires as to whether decolonisation and democratisation, are at all compatible. 1

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As a derivative of the first consideration, the second looks at the implications of these political contestations. In the simplest sense, I am concerned with how these contestations have shaped knowers and knowledge systems such that we have a hierarchy that distinguishes between those who are regarded as having more epistemic authority3 in the knowledge-making process and those whose knowledge is treated as fictitious, mythological, and subsequently, necessarily dismissible, from the vantage point of a positivist, ‘apolitical, ahistorical’ and rationalist perspective that defines the westernised University.4 This second consideration will reveal the reality that what is experienced in the South African context must not, nor can it be considered, an exception to the rule. This is evinced in the arguments developed in by Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt and Dallas Ahenakew (Chapter 3) and Fatima Pirbhai-Illich and Fran Martin (Chapter 4). This claim is reiterated once more in the closing considerations, detailed in the afterword by Siphamandla Zondi, when he suggests that the South African epistemic decolonial turn is a historical fact, one whose lineage goes back to the decolonial moment (the moment of contact and resistance wherein Indigeneity had to fight to preserve its modes of life). This is to say, as per Zondi’s contention, that as South Africa engages and finds lines of solidarity in the work and scholarship of other locales, these resonances were birthed, first, by ‘those who were engaged in primary and secondary resistance to colonial conquest […] and were also in spiritual, psychological and epistemic defence of their right to be themselves’. In detailing the occlusion, erasure and negation in the first move of this chapter, this second consideration takes more seriously the role of knowledge displacement and its effects. With Chapter 3 considering a holistic understanding of decolonisation that takes into account the global climate change effects of colonial greed and the subjugation(s) of IKS, this brings us closer to understanding the implications of political contestations that define the knowledge-making project.5 Considering the effects of the political contestations of knowledge brings us to the crucial question – how then do we understand the knowledge project if it is influenced by these contestations? In simple terms, can knowledge ever be this apolitical and ahistorical enterprise as supposedly framed by the proponents and beneficiaries of the westernised University? The consequent move would be to consider what shifting the narrative in knowledge-making would look like. Pirbhai-Illich and Martin dedicate their analysis precisely to this task and Chapter 4 begins to highlight the effects of said shifts. It will therefore be useful to consider the propositions put forward in Chapter 4 in the South African context; a context defined by a minority that still holds control with respect to the rules of engagement vis-à-vis knowledge development and production. In simple terms, one ought to consider whether this hegemonic hold on the definitions of what constitutes the ‘knowledge-making enterprise’ is at all aligned with the aims of addressing the sociopolitical woes of the country. This is to say, with decolonisation framed as a knowledge democratising activity, does the direction of knowledge-making taken by white South Africans in the University fulfil this objective? This question is asked vis-à-vis the claim made by Steve Biko (2004/1978: 97) when he writes about the ‘greed exhibited by white 2

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people in the country’.6 Put differently, while we examine the implications of the political contestations of the knowledge project, it is also necessary that we examine the ways in which these contestations have played out; either entrenching the role and place of whiteness in the country through gating out Blackness/Indigeneity in the ‘knowledge-making enterprise’ – or by effectively democratising the knowledge project and advancing the aims of decolonisation and decoloniality. I must reiterate once more that these aims are aligned with democratising the knowledge project.7 In the final consideration, which itself is a derivative of the second move, one ought to examine the place of educational desire. Educational desire, specifically in the South African context, is premised on the historical erasure, occlusion and violence that was promulgated by colonial incursion. There are two reflections that can be redirected to the consideration of educational desire in our context. To contextualise; with educational desire rooted – historically – in the desire to dispel the myth of the indolence8 and retardation9 of the Black/Indigenous being, it might be interesting to question whether educational desire (in this sense) is not itself an invention of coloniality. Educational desire framed in this respect becomes a contentious matter as it might be symptomatic of an internalisation of colonisation that manifests as a desire to be regarded as the equal of the colonial settler descendant. This is to say that educational desire is, from the outset, tainted by its compulsion to respond to colonial mis-framings of African (Black/ Indigenous) subjectivity. An objection to this framing, however, can be raised by decolonial scholars who argue that educational desire is primarily premised on the desire for ‘ontological legitimacy’ (Kumalo 2018). The claim of ‘ontological legitimacy’ subsequently becomes the second basis of consideration on the matter of educational desire. In view of the colonial implications that define the world, owing to colonial imposition, it is necessary to consider how the effects of colonialism shape, either by way of fostering or inhibiting educational desire in the University. I wish to contextualise this briefly. Having posed the questions of democratisation and the hegemonic preponderance of whiteness in our context, how sure can Blackness/Indigeneity and society be of the alignment between institutional and national objectives? To arrive at this question, one ought to bear in mind the two previous moves (democratising knowledge and the implications of the political as it influences knowledge production). In the previous move, this question was framed as the role of white greed in the country. Simply, has this greed subsided or does it continue to influence the direction of the higher education sector, such that the sector serves the interests of whiteness while neglecting the realities of the majority in the country? If the answer to the preceding question is in the affirmative – one needs to consider how, if at all, social redress will be attained and what the derivative implications of this reality will be in the context of a country that continues to be gripped by historical trauma and violence. The consideration then of educational desire, as a contentious matter, is foregrounded. To this end, I would suggest that there is a circularity of motion in the violence of coloniality; a violence that continues to arrest the substantive democratisation of 3

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the knowledge-making project to this day. This violence elicits responses that are themselves violent – something akin to what Mogobe Ramose (2016) considers the rivalry between legitimate and democratic violence.10 While it might seem tautological to state the obvious, it is useful to consider coloniality systematically. Colonial incursion presupposed the hegemonic place of colonial modes of knowing and knowledge-making in the global knowledge paradigm. In turn, this historical fact set into motion political contestations that erased whole peoples while substantiating the violence of this erasure. This paradigm gives credence to the notion of a circularity in the violence of colonialism, which births coloniality.11 It is for this reason that educational philosophers and decolonial theorists make the claim for the need to decolonise and democratise the knowledge-making enterprise. My argument in this respect is a rejoinder to the seminal essay, delivered as the Professorial Inaugural Lecture, by Heidi Safia Mirza (2006). Mirza’s contribution to educational theory facilitated the development, on the part of educational theory, of a lexicography that precipitated and heralded the decolonial turn globally.12 This question, i.e. educational desire as it is inherently intertwined with the colonial project either through resistance or assimilation, is treated by the contributions of Chapters 6, 7 and 8 in this volume. To this effect, in this chapter, I consider these three facets of educational desire and attainment, each of which demonstrate the imbrications of coloniality with contemporary knowledge-making. These imbrications, in contrast, conflict with the educational desire of the contemporary student; a desire that saw the rupturing of the University in our context; i.e. the students calling for decolonisation in the South African University. It is for these reasons that this introductory chapter considers educational desire as the South African epistemic decolonial turn. As a mode of detailing this ‘decolonial turn’, it is useful to think carefully about how we apply the concept in the country. In the afterword, Zondi answers how this conception might be applied, when he maintains that the ‘turn’ in South Africa has been precipitated by historical machinations that have always seen the Indigene fighting to preserve their way of life. Decoloniality in our context is nothing new then – even as the lexicography with which we have been able to articulate the experiences of the Indigene in the academy has been forcefully gouged into the epicentre of ideas, owing to the vexation that defined the life of the Indigene in this space. Put differently, what might be conceptualised as a ‘turn’ needs to be located in the historical political landscape that constitutes the academe. This is necessary as it facilitates our paying homage to the role of those who have come before us in the space of ideas, theory and knowledge production. While the focus is on the South African context, it is also useful to mention that what is seen in the country is not exceptional to our context, but is rather symptomatic of all contexts that are defined by the colonial encounter.13 Each of the struggles that define the resistance mechanisms of coloniality unite all these contexts, and it is for this reason that Decolonisation as Democratisation: Global Insights into the South African Experience was penned.

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Considering the political contestations of knowledge The political contestations of knowledge define, contemporarily, the University globally. These range from the very real political questions of which languages of instruction ought to be used in institutions that were previously only Afrikaans,14 to issues of what should be taught in undergraduate courses and who can and must be considered as part of the canon. In agreement with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 61), I concur that as per ‘Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s (1986) [apt description] colonialism “[was] a vast process” that affected even the consciousness of the colonised African people [… thus] decolonisation has to be an equally “vast process” so as to [expunge] colonialism in every aspect of life ranging from ideology, language, aesthetics to sexual orientations’. These contestations have always existed in the country; however, they were brought to the surface when students could no longer stand the epistemic arrogance of Historically White Institutions (HWIs). The claim that these contestations have always been there is substantiated by the study done by Bongi Bangeni and Rochelle Kapp (2005) and their narration of the stories of students who were forced to assimilate into the hegemonic cultures of the University. To this effect, Bangeni and Kapp (2005: 10) maintain that ‘in Bhabha’s (1994: 44) terms, the students had become “unhomed”. The term does not imply homelessness but signifies the ambivalent space they occupy as they straddle multiple (and conflicting) discourses’. These conflicting realities that students are confronted with in the University might lead to what Kumalo (2018) has termed the creation of ‘a Native of Nowhere’. Kumalo (2018: 7) defines the experience of becoming the Native of Nowhere as [a] commodification, consumption and erasure of Indigenous/Black ontologies [which ultimately creates] a pariah because of [this being’s] inability to navigate and belong to the South African landscape, owing to the demand that s/he assimilate into whiteness which ultimately rejects her/him, while alienating her/him from her/his native identity, subsequently creating the Native of Nowhere. This process of alienation is derived from the move that characterises Black/ Indigenous systems of knowledge as mythological and fictitious in the University. However, this concern might be read as a move toward relativism, a move that Veli Mitova challenges substantially in her contribution to this collection when she maintains that relativism ‘undermines the call to decolonise science and knowledge more generally, by entailing that there are no objective moral truths such as “epistemic injustice is wrong”’. The argument advanced by Mitova is useful insofar as it allows us to establish the necessity of decolonisation without invoking self-defeating arguments that do little to advance decolonial objectives in the contemporary University. In keeping with the objective of decolonisation for the purposes of democratising knowledge production, Mitova crystallises this debate when she observes that the contestation in knowledge production seemingly calls for an arbitration from the view-from-nowhere. She maintains, ‘there is no view-fromnowhere [from which to make the judgement of which epistemic framework best

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explains a case of pneumonia] in a case whereby we have two competing conceptions of the illness’. When trying to resolve the political contestations of knowledge using a framework, we are privy to the challenges that are encountered when trying to make good on the promise of epistemic justice. Relativism, as a response to the contestations of the political in the knowledge-making project, is rooted in the competing frameworks that must coexist in the University. This comes as André Keet (2014: 29) maintains that the ‘global history of the University [with respect to these political contestations] is that the knowledge generation process failed to inscribe [a sense of] epistemic justice. Rather it is epistemic injustice that became imbedded within the academy and the disciplines’. In undoing this embeddedness of epistemic injustice, decolonisation proposes the democratisation of knowledge production. In this proposition, one can read the calls for decolonisation as the establishment of mutual deference between competing knowledge systems. The challenge, as highlighted by Mitova, is the reality that we do not have the luxury of speaking from a position of nowhere, so as to make a decision about these competing epistemic frameworks. To complicate this reality, one cannot elide the historicity that defines the contemporary political contestation in the knowledgemaking process. To be exact, Ali Mazrui (1978: 11) as quoted in Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 12) makes the compelling observation that ‘the French colonisers became famous for their “cultural arrogance” whereas the British became known for their “racial arrogance” and all these “arrogances” combined [served the main purpose] to degrade the very humanity and cultures of Africa’. It is for this reason that Kumalo makes the case for a Socratic Social Criticism in higher education in Chapter 5. The argument advanced by Kumalo suggests that Socratic Social Criticism turns criticality in on the University, subsequently advancing the objectives of knowledge democratisation – an aim aligned with the understanding of decolonisation that informs this volume. This claim is rooted in the reality that defines the context in which we are located; a context that continues to be defined by unfreedom, exploitative labour relations and undemocratic knowledgemaking systems. In note 9 of his chapter, Kumalo maintains – quoting from the White Paper 3 of 1997 – that ‘the higher education system must be transformed to redress past inequalities, to serve a new social order, to meet pressing national needs and to respond to new realities and opportunities’. This objective, as outlined by the historical legislation that governs the sector, seeks to realise the promise of freedom for the vast majority of South Africans who continue to eke out an existence under circumstances of unfreedom. The argument made by Kumalo echoes that of Teboho Lebakeng, Mathiba Phalane and Dalindjebo Nase (2006) who decry the continued displacement of Indigenous ways of knowing and subsequently Blackness/ Indigeneity itself; a displacement derived from the arrogances cited by Mazrui (1978) above. To this end, Lebakeng, Phalane and Nase (2006: 70) maintain that ‘[higher] education institutional cultures continue to privilege western symbolisms, rituals and behaviours imposed as a result of epistemicide’. The undemocratic unfreedoms of the contemporary day and age are derived/inherited from the colonial yoke that

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continues to bear down on the objectives of justice (whether epistemic or social), substantive democratic participation, and the liberation of the majority. It is useful to reiterate that these objectives are inscribed in the historical conception of the University at the dawn of democratic governance in South Africa. The ghosts of the past, however, as they haunt us as contemporary coloniality – specifically in South Africa – are discussed at length, with respect to the role of knowledge production at the University of Pretoria under apartheid. Ulrike Kistner in Chapter 9, further detailing philosophical contextuality and the pedagogies of decoloniality, traces the historical pedagogies of South Africa. Her analysis reveals that these were rooted in the philosophy of fundamental pedagogics that was ‘hatched’ in the disciplinary triad of philosophy, theology and education. Kistner’s systematic and detailed analysis re-enforces the objection developed by John Higgins (2001) against the marriage between the University and the state. This re-enforcement comes from the implications that this relationship had in the past, affecting the South African education system to this day. I make this claim in light of Kistner’s assertion that the ‘(Introduction to fundamental education) [also] marked the arrival of Fundementele Pedagogiek in South Africa at exactly the time when the Bantu Education Act (1953) was being implemented’. The objection to the marriage of the University and the state is crystalised by what Kistner draws our attention to – using Penny Enslin’s (1992) work. This is to say that ‘[fundamental pedagogics] has been the dominant approach to the study of education in the Afrikaans-medium universities and colleges of education. More importantly it is also the dominant approach to education at the ethnic or black universities […].’ Kistner, in drawing our attention to this reality, echoes Jonathan Jansen’s (2017) observation of the role and function of the ‘bush colleges’ that were ‘heavily staffed by second-rate Afrikaner academics who could not make the grade at the well-funded establishment universities such as Stellenbosch’. In this sense, the marriage between the University and the state becomes a dangerous one, only in the instance of a totalitarian and undemocratic state. While I am venturing in the terrain of the speculative, since South African democracy is still in its budding years,15 the marriage between the state and the University is useful insofar as this marriage is committed to democratic values. In this respect, I am suggesting an institution that is reminiscent of Bill Readings’ (1996) suggestion when he writes of this marriage/relationality. Readings (1996: 6) argued that ‘to speak of the University and the state is also to tell a story about the emergence of the notion of culture […] as Fichte put it the University exists not to teach information but to inculcate the exercise of critical judgement.’ The inculcation of critical judgement, an ideal that was undermined by the philosophy of Fundamentele Pedagogiek – as per the argument advanced in Kistner’s chapter – is aligned with democratic principles that undergird the decolonial agenda. This alignment of criticality, democratic values and criticism is denotative of Socratic Social Criticism, which, as argued by Kumalo, redirects criticality towards the University. With Fundamentele Pedagogiek undermining the objective of criticality, it is useful to inquire if the University in the country has done away with this institutional culture that serves the purposes of preserving whiteness and white interests in our context. 7

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White greed as oppositional to democratisation? The reader will recall from the introduction of this chapter, that this second consideration is derived from the first (decolonisation as knowledge and institutional democratisation). In this second consideration, the question focuses on the implications of democratisation, or the undemocratic nature of knowledge production in South Africa.16 It is through considering these two moves – democratisation as a first and the implications of said democratisation as a second move – that we are able to then pose the question of the kind of institution that we desire and are trying to fashion through the project of decolonisation. When one considers whether or not the University in the country has embraced a sense of criticality, or continues to undermine this value, it is useful to repose the question: does the direction of knowledge-making taken by white South Africans in the University fulfil the objective of democratisation? One might inquire as to why this question is being posed in the first instance. The question is rooted in two things that, when taken together, give us a better understanding of the demand for decolonisation. Firstly, the professoriate in South Africa continues to be largely populated by the minority, white, colonial settler descendant demographic.17 While there are inroads being made to redefine this landscape, disciplines such as Philosophy continue to lag far behind in transformative (racial demographic) representation, with the discipline continuing to look like a lily-white sea (see Paphitis & Villet 2017).18 In the second sense, this question is posed as a result of the curriculum that continues to define the sector; a curriculum that still invokes the critique first levelled by Lebakeng, Phalane and Nase (2006: 72) one-and-a-half decades ago when they historically observed that ‘the inauguration of western higher education in the colonies, however, reflected cultural parochialism. Its basic assumption was that a University system for Europeans brought up in London […] was also appropriate for Africans brought up in Lagos […].’ There are two things to be said about the justifications that undergird the question: does the direction of knowledge-making taken by white South Africans in the University fulfil the objective of democratisation? To answer this question in the first regard, one needs to consider the direction(s) that have been taken under white directives in the sector. It is also useful to note that these dictates have been developed with the sole purpose of preserving and sustaining white colonial settler descendant futurity in the sector. For the justification of this claim, I direct the reader to notes 8 and 17 below. My argument needs to be read carefully here; while I am not suggesting the wholesale expulsion of whiteness from the academe – as this would be an instantiation of the perverted inversion of power – I am, however, suggesting that if whiteness were committed to just and equitable change, institutional decolonisation would be rooted in what has been defined as institutional responsiveness by Kumalo (2020). It is also useful to caution against a crude reading of the scholarship of intellectuals such as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015), Lebakeng, Phalane and Nase (2006) and Ramose (2004) as propositions for the perverted inversions of power. My reasoning here is based on the reality that these scholars have been advancing precisely the aims I detail above; they have been 8

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calling for a substantive engagement with the epistemic frameworks of Blackness/ Indigeneity and not an unjustifiable expulsion of whiteness from the academe. In contravention and stark dismissal of the objective of substantive engagement with the epistemic traditions of Blackness/Indigeneity, one of the directions taken by the white-led academy19 has been that of inclusion. On this approach, Chapter 3 by Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt and Cash Ahenakew, in this volume, is instructive. These scholars suggest ‘inclusion [in the framework developed by the westernised University] itself is a flawed proposition as it presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities’. Stein et al. substantiate Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s (2012) seminal treatise when they reveal the logics that govern modern higher education institutions. Stein et al. maintain that ‘not surprisingly, the colonial economies that govern life within modern institutions, including institutions of higher education, are generally at best unconcerned with decolonisation, and at worst actively hostile to it’. This hostility is dressed up as inclusion by way of toleration; tokenistic inclusion that serves the purposes of ticking performance-management boxes while leaving the structural basis of these colonial institutions unchanged and uncritiqued. This position is substantiated by Siseko Kumalo and Leonhard Praeg (2019: 1) who argue that ‘these performances of “decoloniality”, which often take the form of elaborately ritualised and expensive decolonial lectures delivered by international scholars, amount to a form of ticking” that lacks substantive engagement with locally situated struggles, debates and dialogues’. This amounts to what Tuck and Yang (2012: 10) call ‘professional kudos’ accrued by settler scholars, who justify their superficial engagement with decolonisation by way of appealing to ‘settler moves to innocence’. Tuck and Yang (2012: 10) trouble this phenomenon when they argue, ‘settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler’.20 Tokenistic inclusion that is hollow is symptomatic of the principal concern that drives this second consideration, this being the ‘white greed exhibited by white people in the country’. This greed, according to my analysis, serves the purposes of undermining institutional decolonisation, i.e. democratisation, while buttressing acts of securing white futurity through moves to innocence in the sector. In the second instance, one might consider a more radical position – this being what a decolonised institution might look like. To this effect, Fatima Pirbhai-Illich and Fran Martin give some insight into this question. In Chapter 4, which also challenges tokenistic inclusion, these scholars maintain that ‘when a de/colonial, relational onto-epistemology is applied to educational spaces and relationships, the classroom is not merely the physical backdrop to social action or a metaphor for the social environment. Instead, space is seen as relational […]’. Their contribution comes as a response to the white greed that defines the global colonial entanglements that created our contemporary world. By giving us a conception of relationality that transcends possessive characteristics of being and relating to the world, Pirbhai-Illich and Martin foreground two things. First, the objective of decolonising knowledge

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and modes of being such that we create a conception of the global commons that is inclusive and one that moves away from exclusionary and exploitative, personal, social, economic and political relations. In the second sense, they demonstrate the similarities that necessarily demand and mark the solidarities of all oppressed groups globally. Put simply, the argument developed in Chapter 4 compels us to philosophical thinking, which as defined by Dana Villa (1998: 157) ‘requires a withdrawal from the world of appearances; it is, essentially, the contemplative attempt to grasp the nature of the whole’. Pirbhai-Illich and Martin poignantly demonstrate the need and importance of a decolonial agenda that moves away from possessive white greed, towards a democratic mode of existence, that is rooted in the due deference that defines the epistemic exchange within a decolonial framework. To this end, due deference can be explained through an analysis of Kumalo’s (2018) concept of ‘ontological legitimacy’.

Educational desire as ‘ontological legitimacy’ As detailed by Teboho Lebakeng, in the sixth chapter of this collection, the ontological legitimacy of Blackness/Indigeneity has always been undermined by the logic of coloniality. To be sure, Lebakeng drives this point when he maintains that ‘for all practical purposes, Africans were excluded from the category of rational beings and thus denied reasoning as a virtue […] This predisposition of European modernity […] promoted a self-made image by proclaiming its knowledge as constituted by objectivity and rationality.’ This erasure is indicative of the abjection that Kumalo (2018: 3) writes about when he argues that ‘through these modes of silencing, I maintain that Blackness/Indigeneity is continuously and strategically re-framed to serve the purposes of whiteness, thus, reaffirming the claim of abjection in the University’. In this respect, the reader might want to suggest that the question posed in the previous consideration was not sufficiently answered; the question of white greed in the South African context. There are two approaches to answering the question. The first lies in a return – as it were – to the thinker who first treated this question (Bantu Biko). Biko (2004 /1978: 97) writes of this question, ‘white people now despise black people, not because they need to reinforce their attitude and so justify their position of privilege but simply because they actually believe that black is inferior and bad’. While there is a great deal that can, and ought to be said about the thought of Biko (2004 /1978) in general, I will limit myself to one observation. Biko (2004 /1978) was writing at a time that was defined by the height of racial animosities in the country. As aptly demonstrated by notes 8, 9 and 17 below, these animosities are rooted in the historical violence of unjustified and unjustifiable colonial imposition and epistemic displacement. As a derivative of colonial violence and imposition, it is therefore not surprising that knowledge economies are themselves shaped and influenced by these colonial logics. In the second response to the question, one should be and is compelled to analyse the tensions created by coloniality, such that said white greed is made visible. Lebakeng details these tensions systematically in Chapter 6 in this collection, when he writes ‘it 10

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was the (supposed) inferiority of the non-euro-western human being with which the euro-western (supposed) superior human being had to contend. This euro-western superior human being, according to this colonial mythology, is thus the actual sufferer from colonialism.’ The burden of the white man in this respect is embroiled in the task of educating the Black/Indigenous being, such that this being becomes ‘an active participant in modern civilisation’, as detailed in note 9. The burden of the white man, then, throws into focus the contentiousness of the educational desire exhibited by Blackness/Indigeneity. Put crudely, the sufferer of colonialism – a sufferer only insofar as this suffering is an extension of the mythology of the colonial enterprise, namely, the white man – throws into question the authenticity of Black/Indigenous educational desire. This claim is substantiated by the probing question posed by Abraham Olivier in Chapter 8, when he quotes from Mbembe (2016) and inquires: ‘what should we do with the inherited education system and the consciousness it necessarily inculcated in the African mind?’ To contextualise the historicity of how fraught this question of educational desire is in our context, I appeal to Gqoba’s (1906/1888: 50) composition, Yay’ibhungce ngobusuku, BenoZweliqhelesile – Bemikhomb’ibhembesile, Kuvingcelw’umncedi wabo. Babeziinto zifileyo; Bamyekela loo mnumzane, Babaleka bamushiya; Selesala encinithwa, Selesala sel’echithwa. Baqubula oozinkomo, – Sekuntuli kuthi mo; Kwamigqeku, kwamathanga Welinen’uBhedidlaba In this composition, u-Gqoba (1906/1888) echoes the challenge detailed by u-Mqhayi with respect to colonial modes of education. U-Mqhayi (2009/1917: 125), detailing the contestations that define the knowledge-making enterprise, writes ‘imfundo yombuso u-Maqoma uyifunde ngokutana nca noyise u-Ngqika, waye uyise lowo wayetatyatelwa pezulu kakulu ngamapakati, esenza ukumhluta kuyisekazi u-Ndlambe, kuba ayefuna ukumfundisa ngeyawo indlela’.21 In this regard, education and, by extension, educational desire in the country is fraught with contestations. These contestations do not only speak to contestations of power, but are also imbricated with questions of land(lessness) and/or dispossession, owing to the position to which Blackness/Indigeneity is elevated when educated in colonial modes of knowing.22 The elevation of the Black/Indigenous subject that is 11

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educated in the culture, mores and values of coloniality institutes social divides and derision within and among Blackness/Indigeneity. This goes as far back as the time of u-Ngqika seen in the analysis presented by u-Mqhayi (2009/1917: 125) when he writes, ‘zite kanjalo i-Ruluneli ezimhlope zakufika, nabafundisi ngokunjalo, zamtabata u-Ngqika njengoyena Kumkani mkulu wasemaXoseni, yaza lonto yenza ukuba u-Ngqika acunubeke kwezinye inkosi zakowabo. U-Maqoma waba nokulubona, kwasekubuncinaneni bake ke ngoko lonke unyhwalazo, nobuqetseba bezizwe ezimhlope.’23 To borrow from Olivier once more, ‘the point is that we still witness an ongoing presence of western academic hegemony, of the colony in disguise, the disguise of neoliberal global capitalism, driving the restructuring of universities’. This hegemony is seen as the epistemic arrogance of colonial education models in our context; an arrogance that is oblivious to the effects it has on the lived realities of the majority. I call this an obliviousness owing to the reality that the HWI, and its practitioners, were and in some respects continue to be dismissive of the effects that their prescribed curriculum has on the embodied and experiential existence of Blackness/Indigeneity in these institutions. The question of educational desire then requires a reframing – one that is cognisant of the ontological legitimacy of Blackness/Indigeneity. To substantiate this, Yvette Freter and Björn Freter in Chapter 7 suggest that ‘overcoming colonial violence is not simply re-appropriation or even a “simplistic decolonisation of western knowledge practices” […] but a process of being open to “further inquiry and productive ways of thinking in and through complex and contested knowledge terrains”’. This is to suggest that the modes of invisibilisation detailed in note 4 below need to be countered. Freter and Freter make this point through the contention that ‘the racism, sexism, classism – and all the other forms of superiorism that seek to marginalise – which are enduringly endemic of (post)-colonial mindsets cannot be addressed and countered unless they are made explicit’. The move to make explicit, these modes of thinking, is aligned with the aim of decolonisation as democratisation – ‘decolonisation as justice a priori’ as detailed by Kumalo and Praeg (2019). To recall then, decolonisation as democratisation means reframing our understanding of educational desire; a reframing that begins to take seriously the ontological legitimacy of Blackness/Indigeneity. Ontological legitimacy, in this respect, acknowledges and substantiates the argument of educational desire detailed by Mirza (2006: 145) when she writes, ‘with the scrapping of grants, increasing tuition fees, and the realities of long-term debt – educational desire – the sheer motivation to succeed, is not enough if the structures and systems mitigate against you’. Higher education decolonisation in South Africa attempts to respond to the poignant observation made by Mirza (2006: 152) when she maintains that the structural oppression that is being resisted, through calls for democratisation, seeks to undo ‘the harsh story of failure and being failed by the educational system’. Educational desire, understood as ontological legitimacy – a legitimacy that recognises the ambitions and hopes of Blackness/Indigeneity in the institutional arrangements of

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the sector – symbolises a resolution that ‘remains hopeful and enduring’. In the face of racism and hate, this hope becomes ‘the story of love’ (Mirza 2006: 152). This story of love does not elide the biases and personal motivations that we each bring to the pedagogic exchange, for, as Freter and Freter maintain, ‘it is thus important to realise that the curriculum is comprised of the embodied teacher bringing his/her race, class, gender, and epistemological and pedagogical preferences into the class with him/her along with the texts s/he has chosen’. It is for this reason, driven by the desire to decolonise/democratise the knowledge enterprise through an acknowledgement of the ontological legitimacy of Blackness/Indigeneity, that the South African epistemic decolonial turn ought to be seen for what it is – an expression of educational desire, both in its historical and contemporary articulations.

Structure of the book This collection opens with an introductory chapter that argues for a reconceptualisation of decolonial struggles in the country. The move to shift the narrative is inspired by the probing questions that lead to the claim of decoloniality and decolonisation as democratisation. Democratising the knowledge project presages a paradigmatic shift that infuses the chapters that constitute this volume, a paradigmatic shift that frames decolonisation as educational desire. In the introduction, here above, educational desire construed as intricately tied to decolonisation and the democratisation of the knowledge project implies a radical move: an acknowledgement of the ontological legitimacy of Blackness/Indigeneity. This is a radical move insofar as it challenges and destabilises the ingrained assumptions that continue to locate Blackness/Indigeneity in a position of inferiority. To make this argument, the volume is structured by a divide that gives us two sections: 1) Concerns of and Approaches to Decolonial Agendas; and 2) Philosophical Contextuality, Pedagogies and Decoloniality. The first section is constitutive of three chapters that each address the contemporary manifestations of decoloniality in the South African, Canadian and United Kingdom contexts. The second section contains five chapters that deal with the implications of decolonising the curriculum in the discipline of Philosophy and more generally decolonising knowledge in the humanities and social sciences in the University. The volume concludes with a chapter that thinks through Futurity, Decolonisation and the Academy. The contributions to this volume create a book that teases out some of the complexity and nuances, while detailing the cautions that must inflect our thinking around the project of decolonising knowledge in the South African higher education landscape. It has, as its stated aim, the objectives of gleaning useful and pragmatic lessons regarding some of the pitfalls and shortcomings of decolonisation and Indigeneity studies as witnessed all across the globe, as we have each been fighting for the ontological legitimacy detailed above using Kumalo’s (2018) analysis. This is the reason behind the inclusion of work of scholars located outside of South Africa. Furthermore, the global inflections that define some of the contributions in this collection have, as their stated aim, the objective of creating ties of solidarity 13

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in decolonial struggles. Ties of solidarity globally further drive the objective of highlighting the similarities that define decoloniality as a global undertaking. This is to say that we, in the South African context, realise that there are continuing struggles – each of which are modified by the context specificities of Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany; specificities that irrespectively require our collective efforts through modes of learning and teaching that are inclusive, i.e. decolonial and democratic. Put differently, while we acknowledge that we are each situated in different contexts and have different subtleties that characterise where we are situated, we also are mindful of the reality that coloniality has operated, in our varied contexts, with the same logic. Irrespective of where we find ourselves, this logic has been one of violence, domination, injustice and erasure. Our scholarship, therefore, takes seriously the call to activism (scholarly activism) that is rooted in the desire to change and transform our societies through the knowledge we create. Owing to our desire to discharge our duty in respect of this scholarly activism, each of the contributors to this collection acknowledges the political significance of each knowledge claim that constitutes this collection of work. With this thinking in mind, I wish to address the dearth of scholarship from the African continent in this collection. In responding to this question, there are two things to bear in mind. In the first sense, projects like these are always a huge undertaking with respect to coordinating the contributions and soliciting responses to such a question as posed in this volume; a question that aims to understand the varied and differentiated decolonial articulations – as witnessed throughout the globe. In the second sense, one ought to remain cognisant of what has been detailed throughout the introductory chapter – this being the reality of the politics of knowledge production. This is to say that the situatedness that defines us, both as researchers and individuals with collaborative partners in the global academe, determines the geographies of collaboration that are easiest to reach out to. The sheer silence of contributions from African partners and institutions in this volume itself suggests the orientation of the South African University in the last couple of decades; that is – towards the global north. In simple terms, then, the South African University has fashioned and styled itself in accordance with the same logics of exceptionalism that define the sociopolitical landscape. This is not to say that we revel in this, but rather that we acknowledge the implications of this orientation and should attempt to respond to it. Part I of the book deals with the concerns and approaches to decoloniality with Veli Mitova in the first chapter, looking at the question of relativism as it relates to the demands/motivations of the decolonialist. Mitova suggests that we evaluate the demand for decolonisation on moral standards, concluding her argument in these terms, ‘[since] moral standards are generally taken to trump others, we would not have the reiteration of the view-from-nowhere problem that tripped us up earlier. This seems to me like a promising direction […].’ This suggestion is useful and implicitly informs the argument made in this introductory chapter that frames decolonisation as democratisation. Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt

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and Cash Ahenakew consider the nuances of decolonisation and make the case for broadening the ambits and conceptions of decolonisation in the global academe. Their chapter makes the case for broader conceptions of decolonisation that begin to transcend the anthropocentric and neoliberal capitalist economic paradigms that dominate global thought processes. Fatima Pirbhai-Illich and Fran (Frances) Martin detail the colonial power dynamics of education from a position that takes seriously the ways of knowing and being of Indigenous peoples in Canada. As detailed in the introduction above, their work allows us to begin imagining what a reconceptualised educational landscape might look like; a reconceptualisation that liberates us from colonial modes of thought. In this respect, Pirbhai-Illich and Martin substantiate the chapter that precedes theirs, by making the case for modes of being that go Beyond Possession. Part II deals with the philosophical contextuality and pedagogic strategies in the decolonial debate. To situate these concerns and frame the debate Siseko Kumalo’s chapter, Socratic Social Criticism in Higher Education, opens this section with a consideration of the place and role of the higher education institution in the country. The argument makes a call for a responsive sector. Teboho Lebakeng, in Chapter 6, considers the structural and historical realities that inaugurate decolonisation in our context. Lebakeng traces the logics of coloniality, showcasing the violence and destruction wrought by this system. His argument primes the ground for the following chapter that begins to develop a South African decolonial lexicography. Yvette a Freter nd Björn Freter continue from where Teboho Lebakeng left off, arguing for an ethical epistemic approach. Their chapter concerns the task of addressing ‘teachers of philosophy in South Africa’. They make the case for epistemic diversification – democratising the knowledge project – and, in this regard, join the long-established tradition of philosophers who have been calling for epistemic humility, not only in South Africa, but globally. Abraham Olivier, in Chapter 8, conducts a systematic analysis of what decolonising the University might look like; he does this work through a systematic engagement with the concept of place. He maintains that ‘[to] decolonise the University of today and “rethink the University of tomorrow” calls for a clear understanding of its present situation’. Echoing the subtitle of this volume, Global Insights into the South African Experience, Olivier suggests that ‘[as] universities are knowledge providers, and the provision of knowledge across borders is sought, a process of denationalising universities is taking place’. This re-inscribes Olivier’s use and understanding of displacement as it applies to his analysis of decolonisation. In the final chapter in this section, Ulrike Kistner reveals the historical imbrications between philosophy, theology and education, specifically as this relationship manifest(ed) at the University of Pretoria. It is important to note, as Kistner’s argument showcases, that although these links were playing themselves out at the University of Pretoria, they had national implications for education across the country. It is for this reason that Kistner’s argument becomes so important to this volume. Her contribution highlights the importance of decolonisation – a decolonisation that is truly aligned with the objectives of democratisation. Kistner’s chapter cautions us against white moves to innocence that secure white settler 15

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colonial descendant futures; moves that were historically seen through/as the teaching of and research in traditions such as critical theory. Her cautionary remarks are made owing to the glaring schizophrenia that arguably defined Philosophy Departments in institutions such as the University of Pretoria. Kumalo concludes the book by way of a retrospective and prospective detailing of the decolonial agenda in the South African context.

Conclusion Decoloniality in the South African and global context has been framed through the lens of reacting to the demands of students as they swept through the higher education landscape during the 2015–2017 academic years.24 The scholarship of decolonisation has given due consideration to the place of education, as much of it has centred on the decolonisation of curriculum and institutional cultures25 with the aim of transforming universities into more democratic institutions. However, the global academy has not yet produced a book that brings together philosophers and educational theorists; a gap that is identified and filled by this volume. This volume recentres the position and role of the educational philosopher in the South African context, a component that has been sorely missing in much of the decolonial debate that has been roaring in the country. This book invites some critical and reflective debates around the imperatives of decolonisation while taking care to manage these in ways that do not limit the debates in essentialist and problematic ways. The target audience of the volume, as a result of straddling an in-disciplinary position by way of bringing together philosophers and educational theorists, is the philosopher, teacher trainer (in the form of the contemporary professor of education), the administrator who is tasked with institutional decolonisation, and students, along with scholars of decolonisation. As a book that aims at the re-articulation of the importance of the philosopher of education in South Africa, this volume is targeted at scholars and intellectuals who are invested in the decolonial agenda, by way of learning from the experiences of other contexts, a position that dethrones the notion of South African exceptionalism. Notes 1

In this respect, it must be stressed that while I am making reference to the South African University sector, this sector is in fact representative of the westernised University that finds itself located in our context. The challenge presented by the westernised University is its epistemic preponderance and presuppositions that seek to annihilate the knowledge systems of Black/Indigenous communities, wherever this institution is located. For a systematic analysis of this debate, see Grosfoguel (2007, 2013), Lebakeng, Phalane and Nase (2006) and Ramose (2004).

2

For a more careful and considered analysis of how the political contestation of knowledge is inaugurated by colonial incursion, I invite the reader to consider Mignolo’s (2009) treatise

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of the geo- and body-politics that are derived from colonial violence and displacement. The role of displacement is also taken up, with careful consideration and treatment in this volume, by Abraham Olivier’s Chapter 8 titled Decolonisation and Displacement. 3

It should be noted that the concept of ‘epistemic authority’ is a contentious matter, one that is fraught with various challenges as a result of being closely linked with/to the political contestations considered under the first scope – decolonisation and knowledge democratisation. This contentiousness is given careful analysis by Veli Mitova’s contribution in Chapter 2 in this volume.

4

This institution, the ‘westernised University’, was imagined and designed with the white, cisgendered, heterosexual, middle-aged and patriarchal man in mind. In critiquing this identity that is framed around rationality and the exclusion, occlusion and negation of knowers that do not fit into this identity, I join Snow (1959). Snow’s timeless critique of The Two Cultures revealed that the rationalist, objective knower is himself constitutive of and constituted by a cultural base, irrespective of attempts at denying and concealing this cultural identity. The concealment of this cultural identity serves to substantiate the scholarship of decolonialists (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015, 2018) and Critical Race scholars (DiAngelo 2011; Mills 1997; Yancy 2008) who have argued that whiteness invisibilises itself while overly visibilising the Other. This is to say that whiteness is premised on an epistemology of concealment. Concealment serves the purposes of colonial violence – which operates under the logics of theft, dispossession and epistemic injustices – perpetrated against the colonised being who is defined as Black/Indigenous – Other.

5

In light of this argument, Chapter 3 is considered against the seminal essay Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, developed by Tuck and Yang (2012).

6

In the academe, this greed is exhibited as a University that claims academic freedom and institutional autonomy when it is asked to consider questions that would begin to effectively action the notion of Justice through Higher Education (Kumalo 2020) as laid out in the White Paper 3 of 1997.

7

This democratisation is framed by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 6) as epistemic freedom, which has, at its centre, the aim of ‘demythologising […] both the idea of Europe as a teacher of the world and the idea of Africa as a pupil’.

8

In this respect, I encourage the reader to consider JM Coetzee’s analysis in his White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (1988). Coetzee maintains that the indolence discourse that was used to frame the ‘Kaffir’ and the ‘Hottentot’ was the premise used to justify the occlusion, negation and erasure of Blackness/Indigeneity in the South African context. This was meant to justify white settler colonial invasion in the country, while equating Blackness/Indigeneity to animality – a move that primarily questions the ability of the Black/Indigenous being to reason.

9

To this effect, one can consider Mudimbe’s (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Mudimbe (1988: 33) makes the claim that African knowledge systems and by extension the African were framed by disciplines such as Anthropology (the handmaiden of colonialism and dispossession on the continent) as ‘the savage [that needed to] become an active participant in modern civilisation’ – as the Indigenous African knower was regarded as ‘retarded, gradual and backward’. The status from savage to ‘active participant in modern civilisation’ came with the aid of colonial education – displacing and erasing the

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educational models and institutions that existed prior to the invention of Africa, through the colonial narrative. I make reference to an African education system on the basis of the analysis presented by Gqoba (1906/1888) wherein he curates Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo. 10 Legitimate violence in this case is the violence wielded by the state and subsequently by the city state of the University. The city state – the University – comes to wield this power having premised it on the condition of institutional autonomy, which is enshrined (in the case of South Africa) in the Constitution and protects this institution from external interference from the state (city and/or province) wherein this city state is located. When considering the countless protests that have come to define the higher education landscape, protests that began in the early 2000s in Historically Black Universities (HBUs), legitimate violence subsequently is envisaged as the deployment of police against students, and the ways in which this is substantiated by institutional administrators. In the case of democratic violence, one can describe this as the violence used by students to attempt to remove the inherent injustice that they face/encounter in these institutions. Ramose (2016: 4) frames this as follows, ‘democratic violence is violence that consists in the coercion of persuasion. The hallmark of democratic violence is the ethical demand for equality of condition, that is, substantive as opposed to formal equality.’ 11 It is useful to remind the reader of the definition of coloniality as given by Grosfoguel (2007: 218), and for this reason I quote Grosfoguel at length here: ‘Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labour in the periphery, the new identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination/exploitation of, non-Western people.’ 12 While I single out the work of Heidi Safia Mirza (2006), it should be stated that there were other thinkers who considered this question from various locales and contexts. My specific attention to Mirza’s work is deliberate in demonstrating the saliency of the logics of coloniality, be it in the South African context, the United Kingdom, Germany or Canada. Mirza’s essay in this respect does well to demonstrate this point. 13 To this end, it is worth noting that while South Africa is defined by a demography that has a majority Black/Indigenous population, other contexts where Indigeneity was wiped out share a similar experience to ours. This experience is one of colonial violence, negation, physical, ontological and epistemic erasures, along with the continuation of this violence, which is contemporarily marked by the continuing contestations that define the University (globally). It, therefore, goes without saying that the Black/Indigenous people of South Africa stand in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States of America, Australia, New Zealand and the Latin American territories. Closer to home, on the African continent, we are cognisant of the colonial violence that led to the Herero and Namaqua Genocide of Namibia perpetrated by the Germans; the Rwandan Genocide, which is rooted in the colonial logics of Belgian rule – as detailed by Mamdani (2001); the Liberian struggles that were defined by a decade-long civil war (from 1989–1997); and the Chimurenga in Zimbabwe that led to the genocidal murders of Matabeleland (Gukurahundi). These violence(s) are all premised on the ‘greed exhibited by whiteness’, not only in South Africa but globally.

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14 The reader is encouraged to see the Constitutional Court judgment on the Stellenbosch University language policy (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfOzT2ZCH44). The reader might also recall the protests and social movements that erupted in 2015, giving rise to the 2016 Language Policy discussed in Justice Froneman’s judgment in the link above. For a detailed account of these protests and subtle modes of defiance in the face of institutionally led erasure, occlusion and negation, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF3rTBQTQk4. 15 One should question, though, how much longer we will continue to classify the South African democratic experiment as a ‘budding’ one, seeing as we are fast approaching the third decade of democracy in the country? 16 The reader might question the very nature of such a project. My response to this question is simple. I am here following in the tradition of philosophers who are committed to the project of ‘the ability to think without rules’ (Villa 1998: 151). My commitment to this project stems from the fact that Blackness/Indigeneity in our context and in all locales that have been defined – historically – by the violence of colonial incursion, imposition and erasure has always been consigned to thinking within the confines of the rules that were already predetermined and prescribed by whiteness, thus undercutting an authentic commitment to an unencumbered philosophy, which, ‘as Arendt understands it, [signifies] the Socratic project [that] aims to cultivate not solidarity but thoughtfulness’ (Villa 1998: 151). 17 As noted in note 8, the occlusion of Blackness/Indigeneity is rooted in an historical reality that is theorised in the literary scape by JM Coetzee (1988) as a silence regarding ‘the place of black labour’. To this effect, Coetzee (1988: 71-72) poignantly notes, ‘[…] silence about the place of black labour is common not only in Schreiner and Smith but, by and large, to the Afrikaans plaasroman [the Afrikaans – South African – novel], and represents a failure of imagination before the problem of how to integrate the dispossessed black [wo]man into the idyll (or in Schreiner’s case the anti-idyll) of African pastoralism’. 18 I caution against a misreading here. While we are advocating for the transformation, racial and epistemic, of disciplines such as philosophy and the broader University – it is useful to bear in mind that one’s racial identity does not automatically mean that their politics will align with those of the oppressed. One can be Black/Indigenous but continue to be disaffected and disinterested in the political and intellectual struggles of other Black/Indigenous beings. 19 A white-led academy does not necessarily mean that white scholars/intellectuals continue to be the leaders of our institutions of higher learning – by way of occupying roles such as the Vice-Chancellorship. Rather, white leadership is envisaged as the highest decisionmaking body in the University, the Senate, continuing to be dominated by white scholars. The Senate is constitutive of senators who are the professoriate, a professoriate that is predominantly white. It is for this reason that I argue that our institutions continue to be white-led. 20 In South Africa, not only as it pertains to the knowledge-making project – but inclusive of the very social fabric of the constitutional project – these superficial moves to innocence that define white settler colonial descendent futurity are challenged by scholars such as Modiri (2018: 4), who maintains ‘that South Africa’s constitutional democracy has over the years been rendered empty by the absence of concrete historical justice and the nonrealisation of an emancipatory experience of freedom and dignity in the lives of the black majority […]’.

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21 While I am cautious about translating this work, I acknowledge that it will not only be read in the South African context, but also further afield. In this regard, my inclusion of a translation is done with the intent of opening up this work to these audiences. I must categorically state that I do not include a translation for the purposes of accommodating white South Africans who continue to harbour conceptions of Blackness/Indigeneity as inferior – ideas that are seen in the refusal of whiteness to learn our languages. This refusal is doubly charged as whiteness in our context invests copious financial and intellectual resources into the study and development of European languages, even as they claim a South African identity while being unable to speak and unwilling to learn an African language. In and of itself, this continued denial and refusal to learn an African language is symptomatic of the deep-seated nature of epistemic injustice and arrogance in our context. To translate then:

Maqoma learnt about matters of state from close association with his father Ngqika, who was very highly regarded by his councillors, who worked at taking him from his uncle Ndlambe because they wanted to teach him in their own way. (translated by Jeff Opland 2009: 124)

22 This elevation should be understood in light of its adverse effects as well. The Black/ Indigenous, being without said education, is regarded as the backward, retarded and gradual being described by Mudimbe (1988). 23 When white governors and missionaries arrived, they treated Ngqika as paramount chief of the Xhosa, and the other chiefs of his nation then grew hostile to Ngqika. Maqoma, at this young age, witnessed all the hypocrisy and deceit of the white nations (translated by Jeff Opland 2009: 124). 24 See, for instance, the work of Booysen S (Ed.) (2016) Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press; Praeg L (Ed.) (2019) Philosophy on the Border: Decoloniality and the Shudder of the Origin. Scottsville: UKZN Press; Jansen JD (2017) As by Fire: The End of the South African University. Cape Town: Tafelberg; Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ & Zondi S (Eds) (2016) Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa. North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press; Etieybo E (Ed.) (2018) Decolonisation, Africanisation and the Philosophy Curriculum. London: Routledge; Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ (2018) Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization. London: Routledge; and Arday J & Mirza HS (Eds) (2018) Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 25 See Tabensky P and Matthews S (Eds.) (2015) Being At Home : Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. Scottsville: UKZN Press.

References Arday J & Mirza HS (Eds) (2018) Dismantling race in higher education: Racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy. London: Palgrave Macmillan Bangeni B & Kapp R (2005) Identities in transition: Shifting conceptions of home among 'black' South African University students. African Studies Review 48(3): 1–19 Bhabha H (1994) The location of culture. London: Routledge

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Biko S (2004/1978) I write what I like (edited by CS Stubbs). Johannesburg: Picador Africa Booysen S (Ed.) (2016) Fees must fall: Student revolt, decolonisation and governance in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press Coetzee JM (1988) White writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press DiAngelo R (2011) White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(3): 54–70 Enslin P (1992) The political mythology of childhood in South African teacher education. Discourse 13(1): 36–48 Etieybo E (Ed.) (2018) Decolonisation, Africanisation and the philosophy curriculum. London: Routledge Gqoba WW (1906/1888) Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo. In WB Rubusana & SC Satyo (Eds) Zemk’ Inkomo Magwalandini. Claremont: New Africa Books Grosfoguel R (2007) The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies 21(2&3): 211–223 Grosfoguel R (2013) The structure of knowledge in westernised universities: Epistemic racism/ sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 1: 73–90 Higgins J (2001) Academic freedom in the New South Africa. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies 2(2): 1–19 Jansen JD (2017) As by fire: The end of the South African University. Cape Town: Tafelberg Keet A (2014) Epistemic ‘othering’ and the decolonisation of knowledge. Africa Insight 44(1): 23–37 Kumalo SH (2018) Explicating abjection: Historically white universities creating natives of nowhere? Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) 6(1): 1–17 Kumalo SH (2020) Justice through higher education: Revisiting the White Paper 3 of 1997. Higher Education Quarterly https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12253 Kumalo SH & Praeg L (2019) Decolonisation and justice a priori. Journal of Decolonising Disciplines 1(1): 1–9 Lebakeng JT, Phalane MM & Nase D (2006) Epistemicide, institutional cultures and the imperative for the Africanisation of universities in South Africa. Alternation 13(1): 70–87 Mamdani M (2001) When victims becoming killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press Mazrui AA (1978) Political values and the educated class in Africa. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press Mbembe A (2016) Decolonising the University: New directions. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15(1): 29–45 Mignolo WD (2009) Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 159–181 Mills C (1997) The racial contract. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press Mirza HS (2006) ‘Race’, gender and educational desire. Race Ethnicity and Education 9(2): 137–158

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Modiri J (2018) Conquest and constitutionalism: First thoughts on an alternative jurisprudence. South African Journal on Human Rights DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02587203.2018.1550939 Mqhayi SEK (2009/1917) U-Maqoma (trans. J Opland). In J Opland (Ed.) Abantu Besizwe: Historical and Biographical Writings, 1902–1944. Johannesburg: Wits University Press Mudimbe V-Y (1988) The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy and the order of knowledge. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ (2015) Decolonization as the future of Africa. History Compass 13(10): 485–496 Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ (2018) Epistemic freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and decolonization. London and New York: Routledge Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ & Zondi S (Eds) (2016) Decolonizing the university, knowledge systems and disciplines in Africa. North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press Paphitis SA & Villet C (2017) The demographic diversity of philosophy and the possibilities for transforming philosophy in South Africa. Report prepared for the Transforming Philosophy in South Africa Workshop, Rhodes University (19–20 January) Praeg L (Ed.) (2019) Philosophy on the border: Decoloniality and the shudder of the origin. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Ramose MB (2004) In search of an African philosophy of education. South African Journal of Higher Education 18(3): 138–160 Ramose MB (2016) Modu wa Taba. Paper prepared for the Rhodes University Institutional Culture and Transformation Conference, Rhodes University Readings B (1996) The university in ruins. Chicago: Harvard University Press Snow CP (1959) The two cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Tabensky P & Matthews S (Eds) (2015) Being at home: Race, institutional culture and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Tuck E & Yang KW (2012) Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1): 1–40 Villa DR (1998) The philosopher versus the citizen: Arendt, Strauss and Socrates. Political Theory 26(2): 147–172 wa Thiong’o N (1986) Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey Yancy G (2008) Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race in America. London: Rowman and Littlefield

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PART i

F O S N R E C N O C AND O T S E H C A O R P P A L A I N O L DECO S A D N E AG

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How to decolonise knowledge without too much relativism Veli Mitova

Introduction According to a popular line of thought, we should decolonise knowledge, science and our University curricula for relativist reasons. Very crudely: the epistemic perspectives of different cultures have an equal claim to knowledge of the world; so, privileging any single perspective amounts to epistemicide. Part of the evil of colonialism lies in obscuring this fact, the perpetrators elevating their own idiosyncratic western white male world view to the status of ultimate epistemic emissary from objective reality. The first aim of this chapter1 is to argue that while this diagnosis of the epistemic wrong in colonisation is on the right track, the relativist thinking kindling it, far from supporting the call to epistemic decolonisation, in fact subverts it in at least two ways of relevance to this volume. First, it undermines the call to decolonise science and knowledge more generally, by entailing that there are no objective moral truths such as ‘epistemic injustice is wrong’. But if there are no such truths, the main rationale for epistemic decolonisation is undercut. Second, relativism of the above kind undermines the call to decolonise the curriculum or any other aspect of teaching institutions, by undermining the concept of teaching, and the idea that one syllabus can be epistemically better than another. These are clearly unpalatable conclusions, so something is amiss with relativist motivations for epistemic decolonisation. A far stronger motivation would start with treating claims about epistemic injustice as objectively true (or false). From such a starting point, we can proceed to legitimately assign objective status to claims about the need to decolonise and the best ways to do so in academia. But this strategy comes at the price of a puzzle: we need a ‘view-from-nowhere’ to help us adjudicate among competing and sometimes incompatible perspectives. The second aim of this chapter is to clear the ground for defusing this puzzle. Although such ground-clearing doesn’t amount to a solution, it nonetheless hopefully makes three important contributions to the debate on epistemic decolonisation: if the arguments here work, we will have shown why relativist rationales for decolonisation are not promising; what is nonetheless valuable about them; and address some of the challenges that absolutist rationales must meet in order to pass muster. I proceed as follows. The first section of the chapter makes the relativist rationale for the decolonial turn a bit more precise, after which I zoom in on its most problematic 24

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premise, the idea that competing epistemic perspectives can have equal epistemic authority.2 In the third section, I isolate the kind of relativism involved in this premise, and consider some old-school moves against it. Two more sophisticated kinds of relativism emerge. Following this, in the fourth section, I argue that their sophistication notwithstanding, none of them provides a good foundation for decolonising knowledge. In the final section, I identify the main challenge for a less relativist way forward.

The Rationale into focus Epistemic decolonisation What exactly is epistemic decolonisation? The question is very much up for grabs at this stage. Many people mean different things by the term. Here I will pin down its contours by firstly distinguishing it from transformation,3 and then drawing on Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2018) recent discussion of epistemic freedom in Africa. I take transformation to be a broader (albeit related) concept than epistemic decolonisation. It is broader in at least two senses. First, it does not involve epistemic transformation alone, but many other forms of transformation, such as, for example, diversifying or making more demographically representative the staff of an institution. Second, a major motivation for transformation, and hence the concept itself, concerns redress and reversal of any marginalisation and exclusion; for instance, those that come with patriarchy. Epistemic decolonisation, in contrast, concerns the redress and reversal of the particularly colonial subclass of wrongs. What does this involve exactly? Ndlovu-Gatsheni identifies at least seven features of epistemic freedom, which I think would likewise characterise a fairly comprehensive concept of epistemic decolonisation.4 First, then, epistemic decolonisation speaks to cognitive justice. [It] is fundamentally about the right to think, theorise, interpret the world, develop [our] own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism. (2018: 3) Second, as applied to Africa, this involves [a]n intellectual and academic process of centring Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world, while at the same time globalising knowledge from Africa. (2018: 4) Third, it is basic to political and economic transformation, in the sense that ‘it deals with the fundamental issues of critical consciousness building’. (2018: 5) Fourth, it involves the move away from thinking about knowledge in the singular to thinking of it in the plural – the move from ‘knowledge’ to ‘knowledges’ (2018: 4, 8). It involves, that is, ‘[r]ecognition of various forms of knowledge and knowing’. (2018: 5) 25

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Fifth, and consequently, this implies the ‘demythologising of both the idea of Europe as a teacher of the world and of Africa as a pupil’. (2018: 6) Sixth, since part of the epistemic injustice of colonisation is entangled with social power and race, epistemic decolonisation requires us ‘to correct the distorted human relationships that emerged from the social classification of human species and their racial hierarchisation’. (2018: 9) Finally, it is not meant to be a lapse into ‘nativism’ (2018: 10), but (as the second quote above suggests) is rather about globalising knowledge from Africa, as well as centring it here. Although one could go into these features in much more detail, I hope that they are intuitively clear enough as they are, to give us at least a vague outline of the concept of epistemic decolonisation that features in this chapter. It is essentially tied to the epistemic wrongs of colonialism, and involves the reclaiming of the right to think and theorise from our point of view rather than from the one unjustly imposed on us. It is a basic precondition for all freedom since it involves the freeing of thought itself. It requires us to acknowledge more than one kind of knowledge system as epistemically authoritative. It hence abandons the teacher-pupil relation among knowers from different systems, and claims in its place epistemic equality. It is essentially entangled with reclaiming other forms of equality and rejecting the historical and scientific lies that perpetrated the inequalities in the first place. And it is not meant to be a retreat from the world but a giving of African knowledges to the world.

The Rationale With this conception of epistemic decolonisation in place, we can make more precise the Rationale for epistemic decolonisation that I opened with, by breaking it down into three steps. The first is the thought that colonialism has set up a single epistemic authority that gets to say what counts as knowledge, rationality, science, philosophy, and every other epistemic endeavour you can think of. Thus, certain peoples’ thoughts about reality count as knowledge, while others’ thoughts don’t. Phrenology, for example, is a genuine source of knowledge while Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) aren’t.5 And certain people’s questions and practices count as scientific, while others’ don’t. Questions about phlogiston, for example, and the practice of lobotomy count as scientific, while questions about how your relationship with your ancestors affects your health and the herbalist’s practices don’t. And, of course, only certain people count as rational, while others are emotional, irrational, mystical, intuitive, and generally in need of civilising and cognitive upgrading. Finally, only certain practices, questions and people count as philosophical, while others don’t. So-called continental and analytic philosophers make it, while what African thinkers do gets classified as anthropology or history of ideas. These are caricatures, of course, but the disturbing thing is how familiar and close to the real thing they actually are, even when presented in this crude polemic form. 26

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The second step of the Rationale for epistemic decolonisation that is the target of this chapter is to note that this hegemonic perspective sells itself as neutral and objective, but is in fact just one among many equally legitimate ones.6 Since part of its powers for sustained hegemony are drawn precisely from this claim to neutrality and objectivity, we need to abandon such claims altogether. Some of the classic motivations for South African transformation involve this thought. Elza Venter, for instance, writes: [We] need to learn to accommodate different value systems and to place them within a framework of common human values…People need to accept that there is no one unique truth which is fixed and found, but rather a diversity of valid, and even conflicting, versions of a world in the making. (Venter 1997: 57–62, emphasis added) Excluding these other perspectives – the third step of the Rationale – amounts to a kind of epistemicide, since they are as legitimate as the one currently in place. Therefore, decolonisation requires at a minimum treating all epistemic perspectives as equal. Here is an example from the literature on Africanising University curricula: in advocating for the reversal of epistemicide, we necessarily seek to place Indigenous Knowledge Systems of the conquered peoples of South Africa on the same level of parity with other epistemological paradigms in order to achieve both formal and substantive equality. (Lebakeng, Phalane & Nase 2006: 76, emphasis added) Let me formalise these thoughts, so that we have a clearer way of evaluating them: The Rationale P1 Colonialism has set up a single perspective as epistemically authoritative. P2 This perspective is in fact just one among many equally legitimate ones. C1 So, colonialism has committed epistemicide by setting up a single perspective to the exclusion of others. C So, decolonising knowledge requires at a minimum taking different perspectives to have equal epistemic authority. For ease of exposition, I will keep referring to this argument as ‘the Rationale’, and to its friend (broadly construed) as ‘the relativist decoloniser’. I should stress, though, that I am not here concerned with showing that this rationale is faithful to the thinking of any single theorist. The idea is that it is out there in common, as well as scholarly, discourse; and the concern is to explore how theoretically fruitful it is. For this task, it is enough that some thinkers endorse bits of it explicitly, and others endorse the whole implicitly. I take myself to have provided enough evidence of that here and in the section detailing the Rationale above.

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What should we make of the Rationale? Let me start with the inferences. I think it is obvious that the move from P1 and P2 to C1 is valid: if we exclude legitimate perspectives, then we commit some serious epistemic or moral injustice, or most likely both. ‘Epistemicide’, I take it, is just a vivid way of driving home the seriousness of these injustices.7 I think that the move from C1 to C is similarly unproblematic. If coloniality has inflicted this bunch of wrongs that fall under the umbrella ‘epistemicide’, then obviously decolonising must, at a bare minimum, involve redressing these wrongs. And if the wrongs consist in not taking various perspectives to be equally authoritative, the least that decolonising would require is restoring the legitimate epistemic equality of these perspectives. Note that this thinking doesn’t commit us to the implausible thought that all perspectives are equally authoritative, but to the idea that the current contestants – the main characters in the dramas of colonialism and decoloniality – are. So, the inferential moves in the Rationale seem fine. This leaves the two premises. I think that P1 is also unproblematic. It is an empirical claim, the evidence for which seems well documented. We just need to think of the language of civilising, uplifting and enlightening that went with colonisation to be immediately convinced of P1.8 Of course, the assumption that there is a single perspective shared by all beneficiaries of colonialism is false if we hear it literally. After all, people everywhere disagree on many, many issues. But we know what P1 means: there is indeed a dominant notion of science, rationality, progress, and so on, that has been shouting the odds ever since ‘the Civilising Mission’. Whose notion is that? Roughly (and somewhat ungraciously) – the western white male’s notion. So, while we can fight about the exact phrasing of P1, many would agree that its spirit is spot-on. Since the validity of the argument is also fine, if there is going to be a serious problem with the Rationale, it will lie in P2. I now turn to this premise.

The problem premise The second premise of the Rationale is the claim that the colonial perspective is just one among many equally legitimate ones. How should we understand this idea? One way would be in perspectivist terms. According to this understanding, there is an objective reality out there, but we are each privy to different portions of it, by virtue of our differing perspectives. Suppose that you and I are sitting at a table opposite each other, and there is a vase full of tall flowers between us. Perspectivism of the kind I am imagining here simply says that there will be flowers and a part of the vase that you see but I don’t, and vice versa.9 The important thing is that there is nothing incompatible about our perspectives, and there is nothing to prevent each of us from walking around and getting the other’s perspective. The same would go for other aspects of reality on the current proposal. Suppose that your perspective includes knowledge about music, Lindiwe’s about astronomy, 28

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and mine about philosophy. Saying that your perspective is just one among many equally legitimate ones, as does P2, would then amount to saying that in order to get maximum knowledge of reality, we need to give all three perspectives equal authority. Perspectivism of this kind isn’t implausible, but it will not get the relativist decoloniser where they want to go – the conclusion of the Rationale then simply doesn’t follow. That is, from the innocuous thought that we all have different perspectives in this sense, it simply doesn’t follow that decolonising knowledge requires treating different perspectives as equally authoritative. At least two considerations show this. First, suppose that my perspective concerns a lot of trivial knowledge. Say that I know the exact number of umbrellas on various beaches (for example, Durban North Peer – 3 456, Acapulco Playa Pie de la Cuesta – 4 532, etc.), the number of cat’s eyes down the middle of particular freeways (for example, Johannesburg to Durban – 25 678, etc.), and other such useless stuff. Even though this is an epistemically legitimate perspective, it isn’t at all obvious that decolonising knowledge involves treating it as equally authoritative on any issue as other peoples’ perspectives (except in those tiny areas of weird knowledge). Second, if we are trying to decolonise a particular domain, say astronomy, it isn’t clear why we need to think of perspectives that concern other domains as equally authoritative to an astronomer’s. Thus, to go back to my earlier example, my perspective (which concerned philosophy) and your perspective (which concerned music) should not be thought equally authoritative as Lindiwe’s, who was an astronomy expert. And if Lindiwe, or anyone ignores our perspectives, there can be no question of epistemicide being committed. Yet, the Rationale requires that whatever exclusion is going on must be an unjust one. So, this kind of perspectivist reading of P2 will not help us get to the imperative to treat different epistemic perspectives as equally authoritative. But perhaps this is misunderstanding the perspectivist version of the premise. Perhaps a more plausible reading would be a kind of focused perspectivism. Thus, just as the original example involved the same object – a vase full of flowers – on which you and I had different but equally authoritative perspectives, so perhaps perspectivism is about giving equal authority to different perspectives on a single topic. The trouble with this reading now is that sometimes such perspectives will be incompatible. So, we simply won’t be able to give them equal authority without lapsing into some form of relativism or other. Let me explain. Suppose that Bob can’t breathe. You and I are trying to explain why. You say it’s because he has double pneumonia. I say that it’s because his ancestors are angry with him for having wronged his cousin. On the surface, it looks like these explanations could both be true. It could be that the ancestors’ anger vented itself in double pneumonia, for instance. So, it might look like perspectivism is enough to give equal authority to our perspectives. Or so things look until we notice that my cosmology features supernatural entities, while yours (I am stipulating) doesn’t. 29

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In your cosmology, bacteria are the sufficient cause of double pneumonia; in mine, they are not the sufficient cause. So, at some level our perspectives start looking incommensurable, or – to give it a less barbed gloss – at least incompatible.10 If this is right, the kind of neutral perspectivism I have been describing here won’t provide a reading of P2 that gets us to the Rationale’s conclusion. It looks as though the only option for treating our perspectives as equally authoritative is to assume some form of relativism. (I appreciate that I have hardly offered a decisive argument for this claim, but I think that what I have offered is dialectically sufficient, since I will argue that it is a bad idea to motivate decolonisation on relativist grounds.) What kind of relativism exactly? The most radical kind would be metaphysical relativism. According to this view, there is no objective reality out there; rather, our competing perspectives make up competing realities. The most popular way of hearing this idea, associated with authors such as Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam, is what Paul Boghossian dubs ‘fact-constructivism’, and captures in the following thesis: Description Dependence of Facts: Necessarily, all facts are description-dependent: there cannot be a fact of the matter as to how things are with the world independently of our propensity to describe the world as being a certain way. Once we adopt a particular scheme for describing the world, there then come to be facts about the world. (Boghossian 2006: 28) To go back to Bob: there is no fact of the matter as to why he is ailing. According to you and your community Bob is ailing because he has double pneumonia. According to me and my community, Bob is ailing because his ancestors are angry with him. Again, these could both be true, but we know that currently one of these is held up as the best and sufficient kind of explanation by the west. The metaphysical relativist says that this is illegitimate because each of these competing explanations has an equal claim to epistemic authority. This is because the perspectives from which they are offered constitute different – but equally real – realities, by virtue of constituting the facts differently. Suppose we took this kind of relativism on board. The epistemicide of colonialism would then consist in excluding these different perspectives. Decolonising knowledge would, consequently, require giving them their full epistemic due as constituting equally legitimate realities. This seems to be precisely what the theorists I cited earlier have in mind (see Venter 1997; Lebakeng, Phalane & Nase 2006).

Relativisms Relativism of this kind is prone to well-known, and by now standard, objections. In this section, I look at two such objections, by way of coming up with the best possible relativist reading of P2. But first, a word on why I won’t consider more high-flying

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arguments against relativism. The recent literature on relativism is vast and intricate. So, I think that to consider some of its core arguments would involve too much setting up, taking our eye off the real ball here – the decolonisation of knowledge. Fortunately, the points I wish to make against a relativist rationale for decolonisation are rough enough not to need such sharp tools.

The no-disagreement problem The first move against relativism I would like to consider is the so-called ‘No-disagreement problem’.11 In outline, it goes something like this: 1. If metaphysical relativism is true, no genuine disagreement is possible. 2. Genuine disagreement is possible. C. So, metaphysical relativism is false. This problem should be familiar to analytic philosophers, and a version of it has been recently applied to a cousin of the Rationale, a relativist motivation for Africanising the curriculum (Metz 2017). Let me briefly explain the problem. Go back to Bob and imagine a dialogue between you and me: I say: Bob can’t breathe because he is cursed. You say: Bob is not cursed; he can’t breathe because he has double pneumonia. According to relativism, any statement is only true relative to a perspective. To keep it simple, let’s stay with cultural relativism. On this view, the relevant perspective is that of the speaker’s community. Our statements, then, translate into: Mine: Yours:

According to my community, Bob is cursed. According to my community, Bob is not cursed.

But where is the disagreement here? I am very happy to grant that your community doesn’t consider Bob cursed, as presumably you are happy to grant that mine does. So, if relativism is true, we can’t disagree. This is what (1) says. But, intuitively, we are disagreeing. I am saying that Bob is cursed, and you are denying that. This sounds like genuine disagreement. Hence (2), the intuition that genuine disagreement is possible. But then if it is, and relativism makes it impossible, relativism can’t be right. How impressed should the relativist decoloniser be with this kind of worry? Not very, I think. The first reason is that (2) is just an intuition, and in the absence of independent support begs the question at issue here. If the relativist is right, disagreement is impossible. What backs the intuition that it is possible? Linguistic considerations, presumably: it just sounds like we are disagreeing – I am saying ‘yay’ and you are saying ‘nay’. But such superficial linguistic considerations have long been suspected of

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not being up to the heavy metaphysical jobs we ask them to do. It is always open to the relativist to point out that the yay-nay sound of the dialogue is a mere function of surface grammar.12 So, in the absence of an argument for the intuition that genuine disagreement is possible, the no-disagreement problem is uncompelling. The second reason the relativist decoloniser shouldn’t be impressed with the problem is (1). For starters, (1) isn’t as obvious as it’s often made out to be. Indeed, some have used the possibility of so-called faultless disagreement to support relativism (for example, Kölbel 2003). But in line with my promise not to plumb the depths of the relativist literature, let me make a more intuitive point. (1) can backfire rather easily in the present context. One can point out that if no genuine disagreement is possible, then all the more reason to treat different epistemic perspectives as equal! This would be to enforce, rather than subvert, the relativist decoloniser’s case. So whatever else one might want to say about (1), it should be dialectically unpersuasive for the relativist decoloniser, at any rate.

The self-refutation problem A second popular move against the metaphysical relativist is to argue that the position is self-refuting. Again, this is an old move, and again, it has been recently used in the literature on Africanising academia (Metz 2015). It goes like this: 1. 2. C.

According to metaphysical relativism, there are no objective truths. But (1) itself purports to be an objective truth. Therefore, relativism is self-refuting.

Once again, I think that the relativist decoloniser needn’t despair here. Several ways out-suggest themselves. Let me start with the least promising one. One could adopt a sort of partial relativism, maintaining that there are no objective truths within certain knowledge domains, but that there are objective meta-truths.13 This would allow the relativist decoloniser to block the argument by maintaining that: (i) while there are no objective truths in certain domains, say, in science, (ii) there are objective truths (a) about the contours of reality itself, and (b) moral truths such as what decolonisation objectively requires. By virtue of (i), they can conclude that decolonising science requires treating different scientific perspectives (on the same topic) as equally authoritative. In virtue of (ii.a), they can block the self-refutation argument. In virtue of (ii.b), they can argue for an objective imperative to decolonise. This sort of strategy is arguably implicit in the earlier Venter (1997) quote, where she starts by urging that we need to accommodate different values ‘within a framework of common human values’, and then goes on to talk about equally valid but conflicting perspectives. Presumably the point about common human values 32

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presupposes something like moral absolutism, while talk about equal validity assumes relativism about certain knowledge domains (in this case – the subjects taught at academic institutions). What should we make of such partial relativism? I think it is infelicitous on at least two counts. First, the idea that there are only some objective truths suggests a strange reality potted with objectivity gaps. But why would reality have such gaps? That is, why would there be a fact of the matter about certain reality portions, and no fact of the matter about others? And what does that even amount to? Are we meant to picture reality as a kind of Swiss cheese, with solid objective bits and holes where anything goes?14 Perhaps this point says more about my imagination than about partial relativism, so let me make the second one. Usually, people tend to be absolutists about facts and relativists about values. Thus, even the most relativistically inclined would be happier to concede that there is a fact of the matter about whether this thing on your plate is meat or not (fact), than whether your plate should have meat on it, whether you are evil for wanting meat on your plate, and so on. This latter, moral bunch of claims is usually where relativism seems most plausible to both philosophers and lay people. Yet, the current partial relativist suggestion is proposing a precise reversal of this picture: according to the proposal, it is precisely moral truths that are absolute – as per (ii.b) above – while empirical ones are not. So, if the relativist decoloniser wishes to defend this way out of the self-refutation problem, they would at the very least owe us an argument as to why this dialectically awkward reversal is theoretically viable. Fortunately, there are two more congenial ways out of the problem at their disposal. Consider a different kind of relativist – the conceptual relativist. According to her, there may be an objective reality out there – seamlessly, a non-Swiss cheese objective – but different cultures have different conceptual frameworks through which they process this reality. Some concepts, then, would not be shared across cultures, and statements featuring them will turn out to be true in one culture and false in another. How does this view differ from the metaphysical relativism I gestured at earlier? I think this is made clear by a distinction that Boghossian draws between being a relativist about facts and merely acknowledging the relativity of descriptions.15 The earlier metaphysical relativism, recall, was a kind of fact-constructivism. It maintained that there are no facts before description; and competing descriptions constitute competing facts. The conceptual relativist I have in mind here accepts the idea that there can be competing descriptions. But they would maintain that such descriptions don’t constitute different realities; rather, they carve out, in competing ways, a pre-existing objective reality. Take, for instance, the Yoruba concept of health.16 According to Godwin Sogolo (1998), some of the following features distinguish it from the western one. First, it is holistic: it concerns the totality of physical, social, psychological and spiritual wellbeing of the person. Second, spiritual well-being depends partly but essentially on one’s relations with other members of one’s community, as well as with one’s ancestors 33

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and gods. Third, and consequently, the target of diagnosis, on this conception, is the whole person. This is evinced in the fact that medical examination never starts with a bodily exam, but with an inquiry into one’s sociocultural and divine relations. Finally, and implicit in the above, causal explanation often features both natural and supernatural elements. This is not meant to capture the full richness of the Yoruba concept of health, but to give us enough resources for making the following point: there will be many cases in which the locution ‘Bob is ill’ is true for a Yoruba person, but false for a western one. And here is the real point: there simply isn’t a way of stepping outside these two conceptual frameworks in order to adjudicate between them. There is no viewfrom-nowhere, to put it in familiar philosophical speak, from which to make that judgement.17 And since there is no such view, the relativist decoloniser can urge that we should treat both frameworks as equally legitimate, resulting in crediting the epistemic perspectives embedded in each with equal epistemic authority. It may be objected at this point that the above thinking is a vast oversimplification on at least two counts.18 First, it ignores debates in the philosophy of medicine over the differences between illness, sickness and disease (for example, Hoffman 2016). And second, it ignores the nuanced distinctions between being ill and not being healthy in some broader sense. It may be that once I have refined things a bit, the above incompatibility will disappear. But I think that this objection speaks more against my example than the point I am trying to make here. It is this: if we accept that people can think about the world from within different conceptual frameworks, then there are bound to be cases in which a statement will turn out true in the one framework but false in the other. It is these cases that are of concern here. A final, and similar, way out of the self-refutation argument is epistemic relativism. This view once again concedes that there may be an objective reality out there, but denies that there are objective epistemic standards for assessing our beliefs about this reality: different cultures have different ideas about what counts as evidence of what, and/or what makes a belief justified. Thus, for example, ‘hearing voices’ is evidence of schizophrenia in the west; while in many places in the south, it is evidence of an ancestral calling to become a healer. Given this, your belief that Bob is schizophrenic is supported by your evidence but not by mine. But, the thought goes, as with conceptual relativism, that there simply isn’t a view-from-nowhere to adjudicate between such competing epistemic standards, hence no way to determine whose belief is objectively justified.19 Now, I think that these two views may be liable to similar worries as the Swisscheese one from earlier.20 Why would there be an objective reality out there for most things but not for epistemic or conceptual standards? But let that pass. All I have tried to make persuasive here is that the relativist has some ways out of both the no-disagreement and self-refutation charges.21 I now turn to the implications of these ways out for decolonisation.

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Relativism and decolonising knowledge Let me briefly sum up how far we are. I have been trying to interpret the problem premise of the Rationale. This was the claim that the colonial perspective is just one among many equally legitimate ones. I first considered two perspectivist ways of hearing this premise, and concluded that something stronger is needed to arrive at the conclusion that we should treat different perspectives as epistemically equal, since the kind of perspectives that perspectivism isolates are not incompatible with each other. The natural candidate then was a metaphysical relativist reading. According to this reading, there is no objective reality out there; rather, different epistemic perspectives constitute different realities. Because these are equally real, the perspectives that constitute them have equal epistemic authority. I then considered two problems for this view, and concluded that the relativist has at least three natural ways out here: partial, conceptual, or epistemic relativism. The issue now is of how much service each will be to them in motivating the decolonisation of knowledge. Start with metaphysical relativism. Even if it didn’t suffer from the problems above, it cannot provide a decent rationale for epistemic decolonisation. For this is the view that there is no matter of fact about anything out there. But proponents of decolonisation rightly insist that there is something objectively wrong with what colonialism has done, wrong both morally and epistemically. When people talk of epistemicide they hardly mean ‘epistemicide according to one perspective’ but ‘beautiful stuff according to another’. They mean epistemicide tout court. And they are right to do so. After all, we know that the colonial perspective didn’t count this as epistemicide but as natural entitlement. What we want is precisely to say that this way of looking at things is wrong. Not just wrong from our – or someone’s – point of view, but objectively wrong. If you don’t want to say that the need to decolonise knowledge is an objective, absolute imperative, then you will probably get off the train round about here. But I don’t think your case for decolonisation of anything will be very strong. Any such case must assume the absolute wrong of what was done and the absolute necessity of undoing it. But we cannot say that there are such absolute things from under the hat of the metaphysical relativist. We can say it from under the other relativists’ hats, though. Partial relativism, recall, was the view that there are no objective truths within certain knowledge domains – such as science – but there are objective meta-truths such as ones about the contours of reality itself, and moral truths such as what decolonisation requires. Suppose we weren’t persuaded by my argument that this view is both strange and dialectically awkward. Even then, I’d like to now point out, the view won’t be of much help to the relativist decoloniser, for it entails that we should decolonise only certain disciplines on relativist grounds. But at least metaphysics and ethics are not places where we should treat different perspectives

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as equal. As the above suggestion has it, there are objective truths in these domains. But if there are such truths, then only one among conflicting views will be correct. So, equal treatment of perspectives for these disciplines would need to be motivated on different, absolutist grounds. On the assumption that the project of epistemic decolonisation concerns all knowledge domains, then, partial relativism would provide a potted rationale for such decolonisation.22 Next, consider conceptual and epistemic relativism. Different cultures have different concepts or epistemic standards, these views say respectively. According to conceptual relativism, sometimes a statement featuring these concepts would turn out to be true in one conceptual framework and false in another. (We had the example ‘Bob is ill’ earlier.) According to the latter view, some of my beliefs would turn out to be justified by a certain culture’s epistemic standard and unjustified according to another’s. (We had the example of ‘Bob is schizophrenic’.) There is simply no viewfrom-nowhere from which to adjudicate between these verdicts because there is no way to choose as objectively correct one conceptual or epistemic framework over the other. Hence the different perspectives that go with these frameworks have an equal claim to epistemic authority. These forms of relativism can make sense of the idea that the need to decolonise is an absolute one, since they don’t deny that there is an objective reality out there. But they run up against problems of their own as far as epistemic decolonisation is concerned. The most obvious one is that they both entail that no epistemic perspective is superior to others. Since the aim of the Rationale is to establish precisely such equal epistemic authority, this seems like a plus for these views as far as the Rationale is concerned. But, in fact, it turns out to be also a liability, for at least two reasons. First, if the possibility of a superior epistemic perspective is undermined, arguably so is the concept of teaching across incompatible perspectives. ‘X teaches Y such and such’ means that X shares something with Y that Y didn’t already know. The concept of ‘teaching’, thus, presupposes that one epistemic perspective can be superior to another, at least with respect to a certain domain. But on the current view, crosscultural epistemic perspectives are equal, so no one person from one conceptual framework can teach anything to people from another (incompatible) conceptual framework. Whenever there is a conflict of conceptual or epistemic standards, neither side is epistemically superior to the other. So, neither can teach the other. If this argument seems a bit quick and nasty, consider a second, related, one. Suppose that we are trying to choose between syllabi for our metaphysics module. One consists of readings on African metaphysics; the other on western metaphysics. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that these form two incompatible frameworks. (I don’t believe this, but just suppose.) Which one should we choose on purely epistemic grounds? That is, which is the epistemically better one, the one that will teach our students the most about reality? Well, if we are epistemic or conceptual relativists, then there will be a matter of fact about how things stand with metaphysical questions. So, one of these sets of readings will be better at representing reality more

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accurately. But despite that, we can’t answer the question of which is epistemically superior, and hence which we should teach on purely epistemic grounds. For, if we are one of these two kinds of relativist, we think that both have equal epistemic authority. Hence, neither is better at representing the world than the other.23 Of course, we could answer the question on moral, or cultural, or pragmatic grounds. Thus, we can say that we should teach African metaphysics, say, because it is more relevant to our concerns in Africa, or because this would get us more government funding, or whatever. But we assume that this is not the right way to pick University curricula. The right way, rather, is to teach the epistemic best, to say that we should teach African metaphysics because they get us the closest to reality, or provide a more comprehensive picture of it. And, indeed this is what epistemic decolonisers urge: that colonialism has deprived us of important, genuine knowledge by excluding forms of knowing that don’t fit its own.24 This implies that there is such a thing as epistemic superiority. The idea is also implicit in the claim, gaining rightful popularity, that colonialism has appropriated certain bits of Indigenous knowledge, and illegitimately claimed them as its own, while giving lower epistemic status to the IKS themselves. The idea that we should teach the epistemic best, then, is both intuitively plausible and implicit in the discourse on decolonisation. But, on conceptual or epistemic relativism, there is no such thing as an epistemic best. It could be objected that these arguments already assume a particular view of what counts as ‘epistemic’ – a purely truth-related view. But, the objector could point out, the whole point of movements such as epistemic relativism is to undermine this conception. Thus, for instance, if one is an epistemic pragmatist, one would think that by having said that one framework is more useful than another, we have in fact said that it is epistemically best. This retort, however, threatens to show too much. For, if this is our conception of ‘epistemic’, then the notion of ‘epistemic authority’ will likewise shift in meaning throughout the Rationale. And we cannot think both that the one perspective is epistemically best and that they have equal epistemic authority. We cannot, that is, get to the conclusion of the Rationale. If these thoughts are on the right track, both conceptual and epistemic relativism would yield a terrible rationale for decolonising teaching institutions such as universities, for the views undermine the coherence of the very bread-and-butter of such institutions – the notion of teaching, and the idea that teaching one thing is epistemically better than teaching another.

A way forward? These are quick and intuitive challenges, which could perhaps be met by more sophisticated forms of relativism. Still, the rough-and-ready relativist thinking that is actually offered as a rationale for epistemic decolonisation most certainly faces 37

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one of these challenges. And remember that my aim here is to show not just that relativism isn’t a great rationale for decolonisation, but also to identify the challenges that an absolutist rationale would face. So, instead of working out how the relativism underpinning such thinking can be refined in response to the problems above, let me see if we can’t sidestep these problems altogether.

A strategy Here is a suggested strategy: look at the various kinds of relativism discussed so far, and see which of them meet two desiderata – they yield an objective imperative to decolonise, and have the least serious problems. Then isolate what is right about them, and set the right bits as constraints on what would count as a good rationale for epistemic decolonisation. Figure 2.1 maps the discussion so far. Figure 2.1: Kinds of relativism and their implications for epistemic decolonisation P2 The colonial/pale male perspective is just one among many legitimate epistemic perspectives

There is an objective reality

Conceptual relativism

Epistemic relativism

Objective imperative to decolonise, but undermine 'teaching', hence bad rationale for decolonising universities

There are some objective truths

Metaphysical absolutism; Scientific relativism

Moral absolutism; Relativism about rest

Imperative to decolonise only certain disciplines

Objective imperative to decolonise, but really wierd

There is no objective reality

Metaphysical relativism

Even if self-refuting, no objective imperative to decolonise

As will be obvious from this map, only epistemic, conceptual and one kind of partial relativism yield an objective imperative to decolonise (marked in darker grey). I briefly argued that this form of partial relativism is untenable. That leaves us with conceptual and epistemic relativism. These to me seem to be the theoretical options with fewest costs. For, although I have argued that these kinds of relativism seem to undermine the concept of teaching by virtue of undermining the very possibility of a superior epistemic perspective, one could perhaps retort that the extent of the damage is overstated. Perhaps all that is undermined is the possibility of interperspective teaching, but not of teaching within a single perspective. This response would only favour decolonising the curriculum on some under­ standings of what epistemic decolonisation involves and not others. In particular, 38

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it would work if we think that such decolonisation involves wholesale replacing of the current western epistemic framework with other less colonially entangled ones.25 It would not work, in contrast, if we see decolonisation as a more epistemically diverse affair which allows for incompatible frameworks to be taught side by side. Perhaps this is in fact a good argument for why we should be buying the wholesale conception of epistemic decolonisation. But this isn’t the argument that the relativist decoloniser that I have in mind is pushing, so I will leave it to one side. Be that as it may, on all three views, we at least get an objective imperative to decolonise, while retaining the relativist thought that different epistemic frameworks have equal authority.

A better relativist argument? Here, then, would be a better rationale for decolonising knowledge which works from epistemic relativist considerations. (I think it is replicable, mutatis mutandi, for conceptual relativism in obvious ways, so I won’t go through the steps twice.) The Epistemic Relativist Rationale P1 Colonialism has set up a single perspective as epistemically authoritative. P2* This authority has not been epistemically justified but imposed through power. P3* The only way to epistemically justify a perspective’s claim to authority is through a view-from-nowhere epistemic standard. P4* There is no such standard. C So, decolonising knowledge requires at a minimum taking different epistemic perspectives to have equal epistemic authority. The only bits of the Rationale that have survived are the first premise and the conclusion. The rest has been modified to avoid the pitfalls that a metaphysically relativist reading of the Rationale generated. I think that this argument is much better. (P2*) points to something that is often mentioned in these debates – the insidious and ubiquitous ways in which economic and political power, rather than epistemic justification, are responsible for our acceptance of the authority of a certain epistemic framework. This, in turn, captures an essential part of the distinctively epistemic injustice that is intrinsic to (the epistemic dimensions of) colonialism. I take it that it is a constraint on any decent rationale for decolonising knowledge that it features in one way or another this acknowledgement.26 (P3*) and (P4*) are responsible for the epistemic relativist ring to the argument. Together, they effectively say that we cannot adjudicate among competing epistemic standards, because there isn’t an absolute meta-standard to which we can appeal for such adjudications. 39

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The argument is better than the Rationale, I think, because it doesn’t assume metaphysical relativism, and hence accommodates an objective imperative to decolonise. But this is also its downfall. For consider the conclusion. It says that we are required to take different epistemic perspectives as equally authoritative. But there are at least two problems with this suggestion. First, it isn’t clear that one can genuinely take two competing perspectives to have equal epistemic authority while retaining one’s beliefs on the topic in question. Consider: ‘I believe that this muthi will make him love me, but those who think that this is nonsense are also right.’ The statement sounds very much like a prime Moore-paradox candidate. A more standard example of Moore’s paradox is: ‘I believe that it is raining, but it isn’t.’ The awkwardness of such locutions is supposed to dramatise the fact that to believe something is to take it to be true. Saying that you believe in the powers of muthi but also that those who don’t are right comes really close to the same kind of awkwardness, and hence gestures at the implausibility of taking incompatible epistemic perspectives as equally authoritative. The relativist may have tools at their disposal to avert this charge. One such tool would be Martin Kusch’s (2017: 4694) distinction between the epistemic agent and the epistemic analyst. Thus, I could hold the belief that a particular kind of muthi makes him love me, in my believer’s cap. And this is compatible with my thinking – in my epistemic theoriser cap – that such a belief is as justified as the belief that muthi is nonsense. But even if this move works to save the conclusion, a deeper problem remains with the above rationale for it. Since friends of the above argument are epistemic relativists, they think that there is an objective reality out there. (It’s just that our beliefs about it are justified by different standards.) This is what distinguishes them from the problematic metaphysical relativist. But if so, then for them there is a way that things are. But if there is a way things are, then competing epistemic perspectives cannot be equally epistemically authoritative. For if there is a way things are, then only one of incompatible views captures how things are. And if epistemic perspectives can’t be equally authoritative, why on earth should we take them to be? So, the conclusion (C) simply doesn’t follow from the merely epistemically relativist premises above. Perhaps we could modify this conclusion to read not that we should take different perspectives to have equal authority, but that we should just treat them as equally authoritative? The conclusion then becomes: C*

So, decolonising knowledge requires at a minimum treating different epistemic perspectives as equally authoritative.

What is the difference between (C) and (C*)? In a word, (C) implies an epistemic commitment on our part, while (C*) doesn’t; (C*) implies only a practical 40

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commitment. That is, (C) says that we really believe that different perspectives have equal epistemic authority. This is what caused both the problems I just discussed. (C*), by contrast, doesn’t imply that the agent actually believes that. It just implies that the agent treats the two perspectives as equal; he acts as though they are. And this leaves it open that they may not be. This is all that the argument permits because the only thing that would genuinely make incompatible standards have equal authority is if there were no fact of the matter about how things are – in this case, if there were no fact of the matter about whether muthi works or not. But epistemic relativists don’t say that. They just say that we can’t adjudicate among different epistemic standards for justification, and hence can’t tell which of the two beliefs is justified from some ultimate point of view. This is what gives rise to the necessity to treat different perspectives as equal.

An absolutist rationale? At this point, I get a little bit stuck. Part of me really wants to ask why we should be conceding even this much to the relativist. There are good theoretical reasons not to. As Paul Boghossian (2006) has pointed out, why would there be a fact of the matter about all of reality except about which epistemic standard is right? This is a kind of stronger version of my Swiss-cheese objection, except it now has a single hole. Such (what we might call) a doughnut view of reality is arguably even less plausible than the Swiss-cheese one. So we should doubt the proposal on ontological grounds. But there is also a good reason not to concede anything to the epistemic relativist from the point of view of decolonisation. For if we went for absolutism instead, not only would we get an objective imperative to decolonise, but we’d also have a cleaner rationale for decolonising knowledge: 1. 2. 3.

Given that there’s an objective reality, certain perspectives are epistemically better than others at tracking this reality. The colonial perspective is epistemically inferior. So, we should abandon it.

This is to support wholesale decolonisation, but, as I just mentioned, the epistemic relativist rationale only supports that in any case. And, as I argued, the original Rationale doesn’t support decolonisation at all. So why not go for this simpler absolutist rationale instead? I am sympathetic to this thinking. But it seems to me that it too quickly glosses over the view-from-nowhere problem made vivid earlier. This is the valuable thing that we can extract from a relativist rationale to decolonise knowledge: it seems to me that it really is not possible to step outside our framework into a concept-less, neutral space in order to adjudicate among competing frameworks. So, perhaps if we accept this, and want to give an absolutist rationale for decolonisation, we should block the Epistemic Relativist Rationale at P3*, the claim that the only way 41

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to epistemically justify a perspective’s claim to authority is through a view-fromnowhere epistemic standard. What would our be options then? One is to go pragmatist. According to this view, we judge the epistemic goodness of an epistemic standard by its practical usefulness, and we compare competing ones accordingly. Thus, for instance, when comparing the western and southern standards for justification in any particular situation, we choose the one that is more useful to us in that situation. (We may or may not want to generalise.) The trouble with this suggestion, as Kwame Anthony Appiah (2004) has cautioned in a similar context, is that competing frameworks come with different criteria of success. And clearly, what works or what is most useful will itself be a measure of these success criteria. If we are trying to fix the standards for justification for medical beliefs, say, what works will be a measure of our concept of health. But recall the different concepts of health discussed earlier. If we are trying to adjudicate between the Yoruba and western standards for justification of medical beliefs, then, on the grounds of what works, we will just move the problem one step back. We will now need a view-from-nowhere to adjudicate among the different success criteria that these frameworks endorse. Moreover, we won’t have made any progress towards a more absolutist motivation for decolonisation. For many versions of pragmatism are naturally aligned with relativism of the deepest kind. Thus, for instance, Boghossian (2006: 42–46) reads Richard Rorty as the paradigm of a pragmatist relativist, according to whom statements are true relative to a theory; and what makes one theory better than another is how useful it is. So, going pragmatist not only just moves the problem one step back, but would also be a relativist move in any case. A second option is to go externalist. The epistemic standard that we hail as ultimately the best is the one that most reliably produces beliefs with good epistemic status.27 We obviously can’t make that status justification (for we are trying to find a way of adjudicating among standards for justification). But we could perhaps make the status ‘true’. This is classical reliabilism: the best standard is the one that yields the greatest amount of true beliefs (for example, Goldman 1988). Unfortunately, to choose this as the criterion of reliability is already to make a choice of epistemic framework, and hence to reproduce the problem all over again. For different epistemic standards will have different standards for reliability depending on the goals and values that the system espouses as central (Kusch 2017: 4697). Truth is just one such goal. We could have others. For instance, one could think that the chief point of a cognitive system is understanding rather than truth.28 In this case, our measure of reliability, and, hence, of a superior epistemic system will not be one that brings about lots of true beliefs, but a lot of understanding. The goals will not necessarily lead to coinciding epistemic standards; hence, they will not give us the metacriterion for adjudicating between standards that we were looking for.29 So we are back with the view-from-nowhere problem.30

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Conclusion I started this chapter with two aims: first, to show that relativist thinking of the crude kind in the literature on epistemic decolonisation doesn’t work; and second, to set constraints on an absolutist rationale for such decolonisation. Regarding the first aim, I argued that metaphysical relativism cannot yield an objective imperative to decolonise, and hence should be rejected outright as a rationale for decolonisation. Partial relativism fared better as a motivation for an objective imperative, but only for decolonising certain knowledge domains and not others; it also came with some ontological and dialectical awkwardness. That left us with either epistemic or conceptual relativism. I argued that these two get us to the desired equal-authority conclusion, but at the price of rendering incoherent the notions of cross-framework teaching and epistemic comparisons of syllabi. These thoughts suggested that we are unlikely to find a form of relativism that both is plausible and supported the idea that we should take different epistemic perspectives as equally authoritative. One final consideration in favour of this conclusion was that as long as we think that there is a fact of the matter about how things are out there, we shouldn’t take different perspectives to have equal epistemic authority; at best, we should treat them as equal. At this point, an absolutist rationale for epistemic decolonisation started looking more attractive. Why not just decolonise knowledge not on the basis that different epistemic perspectives are equal, but rather on the basis that the colonial one is inferior? And here we started distilling the main challenge for an absolutist rationale. For if we accept that there is no framework-neutral meta-perspective from which to adjudicate among perspectives, what licenses us to make claims like the above? I briefly considered two ways of going here – pragmatism and externalism – but they seemed to bounce us straight back into the original view-from-nowhere problem. Since both relativist and absolutist rationales seem to have pitfalls, perhaps we’ve been looking at the problem the wrong way. The way I have pursued here is the epistemic way: an epistemic injustice has been committed in demeaning certain epistemic perspectives, so we need to redress the injustice by equalising these perspectives. But perhaps we need rather to focus on the moral dimensions of the injustice, and argue from those. We could then defend an absolute imperative to decolonise, and let moral standards adjudicate between competing conceptual and epistemic frameworks, as well as ostensibly incompatible curricular alternatives. Since moral standards are generally taken to trump others, we would not have the reiteration of the view-from-nowhere problem that tripped us up earlier.31 This seems to me like a promising direction, but I leave working out the details for another occasion. Notes 1

This paper was written with the financial support of the British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship NAFR 1180082. Huge thanks for really helpful feedback on earlier versions to

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Abraham Tejiri, Siseko Kumalo, Zinhle Mncube, and my audiences at the MESAP Pluralism, Relativism and Skepticism conference (Cairo, 2019), the 2nd Annual PhiGs Conference (Kent, 2019) and the Rhodes, Stellenbosch and Wits University Speaker Series. 2

Throughout the chapter, I use ‘authority’, ‘legitimacy’ and cognates to refer to epistemic authority and legitimacy.

3

Thanks to Zinhle Mncube for pressing me to think about this distinction more carefully.

4

This is my taxonomy. Ndlovu-Gatsheni himself doesn’t number these features, nor does he distinguish them from one another very clearly.

5

In case this needs saying: I am being facetious about the western sources of ‘knowledge’ in order to underscore the injustice of marginalising the southern ones.

6

As far as I know, it was standpoint theorists who first made this point, concluding that we need to start paying greater attention to the context and situatedness of knowers as an intrinsic part of epistemic theorising (see, for instance, Code 1993; I should note though that Code, at least, is at quite some pains to show that this account of knowledge still preserves a claim to objectivity).

7

Some authors feel that the term ‘epistemicide’ is an exaggeration. (See, for instance, Kumalo’s (2020) piece on ‘Resurrecting the Black Archive through the Decolonisation of Philosophy in South Africa’ in Third World Thematics.) I am not sure that I agree, but in any case my argument does not depend on the precise term, as long as it is acknowledged that a serious epistemic wrong has been committed.

8

For a good discussion of the historical context, see, for example, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: Ch. 1).

9

The perspectivism I am thinking of here goes back to the phenomenologists (for example, Merleau-Ponty 1962: 90ff.). This kind of perspectivism should be distinguished from what we might term ‘normative perspectivism’, which involves the claim that your perspective determines what you ought to do (for example, Dancy 2000: Ch. 3). I understand that the perspectivism I am discussing here may bear some similarities to Nietzsche’s perspectivism (thanks to Zinhle Mncube), but I am not familiar enough with the nuances of Nietzsche’s view to be able to discuss this point in more detail.

10 Claims about incommensurability, initially popularised by Thomas Kuhn (for example, 1970) and Paul Feyerabend (for example, 1981) are notoriously problematic. Donald Davidson (1984), for instance, argued that the very idea of incommensurable conceptual schemes is incoherent. For a more recent defence of Davidson’s argument against objections, see Douven and De Regt (2002). 11 Paul Boghossian discusses a different problem under the similar banner of ‘the problem of disagreement’ (2006: 39). This is the problem that if facts are socially constructed, as they are according to what I am here calling the metaphysical relativist, then, since they are contingently so, it is possible for them to be constructed in one way by community A and in a contradictory way by community B. A metaphysical relativist is thus implausibly committed to believing in the possibility of contradictions. Interestingly, Boghossian thinks that this problem is solved when we relativise truth to a community or a theory. But it should be obvious that this gives rise to my ‘No-disagreement problem’. 12 The surface-grammar move is a popular one in several areas of philosophy: language (for example, Davidson 1967) and metaethics (for example, Blackburn 1998) spring to mind first.

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13 Boghossian (2006: 26) calls this ‘local relativism’. I don’t use his label because – as he rightly points out and I discuss shortly – such relativism usually concerns evaluative, rather than descriptive, domains. 14 It may be that such a model best works on some form of pragmatism about truth. I revisit this suggestion in the section detailing ‘A better relativist argument?’ 15 He also argues (persuasively to my mind) that much of the perceived plausibility of relativism about facts comes from its being conflated with the relativity of descriptions. 16 The point could also be illustrated with other concepts. See, for instance, Wiredu (1998) on the Akans’ concept of God. 17 The phrase ‘view-from-nowhere’ has been used for many purposes, including as a critique of the pretensions to objectivity and neutrality of western male-dominated science and epistemology (for example, Code 1993: 20). I mean it here in the original Nagelian sense of a meta-perspective on one’s conceptual (or epistemological or moral) framework. 18 Thanks to Zinhle Mncube for making me realise this. 19 Martin Kusch (2017) dubs this the ‘No-meta-justification’ view, and defends it rather persuasively against objections. Boghossian (2006: 79) discusses the interesting neighbour of this view that not only can’t we adjudicate from nowhere, but no view of epistemic standards can be justified by its own standards. 20 Boghossian (2006) makes a similar point. 21 Though I should mention that epistemic relativism itself has been subjected to a version of this argument (for example, Boghossian 2006; Pritchard 2009). 22 This should be distinguished from arguments sometimes heard that one should decolonise certain disciplines – generally within the Humanities – but not others – generally within the Sciences. My point here is not about what is being decolonised, but the motivation for decolonising any particular area. 23 But does the incommensurability really run this deep? Sometimes, it seems to me like it does. (For instance, if one scientific framework takes natural entities to be the only ingredients of causal explanation while another posits supernatural ones as well, these are at the very least incompatible.) But I don’t have to commit to the incommensurability view for the purposes of this argument: for the relativist decoloniser, at all events, must think that sometimes frameworks can be incommensurable. This, after all, is the point of firstly talking of epistemicide, and second of going relativist as opposed to perspectivist (as discussed in the section on ‘The problem premise’). Thanks to Siseko H. Kumalo for pressing me on this point. 24 See, for instance, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: Ch. 6). 25 Whether such a disentanglement is even possible without some kind of essentialising is another issue. It is probably one of the main challenges of epistemic decolonisation, but not one that I feel up to addressing in this chapter. 26 This constraint is implicit, for instance, in some critiques of Kwasi Wiredu on the grounds that his conceptual decolonisation is insufficiently sensitive to issues of power. For a persuasive defence of Wiredu against such objections (and others), see Carman 2016.

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27 Zinhle Mncube has pointed out to me that this may just amount to pragmatism in the end. I think this will be true if we have a pragmatic conception of either positive epistemic status or of truth (or both). 28 The most popular alternative nowadays is knowledge (for example, Williamson 2000; Littlejohn 2013). I don’t use it as an example here as it is equally part of the western framework as is truth. 29 As far as I know it was William James (1896) who got us to think about this problem first, when he distinguished the goal of minimising false beliefs from that of maximising true, and pointed out that each would lead to very different epistemic norms. 30 One way of escaping all these worries might be to go for something like Jonathan Chimakonam’s ‘conversationalism’ (for example, Chimakonam 2017). On this view, we retain a kind of relativism about epistemic authority, but what would motivate decolonising knowledge isn’t the relativism itself, nor its palliative powers for redressing epistemicide, but its epistemic fruitfulness, the fruitfulness, that is, of dialogue. This would have the advantage that we don’t have to make claims about epistemic superiority, and hence can avoid the need for a view-from-nowhere. Rather, we can see the dialogue itself as the important agent in advancing knowledge. Although I find this view appealing, I don’t discuss it in more detail here, partly because I can’t do it justice in the limited space available, but, more importantly, because I am not sure how many relativist decolonisers would agree with it as a rationale for decolonisation. Thanks to Siseko H. Kumalo for making me think about this. 31 Some writers have indeed suggested promising motivations of this kind. See, for instance, Edwin Etieyibo (2016), who thinks of epistemic injustice in purely moral terms, and argues that Africanising the philosophy curriculum is a moral requirement of redressing such injustice on both Kantian and Utilitarian understandings of moral requirements.

References Appiah KA (2004) Akan and Euro-American concepts of the person. In LM Brown (Ed.) African philosophy: New and traditional perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press Blackburn S (1998) Ruling passions. New York: Oxford University Press Boghossian P (2006) Fear of knowledge: Against relativism and constructivism. New York: Oxford University Press Carman M (2016) A defence of Wiredu’s project of conceptual decolonisation. South African Journal of Philosophy 35(2): 235–248 Chimakonam J (2017) Conversationalism as an emerging method of thinking in and beyond African philosophy. Acta Academica 49(2): 11–33 Code L (1993) Taking subjectivity into account. In L Alcoff, & E Potter (Eds) Feminist epistemologies. New York: Routledge Dancy J (2000) Practical reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press Davidson D (1967) Truth and meaning. Synthese 17: 304–23 Davidson D (1984) On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. In D Davidson, Inquiries into truth and interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press

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Douven I & De Regt HW (2002) A Davidsonian argument against incommensurability. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16(2): 157–169 Etieyibo E (2016) Why ought the philosophy curriculum in universities in Africa be Africanised? South African Journal of Philosophy 35(4): 404–417 Feyerabend P (1981) Realism, rationalism, and scientific method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Goldman A (1988) Strong and weak justification. Philosophical Perspectives 2, Epistemology: 51–69 Hoffman B (2016) Disease, illness, and sickness. In M Solomon, JR Simon & H Kincaid (Eds) The Routledge companion to philosophy of medicine. New York: Routledge James W (1896) The will to believe. New World 5: 327–347 Kölbel M (2003) Faultless disagreement. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series 104(1): 53–73 Kuhn T (1970) The structure of scientific revolutions (Second edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press Kumalo SH (2020) Resurrecting the black archive through the decolonisation of philosophy in South Africa. Third World Thematics 5(1–2): 19–36 Kusch M (2017) Epistemic relativism, scepticism, pluralism. Synthese 194(12): 4687–4703 Lebakeng LT, Phalane MM, & Nase D (2006) Epistemicide, institutional cultures and the imperative for Africanisation of universities in South Africa. Alternation 13(1): 70–87 Littlejohn C (2013) The Russellian retreat. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113(3): 293–320 Merleau-Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of perception. (trans. C Smith). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Metz T (2015) Africanising institutional culture: What is possible and plausible. In P Tabensky, & S Matthews (Eds) Being at home: Race, institutional culture, and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Metz T (2017) The assumptions of cross-cultural philosophy: What makes it possible to learn from other traditions. Journal of World Philosophies 2: 99–107 Ndlovu-Gatscheni SJ (2018) Epistemic freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and decolonisation. London: Routledge Pritchard D (2009) Defusing epistemic relativism. Synthese 166(2): 397–412 Sogolo G (1998) The concept of cause in African thought. In PH Coetzee & AP Roux (Eds) The African philosophy reader (Second edition). London: Routledge Venter E (1997) A philosophy of education in a new South Africa. South African Journal of Higher Education 11(1): 57–64 Williamson T (2000) Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press Wiredu K (1998) Toward decolonizing African philosophy and religion. African Studies Quarterly 1(4): 28–4

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Complexities and challenges of decolonising higher education: Lessons from Canada Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt and Cash Ahenakew

Introduction New and resurgent movements to decolonise higher education are increasingly found throughout the globe in the context of settler colonies, former colonies and former colonial metropoles alike. As Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars located in what is currently known as Canada, in this chapter we reflect on what we have learned from mainstream efforts to address the country’s history of harm towards Indigenous peoples, and, specifically, to address the ongoing role of higher education in colonialism. These efforts have created precarious openings for not only reflecting on but also transforming universities within a still-colonial society. Without dismissing the possibilities enabled by these openings, we find that in practice many circular patterns emerge that reproduce underlying colonial ways of knowing, doing, desiring and being that make up the primary infrastructures of modern modes of existence. While the mainstream academic imperative would require that we follow up this diagnosis with prescriptive solutions for how to interrupt these colonial patterns in order to arrive at a predetermined decolonised future (decolonisation as a singular event), we suggest instead that decolonisation requires a long-term commitment to sit with and work through our individual and collective investments in harmful patterns so that we might disinvest from them and learn to be otherwise (decolonisation as an ongoing process). Particularly in the context of contemporary crises that are themselves a product of harmful and unsustainable modes of life – climate change, political instability, economic insecurity – only the latter approach to decolonisation offers the potential to open up new possibilities for current and future generations to learn to live together differently on a finite planet. Our conception of decolonisation takes on a holistic view, one that transcends or rather challenges an anthropocentric world view and begins to take seriously our collective commons as the starting point for conversation around justice, in its substantive form. Further, in this context, the need for alternative horizons of possibility takes on a renewed urgency. We begin the chapter by briefly reviewing the primary dimensions of colonialism and current efforts to address colonialism in the Canadian higher education context, so as to situate our contribution. Then, we review critical commentaries on the limits of approaches to decolonisation that are premised on the inclusion of (Indigenous) difference and do little to address the underlying colonial conditions of possibility for the institution. Rather than diagnose the problem of inclusion as one of tokenism 48

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that can be addressed through more radicalised inclusion (for example, centring marginalised knowledges), we suggest that inclusion itself is a flawed proposition as it presumes the underlying continuity of what we diagnose as an inherently unsustainable and violent system with its accompanying set of institutions and subjectivities. In order to envisage what might be possible if we did not presume that the modern/colonial university can or should be salvaged, we propose two pedagogical invitations that gesture towards the decolonisation of higher education as a complex, multi-layered process of learning to be otherwise: 1) Starting and staying with the complexities and difficulties involved in making change, including the structural complicity of those making change, so as to develop the necessary stamina for long-term transformation; and 2) Drawing on Santos’s notion of an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, while developing the ability to discern the contextually relevant gifts and limitations of all ways of knowing, so as to ultimately cultivate socially, historically and ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking.

Diagnosing colonisation In our diagnosis, colonisation is the constitutive underside of modernity – that is, colonialism is what creates the conditions of possibility for modern existence. According to Sylvia McKittrick, modernity is premised upon the presumed imperative ‘of survival-through-ever-increasing-processes-of-consumption-andaccumulation’ (in Wynter & McKittrick 2015: 11). Within this modern imaginary – which is in fact a modern/colonial imaginary – existence is reduced to one’s assigned value within economies orientated by consumption and accumulation. Perhaps the most obvious impact of this imaginary is to naturalise a (capitalist) material economy that sanctions the (racialised) expropriation and exploitation of humans, other-than-human beings, and the earth itself, for profit. However, modernity not only naturalises a particular material economy, it also feeds extractive intellectual, relational and affective economies. These economies in turn feed each other, and while it will be difficult to unravel coloniality if we do not address them all, it is also nearly impossible to address them all at once. For instance, within modernity’s intellectual economy, knowledge is treated as a set of universal, objective facts about the world that can be accumulated and consumed; these facts represent an effort to describe the world in order to control it. Furthermore, anything that cannot be known in this way (particularly that which is not only unknown but also unknowable) is deemed not to matter or even exist (Ahenakew 2016; De Sousa Santos 2007). This intellectual economy is thus fuelled by a sense of entitlement to epistemic certainty, authority, mastery and universalism. Within modernity’s relational economy, the separation of humans from the earth and of humans from one other denies our metabolic interdependence and our intrinsic worth. Indeed, colonialism has been described as ‘a severing of relations between humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between minerals and our bones’ (Davis & Todd 2017: 770). Following this severing, our existence can then be defined

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by our perceived value within the various different economies. In particular, one subset of humanity is deemed to matter more than the others, and is secured at the expense of humans and other-than-human beings, including the earth itself, that are deemed to matter less (if at all). In these separations and hierarchies of value, the integrity of our entangled existence on a shared planet is violated, our simultaneous insufficiency and indispensability is obscured, and our deep responsibility to all beings is denied. Together, the combination of these economies produces the conditions for the reproduction of modern existence, which we elsewhere summarise using the metaphor of ‘the house modernity built’ (Andreotti et al. 2018; Stein et al. 2017). Figure 3.1: The house modernity built

The house is built on a foundation made of concrete that separates humans from each other and the rest of nature; or rather, it creates the illusion of separation. It is this illusion of separation that makes possible modern economies premised on perceived utility and the imperative to accumulate and consume. The exact nature of the house’s many walls shifts over time, but the two carrying walls remain the same: one carrying wall of the house is represented by western humanist values and enlightenment knowledge traditions that promise deliberative consensus and universal relevance. On the other side, there is the carrying wall of nation-states, which promises security through the mechanisms of borders, rights and national homogeneity. The roof of this house is made of tiles of global capitalism, layered over 50

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beams of continuous economic growth and consumption as a measure of progress and civilisation. While these basic elements of the house modernity built offer many shiny promises, these promises have a colonial underside: the externalised and invisibilised costs of building and maintaining the house (see Figure 3.2 and Table 3.1). These costs include historical and ongoing expropriation, land theft, exploitation, destitution, preventable famines/malnutrition, incarceration, dispossession and epistemicides, ecocides, and genocides (Byrd 2011; Chakravartty & Silva 2012; Coulthard 2014; Kapoor 2014; De Sousa Santos 2007; Sharpe 2016; Silva 2014). Figure 3.2: The hidden costs of the house modernity built

Table 3.1: Modern promises and colonial processes of the house modernity built Offers modern promises of…

Enabled by colonial processes of…

Capitalist economic system (roof)

Continuous growth and distribution of growth by way of social mobility as progress

Racialised expropriation and exploitation of humans and the earth for commodity production

Nation-state political system (wall)

Social cohesion through a shared national identity and the protection of property

Securitised borders, domestic policing and international militarism (sanctioned state violence)

Eurocentric knowledge system (wall)

A single, universal rationality and set of values (determined through debate and consensus)

Suppression of other knowledges and attempts to describe the world in order to assert control over it

Existence premised on separation (foundation)

Autonomy and authority of (certain) human populations over others and the earth itself (through hierarchies of value)

Alienation from a wider ecological metabolism, and objectification of the earth and humans (determined by perceived capacity to create value)

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In order for the economies that fuel the house to continue, we must keep ‘investing in’ them and their promised dividends, and thereby premise our existence on practices of separation, consumption and accumulation. The reproduction of these economies is largely enabled by an additional economy, the modern affective economy, which helps to keep all other economies functioning smoothly. Yet, modernity’s affective economy is rarely addressed in relation to the decolonisation of higher education, which tends to emphasise intellectual engagement with the house’s hidden costs. This is a significant oversight, as affective investments often override intellectual critiques: we tend to think that if we can point to the inequitable infrastructures that organise the house and implicate people in its harms, then our epistemic and/ or moral authority will prompt others to change their actions to calibrate with this critique. However, even when we have access to knowledge about the harms of colonialism, investments and attachments to the modern promises that colonialism enables often leads to a disconnect: we may know very well that modern economies are ecologically unsustainable and enabled by ongoing structures of colonial violence, and yet that does not necessarily interrupt or rearrange the affective desires we have for enjoying the comforts, entertainments, dreams and securities that the house offers (Kapoor 2014). This means that interrupting and unravelling colonialism is not (only) an intellectual problem of ignorance that can be solved with more knowledge and information; it is also an affective problem of investment in the house, and thus in denying its true costs. These affective investments need to be addressed in other ways, including through embodied and experiential practices and pedagogies. The affective economy of the house is experienced differentially by different communities, with different responses and forms of support. Communities that are subjugated by the violence of the house are more likely to carry the affective weight of trauma from its organising structures, and their well-being is most compromised by those structures. Meanwhile, those who are empowered and elevated by the house are more likely to carry the fragilities that make them unwilling to face and accept responsibility for their complicity in violence and unsustainability (Ahenakew 2016). Nonetheless, here we emphasise the general patterns of harnessed fears, compensatory desires and perceived entitlements (Figure 3.3) that are products of the infrastructure of the house modernity built, and a set of enduring investments that keep the house going with business as usual. The house modernity built constructs and harnesses certain existential fears to mobilise investment in its reproduction and expansion. These fears are rooted in its foundation of separability and its project of transcendence (of ‘nature’): once we are no longer perceived as interwoven with the land, and the land becomes a ‘resource’ or ‘property’, all other beings (including humans) need to justify their existence by producing value within the various colonial economies of worth. The project of transcending nature can take different forms, but is often characterised by an aversion to death, pain and loss, the overcoming of nature/flaws/material conditions/interdependence and control of a path that can secure the achievement

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Figure 3.3: Fears, desires and entitlements cultivated by the house modernity built

of a specific higher ideal (which may or not relate to a notion of God) (for example, a better life, ‘greatness’, sovereignty, civilisation, progress, development, evolution, etc.). These fears become existential insecurities related to our vulnerability, lack of autonomy and self-insufficiency in the face of death, pain, ‘nature’ and the universe at large. Fears of scarcity, worthlessness, destitution, existential emptiness, loss, pain, death, impermanence, incompetence and insignificance are all mobilised by modern economies of value production where the intrinsic worth of human and other-thanhuman life is denied. As we engage in the production of value for the validation and worth of our existence through intellectual, affective and material economies established by modernity, our desires are allocated accordingly. For example, our harnessed fear of scarcity is turned into a ‘positive’ desire for accumulation, and an entitlement to ownership; our harnessed fear of chaos becomes a desire for order, and an entitlement to control; and our fear of worthlessness becomes a desire for importance, and an entitlement to affirmation. Enacted within, dependent upon and contributing to the continuity of the house, our compensatory desires become naturalised entitlements that mark and limit our ability to face and navigate the complexities and uncertainties of the world. These entitlements calibrate our hopes and fantasies, supporting harmful and unsustainable modes of existence, and trapping human life-force within the house. With all of this in mind, the challenge and perhaps even the impossibility of decolonising higher education becomes evident. If decolonisation requires interrupting, disinvesting from and unravelling these modern economies – in other words, if it requires the end of the world as we know it (which is not the end of the world, full stop, but rather the end of a particular modern/colonial mode of existence) (Silva 2014) – then decolonising higher education would mean the end of higher education as we know it as well (Stein 2019). In practice, however, decolonisation has been taken up in many different ways (Andreotti et al. 2015), which we review in the following section. 53

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Different perspectives on decolonisation Through processes of European colonisation, the modern economies and the house they uphold have been forcibly exported throughout the world, but they also vary in their character depending on the particular context. The Canadian context is governed by the specific social formation of settler colonialism. According to Coulthard (2014: 7), settler colonialism is characterised by interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power [that] has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and selfdetermining authority. The exact character of settler colonialism differs depending on the specific context and its internal historical and political dynamics (see Kelley 2017 for a discussion of South Africa as a settler colony). However, in his famous treatise on settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe (1999) summarises it ‘as a structure, not an event’. If colonisation is enabled through the ongoing reproduction of the economies that naturalise separation, consumption and accumulation, and, thus, the (infra) structure of the house, then decolonisation must be an ongoing process of undoing these economies and creating space for entirely new or previously exiled possibilities for existence outside the house. Not surprisingly, the colonial economies that govern life within modern institutions, including institutions of higher education, are generally at best unconcerned with decolonisation, and at worst actively hostile to it. However, at certain points in time it has become difficult for these institutions to entirely ignore decolonial demands – generally, when ignoring them threatens to compromise their perceived legitimacy. Particularly in societies that conceptualise themselves as liberal democracies, these concessions tend to be organised in ways that offer highly conditional inclusion within a purportedly universal system. This paradoxically equates to a selective incorporation of difference as a strategy to maintain the claim to universality and exceptionalism. For instance, in the contemporary Canadian context, the national discourse on ‘reconciliation’ regarding the country’s history of forcibly placing Indigenous children in residential schools represents a moment in which a settler colonial country and its institutions – including universities – are forced to adjust their practices in response to decolonial demands. As expected, however, these adjustments largely take the form of conditional inclusion (Ahenakew 2016; Ahenakew & Naepi 2015; Ahmed 2012). The dominant approach to indigenisation/decolonisation is that of ‘Indigenous inclusion’ (Gaudry & Lorenz 2018), which offers the guise of change while largely reaffirming western ways of knowing, being and relating. A limited number of Indigenous peoples and knowledges are included, but they are expected to adapt to existing university values. Incorporating select elements of difference into existing institutional structures allows for the strategic management of conflict 54

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without interrupting the hegemony of whiteness or conceding to more substantive demands for changes in relationships and resource distribution. In this sense, those (Indigenous peoples) who are ‘being included’ still remain objects of difference that are being invited into the institution by those who retain the power to arbitrate the space and make – or rescind, or deny – that invitation (Ahmed 2012). Hospitality is highly conditional not only before but also after the invitation, and even with all of these conditions, some are still openly hostile to those who are ‘being included’. Those who are ‘welcomed’ are expected to perform gratitude, and affirm (rather than challenge) existing organisational values and structures. Thus, inclusion remains on the terms of those who have historically held power, and the emphasis is on Indigenous peoples’ adaptation to the existing institution, alongside the development of greater ‘awareness’ and cultural sensitivity from non-Indigenous people that does not address historical or ongoing relations of domination. In this approach to inclusion, indigeneity is framed as a form of ‘difference that makes no difference to business as usual’ (Ahenakew 2016: 330). We elsewhere describe this as a ‘soft-reform’ approach to decolonisation (Andreotti et al. 2015). This approach frames decolonisation as an event with a clear beginning and an end, which can ultimately be absorbed into the colonial mode of existence. Figure 3.4: Different interpretations of decolonisation

The most common response to the limits of this soft-reform approach to decolonisation is what we call a ‘radical-reform’ approach. This approach offers a deeper critique of the colonial economies of modern existence. A radical-reform approach can be said to ‘radicalise’ the conditional inclusion of the soft-reform approach. For instance, rather than having a handful of Indigenous peoples and perspectives that are kept at the margins of the institutions (i.e. tokenism), it 55

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advocates for centring these peoples and perspectives, and redistributing resources in more substantive ways. This approach offers an important challenge to the soft-reform approach, and it can create important spaces in which to nurture and engage with historically marginalised knowledge systems. However, it also has two potential limitations. The first is that, although this approach is understood to offer an alternative set of economies that will not recreate the same problematic patterns as the colonial ones, it risks recreating some of the same patterns of separation, consumption and accumulation, albeit in a different register. In other words, it enables a shift in vocabulary, but not in grammar; and a shift in epistemological terms (at the level of knowing), but not in ontological terms (at the level of being). The second potential limitation is that while the radical-reform approach was somewhat effective in affecting change in the previous Cold-War era of relative abundance and western states’ concern to maintain political legitimacy, in the contemporary context of greater scarcity and the perception that ‘there is no alternative’ to (neoliberal) capitalism, the radical-reform approach no longer retains the same power to affect institutional change. Our concern is not to dismiss the possibilities that are opened up by this approach, but rather to address what may be unintentionally reproduced when this approach is taken up uncritically, and to assess the extent to which it holds strategic impact in our current conjuncture. Radical-reform approaches seek the transformation of existing higher education institutions that exceeds tokenistic inclusion efforts and enables a much more substantive redistribution of both resources and institutional power to marginalised populations. The idea is that these changes will lead to a substantively different institution. However, these approaches also point to the difficulty of enacting another way of being and opening up different possibilities in ways that do not reproduce at least some of the same colonial economies that they seek to transcend. In fact, it may be this will to transcendence that fosters some of the circularities: the desire to arrive immediately at a changed future can result in glossing over important underlying and enduring issues. For instance, there are significant political challenges involved not only in introducing but also in centring marginalised knowledges in a context that has historically been characterised by uneven power relations, which can lead to increased commodification of Indigenous knowledges, as well as a grafting of Indigenous knowledges into western frames (Ahenakew 2016). Another challenge of the radical-reform approach is that having an intellectual critique of harmful colonial patterns does not necessarily result in an affective transformation, that is, a shift away from wanting and desiring the promises that colonialism offers. However, if we do not interrupt the modern affective economy, then it will not be possible to engage the difficult, messy and even painful work that is required for decolonisation – particularly when that work challenges the notion that we are entitled to be the leaders and architects of this change. In other words, saying that we want something different does not necessarily equate to wanting to give up the securities and entitlements that are rooted in systems that maintain the status quo – particularly when those systems offer us the promises of affirmation,

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leadership, control, comfort, authority and even heroism that we have come to desire within the house modernity built. In fact, the desire for quick resolutions and arrival at an ‘elsewhere’ without giving up these promises can actively suppress necessary engagements with our own complicity in and dependency on the very systems that we critique (Jefferess 2012; Shotwell 2016). Figure 3.5: Looking for decolonisation in all the wrong places

In addition to the potential circularities of the radical-reform critique, the conditions of the contemporary context may also undercut or narrow the potential impact of this approach. During the Cold War era, the language and strategy of radical reform enabled significant changes to the canonical university and its centring and universalisation of enlightenment knowledge. Access for traditionally marginalised populations was expanded, and there was a greater (though still selective) inclusion of marginalised ways of knowing, for instance through the inauguration of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies programmes. The way these programmes were ultimately institutionalised meant that they supplemented the western canon, rather than supplanted it. These concessions within universities were made as part of a larger social effort within western liberal capitalist nation-states to demonstrate their commitment to anti-racism in the wake of the Nazi regime, as well as their commitment to equity and redistribution in the context of the creation of viable alternatives to capitalism, particularly the USSR (Bell 1980; Ferguson 2012). In the US, Jodi Melamed (2006) characterised this as a shift from overt white supremacy to

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racial liberalism, which granted the nation-state moral legitimacy on the global stage without it actually giving up (and in fact, globalising) its strategies of racialised capital accumulation. Although she is speaking about the US, similar patterns were at work in Canada; that is, convergence of the state’s international interests in ensuring smooth economic functioning with the interests of marginalised domestic communities demanding radical change resulted in still limited but nonetheless significant social shifts, which generally resulted in limited redistribution and expanded access to mainstream institutions. Thus, concessions like the expansion of civil rights and the conditional inclusion of difference were made only to the extent that they were perceived to facilitate the continuity of capitalism and institutional legitimacy. With the fall of large-scale alternatives to capitalism as well as the shift towards neoliberal financial capitalism and the increasing sense of scarcity that has emerged in the context of slowing economic growth and growing austerity, the strategies that brought about substantive changes in an earlier era may no longer have the same effect as they do today. Narratives that mobilise moral arguments to advocate for inclusion have less impact in a context where there are no apparent alternatives to the dominant system, and where there is greater competition for fewer resources. Although critical discourses are present and perhaps even granted new space within the neoliberal multicultural university (for instance, in relation to discourses of reconciliation), their political and practical impact is declining as they compete for epistemic space and legitimacy within an increasingly cacophonous landscape of theoretical and political perspectives, aided by the rapid proliferation and spread of information that is enabled by technology (Bauman 2001). In this way, difference is allowed to proliferate to the extent that it offers no real threat to the status quo. Despite the diversity of intellectual perspectives on offer, this landscape is effectively dominated by modernity’s financial and affective economies: knowledge that produces (or enables the production of) profit to serve the ends of global capital accumulation is the most highly valued by institutions. Meanwhile, knowledge that speaks to the existential insecurities that are produced by the house modernity built is the most highly valued by individuals. Within this context, the competition for epistemic authority that characterised earlier iterations of modernity’s intellectual economy appears outdated; the rules of the game have changed. Rather than the old pattern of changing peoples’ political and ethical convictions so as to change their behaviour, an even more basic challenge today is to retain their attention (Bauman 2001). This challenge and its impact should not be underestimated, particularly as many national leaders are speaking directly to this sense of not just economic but also existential insecurity (Stein et al. 2017). A discourse of demands based in radical-reform may not be able to compete in this context, leaving the field open for other, often violent discourses to take hold. In response to our recognition of these potential circularities and contextual challenges with regard to the radical reform approaches to decolonising higher education, we have also conceptualised a beyond-reform approach. This approach recognises that universities that emerged within the context of the house modernity 58

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built, and which remain dependent on its economies, are unlikely to survive the current context of volatility and ongoing and impending crises related to its longterm unsustainability. Within the beyond-reform approach to higher education, the horizon of hope is not to salvage existing institutions, nor to immediately dismantle them, but rather to minimise their immediate harms, learn from their mistakes and, as the house collapses, to utilise and redirect their resources towards experimenting with other possibilities for education and existence outside of the house, without a guarantee that this will result in something different or better. The beyond-reform approach calls into question many of the modern economies while recognising that their momentum makes it difficult to challenge them from the outside, and that they may only collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and destructive tendencies. That is, while it might be impossible to transform these entrenched institutions through human will alone, their own inherently violent and unsustainable nature might be what leads to their downfall (Andreotti et al. 2015). This is particularly important in light of the fact that the structure of the house is increasingly fractured under the weight of social, ecological, economic and political crises, including unsustainable growth, overconsumption, a surplus labour force, mental health crises, and cancellation of welfare and rights (see Figure 3.6). Figure 3.6: Structural damage to the house modernity built

If indeed the house is collapsing, and its economies no longer offer the promised benefits they once did, then there are many possible responses: Should we fix the house? Expand it? Build another house? Or create other types of shelter? The proposition that one poses in response to the crumbling house tends to be shaped by 59

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one’s diagnosis of the crisis itself. Importantly, contemporary narratives of crisis often centre the precarity of the implicitly white middle class whose abundance in previous eras was (and is still) subsidised by the subjugation of those largely non-white, lower/underclass people who continue to be the most vulnerable to declining health outcomes, economic insecurity and ecological devastation, and who at the same time often have strategies for survival in the midst of slow violence (Chakravartty & Silva 2012; Whyte 2017). If we do not address the fact that the construction and maintenance of the house has long resulted in crises within marginalised communities, then responses to the current crises risk ‘remain[ing] embedded in many of the political and institutional rationalities that have caused, and continue to replicate, the conditions of crisis’ (Menzel 2010: 1). Indeed, if this is the case, then strategies for addressing the crises that originate from inside the house are likely to reproduce at least some of the same problems. Addressing these alternative histories of crisis also points to the fact that the contemporary crisis of the house is not an external threat (as it is often framed), but is rather the delayed impact of the house’s own toxic and extractive infrastructures: although the house successfully externalised the true costs of its operations for a long while, this is no longer possible.

Pedagogical invitations If, from the beyond-reform perspective, the house modernity built is inherently unsustainable and cannot be ‘fixed’, then what does this mean for higher education? If existing colleges and universities are not redeemable, then we will need to develop other approaches to education. This does not necessarily require that we preemptively leave existing institutions, but rather that we do not invest existentially in their futurity. While we cannot imagine a substantively different approach to higher education from where we currently stand, lest we reproduce the same harmful economies, it is important to experiment with other possibilities, and learn from both successes and the failures that result from them. Further, within the cracks of existing institutions we might find spaces and resources with which we can undertake these experiments. In a gesture towards these possibilities, we end this chapter with two pedagogical invitations to imagine higher education in ways that view decolonisation as a difficult, messy and ongoing process.

Invitation 1: Start and stay with complexity and complicity This invitation emphasises the need to sit with and learn from: 1) the difficulties of trying to keep visible the complexities and tensions involved in decolonisation, without becoming overwhelmed by them; and 2) the structural complicity of those involved, without spiralling into non-generative patterns of guilt that in turn lead to seeking redemption rather than taking responsibility. Instead of seeking a position of absolution, purity or innocence, Alexis Shotwell (2016: 5) suggests the need to ‘start from an assumption that everyone is implicated in situations we (at least in some way) repudiate’. This invitation asks us to consider what responsibility looks

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like when the starting point is not the transcendence of our complicity in harm and the arrival at a position of innocence, but rather a simultaneous recognition of the impossibility of transcending our involvement in harm and the need to nonetheless try to interrupt it. This will require interrupting the modern/colonial illusion of separation and un-numbing our sense of entanglement so that we can remember and reaffirm our sense of relationship and responsibility to everyone and everything. However, this approach also recognises that our situated positionalities will affect the precise shape of what we are called to do in order to affirm our responsibilities to one another, without letting anyone off the hook. As Shotwell (2016: 7) notes, even as none of us sits outside of complicity in harm, we ‘are not equally responsible or capable, and are not equally called to respond’. This approach invites an orientation to learning premised on humility and critical generosity, and suggests further that these are not intellectual choices, but practices of encountering and engaging the world that are only made possible if we divest from desires for control, accumulation, authority, and entitlement that the modern affective economy cultivates. This work is not easy, and may even be painful, particularly for those who have the most to ‘lose’ with the decline or fall of modern economies. When complicity is not something to be acknowledged and then transcended, but rather serves as a ‘starting point for action’ (Shotwell 2016: 5), learners are invited to sit with and be taught by the complexity, discomfort and contradictions that emerge in efforts to make transformative changes that challenge inherited material, intellectual, relational and affective structures. In other words, this is in an invitation not only to learn intellectually about the harmful institutions, social relations and subjectivities that have brought us to our present conjuncture, but also to unlearn our affective investments in these institutions, relations, and subjectivities. Within the context of this invitation, for instance, encounters with different knowledge systems and social practices are not intended as a strategy for acquiring and accumulating new knowledges within modernity’s intellectual economy, but rather for denaturalising the structures of knowing, being and wanting that treat knowledge itself as a site of acquisition and accumulation, and for facing the affective responses that emerge when those patterns are challenged. This relates to the second invitation, which is to cultivate the ability to discern the gifts and limitations of any particular way of knowing.

Invitation 2: Cultivate socially, historically and ecologically accountable pluralistic propositional thinking According to Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007), western thought can be characterised as ‘abyssal thinking’, which institutes a divide between western knowledge as universal truth, and all other knowledge traditions on the other side of the divide, in the ‘abyss’. Knowledge traditions in the abyss are denied relevance and even existence – they are made invisible, and actually become illegible from within the frames of western knowledge. From this diagnosis, De Sousa Santos (2007) proposes the need for ‘post-abyssal thinking,’ and the creation of an ‘ecology of knowledges’ in which all knowledges are insufficient and indispensable. This framework suggests that rather 61

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than approach knowledge through a search for either universal relevance or absolute relativism, it is possible to consider that all knowledges have both internal integrity and contextual relevance – that is, knowledges are valued for the interventions that they enable within a particular context, rather than for their ability to ‘objectively’ or ‘authentically’ represent reality across all contexts. In this way, multiple knowledges might coexist without a battle for hegemony or a demand for synthesis, because each is understood to offer contextually specific, partial and provisional mobilisations, just as each has attendant limitations and ignorances of other knowledges that it must bracket in order for its internal logic to work. De Sousa Santos (2007: 16) suggests that even as we enact this bracketing, we must remember the partiality and provinciality of our own knowledges, affirm the importance of the knowledges we have bracketed, and recognise the need for ‘constant questioning and incomplete answers’. For De Sousa Santos (2007: 9), the ‘ecology of knowledges’ is based on a recognition of the ‘plurality of heterogeneous knowledges (one of them being modern science) and on the sustained and dynamic interconnections between them without compromising their autonomy’. In the ecology of knowledges, knowledges and ignorances intersect: ‘as there is no unity of knowledge, there is no unity of ignorance either’ (De Sousa Santos 2007: 11). He argues that ‘ignorance is not necessarily the original state or starting point…it may be a point of arrival’. We understand this ‘arrival’ through what Spivak (in Spivak & Harasym 1990) called foreclosures – the constitutive disavowals and sanctioned ignorances that enable the logics and practices of a particular way of knowing. In terms of western knowledge production, Spivak talks about foreclosures as sanctioned ignorances that authorise the denial of the violence that is necessary to sustain modern/colonial systems (see also Andreotti 2007). In decolonising work, we are called to arrive at these sanctioned ignorances and face our complicity in systemic harm. However, much work on decolonisation only applies these principles to western knowledge production, creating a desire for a ‘better’ (often marginalised) system of knowledge to replace the modern/colonial one as an act of redress. In an ecology of knowledges and ignorances, facing sanctioned ignorances and identifying potential systemic violences would be extended to all knowledge systems and forms of knowledge production as a practice of prudence. In other words, working towards an ecology of knowledges and ignorances does not equate to decentring western knowledges only to replace them instead by centring non-western knowledges, as this would reproduce the same underlying structure of seeking universalism and exceptionalism. However, it does consider that in order to practice an ecology of knowledges, it would be necessary to reconfigure existing power relations and redistribute ‘material, social, political, cultural, and symbolic resources’ (De Sousa Santos 2007: 9) – that is, to address not only the modern intellectual economy, but the material, affective and relational economies as well. At the same time, we may recognise the need for different approaches to knowledge in the short, medium and long term. In the short term, we might prioritise the (more substantive) inclusion of often delegitimised knowledges and knowledge holders within existing institutions. In the medium term, we might

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engage in difficult conversations about the limitations of inclusion within deeply colonial institutions and how we might address the potential tensions that arise when different, incommensurable knowledges meet – for instance, the risks of romanticising or appropriating non-western knowledges, or betraying their gifts by trying to understand them through western frames (Ahenakew 2016). Finally, in the long term, we might look towards both developing ecologies of knowledges and ignorances, and developing the capacity to respect the contextual gifts and limitations of each knowledge system, including those that are not our own and even those that we do not understand. This includes, for example, using (modern/ colonial) scientific knowledge in counter-hegemonic ways to ‘enable epistemological consistency for [socially, historically and ecologically accountable] pluralistic, propositional thinking’ (De Sousa Santos 2007: 11).

Conclusion In this chapter we have attempted to show how efforts to decolonise higher education can operate in multiple ways, depending on how one frames the problem of colonialism, and what one poses as a solution to it. We conclude with a reflection on what we identify as more and less generative aspects we have encountered in decolonising work. In Canada, movements towards decolonisation have been extremely generative in the creation of more spaces in which questioning colonial habits of being is considered both legitimate and intelligible, leading to important efforts to contest and reimagine institutional practices, individual investments, and conscious and unconscious (harmful) hopes and desires. These efforts have enabled difficult conversations about the limitations and circularities of political horizons orientated by representation, recognition, reconciliation, redistribution and redress. Because of the expansion of these spaces, it is no longer possible for people to ignore or silence questions about the conditional terms of inclusion and integration, about the instrumentalisation of bodies and struggles, and about naturalised practices of resource theft, land expropriation and cultural appropriation. Decolonisation approaches may be less generative when they lead to entrenched dogmatism or self-righteousness that fragment communities of struggle and cause widespread burnout among those who are deeply engaged in decolonising work – especially those operating within the radical-reform space. We also note that for those operating in soft-reform spaces, sometimes more assertive decolonisation claims are perceived as conversation stoppers that prevent further discussions and interrupt the desire to ‘move forward’. In our experience, while it is indeed the case that critical questions and demands can foreclose the possibility of certain conversations and create a barrier towards certain forward movements, this interruption is generally only temporary and often necessary, as these interventions can serve to push the boundaries of what we commonly ask, imagine and desire. The result can be to open up other kinds of conversations (often uncomfortable, but nonetheless important) and movements (not always forward, but nonetheless generative) that were not previously possible. 63

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References Ahenakew C (2016) Grafting indigenous ways of knowing onto non-indigenous ways of being: The (underestimated) challenges of a decolonial imagination. International Review of Qualitative Research 9(3): 323–340 Ahenakew C & Naepi S (2015) The difficult task of turning walls into tables. In A Macfarlane (Ed.) Sociocultural realities: Exploring new horizons. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press Ahmed S (2012) On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press Andreotti V (2007) An ethical engagement with the other: Spivak’s ideas on education. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 1(1): 69–79 Andreotti V, Stein S, Sutherland A, Pashby K, Suša R & Amsler S (2018) Mobilising different conversations about global justice in education: Toward alternative futures in uncertain times. Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review 26: 9–41 Andreotti VDO, Stein S, Ahenakew C & Hunt D (2015) Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4(1): 21–40 Bauman Z (2001) The individualized society. Cambridge: Polity Press Bell D (1980) Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma. Harvard Law Review 93: 518–533 Byrd JA (2011) The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Chakravartty P & Silva DFD (2012) Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism – an introduction. American Quarterly 64(3): 361–385 Coulthard G (2014) Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Davis H & Todd Z (2017) On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene.  ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4): 761–780 De Sousa Santos B (2007) Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Eurozine. Accessed 9 November 2020, https://www.eurozine.com/beyondabyssal-thinking/ Ferguson RA (2012) The reorder of things: The university and its pedagogies of minority difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Gaudry A & Lorenz D (2018) Indigenization as inclusion, reconciliation, and decolonization: Navigating the different visions for indigenizing the Canadian academy. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 14(3): 218–227 Jefferess D (2012) The ‘me to we’ social enterprise: Global education as lifestyle brand. Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 6(1): 18–30 Kapoor I (2014) Psychoanalysis and development: Contributions, examples, limits. Third World Quarterly 35(7): 1120–1143 Kelley RDG (2017) The rest of us: Rethinking settler and native. American Quarterly 69(2): 267–276 64

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Melamed J (2006) The spirit of neoliberalism from racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism. Social Text 24(4): 1–24 Menzel A (2010) Crisis and epistemologies of ignorance. Paper presented at the APSA Annual Meeting. Accessed 10 January 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=1644543 Sharpe C (2016) In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham: Duke University Press Shotwell A (2016) Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Silva DFD (2014) Toward a black feminist poethics: The quest(ion) of blackness toward the end of the world. The Black Scholar 44(2): 81–97 Spivak GC & Harasym S (1990) The post-colonial critic: Interviews, strategies, dialogues. New York: Routledge Stein S (2019) Beyond higher education as we know it: Gesturing towards decolonial horizons of possibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education 38(2): 143–161 Stein S, Hunt D, Suša R & Andreotti V (2017) The educational challenge of unraveling the fantasies of ontological security. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 11(2): 69–79 Whyte K (2017) Indigenous climate change studies: Indigenizing futures, decolonizing the Anthropocene. English Language Notes 55(1): 153–162 Wolfe P (1999) Settler colonialism. London: A&C Black Wynter S & McKittrick K (2015) Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In K McKittrick (Ed.) Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Durham: Duke University Press

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Beyond possession: De/colonising the educational relationship in higher education Fatima Pirbhai-Illich and Fran Martin

Introduction All cultures in the world come from a place and in that place all people are coming into the world and then they come to learn, and they learn from the knowledges that begins within a particular place and that place defines for a group of people…how they relate to the world, how they relate to each other and how they’re going to survive and live within that particular place. (Battiste 2011) We begin by acknowledging that the work we have engaged in that led to this chapter was conducted on the traditional lands referred to as the Treaty 4 territory, the original lands of the Cree, Ojibwe, Saulteaux, Dakota, Lakota, Nakota and on the homeland of the Métis people. We acknowledge the First Nations peoples of the Treaty 4 lands who are the traditional custodians of this land; we respect the treaties that were made on all territories, we acknowledge the harms and mistakes of the past, and we are committed to moving forward in partnership with Indigenous nations in reconciliation and collaboration. In this theoretical chapter, we take seriously the idea that de/colonisation1 is not a metaphor (Tuck & Yang 2012), and consider what we might learn from the principle of repatriation of land that can be applied to education. Our focus is on the connection between identity, land and education relationships. We argue that just as land, property and citizenship are seen to be white possessions (LadsonBillings 1995; Moreton-Robinson 2015), so are the spaces, places and boundaries of education. Our premise is that the classroom is a site of intercultural interrelations; therefore, any project in de/colonising educational relationships has to take account of the histories behind those in relation, including their relationship to land. In keeping with the de/colonial focus of the chapter, we draw on métissage theory and praxis to weave our own narratives and theories with those of others. Métissage has been described as ‘a mixing and rapprochement of differences: race, culture, class, gender, geography and language’ (Hasebe-Ludt & Jordan 2010: 2), and as ‘a writing praxis that enables researchers and their audiences to imagine and create plural selves and communities that thrive on ambiguity and multiplicity’ (Chambers et al. 2008: 142). With its origins in Caribbean Creole research contexts, métissage works with mixed identities, languages and notions of space and place in an approach that ‘affirms, rather than polarises, difference’ (Chambers et al. 2008: 142). Métissage is 66

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therefore congruent with both how we work together and the focus of that work, which also demands us to be hyper-self-reflexive in attending to the ways in which our subjectivities and positionalities affect how we relate to our work, and our complicities in the systems that we seek to change (Kapoor 2004). As Alison Baker, Amy Quayle and Lutfiye Ali (2018: 195) state, ‘[we] live and research in a colonial context with a history of denial around white privilege and racism. Thus, our coming together is a symbolic disruption’, an ‘unsettling’ of both our own ‘loci of enunciation’ (Mignolo 2007), and of the broader discourses on land relations in settler nations that are commonly orientated around an Indigenous-settler binary. We therefore begin by making explicit our identities, subjectivities and positionalities, by focusing on our relationships to land.

Being a bystander I am Fatmakhanu (Fatima) Shamshudin Pirbhai Sunderji Samji Ladha Kurji Thoba Jessani-Illich. Family oral narratives inform me that my family originates from an area called Kutch, situated in the northwest of Gujarat, India. During both the time of the German colonial rule in Tanganyika and the period of the Busaidi Sultanate of Zanzibar, my forefathers migrated to the east coast of Africa to both escape British colonial rule and for a better way of life; my father’s family settled in Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika and my mother’s in Georgetown, Zanzibar. For more than a century my family had lived on the east coast of Africa but as members of the Indian diaspora. In 1961, Tanganyika became independent and, in 1964, Tanganyika and Zanzibar united to form the United Republic of Tanzania. During this time, I learned that we were not welcome there for several reasons even though it had been our family home for several generations. During the time of civil unrest, my mother and I immigrated to Canada; however, my grandfather and father stayed behind and so the land and familial ties to Tanzania remained, albeit as an outsider looking in. In Canada, I quickly learned that my brown body and cultural ways of being and knowing were not welcome there either. Much later, I also learned that the welcome extended by the Canadian government was not theirs to give; that Canada was in fact Turtle Island and rightfully belonged to the First Nations. For more than two decades, I have lived in a land where I have been made to feel that I do not belong. Over the years, I have lived in many other parts of the world and returned to Canada only for familial reasons. The centrality of relations to land that is part of both Indigenous and white identities is not part of my identity. I have a sense of being a bystander to this way of thinking; it is not part of my schema because of the transient nature of diasporic relations to land. I have a longing for Tanzania and India as places where I might be and feel at home, but this longing is based on an imaginary because I have never visited India, and I have only returned to Tanzania once since we left. ‘Home’ as a relation to land is always temporary to me, because ‘a return to “Home” is an eternal impossibility, [while] a reframing of home is a continuous negotiation’ (Bhattacharya 2018: 15). My ‘home’ is a diasporic space of in-betweenness, a space without land. 67

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Rooted in the landscape I am Frances (Fran) Elizabeth Martin. I was born on the farm of my father and grandfather in the southeast of England and lived there all my childhood. As children, we had the freedom to roam in the fields and woods, and never had to question our right to be there or our right of access to the land. It was a carefree existence without external conflict and, although I was not aware of it at the time, a privileged existence of entitlement, permanence and authority. Growing up on a farm, I was closely connected to the land and learned first-hand how our lives revolved around seasonal activities associated with a dairy farm, including the milk that I drank every day that came fresh from the cows that morning. As a white, middle-class Briton, daughter of a farmer and a landowner, I have not had to consider the politics of the countryside. I have always felt I belong to the land and that the land, in a sense, belongs to me – I am firmly rooted in the pastures, hills and woodlands of the Chilterns. It is only in the last 10 to 15 years that I have become consciously aware that the British countryside is not available to all, that it is subject to a racialised discourse of who ‘belongs’ there and who does not: ‘For many black and Asian Britons, rural Britain is, literally, another country’ (Prasad 2004). In contrast, my relation to land is one of permanence and my attachment to the spaces and places of my birth are an integral part of my identity. I have a strong place attachment...a positive affective bond with the English landscape that enhances my sense of individual well-being, but also locates it within the wider social world, giving me a strong, stable sense of community and citizenship (Qazimi 2014). *** In terms of our relations to Canada, the location of our research, we are therefore neither white settler nor Indigenous. Our own ‘place identities’ (Proshansky, Fabian & Kaminoff 1983) provide lenses that trouble Indigenous-settler and colonisedcoloniser binaries. Fatima’s diasporic experiences bring perspectives that ‘disturb received notions of home as a stable centre’ (Chawla & Atay 2018: 7), while Fran’s stable, centred experiences bring perspectives that connect to the construction of property and ownership as a ‘white possession’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015: 20). Similarly, Indigenous and settler relations to land cannot each be reduced to simple homogeneous perspectives, as we explore in the following section.

Land relations and the concept of ownership in settler colonial nations Here we present a range of perspectives on land relations and the concept of ownership from four settler nations: Canada, Australia, the US and South Africa. Our purpose is to specify the particularities of the examples, and to show how each, according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s (2014: 188) theory on the ecology of knowledges, ‘confronts the logic of the monoculture of scientific knowledge and rigour by identifying other knowledges and criteria of validity that operate credibly in social practices’ within their specific human-nature relational contexts.

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Our pluralisation of knowledges concerning land relations is therefore mindful of De Sousa Santos’s (2014: 188) assumption that ‘all relational practices involving human beings and nature entail more than one kind of knowledge, thus more than one kind of ignorance as well’.

Everything is on loan to us For Anishinaape People, the words ‘my’ and ‘our’ do not mean possession or ownership as they do in English or some other languages. In English, these words are even identified as being ‘possessive’ pronouns. In our culture possession is viewed very differently. Our teachers, for example, tell us that our children are not ours but are on loan to us. Our partners are on loan to us. Our homes, our canoes, our tools and equipment are on loan to us. Even the articles of our clothing are on loan to us. Our very bodies are on loan to us. We are very carefully taught that everything on loan to us must be cared for and then returned in the condition, or even better condition, than it was when we acquired it. For Anishinaape People, then, the words ‘my,’ ‘our,’ ‘your,’ ‘his’ or ‘hers’ refer to a relationship. When we say, ‘Trout Lake is my home,’ we do not mean that we own Trout Lake, that we possess it (and therefore you do not and neither does anyone else) but rather, it means that Trout Lake is that part of our great Mother the earth with which we have a very special relationship. (Haig-Brown & Dannenmann 2002: 456). In the excerpt above Kaaren Dannenmann, an Anishinaape scholar, describes a fundamental cultural difference between the Anishinaapes’ and white settler Canadians’ concept of ownership that we understand as a difference between relational and object-focused traditions of knowing and being (Martin & PirbhaiIllich 2016). It is a difference that, in the context of contact between settler colonisers and Indigenous peoples during the negotiations of treaties, was incommensurable and arguably a key reason for how settler colonisers were able to take possession of First Nations lands so easily.

Travelling well in lands not our own However, as we noted earlier, differences in land relations in settler colonial countries cannot be expressed as a simple binary of ‘Aboriginal people and immigrants’ (HaigBrown 2009: 9). Celia Haig-Brown, in her article ‘Decolonising Diaspora’, describes how it was pointed out to her that the use of such a binary in her teaching was reductive and disrespectful. I began to see how offensive and really unfair they are to people who came to this continent in ways which, while not unrelated to colonization – we cannot escape the endless march of capital across the globe – did not implicate them in the same ways as those who came with the clear

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intention of exploitation for profit. Many people came for better lives, to escape war and famine, to seek freedom, to start anew in a country that was advertised as terra nullius, empty land, there for the asking. They came through being enticed by those who were finding the First Nations labour force less than cooperative and who were seeking to occupy ‘Indian’ lands as a way of claiming them and their resources while simultaneously developing a market for the goods Europe was producing. (Haig-Brown 2009: 9) Haig-Brown (2009: 6) sees the lumping together of all non-Indigenous peoples in settler nations as immigrants as an erasure of differences in experience between, for example, those who emigrated by choice, those who were forced to migrate, those who came from countries of the colonisers, those who came from countries where they were colonised, those who sought to exploit and those who sought to ‘“travel well” in First Nations contexts’. She also argues that placing the experiences of the diaspora in relation to those of both First Nations peoples and white settlers adds complexity to our understanding of people-land relations and notions of citizenship in the formation of a nation such as Canada. In light of the complexity that we are confronted with in the Canadian context, a complexity that emanates from a violent colonial economy of being, we now move on to consider other contexts. Through our comparative analyses, we seek to demonstrate that while these contexts might seem similar to one another, there are subtle nuances and differences that define each context – owing to its own cultures and the histories of colonialism that define it.

We are country For First Australians, ‘country’ encompasses an interdependent relationship between an individual and their ancestral lands and seas. This reciprocal relationship between the land and people is sustained by the environment and cultural knowledge. ‘The land is the mother and we are of the land; we do not own the land rather the land owns us. The land is our food, our culture, our spirit and our identity.’ Dennis Foley, a Gaimariagal and Wiradjuri man, and Fulbright scholar When people talk about country it is spoken of like a person: we speak to country, we sing to country, we worry about country, and we long for country. ‘…It is this knowledge that enables me to identify who I am, who my family is, who my ancestors were and what my stories are. We are indistinguishable from our country which is why we fight so hard to hang on.’ Catherine Liddle, Arrente and Luritja woman, and Aboriginal activist Rather than owning land, people develop strong intimate knowledge and connection for a place that is related to them (Common Ground 2019).

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Common Ground (an online resource designed to build foundational knowledge for all Australians to understand and value Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures) presents Australian Aboriginal perspectives on land relations and ownership that are similar to that of Kaaren Dannenmann (Haig-Brown & Dannenmann 2002). Selfidentity, community-identity and cultural identity are completely bound up with a relational connection to land. 'Belonging to country' means something that is outside western ways of thinking – which legally include written forms of proof of ownership, without which Indigenous peoples are positioned as not belonging anywhere – terra nullius…The application of the legal fiction terra nullius ('land belonging to no one') was tantamount to the recognition of British sovereignty and the subsequent investment of property rights in men. (Moreton-Robinson 2015: 66) Aileen Moreton-Robinson, an Australian Aboriginal scholar, notes that these ways of relating to land were unintelligible to western ways of thinking, enabling settler colonisers to position the continent as a ‘terra nullius’ and therefore open to be claimed as British sovereign territory.

After this, nothing happened 'When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened…Besides, you know that part of my life as well as I do.' (Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crow nation, quoted in Lear 2006: 2) The Crow had a conception of happiness...that was an unfettered pursuit of nomadic hunting life in which their family life and social rituals could prosper…With the destruction of this way of life came the destruction of the end or goal of that life. Their problem, then, was not simply that they could not pursue happiness in the traditional ways. Rather, their conception of what happiness is could no longer be lived. (Lear 2006: 55) In his book, Radical Hope, Jonathan Lear discusses what we can learn from Plenty Coups, Crow chief who was a witness to the collapse of the Crow culture and with it its future – a time in which ‘nothing happened’, not because the space/place in which it might have happened had been removed from them, but because this dislocated the Crow from living a life in those spaces and places that gave meaning to their individual and communal identities: ‘the traditional ways of structuring significance, of recognising something as happening, had been devastated’ (Lear 2006: 152).

Imagining ‘home’ abroad In the theory of 'double right', the rights of cultivators, who clear and settle the land, always take precedence over the rights of nomads, who

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merely hunt over it…If the work of hands on a particular patch of earth, digging, ploughing, planting, building, is what inscribes it as the property of its occupiers by right, then the hands of black serfs doing the work had better not be seen. And we here concur with Coetzee (1988: 2–5) when he maintains that blindness to the colour black is built into the South African pastoral. Poets...who have described Africa as not-Europe, dramatising it by antithesis, make Africa into a mere negative reflection or shadow of Europe, insubstantial (Coetzee 1988: 170). Landscape poetry in South Africa has been written predominantly by people to whom English has been a home language and the English literary tradition, however ambivalently regarded, the tradition in which they have been at home (Coetzee 1988: 174). JM Coetzee’s analysis of how white South African writers have depicted the country through their relationship to the land and its First Peoples shows us how land rights were accorded to those who cultivated the land, turning it from a ‘barbarian wilderness’ into a landscape that was ordered and productive. In the racialised discourses of white settler colonisers, the Koi and San (First Peoples) were erased through their non-existence in early white writing, and simultaneously through their bodies being appropriated and ‘cultivated’ as slaves. Coetzee also introduces the idea of the relation between land and ‘home’, arguing that white writings represent European attempts to possess and control the landscape through various imaginaries or ‘dream topographies’ (Coetzee 1988: 6). In effect, it is an attempt to colonise, to describe and thus create a South African landscape that they can settle into and feel ‘at home’, using ‘the categories provided by [their European] language’ (Coetzee 1988: 173).

Property ownership, identity and the ‘white possessive’ As the examples above illustrate, ownership of land and property is understood differently from the perspective of different cultural traditions. Whatever the cultural tradition, there is a deep connection between how communities relate to the land, their ways of being and knowing and how these are expressed through language and other cultural practices. For Indigenous and diasporic cultures, their ways of being and knowing are relational – there is no separation of self from community or community from land; connections extend to all living beings and matter, all of which are considered ‘relations’ (LaDuke 1999). Ownership and property are understood in the context of these relations, and lead to a communitarian sense of identity that includes living in harmony with all living beings and matter (human, non-human and other-than-human). For euro-western cultures, their ways of being and knowing are object-focused – there is a separation of self from other and self from land, which is understood as an object that can be owned and controlled. The logic of separation leads to an individualistic sense of identity in which individuals are seen to have agency outside of their relations to others, and through a logic of

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domination which seeks to control all living beings and matter. As forms or modes of relation the first is reciprocal and dialogic, a relation of ‘being with’; the latter is unidirectional and monologic, a relation of ‘doing to’. In terms of the relevance of all of the above to our focus on educational relations, our purpose is not to create a binary or to contrast the two traditions in order to make a judgement about whether one is better than the other,2 but to argue that, when they come into contact with each other, the object-focused form of relation, due to its colonising mentality, comes to dominate. This has been evident since the spread of European colonialism since the 1490s, through the height of the British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and into the present era through the processes of globalisation and what Dussel (2012) and Grosfoguel (2011) refer to as the Colonial World System. The dominance of coloniality is therefore an ongoing project and one that affects all areas of life, including education. A central idea in coloniality is the possessive principle, including the absolute right to land, resources and peoples. Through the hierarchical racialised discourse that is coloniality, property, land and citizenship became white possessions and it is this ‘white possessive’ (Moreton-Robinson 2015) that we argue is at the heart of mainstream forms of education. Education systems, national curricula and pedagogies, through the colonising desires of imperialism and global capitalism, are euro-western, white possessions. Teacher-student relationships are also colonising because, within a system that is a white possession, the approaches that are rewarded are based on relations of domination that work towards goals or objectives that have been predetermined by those who hold power within that same system.

The spaces, places and boundaries of education Early on in our research collaboration, we were exploring how our respective work on critical interculturalism and culturally responsive pedagogies of relation in local and international service-learning contexts might inform a joint project (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich 2015). A key moment in our theory building was in July 2014 when we had a shared experience, to which we brought different lenses and thus made different interpretations. We have fictionalised our conversations around the experience.

Closed doors and picket fences Fatima had been visiting Fran when Fran’s sister was celebrating her 60th birthday with a family party at quite a distance from Fran’s home. Fran had asked her brother, Steven, if she and Fatima could stay at his home for two nights, as he was closer to the hired party venue. Steven generously agreed; however, they had to share a bedroom that was on the top floor of the house which faced the sea. On their arrival, both women were carrying their bags to their room when Fatima, with trepidation, asked; Fatima: Fran, are you sure your brother doesn’t mind us staying here for a couple of nights? We can easily find a place near the party venue.

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Fran:

Of course it’s okay. He said he was happy to have us here. Why are you asking?

Fatima: Because it seems that we are not allowed into many of the rooms. The doors are all closed, see? Are we allowed in them or can we see what’s behind these doors? Is this your brother’s bedroom, you think? What about this one? Another guest room? Fran:

I’m not sure but maybe he doesn’t want us looking in there.

Fatima: Maybe he doesn’t really want us here because we only have access to the kitchen, sitting room and our bedroom. Fran:

Well...he wouldn’t have said yes if he didn’t want us here.

And so this conversation ended here until the next morning. Gazing at the early morning sun and the sea, Fatima starts to talk again. Fatima: Fran, I feel really uncomfortable here with all these closed doors. Are you sure we’re okay being here? Fran:

Absolutely. Steven was quite happy to have us here.

Fatima: You see, I see the closed doors as a part of identity. Can we talk about this?... and looking at the sea reminds me of the colonisers who sailed across the oceans bringing with them their identities and this brings me to the classroom and how white settler teachers might enact this closed-door mentality in the classroom. Fran:

Oh! Let’s discuss this.

Fatima: We have mostly white settler teachers in K-12 and Higher Education, and they come with this identity (closed or boundaried private spaces) and... Fran: Yes, of course and this then influences how they interact in the classroom. The intercultural space between the teacher and students. And the geography of space. Fatima: Precisely. That’s exactly what I was thinking. But it also relates to student/ student intercultural relationships. If each white student has a similar way of thinking about space and boundaries, then there would be very little room for white settler students and students of colour to truly interact and get to know each other. And so we have that too. And if these boundaries exist, then it would also be difficult for white settler students to understand other ways of being in relation to interrelationships between self and place, and therefore the land, materially and spiritually. Fran:

Right. So we can now look at how spaces, places and boundaries work in classrooms.

The two women spent the day together walking along the shore, attending the party and going back to Steven’s place for the night. The next morning, on the drive back

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to Fran’s home, while Fran was concentrating on driving, Fatima was looking around at the scenery from the car window. Fatima: You know what, it’s so beautiful in this area – the beauty overwhelms me but…all these houses. Look at the houses when you can, Fran. There they are, with white picket fences and gates and some houses have hedges so high that you cannot even see the house. I guess it is for privacy, but this reminds me of your brother’s place. Fran:

How so?

Fatima: They are shutting people out. Okay, so it could be safety as well, but it clearly says to me, it’s their land, their space, their place, their boundaries. Fran:

You know we have a saying in English, a man’s home is his castle. Interesting that. Let’s discuss this some more once we get something to eat. ***

These conversations were the beginnings of our theorising the nature of educational relationships in terms of identity, being ‘at home’, ownership of spaces and places, and invitation and hospitality in terms of the host-guest dynamic (Pirbhai-Illich & Martin 2020). It was the differences in our own ways of being that created this opening – for both Fatima and Fran something familiar was made strange as we saw it through each other’s lens. Steven had opened up his home to them; he had extended an invitation that they had accepted, but with certain boundaries implied through the closed doors. His hospitality therefore extended to opening up spaces to sleep, eat, wash and relax, but it was not unconditional – it was clear that he ‘owned’ the place and had control over which spaces could be accessed. We theorised that what we had experienced in Steven’s home was symptomatic of a cultural way of being (and identity), expressed as a possessive orientation to land and social relations, which could explain neo-colonial educational relations. For this reason, we researched the origins and meanings of the phrase ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ is a British saying meaning that a person’s home is a place where they should be able to do as they please, that no one else should be able to tell them what to do there, and from which they may exclude anyone they choose. The saying invites us to consider the home as a castle, the latter of which is a structure that has a centre/inside (us), with an impregnable boundary that provides protection from those who are on the periphery/outside (them) and are seen to be a threat to the integrity of the centre. The rest of the saying is ‘and each man’s home is his safest refuge’ and is thought by some to have its origins in a legal principle established in 1604 by Edward Coke – that no one may enter a person’s home without permission (Fox O’Mahony 2006). This established a legal right of ownership with the purposes of freedom from harm, but not freedom from the laws of the land. We argue that this way of thinking – property, ownership, home as refuge, privacy and individual freedom – became part of an English onto-epistemology that affected how land was thought about during the imperial expansion across the world in the 75

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the law around property and ownership has undergone changes since the seventeenth century, the principle behind it has remained part of the British imaginary of the home as private property and as refuge. From the perspective of this imaginary, during the spread of the British empire, Britain was positioned as the ‘home/refuge/centre’ and the differences encountered in the new lands were potential threats to this centre. The dominant response to these perceived threats was to take possession and to ‘domesticate’ other places and peoples in order to recreate ‘home’ in another location (Coetzee 1988; Harris 1993). However, as the narratives in the section detailing 'Land relations and the concept of ownership in settler colonial nations' demonstrate, home and ownership of land was (and is) understood very differently from Indigenous and British white settler ontoepistemological traditions. These differing relations to land, coupled with the British Judeo-Christian concept of divine right to sovereignty over the land (MoretonRobinson 2015) made it possible for British white settlers to claim ownership over property and led to settler nations being seen as white possessions. The closed doors, fences and hedges that struck Fatima during her stay in England were evidence of a mindset that land is private property, that the spaces in which the English feel ‘at home’ are for exclusive use and clearly demarcated with material as well as symbolic boundaries, and the boundaries are tightly controlled to maintain the places and spaces as white possessions – the corollary of which is dispossession of the other. The logic of white possession extends to possession of identities (the right to define who is ‘white’), bodies (slavery), institutions of power (legal systems, schools, systems of governance), and knowledges (either through appropriation, assimilation or erasure). The logic of white possession also, through its construction of spaces for exclusive use, creates a fear of any encroachment by another because, when boundaries are seen as fixed, stable and impermeable, any attempt to move into those spaces by the other is likely to be understood as a move to take over, a replacement of one with another. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015: 179) points out, in the twentieth century, this logic was ‘operative...particularly through immigration laws and those affecting Indigenous peoples, and at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, it continues to function invisibly to inform the legal exclusion and regulation of those who transgress within and outside its borders’. Central to our thesis, therefore, is that education and the spaces and places of education are set up as white possessions both structurally, and (in the west) in the form of the teaching profession, which is predominantly white.3 Although the colonising effects of whiteness affect all students, those of colour and Indigenous descent are disproportionally affected because, as white spaces and places, schools are inviting and hospitable to white students but othering of cultural difference. It is these issues that we have spent the last few years addressing through our practice in teacher education programmes. Our attempts to ‘de/colonise’ (Bhattacharya 2018) this work, focusing on our learning from the specific context of our research with pre-service teachers in a mid-western province of Canada, are explored in the following section. 76

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De/colonising educational relations The course that has been integral in our development of theory and praxis in de/colonising educational relations is offered as an elective course to pre- and in-service teachers on a yearly basis for pre- and in-service teachers. Titled, ‘Culturally Responsive Literacy Education’ (CRLE), it introduces a framework for understanding the significance of de/colonial approaches to language and literacy within differing social and political contexts. Central to the course is a one-on-one tutoring element in which the pre-service teachers work with a young adolescent from a marginalised and minoritised community for one hour a week over eight weeks. The young people are all in care at a residential centre which provides for their social, emotional and educational needs. They are predominantly of First Nations and Métis descent, and therefore from communities who have historically been subject to cognitive, emotional and physical violence by the education system (Cote-Meek 2014). Most of them have been failed by the school system. Frustration and failure have often led to anger or withdrawal, a lack of interest in learning, and a lack of trust in teachers. Specialised education is provided at the residential centre to stabilise the student’s behaviour and build academic skills, as well as a transition programme with local schools bridging education provision between the centre and re-entry into mainstream schooling. It is students in the transition programme who are selected to work with the pre-service teachers in the tutoring component of the CRLE course. The course uses different lenses to understand the concepts of space, place and boundaries and the contribution these can make to understanding the role that power plays in the classroom. In this we raise awareness of white possessive narratives and counter them by introducing narratives that encourage thinking about ownership ‘otherwise’. The course explores how pre-service teachers might utilise the ideas of invitation and hospitality in their teaching in ways that break down the boundaries that separate, in order to equalise power. Within this broad framework, the course aims to develop pre-service teachers’ understanding of: de/colonising approaches to language and literacy education; how to work positively and respectfully with students from various cultural, linguistic, and ethnic communities; the importance of developing relationships with learners that are based on a critical ethics of care; how learners’ funds of knowledge and cultural capital influence their language and literacy development. In the winter of 2015, Fatima invited Fran to Canada to learn from what she was doing in the CRLE course. This, along with Fatima’s previous studies on the course, provided opportunities to observe pre-service teachers developing educational relationships with young people of First Nations descent in the spaces provided for in the weekly tutoring sessions at the university. Our entry points into our ongoing research have therefore been the ‘situated everyday practices’ in those sites which have provided us with opportunities ‘to apprehend colonially ordered relations’ and to foreground ‘both embedded colonial perspectives and possibilities for anti-colonial ways of seeing’ (Nxumalo 2016: 643). These entry points have been supplemented by our own audio-recorded hyper-self-reflexive discussions on our

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respective roles in the course, and the pre-service teachers’ descriptions of, and reflections on, their practices in an online discussion forum and their assignments (all names have been given a pseudonym for confidentiality purposes). Here we bring these together in line with the métissage approach adopted for this chapter.

Invitation and hospitality In the winter of 2015, about halfway through the course, we recorded a conversation in which we reflected on our experience of working together for the first time. The extract below indicates how our positionalities affected how we interpreted this experience. Fatima spoke about how she had noticed Fran sitting apart from the pre-service teachers in class, and doing the same when the young adolescents came for their first tutoring session. Fatima: And then again when the children came there was the same sort of situation happened where you sat on the stool and were writing notes while things were going on around you and I thought ah, okay. So it’s different, that, it’s different ways of being and there’s nothing wrong with your way of being just as there’s nothing wrong with my way of being, so I just have to figure out how to work with your way of being and I wonder if you see what you’re doing is a different way than what I’m doing and that neither one... Fran: Um, I do think we have a different approach to teaching, um absolutely and my dilemma about sitting on the side that particular session,...is that I...I didn’t know what my role was, so I felt a bit, am I a teacher, am I part...I honestly didn’t...I was trying to find my way into what my role was...Because I’m not a student and they don’t see me as a student. Why should they because I was introduced not as a student. I’m a prof from another university…So I always worry in that sort of a situation that if I go and sit with a group of students I’ll put them off and they’ll talk in ways that they wouldn’t do if I wasn’t there. So I impede learning. Fatima: But if you didn’t know the content that was being taught...or just had an idea, wouldn’t you be better off to sit with others so that you could all learn together? So what I...so this is just our different perspectives and your way is not wrong or right or, um, it’s certainly, um, I guess the thing that came to my mind is that it was a show of power. Fran:

I’m a guest in that space.

Fatima: You’re a teacher. Fran:

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Yes, but only because you invited me and we didn’t talk beforehand about how our roles would – we’re sort of working it through as we go, so I am probably behaving differently here to how I would at home because I’m uncertain and feeling, yes, uncertain. It’s not my space. The rules of how that space works aren’t clear to me.

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Fatima: Yes, I can see that. Can I make an observation? Fran: Hmmm. Fatima: When I came to your lecture at Exeter, the lecture to your grad students, I didn’t know the content or the reading...but I immediately sat with your students around the table. I didn’t sit next to you or apart from them. I positioned myself as a learner, I engaged in the activities with the learners. Fran: Hmmm. Fatima: Yes, so I didn’t feel that I...I was a guest. I don’t know who those people are or anything like that but I put myself in that position of humility saying, okay, I’m learning as well. So all I’m trying to say is that there are different ways of approaching things. We have chosen this extract because it illustrates an enactment of invitation and hospitality in an educational space. There is a guest-host dynamic between Fran and Fatima which, when interpreted from their respective loci of enunciation, leads to misunderstandings representative of the dualities of coloniser/colonised, centre/periphery, insider/outsider that are intimately and mutually co-dependent, yet also ambiguous and contradictory; dualities that, while incommensurable and seemingly irresolvable, can be held in productive tension such that, through a focus on difference, learning takes place and perhaps a new understanding emerges (De Sousa Santos 2014; Dussel 2012). The difference in this instance is between Fran’s way of learning, which is to observe from the sidelines as a non-participant, and Fatima’s way of learning, which is to inhabit the role of learner as a participant. In retrospect, Fran’s position can be interpreted as a stance that separates researcher from researched and assumes ‘objectivity’ of her single lens; Fatima’s position can be interpreted as a relational stance that seeks to diminish the potential power of her professorial role by foregrounding her learner self. It also illustrates how, in the face of Fran’s reluctance to acknowledge her power using the tactics of denial and avoidance associated with white fragility, Fatima changes language to clarify meanings, and to ‘soften’ the message in order to keep the conversation going, a tactic people of colour learn because, as Fatima expresses later in the conversation: ‘I’ve had to learn how to negotiate being in the boundaries and into the centre and back and forth and sometimes...when I am in the mainstream space and something just doesn’t sit right for me...I have to keep my mouth shut. So, for example, if we didn’t have this conversation I probably wouldn’t have explained more about the issue that went on in the classroom.’ This is what makes the intercultural nature of our research collaboration so vital to the work we are engaged in – the dynamic between us in some ways mirrors the dynamic between Fatima, as transnational scholar of colour, and the pre-service teachers who take her class, the majority of whom are white settler Canadian.

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Reimagining educational spaces as inviting and hospitable Early on in the course, there is a workshop in which the pre-service teachers are asked to do a visualisation exercise of a special place from childhood that they then record in an annotated drawing and a narrative written in the first person to explain the place and the meaning they attach to it. In groups, they then combine elements of their drawings and narratives to create a special place in a shoebox in which there is a sense of community as well as each person being able to recognise their individual identity. This activity aims to show pre-service teachers how they could access the funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti 2005) of the student they would be tutoring without ‘interviewing’ them. Critical reflections at the end of the workshop make connections with spaces, places and boundaries (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich 2017); invitation and hospitality within a relational pedagogy (Pirbhai-Illich & Martin 2020); and culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings 1995) based on home, family and community cultures and literacies. The shoebox works both tangibly and metaphorically to show how it is possible to reimagine spaces for learning as places that are not only bounded (the confines of the box), but also open (what is created in the box is directly related to other people, places and times as visualised by the students), and emergent (there is no ‘template’ to replicate, every shoebox place is unique). The value of the activity is appreciated by pre-service teachers as ‘a good way to get to know your students without forcing them to share things. In this activity, they get to choose what they want to share!’ (Michelle, week 2 reflection) What is striking in the pre-service teachers’ visualisations year on year is that they are almost all in outdoor spaces – gardens, farms, play parks, woods, beaches, rivers. Pre-service teachers are deeply connected to these spaces, which are memorable for what they afford in terms of unsupervised play, social gatherings, family relations and learning. In their descriptions and reflections, examples of learnings ranged from ‘how to catch minnows’ (Michelle), and ‘how to get eggs from the chickens and how to move around the cows without scaring them or making them angry’ (Janette), to ‘organising ourselves to create a game plan, who had what for equipment, where to have refilling pools, whose yards were in or out of bounds’ in order to have a ‘massive water fight’ (Rick). In the pre-service teachers’ descriptions and reflections, few of them questioned their right of access to the land and assumed that this access and the experiences afforded were available to all, of which some of them quite literally took ownership, as this example demonstrates: each summer, at the lake…‘Every family would bring their boats, beach chairs and blankets which we would spread out and make one large blanket claiming our territory’ (Janette). In terms of the broader societal context of their relations to land, although many of the pre-service teachers identified themselves as white, fewer identified as white settler, and only one of them acknowledged her position as ‘living on Treaty 4 land but originally from Treaty 7 territory’ (Rachel). The pre-service teachers do the same, or a similar, activity in the first two sessions with the student they will be tutoring. In these, about 50 per cent of the adolescent students visualised an outdoor space, and 50 per cent visualised either indoor spaces, such as a bedroom or a sitting room, social spaces (for example, being part 80

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of a hockey team), or virtual spaces (for example, Fort-night). Those who visualise outdoor spaces (boating, swimming in the lake, fishing, hunting) seem to have a deeper connection to particular places linked to their First Nations or Métis heritage. The indoor, social and virtual spaces perhaps indicate the reality of some students’ lives who have experienced drug- or gang-related violence, who are in care and/or have lived with a series of foster families, and whose relation to land is therefore troubled and transient. Students who have such experiences will seek other ways to create spaces of belonging; for example, in her assignment, Deandra wrote about how Brittany (student, age 14) told her she had visualised her school (at the residential home where she was in care) ‘because it’s one of the places I felt, like, the most comfortable…and I met a lot of people who changed my life, I guess’. Beginning the tutoring sessions in this way is intended to establish a space for relating that is dialogic, reciprocal and in which the teacher builds a relationship with the student that is orientated towards ‘being with’ rather than ‘doing to’. The preservice teachers are asked to audio-record the first tutoring sessions and to critically reflect on how they interact with the student for an assignment. Suzanne reflected on how relating to the student’s funds of knowledge opened up a more relational space for them to work in: ‘Notably, once I was able to tap into one of Evan’s funds of knowledge, it created opportunities for me to develop questions that were more inviting and interesting to him. After this, I began to notice that our conversations began to evolve, reflecting a more permeable, porous boundary within the space and place of the tutoring sessions.’ However, some pre-service teachers found it challenging to try a different way of being and relating. Deandra became aware of how much space she took: ‘I am the one doing most of the talking…I noticed that I asked her lots of questions to try and get to know her, but I never gave her an opportunity to ask me anything’ and resolved to be more attentive to their conversations in subsequent sessions, giving wait time and space for Brittany to participate. In their written reflections and assignments, it is noticeable that the pre-service teachers use a lot of inclusive language. For example, early on in the tutoring sessions, Janette wrote that she aimed to ‘create a space where everyone is loved’, ‘to make sure that all students’ histories are taught and respected’, and to create ‘a space for students’ identities and knowledges to be shared and welcomed’. We have found this one of the most challenging aspects to question because the story pre-service teachers tell themselves is that they are people who deeply care about being inclusive of all students and it comes as a shock to hear that their ways of caring are culturally determined and have just as much potential to do harm as those who are deliberately colonising (Pirbhai-Illich, Pete & Martin 2017). Another challenging dimension concerns what we have called their euro-western, colonial teacher ontologies (Martin & Pirbhai-Illich 2016) that are borne of their long apprenticeship as students in their own schooling and as pre-service teachers in their internships. These ontologies have created habits of mind that are deep-seated and practices that seem second nature and therefore are hard to disrupt. Thus, although the shoebox activity creates space for a different sort of educational relationship in which the student’s funds of

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knowledge provide the knowledge base and content focus for a small inquiry project, there remains the expectation that the pre-service teacher must ensure that they raise the student’s achievements with regards to curriculum objectives for literacy and math. In other words, pre-service teachers are challenged with both learning a new way of relating, and at the same time balancing this with their habitual teacher practices and, for some, the latter take over. An example of this comes from Sheila whose student, Kyler, drew one of his foster homes: ‘for his happy place, it was on a farm with trees for miles and he lit up as he talked about it’, but rather than draw on the funds of knowledge Kyler had from living on the farm, she chose to use hockey because he also shared that he knew a lot about hockey. Perhaps this felt like more of a comfortable knowledge base for Sheila to use. Nevertheless, the de/colonial framing (theories, practices and content selection) of the CRLE course does have an impact on some pre-service teachers and, by the end of the course, there is evidence that they are beginning the process of de/colonising themselves through explicitly attending to the whiteness/coloniality of their teacher selves and expanding their ontologies to include those that are relational. The words of two pre-service teachers illustrate these changes. Janette, reflecting on the materiality of classroom spaces, wrote that ‘a classroom with very white-settler views would have students sitting in desks that face the board …for many of our students this can be a very oppressive teaching practice’. She also reflected on the spaces she wanted to create for plural knowledges and difficult topics in her future classrooms, writing that she wanted to ‘teach topics that are not always comfortable to talk about such as colonisation, decolonisation and our living treaty responsibilities as people living in Canada. I have come to realise that when working with decolonial methods, we often become uncomfortable because our "white-settler" norms are being challenged and we usually do not like that. I think that as teachers, if we are comfortable, it is potentially not very meaningful. We must begin to work towards being comfortable with being uncomfortable.’ Sharon had a moment of realisation when listening to the audio-recording of the shoebox activity. ‘At one point I silenced Ron. I wanted to add white foam to the edge of the water because that’s how I remembered it in my special place. On the other hand, Ron had funds of knowledge about how foam is dirty so he only wanted it on the side of the shore he wasn’t fishing on...but I ended up putting foam all the way down the shore, discrediting what Ron knew…this learning moment will affect my future sessions – I traditionally see myself as the giver of knowledge. In fact this is an oppressive practice... I will ensure in future sessions that I create places and spaces that defy traditional boundaries and make room for Ron’s voice, knowledge and experiences.’ In her final assignment, Sharon stated that ‘I now pay more attention to the spaces, places and boundaries I create for learning and think about how they are set up and how that determines who has power. I examine whose ways of knowing are present, and where I can make room for different ways of knowing. I now view learning and teaching as a partnership where both parties have equal responsibilities for teaching and learning – it is a two-way road. Each teacher is a learner and every student is a teacher.’ 82

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Beyond possession: Reimagining educational relationships in higher education At the beginning of the chapter we stated our aim of taking seriously Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang’s (2012) assertion that de/colonisation is not a metaphor by exploring the relationship between land, identity and education. We have argued that educational spaces and the relationships within them are white possessions – that is, they are constructed according to a white, colonial, object-focused ontoepistemology that is binary and hierarchical, that creates exclusive categories, that claims the superiority of its own logic and thus seeks to dominate and possess other ways of being and knowing with the goal of reforming them in their own image. When the concepts of binary, categorical, property-bound thinking are applied to education, we can see the coloniality of the classroom ‘box’ – each class/box is separated from the others by four walls with a door, each school is separated from the community by a fence with a gate and a buzzer at the main door so people requesting entrance can be screened. The space for learning is therefore bounded and closed. Within classrooms, space and material resources (arrangement of desks, where the teacher is located in relation to students) are organised to produce hierarchical relations based on ideas of order, discipline and competition, and classrooms constructed in this way have been substantially reproduced without question over the last two centuries (McGregor 2003). The cultural ways of being and doing that create classrooms in this way are familiar to students who are themselves part of the mainstream but are unfamiliar/othering to students whose ways of being and doing are ‘other’ and who are thus automatically disadvantaged. Using a box-like mentality, teachers interact with students as if they are a homogenous group, adopting colour and cultural blindness. From within the same framework, teachers may interact with students as individuals, working in a more thoughtful way to ensure that everyone can be successful. However, the teacher would continue to be the one who ‘owns’ the space and holds all the power. When a de/colonial, relational onto-epistemology is applied to educational spaces and relationships, the classroom is not merely the physical backdrop to social action or a metaphor for the social environment. Instead, space is seen as relational, both producing and a product of social practices and material arrangements. There is a move away from the inside/outside binary to view educational spaces ‘as intersections of a unique constellation of relations…An interrelation of multiple elements in space & time: people, materials, curriculum, technologies etc., in “a practice-relevant” configuration’ (McGregor 2003: 355). If we cease to focus on the classroom as a box-like container, it is possible to think of the students as moving in and out of this place, of their extension to the wider community (space) and to different knowledges. From this perspective, educational relationships focus on the ‘inter’ space that is intercultural, inter-epistemological and reciprocal: teacher-student, student-teacher and student-student. Over time, as everyone gets to know one another, the boundaries between people, their ways

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of being and their knowledges become more permeable; the classroom is a critical intercultural space of interaction and interrelation, people learning with and alongside each other about each other in ways that are explicitly attentive to how power is enacted. We argue that if the teacher is inviting and hospitable and open to breaking down boundaries and giving up some of the power (which does not mean absolving responsibility), it is possible to open up spaces in which students feel they can participate, can share ownership of the space, and see their voices and knowledges being taken up in the teaching. To summarise: 1. At the heart of education is the relationship between subject-identities (and this assumes a plural species understanding of subjects), materiality (and this includes considering all material as living) and spirituality (aesthetic, religious, existential, cosmos, other-wordly). In other words, it is the teacher’s role to develop spaces for critical interrelations. 2. These interrelations are predicated on an orientation towards others that is open to ‘being and learning with’ rather than ‘doing to’; that is not tied to an agenda or objective, and that has a spiritual dimension. It is an emergent coming into being. 3. This foregrounds ethical considerations and how power might be enacted to create inviting and hospitable spaces for learning. This means the teacher sharing her identity as an invitation for the students to share theirs, and thus inviting their cultural practices and ways of being and knowing into the classroom space. 4. As this happens, and students also interrelate in similar ways, their boundaries may become more open and porous, and their sense of self or identity will expand and become more fluid – shifting and changing with each interaction. These are, for us, a prerequisite to de/colonising the curriculum. It is putting these into practice that we argue enables us to work with pluralistic knowledges, and de/ colonial ways of being and doing education. To quote from our recent book: This work requires a commitment: a commitment to discomfort, a commitment to questioning oneself and one’s identity, a commitment to engagement with difficult truths and alternative histories, a commitment to developing ethical relations with the other, a commitment to being taught in unexpected ways in unexpected situations by unexpected people, a commitment to seeing learning from the other as a gift, a commitment to critical and hyper self-reflexivity, a commitment to letting go of investments which support unearned privileges, and a commitment to investing in new ways of being and doing (Pirbhai-Illich, Pete & Martin 2017: 253).

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Notes 1

We use the term de/colonising with a slash in the same sense as Kakali Bhattacharya ‘to denote the lack of a pure utopian decolonising space by being in an always already relationship with colonising discourses and materiality. Therefore, de/colonising denotes a movement within, in-between, and outside colonising discourses and decolonising desires’ (Bhattacharya 2018: 15).

2

In this vein, we echo Veli Mitova’s cursory treatment of what might be gained in the project of bringing two traditions into conversation with one another, as detailed in note 30 of Chapter 2. Like Mitova, we here, do not have the scope to deal with this matter in detail and thus merely suggest at it as opposed to detailing it in-depth.

3

Canada, South Africa, Australia – figures not available; US – 80 per cent of public school teachers are white (Loewus 2017); UK – 86 per cent of state-funded school teachers are white (Department for Education 2018); New Zealand – 70 per cent of state school teachers are European (data provided by ethnicity not race) (Ministry of Education 2018).

References Baker A, Quayle A & Ali L (2018) Reflexivities of discomfort: Unsettling subjectivities in and through research. In N Oke, CC Sonn & A Baker (Eds) Places of privilege: Interdisciplinary perspectives on identities, change and resistance. Leiden: Brill Battiste M (2011) Knowledge as a key site for decolonisation. Accessed 28 March 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evxpt0u4tOU Bhattacharya K (2018) Colouring memories and imaginations of ‘home’: Crafting a de/colonizing autoethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 18(1): 9–15 Chambers C, Hasebe-Ludt E, Donald D, Hurren W, Leggo C & Oberg A (2008) Métissage: A research praxis. In A Cole & J Knowles (Eds). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Chawla D & Atay A (2018) Introduction: Decolonising autoethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 18(1): 3–8 Coetzee JM 1988 White writing. New Haven: Yale University Press Common Ground (2019) Connection to country. Accessed 28 March 2019, https://www. commonground.org.au/learn/connection-to-country Cote-Meek S (2014) Colonised classrooms: Racism, trauma and resistance in post-secondary education. Black Point: Fernwood Publishing De Sousa Santos B (2014) Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. Abingdon: Routledge Department for Education (2018) School Teacher Workforce. Accessed 16 June 2019, https://www. ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/schoolteacher-workforce/latest Dussel ED (2012) Transmodernity and interculturality: An interpretation from the perspective of philosophy of liberation. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(3): 28–55

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Fox O’Mahony L (2006) Conceptualising home: Theories, laws and policies. London: Bloomsbury Gonzalez N, Moll LC & Amanti C (2005) Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practice in households, communities, and classrooms. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Grosfoguel R (2011) Decolonising post-colonial studies and paradigms of political economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(1): 1–37 Haig-Brown C (2009) Decolonizing diaspora: Whose traditional land are we on? Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry 1(1): 4–21 Haig-Brown C & Dannenmann K (2002) A pedagogy of the land: Dreams of respectful relations. McGill Journal of Education 37(3): 451–468 Harris, CI (1993) Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707–1791 Hasebe-Ludt E & Jordan N (2010) May we get us a heart of wisdom: Life writing across knowledge traditions. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 7(2): 1–4 Kapoor I (2004) Hyper-self-reflexive development? Spivak on representing the third world ‘other’. Third World Quarterly 25(4): 627–647 Ladson-Billings G (1995) But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into Practice 34(3): 159–165 LaDuke W (1999) All our relations: Native struggles for land and life. Cambridge: South End Press Lear J (2006) Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Loewus L (2017) The nation’s teaching force is still mostly white and female. Accessed 16 June 2019, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/08/15/the-nations-teaching-force-isstill-mostly.html Martin F & Pirbhai-Illich F (2015) Service learning as post-colonial discourse: Active global citizenship. In R Reynolds, D Bradbery, J Brown, K Carroll, D Donnelly, K FergusonPatrick & S Macqueen (Eds) Contesting and constructing international perspectives in global education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers Martin F & Pirbhai-Illich F (2016) Towards decolonising teacher education: Criticality, relationality and intercultural understanding. Journal of Intercultural Studies 37(4): 355–372 Martin F & Pirbhai-Illich F (2017) Places, spaces and boundaries: A critical look at the relational in geography classrooms. In S Catling (Ed.) Reflections on primary geography: Proceedings prepared for the 20th Charney primary geography conference. Charney: Register of Research in Primary Geography McGregor C (2003) Making spaces: Teacher workplace topologies. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 11(3): 353–378 Mignolo WD (2007) Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of decoloniality. Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 449–514 Ministry of Education (2018) Education counts teacher workforce statistics. Accessed June 2019, https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/statistics/schooling/workforce/teacher-workforce Moreton-Robinson A (2015) The white possessive: property, power, and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

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Nxumalo F (2016) Towards ‘refiguring presences’ as an anti-colonial orientation to research in early childhood studies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 29(5): 640–654 Pirbhai-Illich F & Martin F (2019) Understanding hospitality and invitation as dimensions of decolonising pedagogies when working interculturally. In P Bamber (Ed.) Teacher education for sustainable development and global citizenship: Critical perspectives on values, curriculum and assessment. London: Routledge Pirbhai-Illich F & Martin F (2020) De/colonizing the education relationship: Working with invitation and hospitality. Critical Questions in Education 11(1): 73–91 Pirbhai-Illich F, Pete S & Martin F (2017) Culturally responsive education: Working towards decolonisation, Indigeneity and interculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan Prasad R (2004) Countryside retreat. The Guardian, 28 January. Accessed March 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jan/28/raceintheuk.raceequality Proshansky HM, Fabian AK & Kaminoff R (1983) Place-identity: Physical world socialisation of the self. Journal of Environmental Psychology 3(1): 57–83 Qazimi S (2014) Sense of place and place identity. European Journal of Social Science Education and Research 1(1): 306–311 Tuck E & Yang KW (2012) Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1(1): 1–40

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L A C I H P PHILOSO , Y T I L A U T X E T N CO D N A S E I G O G A D PE Y T I L A I DECOLON

5

Socratic Social Criticism in higher education Siseko H Kumalo

Introduction Recently, higher education has been presented with the historical task of thinking through the call for decolonisation. This is an historical task in two ways; in the first instance – Historically White Universities (HWUs) in our context were never presented with the demands that were put to them by the student body and academics alike, between the 2015–2017 academic years. The University, prior to the historical moment that saw the rupture of the sector owing to calls for decolonisation, existed as a unitary institution that espoused a singular culture (an English culture and identity in the case of Rhodes University, the University of Cape Town (UCT), the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Natal:1 a Zuluness at the University of Zululand; Afrikanerdom at Stellenbosch University, the University of the Free State and the University of Pretoria (UP); Xhosaness at the University of the Transkei; Colouredness at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and an Indianness at the University of Durban-Westville).2 This singular identity that constituted the values, mores and understandings of the University was challenged by a student body that was no longer uniform and monocultural. The contemporary student body had become diverse, multicultured and defined by cross-cultural pollination. This change in the composition of the mono-culturalist identity was first engaged with and addressed by UWC under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor and Principal Jakes Gerwel, who defined the institution as a leftist-leaning University – in open defiance of the apartheid state – through an open access policy in the early 1980s (Anderson 2002). UWC was the first Historically Black University (HBU) that grappled with undoing the apartheid raciality that sought to define the sector. This might be the reason why Jansen (2017: 104) maintains that: Only one historically black university in South Africa has defied the apartheid odds […] Like the other bush colleges, the University of the Western Cape was designed to fail. It was heavily staffed by second-rate Afrikaner academics who could not make the grade at the well-funded establishment universities such as Stellenbosch.3 The second historical aspect that Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) were forced to confront spoke to an historical undertaking; universities in the country were pressed once again to enliven their historical commitment to humanity, what Bill Readings (1996: 5) calls ‘the historical project of culture’. While institutions might want to claim that they were and continue to be engaged in this project, the advances of decolonisation by students and Black/Indigenous intellectuals prove this claim to be rooted in the one-dimensional idea of culture as a euro-western invention. 90

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Simply put, the University, in our context, abandoned its historical role as the producer of culture through failing to graduate a critically aware and responsive citizenry that was also engaged in the polity. My reader might want to object to this formulation on the very premise of my preceding claims regarding #FeesMustFall and the #MustFall movements, which were characterised by diversity and multiculturalism. I say that the University failed to produce a critically aware citizenry on the basis of the onedimensional view adopted by the student body. Students, while laudably ‘woke’, as it were, became reductionist in their thinking – failing to see the complexity that constitutes the South African constitutional project of nation-building. This abandonment of the historical role of the University came to haunt this institution as the demand/charge for decolonisation/decoloniality. To frame the concept of culture, specifically in the University in our context as a euro-western invention is premised on the reality that the peripheral cultures – Zuluness, Xhosaness, Colouredness, Indianness – that defined the ‘bush colleges’ are synonymous with institutional failure, for as Jansen (quoted above) noted, there was only one institution that did not succumb to this classification of institutional failure – by his measure. This, the euro-western conception of culture, is taken further by white intellectuals and administrators – in their framing the desire for Africanisation and decolonisation as a devaluation of standards and the loss of meritocracy in HEIs. Raymond Suttner (2010: 515) frames this thinking so: ‘[Africanisation] is controversial for many in South Africa, because it is seen, along with affirmative action and “playing the race card”, as one of the ways in which merit is devalued.’ Moreover, when Blackness/Indigeneity is imagined to have culture, as Mahmood Mamdani (2001: 31) put it, our cultures are imagined as fixed, unchanging and are the invention of coloniality, for ‘the post-colonial state accepted as “authentic” the colonial construction of the native: as an ethnic being ruled by a patriarchal authority with an authoritarian and unchanging custom that needed to be enforced officially as “customary” law’. This epistemically biased belief does little to resolve the ‘biting pains of phenomenological issues worrying the continent that creditably compels us to engage in finding ways to survive as a people and live with other peoples, to resolve our problems and to progress4 like the rest of the world’ (Chimakonam 2018: 1). The contestation to this claim, that the University has abandoned its timeless obligation to produce a critically aware and responsive citizenry through a commitment to its participation in the historical project of culture, is framed by Sioux McKenna et al. (2016: 170) as follows: If universities understand knowledge to be a market-responsive product with currency, then their job would be to ensure their graduates have cutting-edge workplace skills and problem solving abilities. But, by and large, universities resist this simplification and seek to attend equally to notions of critical citizenship and public good. While I am inclined to agree with this point, it is clear from Siseko Kumalo’s argument (2020) how this conception of the University is gradually being lost as

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the institution becomes more corporatist. The corporatisation of HEIs is implicitly lamented by Adam Habib5 (2019) when he unreservedly details the task of balancing corporate demands and the democratic principles of governing a university. Writing about the political crisis that was #FeesMustFall, Habib (2019: 79) maintains that ‘all of them [non-executive-staff] effectively operated from the assumption that public education should be fully funded by the state; they gave no thought, therefore, to trade-offs between competing priorities’ (emphasis added). In this respect, I draw my readers’ attention to the second historical moment that defined the protests that swept through higher education: the University was revealed to be consistently betraying its historical definition – as a site of the production of culture. This move away from the University as producer of culture might be ascribed to Readings’ (1996: 13) diagnosis when he maintains, ‘the University no longer has to safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation-state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself ’. In articulating the crisis of HEIs as the betrayal of their historical call in their participation in the project of culture, this can be framed as a colonial trope, manifesting as the internalised colonisation of a black, queer intellectual who is still holding onto historical understandings of the University.6 For as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 78) argues, ‘it is “vanguardist scholarship/vanguard theorising” which breeds such arrogance as to even refuse to recognise other people’s language.' This counter-linguistic lexicon, as it were, that is decoloniality, which contests the traditional conception of the University, might be framed as a rejection of the notion of an historical participation in the project of culture. The rejection, if taken to have merit, would then contest the very foundational principle from which I am writing – that suggests an historical participation in the project of culture. What my framing seeks to demonstrate, however, is that the conception of the University that is taken as the starting point of my argument is responsive to the local challenges that our communities encounter, owing to the reconceptualisation of how ‘the institution ought to function’7 (Kumalo 2020). In this way, I seek to demonstrate – through my argument – how the claim of an African University participating in the historical project of culture is no longer lost to the reader; this institution becomes the mechanism by which we address the biting phenomenological pains that afflict our local communities. In a more radical proposition, the African University – once decolonised and truly an African institution and not rather a westernised university that finds itself on the African continent – becomes the tool by which coloniality of being is itself resisted through the inculcation of a culture that affirms the epistemic and ontological schemas of Black/Indigenous people.8 There are two components to contend with in the African University that is decolonised and subsequently participates in the historical project of culture: one being the diversity in culture that is brought into the contemporary university owing to the fact that higher education is framed as a social institution that will ameliorate historical injustices.9 Diversity is framed as a paradigmatic shift that reframes the institution into a responsive tool that engages the realities of the people it is meant to serve. As Kumalo (2020: 1) puts

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it, ‘a redefinition of higher education institutions’ public accountability in terms of responsibility to their “institutional locale” or community […] can be an effective “proactive tool” with which higher education can redress social injustices.’ Second, the decolonial demand, which revealed how the University has betrayed its historical commitment to the project of humanity, showcases the historical magnitude that defined the decolonial moment in South Africa. By historical magnitude is meant the opportunity that lay in aligning the policy objectives of the White Paper 3 of 1997 with the ambition of addressing sociopolitical realities through higher education in the country. It was in this moment that the country was presented with the opportunity of ‘rethinking thinking’, as suggested by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018). Furthermore, the reader will appreciate how these two components that are addressed by the African University that is decolonised are themselves interlinked. The link between the two positions is derived from the fact that one cannot get to addressing the historical magnitude of the demand for decolonisation without first accounting for the paradigmatic shift – that even momentarily sought to (re)-define the sector in alignment with the White Paper 3 of 1997. With university administrators viewing decolonisation as another institutional tickbox exercise, and intellectuals monetising this historical moment as an opportunity for career advancement and promotions through publication outputs, decolonisation was at the crossroads, like transformation, of losing its moral and ethical impetus in the academe. The reader will recall Lis Lange’s (2014) fundamental contribution that treated the task of Rethinking Transformation and its Knowledge(s), wherein she made the case for how transformation had become vacuous in HEIs. This vacuousness that is attempting to define the decolonial turn in our context misses the opportunity to analyse and think carefully about sociopolitical, economic and historical problems through the humanities and social sciences. Through the sanitisation and academicising of decolonisation, we created of this historical moment an unrecognisable academic discourse that is removed from the sociopolitical realities of the majority.10 When the reader considers the underlying rationale for decolonisation, they will come to the realisation that the students who drove it were fundamentally questioning the ontological elision of Blackness/Indigeneity in the country. Put differently, students took issue with an education system that was unresponsive to their very real existential dividedness that was marked by the reality of existing in the lush, manicured campus of UCT, and going home to a dehumanising bucket system that forces Blackness/ Indigeneity to confront its faeces; a dehumanisation marked by Blackness/Indigeneity living with and among its own excrement. It was a confrontation of this reality that drove UCT student, Chumani Maxhwele, to carry said human excrement onto campus and demonstrate his existence – physically perform his political existence – through pouring this ‘shit’ on the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Even in this moment, a great number of white decolonial thinkers missed the point. Maxhwele’s act, while a sheer confrontation of colonialism and continued coloniality, sought to express the reality that the actions of CJ Rhodes were still being felt by the Black/Indigenous being who

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was being forced to confront their perpetrators’ actions on the beautifully manicured lawns and gardens of their campus through the statue of Rhodes. In Maxhwele’s act, the academe was privy to the confrontation of two world views; one premised on domination, dehumanisation and dispossession; and another that attempts to piece together fragments of existence after an encounter with this violence. The act of piecing together the fragmented realities of Blackness/Indigeneity is described as the act of ‘re-membering’ in the decolonial tradition (see Kumalo 2018a; NdlovuGatsheni 2018; and wa Thiong'o, 2009). With decolonisation (mis)-framed in some quarters as a return to a precolonial temporality, the underlying reasoning behind this move is to suggest that decolonising the University will undermine the cornerstone value of criticality.11 This claim fails to take seriously the role and function of decolonisation12 in South African HEIs contemporarily. Decolonisation calls for the posing of historical questions that were aimed at deciphering the role of the University on the continent. Ali Mazrui (1978) frames these questions as a distinction between academic freedom and academic democracy. He inquires: ‘[how] widely distributed is the right of participation in academic decision-making? How effectively are different interests within the institution represented within the structure of power? How powerful are heads of departments, deans, the vice-chancellor and administrative committees of the university?’ These questions suggest the fundamental prerogative of decoloniality and decolonisation as intellectual movements and tradition. From its earliest articulation, decolonisation in the South African context has been interested in opening up closed spaces in HEIs so as to direct knowledge with the intention of making it responsive to the ills affecting the challenges of society.13 This move, insofar as it is an espousal of decoloniality, is aligned with redressing how the University was used in the country in bygone years. In Chapter 9, Ulrike Kistner substantiates this point, revealing the imbrications between philosophy, education and theology at UP and the subsequent requirement for decolonisation. To reiterate the point made by Jonathan Chimakonam (2018), who echoes the aims of the White Paper 3 of 1997, the University in our context is defined as a vehicle for social change, with decolonial theorists substantiating this call through propositioning for the democratisation of knowledge. Decoloniality in this sense becomes a move towards the realisation of academic democracy, therefore, undergirding the notion of epistemic plurality in the University. It is on the basis of this framework and mode of thinking that I deal with Socratic Social Criticism as a principle that advances the democratisation of knowledge, along with a renewed commitment to criticality. This renewed commitment comes as the continuous investigation and consideration of the sociopolitical context in which the University is located. In simple terms, decolonisation is useful insofar as it turns the criticality of the University in on itself. As academics, intellectuals, students and administrators – each public of the University is forced to confront how it is using its powers to ensure that the institution becomes not only responsive, but furthermore proactive, in addressing the challenges of its locale; i.e. public responsibility in the case of a public institution. I tease this out in my argument in

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three moves; first by way of considering how the decolonised and epistemically just University mediates a dilemma. The second consideration deals with an objection that may be levelled against the proposition I put forward in thinking through and mediating this dilemma. In the final move, I sketch a reply to the objection which is formulated as Socratic Social Criticism from a local context; I do this by way of appealing to the work of William Wellington Gqoba (1906/1888) in his Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo.

Mediating a dilemma: An institution reconceptualised ‘and if the white man thought that Asians were a low filthy nation, Asians could smile with relief – at least they were not Africans.’ (in Kallaway 2002) I, here, perform a diagnostic analysis – if one would call it such – that frames how the reconceptualised University might assist us in mediating a dilemma; one that was instituted by the historical realities that define the sector in our context. By diagnostic analysis, I mean to contextually locate the dilemma that can either produce a parochial or perennial institution. Parochialism can stem from an uncritical and unthinking commitment either to state ideology or a decolonial agenda that is exclusionary and essentialist in nature.14 This dilemma then, that I sketch out in this section of the chapter, is rooted in the competing interests of an historical and contemporary conception of the University; interests that are sharply focused by the decolonial charge that aims at epistemic plurality and the democratisation of knowledge production, so as to confer upon each epistemic framework due deference in any intellectual exchange within the confines of the University. The first of these competing interests lies in the protection, promotion and reproduction of academic freedom, which allows the intellectual the space to think and make sense of the world; the capacity to develop theory that advances humanity. This principle is framed by John Higgins (2001: 2) as ‘too important to realising the ideals of a participatory democracy to give up without a fight’. To the ideal of participatory democracy, I put the question – who gets to participate in this democracy in the University? With decoloniality aiming precisely for the attainment of participatory democracy within the University, my reader ought to (re)consider Mazrui’s (1978) question(s) once again. When reading this claim15 of an ideal of participatory democracy as the assertion of the refrain of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, it inspires great debate and relies on academics strictly adhering to Thomas B. Davies’ definition. I should qualify that this adherence to Davies’ notion of academic freedom misses the point of his intentions, as he intended a system predicated on freedoms that would see the University participating in the historical project of culture. Davies’ definition of academic freedom reads as follows, that academic freedom is ‘our freedom from external interference in (a) who shall teach; (b) what we teach; (c) how we teach; and (d) whom we teach’ (Higgins 2001: 8). A strict adherence to these principles without acknowledging the political undercurrent that may be a commitment to a state-driven ideology – as was the case in South Africa’s Afrikaner

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universities – is at odds with the framing of my second principle, which suggests that the University needs to respond to local demands of the context in which it is situated. Defined as a space that is undergirded by reason, logic and the potentiality of advancing human kind through the development of scientific knowledge, the historical conception of the University can be challenged for its European underpinnings. These underpinnings substantiate a detached understanding of academic freedom that is not responsive to the locale in which the institution finds itself. Framing the University through the use of these undergirding principles further buttresses the use of criticality, reason and logic as the main arguments that divorce the political from the academic enterprise. To put it crudely, the dilemma in the South African context arises from a conception of the University that protects the absolute freedoms of the academic. Defending academic freedom from apartheid incursion on the autonomy of institutions, Steven Friedman and Omano Edigheji (2006: 2) contended that, ‘it was predictable that this insistence on drawing an ethical line beyond which the state should not venture tended to be seen as a protest against tyranny, not a selfish attempt to avoid public responsibility’. However, I maintain that this ethical move became the refrain used in the HWU to forestall substantive academic democracy postapartheid. I make this claim on the premise that in the City State of the University, specifically in our context, these absolute freedoms enjoin a hierarchy of existence that sees whiteness at the helm of the City State. To answer the question that I posed earlier concerning who the participants are in the context of the ideal of academic democracy, it would seem that it is the white professoriate that constitutes the highest decision-making body in a university – the Senate. In this framework, we ought to consider the following that gives us our dilemma: a) in a context where academic freedom and democracy are ideals enjoyed only by those who have been historically privileged to occupy the position of the most senior citizens in the City State that is the University; b) with these most senior citizens using the claim of knowledge for knowledge’s sake as a means to depoliticise the knowledge project – we arrive at the question/dilemma of c) competing interests between an historical understanding16 of the University and a contemporary requirement that this institution redress historical injustices. The same report (Friedman and Edigheji 2006: 2) quoted above concurs with my diagnosis when it claims: Leaving higher education to its own devices could, in this context [of a legitimately elected democratic government], be seen not as movement away from oppression but as abrogation of responsibility, for it seemed certain to allow white-run institutions to remain islands of privilege, immune from the pressures for racial equity which the new order was meant to pursue. The reality of post-apartheid South Africa inspired a number of considerations with respect to how the University ought to function, specifically under its new form as a socially responsive institution. Framing the University as a socially responsive institution meant two things, which, when read together, accentuate my claim of a 96

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dilemma. First, that knowledge – irrespective of which discipline one speaks from – can no longer be taken as apolitical and ahistorical. In the second case, the political and historical underpinnings of knowledge meant that the University was now required to be responsive to the demands of the polity – exercising or demonstrating public responsibility. The first, knowledge as politically and historically situated, subsequently speaks to the reality that the humanities, disciplines such as art, philosophy and literature, could no longer hide behind the claim of aesthetics (knowledge for knowledge’s sake).17 In literature, as was the case for the literary scape of the country, this disciplinary domain began to focus itself on how it treated the subject (matter) of apartheid. Zoë Wicomb (2018/1993: 58) observes: indeed, in the plethora of conferences in Europe and the U.S.A., writers are routinely asked whether the removal of apartheid will not also remove our subject matter and therefore the impetus to write, a question that perversely casts apartheid as an enabling system. From this claim, there a few things that can be said; however, I will limit myself to an observation of only two issues. The first deals with the notion of apartheid as perversely framed as an enabling system (the political as embedded in the aesthetic treatment of a literary text), while the second deals with the role of the University in reframing the narrative around culture in the South African context (the public responsibility assumed by the intellectual in the disciplinary domain of literature). These two, apparently, competing frameworks, when read/understood from the vantage point of a reconceptualised institutional make-up, work to mediate the given dilemma I am considering presently. It is important to note the role of the University with regard to how it was conceptualised in the early post-apartheid years of South African constitutional democracy; a framework sketched out in the White Paper 3 of 1997. This framework is such that, contemporarily, there is a move to reconsider the aims of framing higher education as a social institution that would ameliorate social injustice of an historic kind. On the first matter, however, namely, the perverse claim of apartheid as an enabling system, it is useful to consider the function of apartheid in our context. While I am in agreement with Wicomb (2018 /1993) that this system was intended for the debasement of Blackness/Indigeneity, one cannot hide from the reality that it did enable some – white intellectuals who relish(ed) in the pain and suffering of Blackness/Indigeneity. By relish(ed) I mean to point the reader’s attention to the acclaim that white scholars got from/for writing about the pain and suffering of Blackness/Indigeneity. Their acclaim, while useful in highlighting the injustices perpetuated by a system of violence and inhumaneness against Blackness/ Indigeneity, did not appreciate nor seriously address the experiential conditions of Black/Indigenous subjectivity. As whiteness uses Black/Indigenous labour to acquire its wealth,18 when propounding the claim of an aesthetic object such as in the literary disciplines, we are once again privy to whiteness using Blackness/Indigeneity to acquire fame, acclaim and literary kudos. Consider for instance, Alan Paton (1948: 65) in his renowned Cry, the Beloved Country, wherein he writes: 97

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I say we shall always have native crime to fear until the native people of this country have worthy purposes to inspire them and worthy goals to work for. For it is only because they see neither purpose nor goal that they turn to drink and crime and prostitution. In treating this literary artefact as an aesthetic object (knowledge for knowledge’s sake), we abdicate Paton (1948) from his own position as a conscious literato, while undermining the truth of the matter that indeed apartheid was an enabling system for white writers. This enabling environment is dealt with by JM Coetzee in his White Writing (1988). Furthermore, the intellectual that would de-throne Paton from his self-directed position as a conscious literato – conscious insofar as his subversive writing acquired him acclaim and status as a white writer – fails to recognise their public responsibility in a democratic society. In this brief example, we vividly see the dilemma that the contemporary university is meant to address. This dilemma is the competition between the historical conception of the University and the contemporary demands that this institution should play a social bridging role of facilitating the re-articulation of a mutual humanness from either side of the cleavage that defines one as separate from the other. The role of bridging these gaps, either through socioeconomic development, the recognition of the sociocultural position of Blackness/Indigeneity, along with its epistemic frameworks and their value, or the sociopolitical conditions that define Black/Indigenous life – these moves are what constitute the public responsibility that a reconceptualised university ought to address. At the dawn of democracy, Wicomb (2018/1993: 59) made a startling claim that is useful to consider when thinking about the decolonial agenda as it was advanced by students; she maintains that ‘we have all become rather perversely attached to apartheid. How will black people, long accustomed to dispossession and deprivation, adjust to a new condition of not being racial victims?’ This question is useful insofar as it showcases the shortcomings of the White Paper 3 of 1997, which can be read as continuously locating Blackness/Indigeneity in the role of victim. However, this claim can solicit an objection using the very same legislative mechanism. As indicated in note 9, the idea behind an integrated higher education system was to unlock the potentiality that lies within the broader community of the South African public, framed as the aim to ‘create a learning society which releases the creative and intellectual energies of all our people towards meeting the goals of reconstruction and development’ (DoE 1997: 1). While considerable scholarship, developed by the humanities and social sciences, has addressed the question of historical injustices, specifically as these pertain to the apartheid project, it is useful to consider whether this line of inquiry has not become an arresting reality that we are unable to get away from. Put differently, it might be useful to inquire as to whether the revelatory line of thinking that marks much of the scholarship that decries apartheid is aligned with the aim of reconstruction – newly innovative construction that is removed from the historical links that continue to stifle our imagination – or whether this objective is subsumed by a fixation with the state of victimhood, premised on a

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racial system. My thinking is informed by Wicomb (2018/1993: 65) once again when she maintains: We need a radical pedagogy, a level of literacy that will allow our children to read works of literature that will politicise them into an awareness not only of power, but also of the equivocal, the ambiguous, and the ironic that is always embedded in power. This literacy and – in some respects, awakening – is required owing to the fact that the contemporary University is pressed once again to assume its historical role as the bearer of culture. This comes as Blackness/Indigeneity ought to assume its agency that is legislated through the White Paper 3 of 1997. This legislation as actioning agency is exemplified in Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1964 /1965: 13) contentions in Black Orpheus when he writes, When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you – like me – will feel the shock of being seen.19 My concern or intrigue lies with the final sentence in the above quoted excerpt, ‘here are black men standing, looking at us, and I hope that you – like me – feel the shock of being seen’. My fascination with this claim comes partly as a question: how has Blackness/Indigeneity used its gaze in our context? My question is inspired by the idea of public responsibility as Black/Indigenous intellectuals are now assuming their role as leaders in HEIs across the country. This returns my analysis then to Friedman and Edigheji's (2006: 21) observations, when they treat the matter of public responsibility thus: The line between irresponsibility and independence is often purely in the eye of the beholder. It is hard to imagine a formula which could plausibly guarantee that this tension is resolved in a way which both does justice to the imperatives of accountability and protects the academic enterprise. The two tensions seen as a) the imperatives of accountability (speaking to the very question of public responsibility and responsiveness); and b) the academic enterprise (the participation of the University in the historical project of culture) both showcase the dilemma that I have sketched in this section. A possible mediation of this dilemma might be found in the complete reconceptualisation of the University. In this instance, I take my cue from Kumalo (2020: 8) when he writes: To deliver on social justice entails responsiveness and accountability from the university towards its local community. This accountability shifts from a vertical model to a horizontal one. Accountability framed as horizontal delivers on demands for social justice highlighting the link between social justice, public accountability and the holistic schema.20 99

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This shift solicits a repudiating objection from scholars such as Higgins (2001) on the basis of supposedly marrying public accountability/responsibility with the academic enterprise. To frame this objection cursorily, Higgins (2001: 5) maintains that ‘this [buttresses the ability of each group interpreting academic freedom], in accordance with the apartheid ideology which, like any ideology, sees itself as merely reflecting “the realities of the situation” without the refraction which the bias of others introduces’. Higgins’ (2001) framework would suggest of my proposition of a reconceptualised University, an infringement on the historical project of the academic enterprise. The framework developed by Higgins, therefore, is reminiscent of that developed by Richard Rorty (1999) in arguing for a principle of academic freedom that is absolute. Rorty (1999) is useful, however, in his admitting that his conception is utopian. In a context such as South Africa, where the historical reality has seen the use of knowledge for the oppression and dispossession of a majority by the minority, the way in which the University can respond to the dilemma I have sketched above is by way of assuming a locally responsive/globally relevant knowledge framework. This is to say that I am proposing a marriage between the University and State objectives of redress and social transformation. This proposal is predicated on Kumalo’s (2020) notion of a university system that delivers on both epistemic and social justice in the South African context. It is on the basis of this proposition that I now consider an objection.

An objection: ‘Post-coloniality’ and its fallacies I, here, deal with an objection that can be levelled against my proposition as detailed above, in terms of how we deal with the dilemma of a ‘post-colonial’ university. The reader should pay mind to my orthography, which is to say that in this section, I am not dealing with a decolonial university, but rather a ‘post-colonial’ institution. My shift seeks to unearth the fallacies that are attendant upon the post-colonial context, as I am not convinced that we are yet in the post-colony – to borrow from Achille Mbembe’s (2001) writing. My fundamental disagreement with the notion of a postcolonial state (state here being taken to represent a double sense in the state of being that portends the political state) in our context is premised on the objection that I aim to sketch in this section of the chapter. I treat this objection in the following section, as here I am only interested in staking the claim of the objection. My interest in this objection is in keeping with the Socratic Dialogue format, as my argument has been developed or set up in the form of a Socratic Dialogue. I understand post-coloniality to assume a complete move away from coloniality into a condition whereby we are no longer haunted by the shadow, or, as Walter Mignolo (2011) puts it, The Darker Side of Modernity. My analysis, along with giving a reply to the objection in the following section, also treats the problematics of a ‘post-colonial’ university. I am here interested merely in the objection that can be levelled against my proposition. The objection then comes as the contestation of what I frame as a marriage between the State and the University. In Higgins’ (2001: 16) contention:

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This service [the proper discharge of the duties of the intellectual] is that traditionally associated with academic freedom: the university is the one place in society whose function is the pursuit of truth, not for direct commercial advantage or in the service [of] a political ideology, but for its own sake, and in the firm belief that no society (and certainly no state bureaucracy) knows in advance what knowledge will come in useful. To discharge the duties of the intellectual/academic/professor without interference from the state amounts to the ideal of absolute academic freedom. Prior to interrogating the problems with absolute academic freedom, it is useful to consider its positive spin-offs. Absolute academic freedom, as framed by its proponents (Higgins 2001: 16), ‘is a humble reminder of blindness and short-sightedness, the simple fact that so many crucial inventions have been discovered by accident and not design, or by the turning of an apparently failed or useless research project to another direction.’ In this sense, the marriage between the University and the State jeopardises the capacity of the intellectual to pursue knowledge unencumbered by the demands of those who dispense public funds for research and inquiry in the City State of the University. The marriage of the University and the State stands to contravene the definition of academic freedom, if we hold to a radical reading of Davies’ articulation of the concept. To this end, Higgins (2001: 8–9) elaborates on Davies’ definition thusly: we desire at all times (a) to be permitted to appoint our staff on the grounds of their fitness by scholarship and experience for the research and teaching for which they are needed, (b) that the staff duly appointed shall teach the truth as they see it and not as it be demanded by others for the purposes of sectional, political, religious, or ideological dogmas or beliefs, (c) that the methods of teaching shall not be subject to interference aimed at achieving standardisation at the expense of originality or orthodoxy at the cost of independence, and, lastly, (d) that our lecture theatres and laboratories shall be open to all who, seeking higher knowledge, can show that they are intellectually capable of benefiting by admission to our teaching and are morally worthy of entry into the close intimacy of the great brotherhood which constitutes the wholeness of a university. From this framework, it is useful to consider the historical implications of this understanding of academic freedom. In its simplest terms, I aim to interrogate this definition in the section that follows, using contextual analyses of our sociopolitical condition. This is done with the intent purpose of showcasing how decoloniality is not, in fact, a betrayal of the principles of academic freedom and democracy, but rather seeks to uphold these values as they have been enshrined in the Constitution.

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A reply: Criticality, social and epistemic justice 'Zonk’izinto ziingaka nje, Azikho na ngale nene? Khon’ukuba inyaniso, Imi ngakutshaba lwakho, Iyekwe na? Ishiywe na? Igqutywe na? Igqwethwe na?' (Gqoba 1906/1888: 49) To begin with, I wish to remind the reader of Friedman and Edigheji's work and how they frame public responsibility. They (Friedman and Edigheji 2006: 16) suggest that public responsibility is an obligation that institutions owe the community, a matter framed as follows: ‘the obligation owed…to the public, the ultimate sovereign in a democracy, for explanation and justification [signifies what is meant by accountability as responsibility]…Accountability is the price citizens extract for conferring substantial…discretion and…responsibility [to the university].’ This extraction – which is framed as the community being kept abreast with the workings of the University – is intended to keep the institution responsive to the local challenges of the community. The demand that the University be responsive comes from the legislative framework that governs the sector, namely the White Paper 3 of 1997. One could read the legislation as being committed to these ideals owing to the fact that, as maintained by Tebogo Lebakeng, Manthiba Phalane and Nase (2006), the South African University, specifically the HWU, has functioned with the intent aim of serving a student body that is imagined to have the experiences and life journeys of students from London, Hull, Manchester and Paris. This imagined student who is removed from South African reality, as indicated in the first section using the work of JM Coetzee, is predicated on the transplantation of the University, as a colonial institution, from these locales of the European metropole into our context. While Coetzee deals with the occlusion of Blackness/Indigeneity in our context, the reader might appreciate how this occlusion continues through the denial of the epistemic frameworks of Blackness/Indigeneity to this day in the South African University. In decrying this reality, Gqoba (1906/1888: 47) was among the first to observe the problematics of colonial education on the native subject, and he frames this impact in the following way, ‘nokuba kukwizindlu ezifundisa amashishini, nokuba kusezikuleni zomthinjana, tu nto yona siyenzelwayo ngoku ngaba bantu. Mna okwam, nindibona nje sendincamile, ingaba nini kambe madodana, nani mthinjana wakowethu eningaba nisakholwa; koko ningekabaqondi aba bantu kuba nisengabantwana.’21 In light of Gqoba (1906/1888) lamenting the problematics of colonial education, considering the claim of ‘post-coloniality’ subsequently frames how I will treat the objection to my argument. In the first instance, I want to direct the reader to the reality addressed by Kumalo (2019) wherein he troubled the problem of Black/Indigenous people being denied authority over their own knowledge systems. Kumalo (2019: 116) maintains that 102

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the issue in South Africa goes back to the disqualification of the Black/Indigenous being as a thinking being, a position that is substantiated by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 80) when he maintained that ‘denial of being automatically denies epistemic virtue. This is simply because non-humans do not produce knowledge. They might have instincts but not knowledge’. This denial of being is seen in the case that holds that knowledge in our context is knowledge only insofar as it is produced by whiteness. This claim, seen in how the leading theorists of Ubuntu are white scholars in South Africa begins to address what is meant by the concept of the fallacies of postcoloniality. While I appreciate the ideal of democratic principles which are supposed to govern the South African sociopolitical landscape, there is no escaping the reality that relations between Blackness/Indigeneity and whiteness in the country are still governed by animosities reminiscent of Fanon’s observations in Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon (2008/1952: 74) maintains: but if he [the black man] forgets his place, if he thinks himself the equal of the European, then the European becomes angry and rejects the upstart, who on this occasion and in this “exceptional instance” pays for his refusal to be dependent with an inferiority complex. In light of these contestations of being, which suggest an interrogation of the fallacy of a post-colonial condition22 in our context, I move on to consider the principles of academic freedom, against the objective of academic democracy as they are treated by Mazrui (1978). Davies (cited in Higgins 2001: 8) maintained that academic freedom means, the freedom ‘to be permitted to appoint our staff on the grounds of their fitness by scholarship and experience for the research and teaching for which they are needed’. I am inclined to inquire about the kinds of knowledge that are produced in the contemporary South African University. The decolonial demand pressed that the knowledge produced and taught in the contemporary University in the country be responsive to the local challenges of the people. To this end, it is useful to consider a question posed by Ranger (1968: x) when he inquired whether African history, as discipline, ‘had developed the methods and models appropriate to its needs or [if it] had depended upon making use of methods and models developed elsewhere’. This question inspires an interrogation of the demographics in the South African context, specifically as these relate to the question of institutional appointments under the guise of academic freedom. Put simply, are those who are appointed in our universities addressing the objectives as they were laid out by the White Paper 3 of 1997, which intended to redress the sociopolitical structure of South Africa using the higher education institution; the University? Students across the country challenged, as late as the 21st century, curricula that did not speak to their lived realities and experiences – substantiating the claim put by Kumalo (2018b) in maintaining that the HWU created of the contemporary student, a Native of Nowhere. In light of this reality, the student uprising – which contested the place of the intellectual as the omniscient knower – suggests that the freedom in institutional appointments was not addressing the challenges as envisioned by the legislation in the sector. It is for this reason that Friedman and Ediheji (2006) hold public responsibility as

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an undergirding principle that guides the other sacrosanct principles that govern higher education (namely academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability). The report (Friedman and Edigheji 2006: 22) is substantiated then when it inquires: ‘when does the insistence on freedom become a self-indulgent abdication of social responsibility – a profound form of “irresponsibility"?’ A simple reply to this question would be to suggest that this happens when knowledge is no longer serving the broader interests of the social context in which the institution finds itself; this is when freedom becomes a profound form of irresponsibility. My framing here should not be mistaken as a unidirectional conception of public responsibility that erodes institutional autonomy, but rather should be treated as a mechanism that aids us in democratising the knowledge project. This aim at democratisation is what the decolonial theorists and Mazrui (1978) are calling for, specifically as the decolonial debate finds itself manifesting in the South African context. On the second matter, ‘that the staff duly appointed shall teach the truth as they see it and not as it be demanded by others for the purposes of sectional, political, religious, or ideological dogmas or beliefs’ (Higgins 2001: 8), I put Hannah Arendt’s (1961/1954) objection to this claim. While this second tenet is useful, it is interesting to inquire as to whose truth is being taught by the academics that claim to be teaching said truth? In the second chapter in this volume, Mitova treats this question in some detail, defending her argument against the objections of relativism, incommensurability and irrational moves that do little to uphold the philosophical project. I am inclined to read Mitova more generously than Higgins (2001). The main difference between the two positions, or so I find it, is that Mitova takes care to assume what Arendt (1961/1954: 11) terms joint responsibility – a proposition framed as follows, ‘anyone who refuses to assume joint responsibility for the world, should not have children and must not be allowed to take part in educating them’. While, the reader might object and claim that in the context of the University, we are not dealing with children but rather with adults who are able to make their own decisions and discern for themselves between that which is right and that which goes against their values, I put it to the reader: how much influence does the student body have in determining curricula in the University? This question is once again aligned with the objectives of academic democracy as addressed by Mazrui (1978). Furthermore, was it not this precise limitation on the capacity to influence the institution, through its curricula, that gave rise to the demands for decolonisation as they were propounded by the student body? In simple terms then, while I am appreciative of Davies’ definition – in the case of academic freedom as a value that is not influenced by anyone in how intellectuals teach and what it is that they teach, it is useful to inquire as to which truth is being taught, a question that is reminiscent of Alisdair MacIntyre’s (1988) seminal treatise Whose Justice? Which Rationality? On the third matter, ‘that the methods of teaching shall not be subject to interference aimed at achieving standardisation at the expense of originality or orthodoxy at the cost of independence’ (Higgins 2001: 8), I put this claim against the work of Gqoba, (1906/1888: 49) in writing:

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‘Aba bantu bayakhetha, Kuyinene inanamhla. […] Aba bantu baPhesheya, Ngabaze kusibulala Basihluthe nomuhlaba, Asinawo namakhaya It is useful in this context to consider the importance of how Blackness/Indigeneity perceived and continues to interact with education in the South African context. In Gqoba’s (1906/1888) contention, it is this very education that has dispossessed the native. This dispossession came in the form of alienating the Black/Indigenous subject from their modes of knowing. Black/Indigenous knowledge was framed, owing to coloniality, as a backward and primitive way of being. Gqoba (1906/1888: 54–55) writes, ‘Babefika kusagquma Ingonyama yobumnyama; Kusanukwa, kusasikwa, Kusanqulwa iminyanya, Kuthinyulwa ngoQamata Kusalinywa ngemithathi, Kusabethwa oozihadi, Kusaleqwa, kusadudwa, Amaphulo esaphunywa, – Uyolile nomuhlaba; Eth’umfana xa esenga Awuphuz’ememelela; Eth’imazi yakwaGcina Owoy’seng’woy’bophelela.’ Zidwelile kwaneemvaba, Oozinkomo besalila;’ One of the pivotal things that the reader should note from the composition cited above is the dismissal and epistemic injustice that was endured by Blackness/Indigeneity, owing to the epistemic impositions of coloniality in our context. While I have troubled the issue of integration elsewhere, it is clear to note that coloniality did not even think to integrate African modes of knowing into their conception of a civilised and educated Black/Indigenous class. This rejection of African thought also manifested as the resistance to standardise teaching and learning, along with the institutions that dispensed knowledge to the Black/Indigenous subject that was being forced to learn euro-western culture and values. This resistance to standardisation is also indicative

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of the fact that academic freedom was only upheld insofar as it concerned white institutions, a reality that substantiates the claim that whiteness never saw Blackness/ Indigeneity as having the capacity to think. The lack of and resistance to standardisation is what resulted in this discriminatory behaviour noted by Gqoba (1906/1888: 49). This culminated in the differential treatment that was codified in the Bantu Education Act (1953) and, later, in the Extension of University Education Act (1959). These legislative mechanisms further substantiate my minor objection to Wicomb’s (2018/1993) notion of apartheid being perversely framed as an enabling system as detailed above, with the main idea suggesting that indeed this system was enabling for whiteness in the country. This is to say that the principle of academic freedom, as we see it being defended and upheld by white intellectuals in our context, served only to benefit the interests of white intellectuals and scholars, and subsequently why the sector witnessed the historical moment that demanded equality and substantive participation in the knowledge project through decolonisation. In its simplest understanding, decolonisation aims at substantive freedom and the participation of all in the knowledge production economy. It is on the basis of this reasoning that one can and should question and challenge principles that have been taken for granted in the sector, without the consideration of the impacts that this has for the vast majority in the country. To put it crudely, when considering the decolonial question as it relates to the South African University, there is a need to consider whether the South African University has indeed achieved the objectives set out in the White Paper 3 of 1997. Has the sector been a catalyst for socioeconomic transformation in the country? To what end have HEIs fulfilled the role that they were imagined to play at the inception of democracy in the country? Answering this question will require that I return to the proposition I made in the introduction to this chapter: that decolonisation allows for a criticality that is evaluative of the university itself.

Conclusion In the introduction of the chapter, I put the claim that Socratic Social Criticism allows for the University to turn criticality in on itself. In my concluding remarks, I deal with this claim in more detail. As showcased in the preceding sections of this chapter, the South African higher education landscape continues to grapple with the challenges that started with the arrival of the European colonial settler. In detailing the role of academic freedom in the sector – as it relates to the question/demand of public responsibility – the idea was to show how the principle of public responsibility is aligned with the decolonial agenda in higher education. This was done by way of setting up the debate in a Socratic Dialogue through the form of sketching the problem (in this case this being the dilemma) and proposing a way out of it. The second move lay in showcasing a possible objection(s) to the proposition of how we can mediate the dilemma that is inaugurated by the arrival of the colonial settler and the requisite need to continue coexisting with the settler colonial descendant. The third move was to supply a reply to the objection(s) as a mode of showing how the decolonial demand is aligned with the principles of democratising knowledge 106

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production. To this end, it is important to highlight how the call for decolonisation turns institutional criticality in on the University, therefore allowing for all publics of the University to participate, substantively, in the City State’s democratic institutions, fora and platforms. To flesh out this concluding thought, I return once again to Davies’ definition of academic freedom, specifically his last tenet of knowledge as an enterprise that is open to all. He maintains that academic freedom means: that our lecture theatres and laboratories shall be open to all who, seeking higher knowledge, can show that they are intellectually capable of benefiting by admission to our teaching and are morally worthy of entry into the close intimacy of the great brotherhood which constitutes the wholeness of a university. (Higgins 2001: 9) In light of this claim, of how academic freedom should and must be exercised in the university, it is useful to inquire if indeed this is how the system has functioned. I would like the reader to bear in mind that the charge for institutional decolonisation was also constitutive of the #FeesMustFall demand. This demand is insightful in two ways, the HWUs in the country could and indeed did discourage Blackness/ Indigeneity from these institutions through demanding exorbitant fees in the sector. As this matter has been dealt with in the literature on institutional decolonisation, I will not deal with it here. I merely seek to pay mind to the exclusionary mechanisms that were instituted even as the university claimed to be espousing an ideal that is married to the South African objective of social, political and economic transformation. In the second sense, institutional autonomy can be seen to have had precisely the impact of profound irresponsibility when it comes to its societal mandate. Institutional leaders such as Habib (2019) have defended these exorbitant fee increases on the premise that there was no sustained/increased state subsidy to match the demand in the country. In the very same treatise, Habib (2019) revealed the interconnections between the players in the sector – Ministry, Council on Higher Education, Universities South Africa (previously Higher Education South Africa [HESA]), University Councils and the institutional administrators as well as the publics that constitute the university, the professoriate, intellectuals and students. It is for this reason that I maintain that HWUs used the notion of those who demonstrate that they are ‘intellectually capable of benefiting by admission to our teaching and are morally worthy of entry into the close intimacy […] which constitutes the wholeness of a university’ (Higgins 2001: 9) as a tool to exclude the other.23 This exclusion did not come in the form of intellectual exclusion but in the form of financial exclusion in the new South African University. This form of exclusion goes to show that this institution is not new, but rather continues to be predicated on the institutional logics of the exclusionary, elitist and ivory tower conception of the University that prevailed under apartheid years. Decolonisation then, demands a new institution and one that is not only responsive but also espouses the principles of public responsibility. It is for this reason that I claim that decolonisation – read through Socratic Social Criticism – turns criticality in on the University and works towards democratising the institution.

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Notes 1

Inasmuch as I claim that these institutions espoused a similar culture, it is important for the reader to note that there were subtleties and nuances in how each defined these institutions in their respective forms. While I am suggesting that there were similarities in the cultures of these institutions, there were also differences that each made these institutions standalone through their political underpinnings. For a more considered treatment of this idea, I would recommend Worger (2014).

2

This list should not be read as exhaustive of the categories that define the university topography in the county. What is useful to note, however, as argued by Jansen (2017) and substantiated by Almeida and Kumalo (2018) is the reality that these institutions were seen to be bush colleges. ‘They were located in isolated, mostly rural areas – hence the adopted name “bush colleges” for the collective of ethnic universities birthed by the apartheid state through the ironically named Extension of University Education Act of 1959’ (Jansen, 2017: 104). Almeida and Kumalo (2018: 6) substantiate this claim and go further when they maintain, ‘we must acknowledge the similarities between HBUs and HWUs. By similarities, we allude to specific forms of administration, direction and structure which stifled the capacity of HBUs to define themselves either in opposition to or against the apartheid state.’ The role and function of these institutions, while different in the sense of separatist education, which is itself critiqued by Jansen (2009: 260) who argues that ‘[moreover] separate education simply hardens the boundary lines that separate young people coming in from already divided communities’, these institutions were similar in their conceptualisation and how they functioned to serve the state.

3

Anderson (2002) makes the poignant observation that the cultural composition of this institution was challenged by the open access admissions policy instituted by Gerwel (who was at the time the VC), as the institution was, for the first time, forced to grapple with the competing racial interests of two identities (Coloured and Xhosa) that were in competition with one another at the institution. Jansen’s (2017) framing of UWC as one of the institutions that did not succumb to the historical reality of being a failed institution speaks to the ways in which UWC managed to pre-empt and circumvent many of the challenges that came to define the HBU in post-apartheid South Africa.

4

The concept of ‘progress’, as Chimakonam (2018) refers to it, is troublesome in its continuation of problematic categories of thought that are rooted in colonial logics.

5

Adam Habib was the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 2013 to the end of 2020.

6

In this conception of the objection that can be levelled against my assertions, it is interesting to note some of the inherent contradiction with which the reader has to contend. One cannot downplay the effects of coloniality on the subjectivity, personhood and ontology of Blackness in our context and other colonised territories.

7

Kumalo (2020) breaks from the historical conception of public accountability that defines the South African higher education landscape. He proposes rather the use of public accountability that is aligned with the aims of advancing social and epistemic justice. His re-articulation of public accountability from a vertical to a horizontal accountability will be useful in framing the role of Socratic Social Criticism as I develop it in this chapter.

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8

Any critical reader will have an objection to this framing of the University. I would understand their objection to be premised on the fact that my argument seems to be framing higher education as a sociopolitical tool that is implicated in the political struggles of its participants and not an objective apolitical and ahistorical undertaking. My response to such an objection is framed through the analysis of Boughey and McKenna (2015: 7) who traced the discourses of teaching and learning and found that the dominant discourse was driven by the ‘ideas (i) that education is asocial, acultural and apolitical and (ii) success in education is dependent on factors inherent to the individual’. This framing of education is what has allowed higher education practitioners and theorists on student success in higher education to blame the student for their failure in higher education, while concealing the reality that educational desire is determined by the politically constitutive components that dominate in any given society as suggested in the introduction to the volume.

9

This claim is premised on the White Paper 3 of 1997 in its articulation of the function of higher education in South African society as follows – through the foreword to the policy document by then Minister of Education, Bengu (1997: 1), ‘The transformation of the higher education system to reflect the changes that are taking place in our society and to strengthen the values and practices of our new democracy is, as I have stated on many previous occasions, not negotiable. The higher education system must be transformed to redress past inequalities, to serve a new social order, to meet pressing national needs and to respond to new realities and opportunities.’

10 In this sense, I wish to address the contentious point of having knowledge serve as a tangible end. While I appreciate the problematics that can accrue from this end, which frames knowledge as a means, I am equally concerned with a system of knowledge that is unaccountable on the premise of academic freedom. While I appreciate the objection to this argument, as raised in the section that deals with the objection – I cannot stress enough the importance of responsive intellectual work that engages the problems of society as is addressed by Chimakonam (2018). 11 In this claim as well, we see the continued confrontation of these world views. The one is attempting to make sense of an alien environment into which it was cast owing to the depravity of colonial violence. The lingering historical reality of having to confront this violence is framed by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 43) as coloniality, which ‘differs from postcolonialism as it is not an “after” of colonialism’. 12 My reader will recall that I discussed the ways in which Africanisation and decolonisation are seen by white scholars and academics, who subsequently claim that these projects stifle and get in the way of meritocratic promotion and advancement. This claim, as it comes from white quarters in our country, elides the very real implications of colonialism and the separatist thinking of apartheid South Africa. Suttner (2010: 518–519) frames the implications of this thusly, ‘All colonial projects – and in the South African case also subsequent apartheid projects – are not purely about domination over a range of aspects of the lives of the colonised. They also include notions of knowledge and identity: “Who is what and belongs with whom?” is simultaneously an identity and a knowledge question.’ Decolonisation, as a response to these epistemic harms of systems predicated on concealment and violence, attempts to correct this violence through surfacing the knowledge of oppressed groups and re-membering said knowledge.

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13 In thinking about the role of criticality in the contemporary University, a principle that has been used by white intellectuals across the country as a way of shutting down decolonial efforts, it is useful to consider whose criticality is under consideration. Here, one can consider the seminal question posed by MacIntyre (1988) as to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? This question facilitates a better understanding of challenges we are grappling with, resultantly revealing the modes by which particular circles retain their power and continue to structure these social institutions in ways that perpetuate epistemic injustice. 14 By a parochial or essentialist decolonial agenda, I follow the advice of Grosfoguel (2007: 212) when he writes, ‘this [his analysis] is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, antiEuropean critique. It a perspective that is critical of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism. What all fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality.’ 15 This being the claim of an ideal of substantive participatory democracy can be understood as exclusive when one considers how decolonialists have framed the charge in the contemporary South African University, that alternative modes of knowing be included in this institution. If indeed the ideal of participatory democracy had been achieved, a status quo of that nature would beg the question of why there has been a charge for democratic inclusion and participation in the contemporary University. 16 At this point, there needs to be a distinction made between the historical understanding of the University along with the charge to have the University participate in the historical project of culture. The first of these two categories, ‘the historical understanding of the University’, maintains a system that is closed off – one that limits democratic participation in the University to the select few who are historically defined by racial privilege that was not historically premised on meritocracy. This historical understanding of the University, specifically in the South African context, can be framed as the fruits of injustice, oppression and domination – thus inspiring decolonisation. The second, the University’s participation in ‘the historical project of culture’, speaks to a mode of existence within the University that is aligned with the decolonial tradition. This alignment manifests as the production of culture, through a locally responsive institution that addresses the local challenges of the context in which it is situated. 17 While I am fully appreciative of the contentions raised in note 10 above, I would put it to the reader – as it is a question that I continue to grapple with, even in my own praxis and scholarship; when do intellectuals get the chance to effectively address their desired questions and research objectives without state interference? In simpler form, one could inquire as to whether knowledge production always has to be a means to an end. If the answer to the question is in the affirmative, then a secondary question arises: do we not limit the capacity to discover new knowledge through scientific inquiry and imagination? Furthermore, the affirmative to the primary question presupposes and arrogantly assumes the meaninglessness of disciplines such as Art, Literature, Philosophy and Music, which do not directly frame their disciplinary aims as being responsive to societal problems/questions. I wish for the reader to bear this in mind, while also acknowledging that in our context we are unable to cop-out of the obligations to social justice through higher education, as convincingly argued by Kumalo (2020).

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18 In this respect, I substantiate my claim of the use of black labour with JM Coetzee’s (1988: 5) argument when he writes, ‘what inevitably follows is the occlusion of black labour from the scene: the black man becomes a shadowy presence flitting across the stage now and then to hold a horse or serve a meal’. This point is further substantiated when Coetzee (1988: 5) writes, ‘[this occlusion which dehumanises Blackness/Indigeneity through placing these people in the perpetual place of servant] can be proposed as the just and proper place for the black man only as long as it can be argued that it is a step up from a hut in the wilderness; yet on the farm, where his raison d’être is to perform the work that is the badge of his ascent from the indolence of the wilds, his toil threatens to deprive the white man of the labours that he, as Africa’s new heir, must not only perform but, more important, be seen to perform.’ In probing this reasoning that whiteness uses to continue its unjustifiable exploitation of Blackness/Indigeneity in the country, Coetzee inquires (1988: 11): ‘Do white hands truly pick the fruit, reap the grain, milk the cows, shear the sheep in these bucolic retreats? Who truly creates wealth?’ 19 The idea behind the notion of Black Orpheus auctioning this legislative mechanism is meant to address specifically the question of the Black/Indigenous gaze. This is to say that in contesting the claim of victimhood as it is detailed by Wicomb (2018/1993), we must inquire as to how Blackness/Indigeneity has used this gaze in the democratic era. This inquiry will go some way to indicating whether or not Blackness/Indigeneity has actioned the policy objectives of the White Paper 3 of 1997. 20 The holistic schema refers to the scholarship of Popkewitz and Brennan (1997, 1998) when they write about the social, political and economic factors that influence education desire, either buttressing its attainment or acting as an impediment to said attainment. These scholars maintain that we cannot understand the pedagogic journey without principally looking to these factors which they frame as a ‘social epistemology’ in the pedagogic exchange. 21 The translation to the quoted passage above is as follows, ‘Even in the schools that teach commerce and business, in the schools of our children, there is nothing of worth that we get from these people. I, as you see me have resigned myself of them, it might be you sons and daughters of the nation who might still believe their lies; as you have not yet understood these people, for you are still young.’ 22 I must highlight that I do not deal with this matter systematically in this chapter. I merely point to its existence, and invite consideration on the claim of a fallacy re: a postcolonial condition in our context. This comes as I am interested in revisiting Mbembe’s (2001) treatise On the Postcolony as I am of the view that this debate has not been exhausted, specifically when we consider the charge for epistemic decolonisation. I would suggest that the matter has in fact received new verve owing to the decolonial demands. 23 In the context of South Africa, the Other speaks to the poor, who are historically Black/ Indigenous people.

References Almeida S & Kumalo SH (2018) (De)coloniality through indigeneity: Deconstructing calls to decolonise in the South African and Canadian university contexts. Education as Change 22(1): 1–24

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Anderson GM (2002) Building a people’s university in South Africa: Race, compensatory education, and the limits of democratic reform. New York: Peter Lang Arendt H (1961/1954) The crisis in education. In Between Past and Future. New York: The Viking Press Boughey C & McKenna S (2015) Analysing an audit cycle: A critical realist account. Studies in Higher Education 42(6): 963–975, DOI: https://doi.org.10.1080/03075079.2015.1072148 Chimakonam JO (2018) The journey of reason in African philosophy. In JO Chimakonam & E Etieyibo (Eds) Ka Osi Sọ Onye: African philosophy in the postmodern era. Delaware: Vernon Press Coetzee JM (1988) White writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press Department of Education (DoE) (1997) Education White Paper 3: A programme for the transformation of higher education. Pretoria: Government Printers Department of Native Education (1953) Bantu Education Act. Pretoria: Government Printers Department of Native Education (1959) Extension of University Education Act. Pretoria: Government Printers Fanon F (2008/1952) Black skin, white masks (trans. R Philcox). New York: Grove Press Friedman S & Edigheji O (2006) Eternal (and internal) tension? Conceptualising public accountability in South African higher education. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education Grosfoguel R (2007) The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural Studies 21(2&3): 211–223 Gqoba WW (1906/1888) Ingxoxo enkulu ngemfundo. In WB Rubusana & SC Satyo (Eds) Zemk’ inkomo magwalandini. Claremont: New Africa Books Habib A (2019). Rebels and rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Higgins J (2001) Academic freedom in the new South Africa. Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies 2(2): 1–19 Jansen JD (2009) Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past. Cape Town and Stanford: UCT Press Jansen JD (2017) As by fire: The end of the South African university. Cape Town: Tafelberg Kallaway P (Ed.) (2002) The history of education under apartheid, 1948–1994: The door of learning and education shall be opened. Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman Kumalo SH (2018a) Defining an African vocabulary for the exploration of possibilities in higher education. Alternation 23: 197–223 Kumalo SH (2018b) Explicating abjection: Historically white universities creating natives of nowhere? Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) 6(1): 1–17 Kumalo SH (2019) Knowledge as political: The Philosophical Society of Southern African (PSSA) and the geography of dissent. MA thesis, University of Pretoria Kumalo SH (2020) Justice through higher education: Revisiting the White Paper 3 of 1997. Higher Education Quarterly DOI: https://doi.org10.1111/hequ.12253 Lange L (2014) Rethinking transformation and its knowledge(s): The case of South African higher education. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) 2(1): 1–24

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Lebakeng JT, Phalane MM & Nase D (2006) Epistemicide, institutional cultures and the imperative for the Africanisation of universities in South Africa. Alternation 13(1): 70–87 MacIntyre A (1988) Whose justice? Which rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press Mamdani M (2001) When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press Mazrui AA (1978) Political values and the educated class in Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press Mbembe A (2001) On the postcolony. Johannesburg: Wits University Press McKenna S, Madiba M, Bokana G, Bozalek V, Sabata S, Scott I & Waghid Y (2016) Teaching and learning. In South African higher education reviewed: Two decades of democracy. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education Mignolo WD (2011) The darker side of modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham: Duke University Press Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ (2018) Epistemic freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and decolonization. New York: Routledge Paton A (1948) Cry, the beloved country. New York: Bennet Cerf Popkewitz TS & Brennan M (1997) Restructuring of Social and Political Theory in Education: Foucault and a Social Epistemology of School Practices. Educational Theory 47(3): 287–313 Popkewitz TS & Brennan M (Eds) (1998) Foucault’s challenge discourse, knowledge, and power in education. New York: Columbia University Press Ranger TO (1968) Emerging themes in African History. Nairobi: East African Publishing House Readings B (1996) The university in ruins. Harvard: Harvard University Press Rorty R (1999) Education as individuation and as socialisation. In Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books Sartre J-P (1964/1965) Black Orpheus (trans. J MacCombie) The Massachusetts Review 6(1): 13–52 Suttner R (2010) ‘Africanisation’, African identities and emancipation in contemporary South Africa. Social Dynamics 36(3): 515–530 wa Thiong’o N (2009) Re-membering Africa. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers Wicomb Z (2018/1993) Culture beyond color? A South African dilemma. In A van der Vlies (Ed.) Race, nation, translation: South African essays, 1990–2013. Johannesburg: Wits University Press Worger WH (2014) The tricameral academy: Personal reflections on universities and history departments in 'post-apartheid' South Africa. Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 38(1): 193–216

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The anatomy of epistemicide and the search for epistemic justice: Towards a relevant education Teboho J Lebakeng

The doctrine of discovery and other myths Broadly speaking, the fundamental issue surrounding the consistent and persistent calls for decolonisation of education in general and the social sciences and humanities in particular is informed by the western European colonial encounter with Africa (Lebakeng 2018a). Dynamically understood, such an encounter did not bode well for Africa or Africans from an interculturality viewpoint (Ndlovu-Gatsheni & Zondi 2016). This is so because at the time of the encounter, the colonising Europe considered itself the sole progenitor and prime mover of world history. The irony that they saw their ‘violent benevolence’ as the proper embodiment of humanity in intercultural relations and based it on the ideology of the benevolence of the ‘white man’s burden’ was not lost on Africans. This ‘violent benevolence’ was possible because, according to Costas Douzinas (2013), in classical philosophy, a teleologically determined human nature distributes people across social hierarchies and roles and endows them with differentiated characteristics. In light of this rationale, there also exists the idea that pre-modern societies did not develop a comprehensive idea of the human species. Historically, colonisation was undergirded by the doctrine of discovery, which, in turn, motivated the ‘right to conquest’. This doctrine was an international law whose legal principle facilitated the European claim to superior rights over Indigenous peoples, Africans included. These claims were justified by racial, ethnocentric and religious ideas of the alleged superiority of western European civilisation and Christianity (Lebakeng 2004; Prior 1997). According to the questionable ‘right to conquest’, the conqueror may impose their will upon the conquered with respect to the meaning of experience, knowledge and truth. Premised on this appreciation of the colonial encounter, it is undeniable that terrible injustices were committed through processes of colonialism in which biblical and theological discourse has been a vivifying component in propelling them (Prior 1997). In this sense, western European representations of themselves thrived on philosophical and intellectual dogmatism and staggering brutality that did not appreciate mutual intelligibility among diverse experiences. In Africa, the doctrine gave credence to the claim of the divine gift of land, which enabled colonial settlerism to colonise countries such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Kenya and Mozambique. This means that colonialists not only invaded 114

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and imposed foreign occupation but they literally settled and took dominion of such countries. Effectively, the power of the colonial sword ramified into the epistemological domain is the toxic inauguration of the prevailing epistemic violence and injustice in Africa (Ramose n.d.; Lebakeng 2011, 2016). In light of this, foreign invasion is a negation of all conceptions of territoriality, that is, states, political organisations and cultures that existed within the occupied territories prior to their colonisation were systematically destroyed and their legal and political forms subordinated to the colonial occupation (De Sousa Santos 2016). The consequences lie in the fact that by virtue of the European colonialists’ questionable right, which viewed Africans neither as part of world history nor part of humanity, western European colonisers appropriated the sole, unilateral right to define and delimit the meaning of social experience, social knowledge and social truth for Africans (Lebakeng 2004; Ramose 2002). The African experience did not find expression in depicting the continent, while writings about Africa were replete with falsehood and tended to be ‘doubtful, mistaken and pernicious’ (Magubane 1971). Thus, as per Valentin Y Mudimbe’s (1988) argument, through the colonial project that displaced African modes of knowing and being – western Europe invented and underdeveloped (Rodney 1972) the African continent. For all practical purposes, Africans were excluded from the category of rational beings and thus denied reasoning as a virtue (Ramose 1999). Flowing from this denial, the colonialists usurped the right to unilaterally determine and portray western science as the only universally valid explanation and prediction of natural and social phenomena. This predisposition of European modernity that heralded the exclusion of Africans also promoted a self-made image by proclaiming its knowledge as constituted by objectivity and rationality, thus claiming its status as universal. The devastating consequences of this have been that the institutional capacity, cognitive ability and hermeneutical power of Africans to expressly and communicatively interpret the world through their own symbols and to represent themselves was systematically undermined. According to Ronald Wanda (2013), this has led to a crisis of meaning via life, person and community. It is noteworthy that Africans have long ceased their laughable comparison of which colonialists were better. The fact of the matter is that it did not matter whether these were Germans in Namibia, Belgians in the Congo, French in Algeria, Portuguese in Angola, Italians in Somalia or the Dutch/British in South Africa. Their methods might have differed logistically and substantively but the fundamentals of the colonial project remained rooted in the aim of dehumanising Africans and denying them reason, relevance and meaning. In contemporary post-colonial Africa, western epistemological tyranny still functions in the academy to undermine efforts to inscribe Indigenous African knowledge systems and alternative knowledge production in the curriculum (Lebakeng 2010, 2016). This particular point is critical because post-colonialism refers to the fact that colonialism did not end with the end of historical colonialism (De Sousa Santos 2016). In South Africa, which only attained freedom in the last quarter of

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the twentieth century, the grip of the tyranny is more pronounced and devastating. Moreover, the academy in the country remains resistant to transformation in the area of knowledge production and dissemination. This is supported by Siseko Kumalo’s argument (2018: 200) when he claims that ‘the contemporary university creates the Native of Nowhere, by inducing a state of oscillation through forced assimilation that rejects Blackness owing to its lack of belonging, while maintaining that its Indigenous identity is mythological and fictitious’. Accordingly, the social sciences and humanities disciplines are still fundamentally founded on the canons of western thought, which were stabilised and consolidated in South Africa due to what Boaventura de Sousa Santos, an eminent Portuguese sociologist, poignantly characterised as epistemicide. Epistemicide is the destruction of the knowledge and cultures of Indigenous people, of their memories and ancestral links and their manner of relating to others and to nature (De Sousa Santos 2016). In Africa, it was systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored destruction. Unlike in Australia, Canada and the United States where epistemicide was coupled with genocide, in Africa, the tension between the need for cheap African labour and the desire to usurp and settle on the sunny African continent was not easily resolved by the colonialists. African resistance was pivotal in this respect. Africans, being Homo sapiens qua Homo sapiens, ensured that residual forms of Indigenous systems survived and persisted, including Indigenous African languages. But simply because there was no total destruction or complete obliteration of these Indigenous systems, this does not imply that there was no epistemicide. More importantly, this cannot be reduced to mere erasure as erasure was just one of the many methods used to accomplish epistemicide. What needed to take place following political freedom and decolonisation was the revival of these Indigenous systems. It is this state of affairs that has necessitated the call for decolonisation of education and insistence on the inscription of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as a way of moving towards relevant education and relevant epistemology.

The anatomy of epistemicide and some implications for Indigenous African knowledge Epistemicide is essentially a condition of injustice and falsity that bestows preeminence to the European system of knowledge and inferiorises other systems of knowledge, in particular Indigenous African knowledge systems. It thrives on the systematic destruction of any Indigenous knowledge base that does not converge with the western knowledge system and superimposes an alien system at the expense of the other’s annihilation. In the process, truthfulness around IKS had to be hidden as these knowledge systems were dethroned and almost lost their intellectual appeal and prowess as western powers unfairly determined the knowledge that would be included and deemed to be right in the university and in society. It was such might that was unreservedly used to undermine, displace and destroy long-established ethical values and tested practices of Africans.

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Inevitably, this led to the endorsement of a single rationality and, further, to claims of knowledge that is supposedly true beyond time and space and unconditioned by particularity. The logic was to invisibilise Africans by calling into question their humanity, to dispel African situated knowledges, discount the role of Africa and the Africans in world history and to deny Africa as a source of ideas but affirm it as a place of data gathering. In practical terms, epistemicide undermined African sociocultural realities and annulled the principle of rationality with regard to Africans and closed the African cultural space, hence African cultural traditions as a heritage were never allowed to develop so as to inform and be informed by African imperatives and sensibilities. I use the concept of epistemicide in line with Veli Mitova’s argument in the second chapter of this volume. As acknowledged by Mitova, I appreciate the contestations that have been levelled against this claim in our context, however, as indicated above, the unsuccessful project of fully annihilating our knowledge systems should not be read/understood as the absence of epistemicide. To justify the colonial self-serving moral rectitude and ethical righteousness, Africans were understood on the basis of the epistemology of alterity, which juxtaposed the colonisers as humans and the colonised as sub-human and was sustained and advanced through galvanising pseudo-sciences and mythical discourses and narratives. This othering was meant to justify enslavement, atrocities and even annihilation as part of the strategies of the civilising mission. At the other end, conquest, occupation and forceful conversion were strategies of spiritual or material development, of progress and integration of the innocent, naïve, undeveloped Others into the main body of humanity (Douzinas 2013). Thus, pursuant to the racist desire to universalise categories that come from Europe and North America to the rest of the world, claims of normative authority were made and a deadly monologue was enforced. On the basis of the preceding sketched context, inferiorising Indigenous African knowledge systems would justify their destruction and assist the west in denying culpability in horrific acts of colonialism. It should thus be understood that the prize of dehumanising Africans has been the self-dehumanisation of western colonisers. One cannot engage in barbaric actions and not be barbaric. To recognise the weight of the tremendously powerful association of Africa with inferiority on intellectual work is to address the fact that, as Tsenay Serequeberhan (2012: 145) argues, ‘behind the many and varied perspectives that constitute the philosophical tradition of the west, one finds the singular view – a core grounding axiom –- that European modernity is, properly speaking, isomorphic with the humanity of the human per se’. Thus, if Europe is the epitome of humanity in this dispensation, Africa is conceptually its inhuman counterpart. Or, put another way, the term 'black human' is an oxymoron. In essence, epistemicide was profoundly informed by Eurocentrism, which was itself fundamentally ethnocentric as it was premised on the belief in European superiority,

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European science and the European civilising mission. Such ethnocentrism was extended to seeing other human beings, especially Africans, outside the defining context of civilisation that comprises, among others, philosophy, culture, traditions and aesthetics. Although disguised under a discourse of universality, the reality is that such epistemic and ontological violence ironically expressed and exposed the provincial and parochial nature of European knowledge. This is because, historically, western knowledge was produced by a few men from a handful of countries in the west. It is in this context that Ramón Grosfoguel (2012) asked the following pertinent question: how is it that the canon of thought in all the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities in the westernised university is based on the knowledge produced by a few men from five countries in western Europe? For Björn Freter (2018), this lack of cognisance of multivariate contexts remains central to the western epistemological heritage, which is grounded in myopia and is particularly manifested in white male heterosexual supremacy. Thus, epistemological racism is still very much alive and continues as the white supremacist heritage of the Enlightenment still permeates the education of successive generations of scholars. It is noteworthy that a more nuanced appreciation of epistemicide points to the fact that it was not just the immoral untruths about the darker races, based on the dubious ideas of eugenics (Samuel, Dhunpath and Amin 2017), that informed the logic of knowledge production. This is crucial since in the western European philosophic tradition ‘man is a rational animal’ and did not speak of the woman (Ramose 1999) and was sexist (Grosfoguel 2013). Hence, in post-independence South Africa, universities have continued to be complicit in perpetuating cognitive damage through symbolic violence associated with indifference to the pernicious effects of race and gender identity. Such institutions are typically characterised by centres of power that continue to suppress women academics and make them invisible and voiceless (Naicker 2012) and black women, in particular, face numerous impediments relating to career advancement, research success and overcoming gender-based epistemological stereotypes (Ramohai 2016). The consequence of marginalisation has been that women academics are not critical beneficiaries of transformation imperatives in such institutions (Badat 2010). The toxic masculinity extends to violating and strangulating female students, as demonstrated by the growing impatience and dissatisfaction about these outmoded institutions during the #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall protests in South Africa. We can thus contend that, unlike the west, most cultures uphold the principle that all humans are equal in their humanity. From this flows the idea of justice as giving to the other what is due to them. This claim is reminiscent of the work of Rawls when he writes about Justice as Desert in his theory of justice.1 In practice, this means according equal and non-discriminatory treatment to equal cases. Western colonisation denies that other human beings are equally human. In this regard, colonisation was the double injustice of conquest in an unjust war and the denial of the humanity of the conquered. Premised on the appreciation of these characteristics, 118

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it is clear that western thought is outmoded and remains dangerous. Hence the need to desuperiorise it through visibilising African knowledge systems. As Nicholas Creary (2012) observes, with regard to the production of knowledge of Africa and its representation, the incompleteness of the decolonisation struggle is evident in the fact that Africa today remains widely associated with chaos, illness and disorder – a range of colonial stereotypes that say more about the seer (the west) than the seen (Africa). The effects of epistemicide are still prevalent in the African academy and affect South Africa disproportionately due to false and unfounded historical identification of the country’s exceptionalism that sought to distance it from its African roots and anchorage. Even in this post-colonial period, when one enters any department in the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, the canon of thought is fundamentally founded on theories, methodologies and concepts produced from the west and the theoretical and cultural presuppositions are still entirely western, this notwithstanding variations in representations and pronouncements within the very west. We thus contend that herein lies the crisis of relevance with regard to the social sciences and humanities as their underpinning theories, concepts, postulates, models and methodologies are not anchored in African epistemological and ontological legitimacies, and, thus, are and essentially still represent extrapolates of discrete western European and American socio-historical experiences and cultural specificities (Lebakeng 2000). As such, there is a fundamental disconnect between curricular content and local needs, especially in relation to development imperatives.2 This does not imply instrumentalism but sensitivity to and service to the multitudes of the poor of the African continent. In light of our appreciation of the anatomy of epistemicide and its detrimental consequences, I sympathise with the call for decolonial thinking as a way of recentring African knowledge systems (Ndofirepi & Gwaravanda 2018) for the purpose of the realisation of justice and truthfulness so as to render relevance, meaning and authenticity to the knowledge production economy within the African university (Lebakeng, Phalane & Nase 2006). This is more so because epistemic violence affected Africans in the area of hermeneutics, especially with regard to how Africans interpret western texts by taking them as the gospel truth and gold standard. The acknowledged lasting negative impact of epistemicide in education is that the dominant curriculum in the disciplines continues to be a source of alienation, frustration and despair for African students. The curriculum does not speak to their experiences since it does not reflect the philosophical and social realities of their experiential knowledge that is also defined by the locale in which they are situated. It is in this respect that I continue to argue that the retention of the consequences of epistemicide cannot be ethically and morally justified, hence the need for academic decolonisation (Lebakeng, Phalane & Dalindjebo 2006) to ensure that the curriculum speaks to the imperatives and sensibilities of Africa generally and South Africa in particular. The importance of this assertion lies in the reasoning that follows that by scripting out African ontological experiences, the history of epistemicide in the social sciences and humanities in Africa raises fundamental questions of cognitive,

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hermeneutic and epistemic justice. Thus, the signature features of epistemicide force Africans to search for meaning, reason and relevance through intellectual standpoints derived from rootedness in African conditions and sensibilities and acknowledging and affirming African ontological legitimacies.

Towards epistemic justice and relevant education through combative ontology Although great strides have been made in countries such as Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Nigeria towards making education relevant by sourcing from African archives and ensuring that local iconic figures also inform what is taught, South Africa still lags behind in this respect. In South Africa, intellectuality is still highly decoupled from the existential sociocultural reality of students and the learning process is still mimetic. The academy in South Africa has been stubbornly resistant to radical transformation in terms of making curricula relevant and meaningful and, as such, the prevailing academic mimetism reflects a failure to cut and dispose of the intellectual umbilical cord binding education to the western epistemological paradigm. Such a paradigm was imposed during colonial conquest and perpetuated in the post-colonial era. The result is an uncritical approach to ideas and concepts from the west, the inability to be creative and raise original problems, the inability to devise original analytical methods, and alienation from the main issues of Indigenous African society and failure to tap into Indigenous resources such as Indigenous African systems and languages (Alatas 1972, 1974; Lebakeng 2000; Lebakeng, Phalane & Nase 2006). An appreciation of the impact of colonisation and the spread of Christianity should alert us that tapping into Indigenous sources does not mean that these sources are not problematic. It is noteworthy that African archives, even when conveyed in Indigenous African languages, were written by icons whose ontology and experiences were at the time being scripted out as missionaries were spreading Christianity. An example is the writings of the first sub-Saharan novelist, Thomas Mofolo, who wrote Moeti oa Bochabela (A Traveller to the East) in 1907. He reflected a different instinct when writing his second novel, Pitseng: The Search for True Love, in 1909. In the latter, he had evolved to a higher level of questioning as compared to his uncritical acceptance of the missionary teachings (Kunene 2013). By the time he wrote Chaka, his third novel, he was conscious of the effects of missionary training on writing on Africa. Inevitably, many of the writings in African languages reflect the existential contradictions and their careful and nuanced reading becomes imperative. The urgent need to reconstruct the social sciences and humanities is informed by the fact that as an academic project in Africa, such disciplines have failed to have material bearing on Africa’s re-awakening as they remain warped in their western origins epistemologically, methodologically and theoretically. Their contrived and tendentious nature ensured scholarship that excludes Indigenous African discourse and IKS from policy formulation in the social, cultural, economic, judicial, 120

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constitutional and educational areas (Lebakeng 2010; Ramose 2002). Inscribing Indigenous knowledge and IKS to inform and undergird the social sciences and humanities in the academy, in Africa in general, and South Africa in particular, should be non-negotiable. In fact, this should be a badge of intellectual status and pride worth striving for. After all, it is the responsiveness to one’s contextual specificities that enhances a university’s ability to make unique contribution(s) to the global corpus of knowledge (Habib 2013). These contextual specificities are crucial in affirming epistemological diversity stemming from ontological pluriversality since ‘universal knowledge can only exist in contradiction’ (Mafeje 2000: 67). Africans need not bother themselves about being seen as parochial because as Archie Mafeje (2000: 67) points out, ‘If what we say and do has relevance, its international significance is guaranteed.’ Thus, in order to reverse the consequences of epistemicide, it is critical that Africans proclaim Africanity as combative ontology. Although Africans in South Africa and the continent would have otherwise taken Africanity for granted had it not been for the colonial encounter, the reality is that this fateful encounter constituted the reality that prompts Africans to proclaim it (Mafeje 2000). As Mogobe Ramose points out: ‘Where there is no justice, the ethical resistance to that condition may be described correctly as a combative ontology’ (Personal conversation with Ramose 20 June 2018). If we subscribe to the philosophical insight that motion is the principle of be-ing, and further accept that the consequences of this is to adopt a 'dialectical' approach to history, then the idea of 'combative' is more than pertinent because every historical moment is to be seen as a challenge that ultimately demands change according to the specific circumstances of the time. Africanity as a combative ontology has the dual task of first, placing African discourses at the centre of scholarship on Africa; and second, of dislocating African humanity from the human-inhuman binary that sought to inferiorise and dehumanise them. It behoves Africans to write in the general traditions of Africana warrior-scholars (Baruti 2004, 2010) and in terms of the idea of responsibility of intellectuals to produce work that lends itself to improving society (Chomsky 2008) through reconstructing the social sciences and humanities (Lebakeng 2018b), lest Africans fail to develop combative frameworks that disrupt coloniality. This claim once again substantiates the preceding chapter in this volume, which looks to the development of public responsibility. An important point stressed by Kumalo in the previous chapter speaks to how decoloniality in this regard turns criticality in on the university. For this reason, it is no wonder that scholars across the length and breadth of the country are arguing for the decolonisation of the university, so as to allow this institution to exercise its mandate of public responsibility. In this respect, African students need to walk in the footsteps of many iconic figures – some departed and others still continuing the good fight with us – whose titanic efforts have been dedicated to the demolition of the philosophical foundations, historical narratives and sociological representations of eurocentric scholarship on Africa and about Africans. Despite the noted limitations, they need to tap into the African knowledge archive in order to

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negate and combat the ‘epistemology of alterity’ that distorts the images that have been produced and reproduced about Africa and Africans. In particular, African students in the social sciences and humanities need to become more critically conscious of themselves and their situation in ways that inform their intellectual practice (Mungwini 2017) and, through research, open new vistas of knowledge to affirm African scholarship. Only by remaking their intellectual practices can they conceptually negate the ahistoricism embedded in colonial historiography on Africa, and place African history at the centre of their scholarship (Lebakeng 2018c). To address the problem of epistemic injustice and its devastating consequences, there is a dire need to revise tendentious colonial historiography which takes its point of departure from decentred Africa (and its resultant history that informs the curriculum) so as to disrupt western comfort zones as projected in their authoritative and canonical writings. This is at the core of the struggle for justice and truthfulness. In essence, this struggle is an insistence on decolonisation of universities and indigenisation of the curriculum in order for Africans to assert and affirm their right to define the meaning of their experience and to hermeneutically present it. In this respect, feminist voices and concerns cannot be subsumed under the imperatives of racial justice. Concretely, in unyoking the ruins of epistemicide in the South African academy, a totalising diversification of the canon would have to take into account factors such as sexism. Failure to do so would result in unintended cognitive injustice with its likely negative effect of perpetuating the institutional cultures of disengaging women from the African academy. In her study, Juliet Ramohai (2014) highlights different social, cultural and institutional barriers that still hinder the successful participation of black women academics in South African institutions of higher education. By this, I do not imply that western canonical writings should not be used by African students. Rather the predominance they occupy, the history they represent and the impact of their pathologising psychology should be questioned and new ways of seeing the canon(s) should be developed. Moreover, the untruths in what is taught in the African academy constitute a major cognitive injustice; hence the need to engage in the quest for truth and justice. Justice here refers to undoing the devalorisation of intellectual thought, of knowledge and aesthetics emanating from outside the western tradition as constituted in the modern disciplines around which the universities are structured (Pillay 2013). This requires interventions in the raging epistemic, theoretical, methodological and philosophical struggles articulated around decolonisation. Only when the academy in Africa is anchored in the specificity of the African context will the world respect Africans and African scholarship.

Concluding remarks On the basis of the arguments advanced in the preceding sections, we can thus conclude that Africans cannot think of a ‘decolonial turn’ in the social sciences and humanities curriculum outside the process of epistemicide. Despite the overwhelming evidence, western European thought has not acknowledged and still

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does not recognise its own epistemic and hermeneutic injustice. Moreover, it does not recognise this injustice as an injustice. Flowing from this implausible deniability, Africanity as combative ontology is thus a historically rooted imperative. Hence, espousing it will privilege Africans to frame and reimagine the disciplines through African lenses, without their ability to think being constantly under question. The current student struggles for decolonisation provide the radioactive substance for revising the Euro-American narratives informing the curriculum in the social sciences and humanities. This is vital for the realisation of epistemic justice. Rarely has there been a better time than now to reverse the impact of epistemicide and its brutal epochal influence. To concur once more with Kumalo in the previous chapter, the decolonial demand is demonstrative of the historical moment that confronted the South African context in the charge for decolonisation in our universities. This matter can no longer be dismissed as a trivial issue. Fortunately, as a systematic, systemic and sustained process that was implemented with intensity and vigour to destroy IKS and cultures of Africa, European modernity and its attendants (colonialism and coloniality) were not completely successful (Lebakeng 2010; Ramose 2014), and Africans, in addition to western impositions, still source their ways of doing and living through Indigenous African knowledges. This sourcing is anchored in the appreciation of the following Southern Sotho proverb: Bonneteng ke hore kajeno nka o hlapanyetsa hore ha ho motho ya ka tsebang setho, moetlo kapa puo tsa dichaba tse ding ka botlalo a sa tsebe puo ya habo, moetlo kapa mekgwa le ditlwaelo tsa habo!!! (The truth of the matter is that I can swear that one can never excel in any language, culture, tradition or custom if one does not know their own language, culture, tradition and custom!!!). This proverb necessitates that a dual challenge is undertaken. On the one hand, that of deconstructing eurocentrism and its assumptions and identifying negative aspects inherited from it. On the other hand, that of reconstructing aspects of the African legacy that need revitalisation. Africanity should be at the centre of this endeavour. Notes 1

While I am appreciative of the Rawlsian conception of Justice as Desert, it is useful to indicate that this is only possible when both parties are recognised to be human and have an intrinsic value, that necessitates that they each be treated equally. This is to indicate that in a context whereby the wronged party is not seen to be human, there is a high chance that they will not be qualified within this taxonomy to get that which rightly belongs to them. In simple terms, I mean to indicate that in a system that dehumanised African people, it is reasonable to understand the continued and unjustifiable measures of taking away from Africa.

2

My argument, in this respect, is aligned with the argument developed by Kumalo in Chapter 5 wherein he makes the claim for orienting an institution towards a responsiveness that proactively addresses the local challenges where the University finds itself. Put simply, I concur with Kumalo in his framing of a public responsibility that is owed to the community by a public institution.

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Ramose M (2001) An African perspective on justice and race’. Polylog: Forum for intercultural philosophy 3. http://them.polylog.org/3/frm-en.htm Ramose M (2002) Inscribing the African experience in the construction of knowledge and the design of education in South Africa. In LA Kasanga & TJ Lebakeng (Eds) Paradigm Shift in South African Higher Education. Sovenga: University of the North Ramose M (2014) Dying a hundred deaths: Socrates on truth and justice. Phronimon 15(1): 67–80 Ramose M (n.d.) A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery: On epistemic justice in South Africa. Draft Rodney W (1972) How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishers House Samuel MA, Dhunpath R & Amin N (Eds). (2017) Disrupting higher education curriculum: Undoing cognitive damage. Rotterdam: Sense Publisher Serequeberhan T (2012) Decolonization and the practice of philosophy. In: NM Creary (Ed.) African Intellectuals and Decolonisation. Athens: Ohio University Press Wanda RE (2013) Afrikology and community: Restorative cultural practices in East Africa. Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 6(6): 1–25

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Embracing an ethical epistemological approach in African higher education Yvette Freter and Björn Freter

Preliminary remarks: Our standpoint As scholars addressing decolonial epistemology in higher education, it is imperative that we situate ourselves and our audience. As euro-western-influenced1 scholars, we are careful not to presume possession of absolute understanding, knowledge or truth. We thus explicitly acknowledge that we have been influenced by a euro-western epistemological framework, but profess our commitment to work consciously to avoid perpetuating colonial violence and colonialism (which are synonymous to us) and seek to align ourselves with the global decolonial traditions. We work consciously against the ‘coloniality of being’, against the ‘violation of the meaning of human alterity to the point where the alter-ego becomes a sub-alter’ (MaldonadoTorres 2007: 257; see also Kumalo 2018: 7). We are engaged in the process of trying to uncouple philosophy from its role as ‘handmaiden to racialised, imperialist colonialism, enslavement […] genocide’ (Outlaw 2017: 246) and epistemicide2 (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018: 348). Thus, our understanding of colonialism is not just the actual invasion of land, but also the continued denial of equality through economic exploitation, paternalistic international aid, and epistemic inferiorisation or marginalisation. We conceive of colonial violence as all acts, past and present, that deny equality and establish inferiority based on geography, epistemology and religion, among other things, for those that are non-western for the enhancement of those who resorted to the violence (see Mignolo 2011). However, we humbly wish to contribute to the conversation among teachers of philosophy – African and non-Africans alike – about grasping the full influence of euro-western philosophy in decolonial educative contexts. By considering colonialism as a historical fact, but not an existential necessity, we suggest an approach to overcome colonial violence through a second, unabridged Enlightenment. With this epistemic stance, we propose that all teachers, regardless of their epistemic and cultural standpoint, enact a responsive decolonial practice. We suggest that this should start with maintaining a desuperiorising outlook (see Freter 2019) and with understanding issues of positionality. This reflexive understanding is coupled with a relational and ethical approach to epistemology that focuses on context, which will then allow for the conscientisation and sensitivity needed to embrace culturally responsive pedagogies and a more balanced decolonial curriculum. We will begin by stating four considerations before we go into details of the educational process.

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First consideration: Colonialism is a historical fact, not an existential necessity Consider this phenomenological exegesis. Colonialism is a historical fact. Colonialism did not come into existence through a necessity. Colonial violence is not something that had to happen. What brought colonialism into existence was will and action of – certain – human beings. These human beings were not urged qua being human beings to be or to become colonial aggressors. Resorting to colonial violence was, and continues to be, explicitly a matter of will and action by human beings. Colonial violators are not, and have never been, irrefutably urged to commit colonial violence. Those who willed and practised this violence could have willed and practised otherwise. We argue that the colonial aggressors made it seem as if their violence was the single appropriate and necessary reaction to the so-called discovery of, for example, the African or the American continents. Colonialism is indeed not a human reaction to facticity, this being only how the colonial violators made it appear (Freter 2019; see also, for a feminist perspective on white supremacy, Frye 1983; 126–7, and for the concept of facticity, Freter 2016). Colonialism invented an idea that it pretended not to have developed itself, but rather to have observed in reality. It invented a fictitious facticity to which it then reacted. In other words, colonialism established a pseudo-reality that was tacitly declared to be reality (Jean 1991) and then reacted upon as if this were not an invention but an observed empirical reality. Simultaneously, colonialism invented a pseudo-natural normative difference between human beings and reacted to this invention with colonial violence as if it were the only rational response. Notwithstanding, colonial violence refused to understand itself as violence; colonialism wanted to be understood as a necessary reaction of the (allegedly) superior human beings to the (allegedly) inferior human beings whom those euro-western (allegedly) superior human beings found, for example, in Africa or the Americas. Lucius T. Outlaw Jr. (2017: 246) has described this precisely: Eurocentrism structured the orientations and practices through which state-sponsored European racialist imperialists ventured onto the continent of Africa and initiated centuries-long programmes of settler-colonialism and capture and/or purchase of African men, women, and children for relocation to diaspora-creating enslavements in Europe and 'The New World' of Caribbean islands and the land masses they would come to occupy by thievery and genocide and rename 'The Americas.' Central to these ventures was the denial of the humanity of African peoples and their descendants, denials that required elaborate rationalisations from those most 'able' of European thinkers, among them the long-since canonised philosophers – Kant, Hegel, Hume.

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It was the (supposed) inferiority of the non-euro-western human being with which the euro-western (supposed) superior human being had to contend. This eurowestern superior human being, according to this colonial mythology, is thus the actual sufferer from colonialism. This being had to react to finding inferiority and had to make the best of it, namely, to improve the lives of their fellow superior human beings (Freire 2017/1970) by leading the inferior beings (Eze 1997; Dladla 2012; Park 2013; Freter 2018). Colonialism invented a new normative hierarchy between human beings; it invented the superior colonial violator and the inferior colonial victim. These entities never existed prior to the choice of each coloniser throughout history; they came into being with the very same mythology that allowed for the exploitation of the allegedly inferior entity. And the alleged inferiority was simply an epistemologically violent reinterpretation of the brute fact of difference. The colonial world order arose from these contrived pseudo-facts that reinterpreted difference as normatively relevant, simultaneously determining the coloniser’s own superiority and the inferiority of those who were simply different.

Second consideration: Overcoming colonial violence The overcoming of colonialism requires two things. Firstly, the violated human beings have to recover and re-appropriate what is theirs (Freire 2017/1970); they have to re-instantiate their ‘ontological legitimacy’ (Kumalo 2018: 7). This recovery is very difficult to achieve because of the many ways in which colonial violence has affected and continues to affect human beings during and even after an official political end to colonialism. An important part of the detraumatisation of victims of colonial violence is to understand that the reality in which it was right to colonially humiliate was an antecedent invention of colonial violators. This reality is staged solely for that purpose. It is most important to understand that the dehumanisation of the colonially violated is ‘although a concrete historical fact [...] not a given destiny’ (Freire 2017/1970: 18). This reality was re-invented as a destiny for the purpose of ethically justifying colonial violence; it was not an observation of phenomena that then made colonialism a human necessity. We consider the overcoming of experienced colonial violence foremost to be a matter that must be achieved by those violated. The violated people do not need the colonial aggressor to assist them in their self-re-appropriation. Lwazi Lushaba put this into powerful words in his open letter to Anthony Butler, head of the Politics Department at the University of Cape Town, that we wish to cite extensively: I ask at this instance fellow black academics to ponder with me the following question: if we as black South Africans continue to be absent or to be exceptions in these departments, who will write about us as they know us? Who will write our history – the history of the land? Who will write the story of Hintsa? Who will teach university students how to write stories and literary works in our indigenous languages? Who will

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undertake the necessary and creative task of thinking from our cultures? Better put, who will transform our cultures into a legitimate philosophical locus of enunciation? Who will write about the black miners we lost in Marikana, not as the working class but as black people whose crime was to be black in a country that is anti-black? Who will write a befitting biography of Brenda Fasie, of Mkabayi ka Jama, of Mgcineni ‘mambush’ Noki? Who will teach about the writings of Don Mattera? Who will write about the gumboots dance black miners perform each time they come to the surface from 12 hours of entombment, in order to re-humanise themselves? Who will analyse – not from a western philosophical locus – the cultural and political repertoire in the songs of Bra Hugh Masekela, Jonas Gwangwa, Victor Ntoni, Zim Ngqawana, Mankunku Ngozi, Ringo Madlingozi, Stompie Mavi, etc.? Who will write the social and cultural histories of our clans? Who will teach about the politics, life and times of Gerard Sekoto? Who will write about our cultural practices not as anthropological curiosities, not as anachronisms or unvanquished remnants of the past erupting on to the continuing present of progress? (Lushaba 2018: 280–281) Secondly, and this is what we are concerned with here, colonialism has to be overcome by the violators, too. The coloniser has to desuperiorise3 (Freter 2019). This is very often overlooked by the colonial aggressor. Colonialism is one of the many forms of superiorism adopted and maintained through the intellectual arrogance of European colonial settler descendants in contexts such as South Africa. The ‘necessity of rendering the slave a foreign species appears to be a desperate attempt to confirm one’s own self as normal’ (Morrison 2017; 29, see also Almeida 2015). This desperate attempt is a denial of equality based on a self-understanding as being superior. It means to ascribe privileges to oneself because of the conviction that one is entitled to be privileged. It means to arbitrarily inferiorise the one that for some reason becomes the other due to the urge to establish oneself as the opposite to the other: as the One, the standard, the canon, the measure of what should be. The colonial violence indeed goes so deep that the human being who was forced to understand him/herself as the other subsequently attempted and attempts to be like the supposed norm, as Carter G Woodson (2005/1933: 15), Frantz Fanon (2008/1952: 29), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964–1965: 13), Stephen Biko (1987/1978: 23), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2005: 17), Partha Chatterjee (1996: 165) and others have shown. But while the colonial victim can and may recover, colonialism remains in the colonial mindset of the aggressor. Colonial violence can only fully be overcome when the violator rejects their violence and rejects their normative-epistemologically violent stance (Scheurich & Young 1997). Colonialism cannot simply be declared as something inappropriate. It is not enough to state that colonialism is a thing of the past. Colonial violence, like any form of superiorism, has to be truly unwanted. The superioristic distinction has to be unwanted for the overcoming of colonialism to be a possibility. We have to not want to be colonial aggressors and we have to continue to unwill colonial aggression

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until it becomes practicably impossible for us. If one does not unwant the colonial privileges, the self-understanding of being entitled to receive those privileges is not dead, but just hibernating. If one continues to assume tacitly that one is better, one will not be able to treat the other as equal, but only, and always, as inferior. Perpetrators of colonial violence must, understanding their superiority as a phantasm, stop willing to superioristically violate, they have to unwant so much that this aggression becomes no longer possible as a way of life. This is indeed also of fundamental importance for the former colonial violator themselves, since ‘no one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so’ (Freire 2017/ 1970: 58). We, as euro-western-influenced scholars, have to ensure that the colonial violence is identified as such and never understood as something that is or was ever correct. We have to make sure that this violence is fully addressed in light of the continued disconnect between liberal ideologies that support equality in theory, but, in practice, lead to self-interested choices (Brantlinger, Majd-Jabbari & Guskin 1996). We have to learn to differentiate between that which is right and that which we are used to. Enactments of coloniality in euro-western-influenced scholarship are so ubiquitous that it seems an outrageous ask that they be refrained from. Colonial violence is so deeply entrenched in euro-western thought that it has created a quasi-natural status for itself, but this is the mantra of self-deception (whether intentional or seemingly unconscious) that has to be (re)viewed.

Third consideration: A second enlightenment The elaborate colonial mythology was conceived to produce a surplus benefit for the self-declared superior human beings by virtue of exploiting the Othered human beings heteronomously declared inferior. This, according to our understanding, inherently contradicts the explicit moral foundations of the so-called euro-western world. We could therefore say that the motive for colonial violence was in many ways the inclination of self-enjoyment of the self-declared superior human being. The foundation of colonial violence is not the sheer physical violence of conquest and exploitation, but rather the epistemological violence that preceded it; the latter, based on pseudo-facticity that it itself invents, is used to declare the former as right. To club an enslaved person is no doubt an act of colonial violence; however, to consider oneself to be entitled and right to do so makes the physical violence possible in the first place. There is a preceding epistemological-normative violence. This epistemological-normative violence, this a priori violence, is not only violence against the violated, as we have stated in concordance with Freire (2017/1970). We assume that it is also violence against one’s own heart and mind, thus the mythology of inferior human beings in order to endure one’s own aggression. The colonial violators of today, enacting economic, epistemic or physical violence, seem to continue to believe that they are not exploiting the non-euro-western people. Whether overtly or tacitly, they continue to believe that ongoing colonial violence is simply a matter of the better people obtaining more than those of less worth.

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However, if we, those influenced by euro-western norms, start telling ourselves our whole story, it is our contention that there might be a chance to understand that this is indeed a myth still hidden in plain sight within our standpoints, curricula and pedagogies. In other words, we believe that there is a substantial group of people who continue to perpetuate colonialism in all its forms based upon (wilful) ignorance towards their own history and, in this case, philosophical canon. This self-induced ignorance was massively influenced by Enlightenment thinkers. We must bring forth a second Enlightenment: An Enlightenment that enlightens the human being in its actual diversity and not, as was mostly the case, only in its (normatively predefined as superior) white, male, euro-western, heterosexual – in one word: superioristic – version. It is our understanding that a large portion of today’s entitlement or ignorance on the part of those influenced by euro-westernism has to do with a form of passed-on pseudo-facticities. These pseudo-facticities need to be re-evaluated. We need to open up to our whole story and consider the way in which educators pass on its assets and liabilities (Martin 2002). And, in concordance with Kwasi Wiredu, it must be added that no serious philosopher can disregard the importance of the ‘process of decolonisation’. This process is of the highest importance to all philosophers, including ‘non-African thinkers, for any enlargement of conceptual options is an instrumentality for the enlargement of the human mind everywhere’ (Wiredu 1995: 32).

Fourth consideration: Unabridged education One way to make people understand and unwant the colonial superiorism is unabridged education. It seems to us that there is lack of understanding of privilege and a lack of understanding that unwanting privileges does not primarily mean to relinquish at all. On the contrary, it means to establish coherence between euro-western self-understanding and practice. This coherence creates a deepened awareness, reflexivity and existential relaxation (Freter 2019: 20) for practitioners, and this coming to consciousness will empower them to find their role in a postcolonial reality. In addition to acknowledging the role of superiorism, we suggest that the contribution to unwanting colonial superiorism which educators can make is to tell its unabridged story. We need to ascertain the extent of superiorism in euro-western philosophy and its institutions. This is important for all institutions and educators who teach euro-western philosophy. Indeed, the ‘institutions of higher learning in South Africa were (and still are) copycats whose primary function was (and still is) to serve and promote colonial western values’ (Lebakeng, Phalane & Nase, 2006: 72). ‘There is,’ as Wiredu noticed, ‘indeed, the possibility – I would even say the rampant reality – of the domination of African philosophical minds by western thought’ (Wiredu 1995: 18; see also Heleta 2016 and Dladla’s (2012) powerful contribution). We must add to that our observations that the original institutions that are being copied in South Africa (and elsewhere) are, even if they hardly consider this as

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their primary function, more or less tacitly still serving and promoting colonial values (Freter 2018). There is limited research on the persistence of prevailing white supremacy, eurocentrism or colonialism – although there are, of course, exceptions, (see, for example, Eze 1997; Bernasconi & Cook 2003; Park 2013; Dhawan 2014; Flikschuh & Ypi 2014). Even the research on non-western philosophy in western institutions is disturbingly limited. We must agree with Jay Garfield and Bryan van Norden when they diagnose that western academic philosophy ‘as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric’ and when they demand that ‘any department that regularly offers courses only on western philosophy should rename itself “Department of European and American philosophy”’ (Garfield & Van Norden 2016). This is why we are calling for a new Enlightenment. The historical Enlightenment – and its institutions – simply did not bring light to humankind, being interested only in a very limited part of humankind and pushing a substantial section of humankind into the shadows of irrelevance or oppression. Therefore, our personal challenge is, for example, not to teach Kant or Hegel on human rights without also teaching Kant’s or Hegel’s understanding of the human being and its limitations. We cannot teach Kant’s or Hegel’s epistemology without also teaching which epistemology they deem to be of exclusive significance – namely their own (Garuba 2015). Eurowestern philosophers have not yet understood that they continue to provincialise the world and that there is dire need for ‘[d]eprovincialising’ to ‘address the problem of marginalisation, decentredness and dismemberment in the knowledge domain’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018: 342; see also Mignolo 2007; Outlaw 2017; Nkomo 2000). We must find out how deeply the euro-western superiorism is entrenched in the philosophical canon. Euro-western philosophers have not yet understood that they are ‘member[s] of a group’, that they are ‘only a part of humanity’ (Frye 1983: 117). We simply do not yet know to what degree Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is actually only a Critique of Pure White, Male, Heterosexual…Reason, or actually only a Critique of Superioristic Pure Reason (Bernasconi 2002; Eze 1997; Freter 2018). We need to find out how to interact with the canon in the light of our work on desuperiorisation (Freter 2019).

On the educational process A cursory investigation into the introductory courses offered in the philosophy departments of the major universities in South Africa reveals that there is a tendency towards what multicultural theorist Sonia Nieto calls monocultural education – that which adheres to the canon of the ‘great white men’ (Nieto 1992: 280; see also Kebede 2004) and leaves racism unacknowledged and educationally static. However, some universities have made notable efforts to become what Nieto calls tolerant by working to address racism and discrimination, offering stand-alone courses on African Philosophy, and connecting to some community projects that allow teachers and students to begin rejecting colonially normative-epistemological stances. But the continued need to revitalise the higher education system, as demonstrated by the #RhodesMustFall movement (Boroughs 2015; Chaudhuri 2016) and the continued 133

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calls for an African renaissance (Dladla 2012; Lebakeng 2018), indicates that further work is imperative. Nieto suggests that when institutions demonstrate acceptance, respect, affirmation, solidarity and critique, then ‘[policies] and practices that affirm diversity and challenge racism are developed. There are high expectations for all students; students’ language and culture are used in instruction and curriculum [...] Everyone takes responsibility for racism and other forms of discrimination’ (Nieto 1992: 281). This truly multicultural learning environment has a curriculum that is enriched because of its diversity and focus on social justice, pedagogy, values, content and process, fostering a dynamic and empowering learning environment in which decision-making is shared and ‘social action skills are the basis of the curriculum’ (Nieto 1992: 281). The imperative of multicultural praxis forces philosophical practitioners in higher education contexts to ask the question: How do I enact a responsive decolonial practice? (Maserumule 2015; see also Mignolo 2009). We have suggested that this starts with maintaining a desuperiorising outlook, and this, in turn, begins with understanding issues of standpoint or positionality. This reflexive understanding is coupled with a relational and ethical approach to epistemology that focuses on context, which will then allow for the conscientisation (Freire 2017/1970) and sensitivity required in order to embrace culturally responsive pedagogies. We call for pedagogies that contextualise learners (see Boughey & McKenna 2016), welcome students and value their experiential knowledge rather than alienate them (see Kumalo 2018) and for a more balanced curriculum. Overcoming colonial violence is not simply re-appropriation or even a ‘simplistic decolonisation of western knowledge and practices’ (Nakata et al. 2012: 120), but a process of being open to ‘further inquiry and productive ways of thinking in and through complex and contested knowledge terrains’ (Nakata et al. 2012: 120); that avoids over-simplified binaries and critique. We suggest approaching the knower, knowledge-making, and teaching with a critical lens. Indeed, ‘critical theory with its emphasis on emancipation or liberation, and on its arguments for participatory knowledge-making and actions offers a place to consider ‘“dominant” power relations and delivering “empowerment” to indigenous people’ (Nakata et al. 2012: 124), while opening the eyes of former dominant group members to decolonial practices. We acknowledge with Martin Nakata et al. (2012: 132) that this is by no means simple: it is ‘a very complex and historically layered contemporary knowledge space’, but is a vital starting place for ‘understanding the relations between the history of western philosophy and Enlightenment thinking, colonial expansion, colonial injustices and ongoing indigenous grievance’ (Nakata et al. 2012: 132).

Understanding issues of positionality We take positionality to mean that our gender, race and class are ‘markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities’ (Thompson Tetreault 1993: 139). Consequently, our positionality informs our ‘goals, knowledge, beliefs, strategies,

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and other normative frames of reference’ (Rehm & Allison 2006: 261) as educational researchers and practitioners, and it influences and affects our relationships with our context and with others (Alcoff 1988; Mayer & Thompson Tetreault 2001). Our educational institutions are locations where knowledge, language, identity, social interaction and our educational practices are refracted through the lenses of race, class and gender, and can be locations of contesting or entrenching the status quo. However, if one seeks to live out the principles of equality, embrace diversity and see education as the location of liberation and preparation for democracy, issues of domination and representation have to be acknowledged and dealt with (Freire 2017/1970). The inescapable power dynamics within educative contexts between instructors and students create situations where cultural assets and liabilities (Martin 2002) are transferred via the conduit of they who determine the curriculum and pedagogy. The teacher acts – be it wilfully or unintentionally – as a transfer agent of ideology and embedded values, such as the superiority/inferiority of certain races, classes and genders. Or the teacher can actively seek to maintain a desuperiorising outlook (Freter 2019). However, the racism, sexism, classism – and all the other forms of superiorism that seek to marginalise – which are enduringly endemic of (post)-colonial mindsets, cannot be addressed and countered unless they are made explicit. James A. Banks, another multiculturalist of note, unpacks critically the questions of canon, knowledge construction and multicultural education that form the backbone of our inquiry here. His work translates well into the African context, as he, too, seeks to counter the euro-western claim to dominance in the curriculum of our educational institutions. Central to his discussion is the linking of positionality to knowledge construction. He states: Positionality reveals the importance of identifying the positions and frames of reference from which scholars and writers present their data, interpretations, analyses, and instruction…The assumption within the western empirical paradigm is that the knowledge produced within it is neutral and objective and that its principles are universal. The effects of values, frames of references, and the normative positions of researchers and scholars are infrequently discussed within the traditional empirical paradigm that has dominated scholarship and teaching [...] since the turn of the century. (Banks 1993: 5) The universities surveyed, a survey that informs the argument we are advancing in this chapter, have almost uniformly demonstrated an adherence to the traditional euro-western philosophical canon in their undergraduate courses on philosophy. Banks (1993: 5) warns us that this is not value-free, and he insists that this canon contains ‘human interests and normative assumptions that should be identified, discussed, and examined’. Santiago Castro-Gómez (2005) denounced this misbelief accurately as ‘hybris del punto cero’, as hubris of the zero point (see Mignolo 2009: 3). Lack of recognition of these normative assumptions victimises our students because

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of the way they have been used (explicitly or implicitly) to justify inferiorisation and colonisation. Due to the general absence of representation of African voices, they devalue Africans by making them invisible or, at best, marginal. Additionally, as a result of a lack of a critical approach to the euro-western tradition and the need for the second Enlightenment, much of the explicit and implicit colonial mindset is being transferred to the next generation, reinforcing the status quo and further entrenching institutionalised racism. This inferiorisation and invisibility harms not only our black African students, but also our white African students by giving them an incomplete view of philosophical richness and social reality. Banks (1993) cautions us that this valorising of only one portion, in this case of philosophical contributions, creates a conflict within students that separates them from their personal/cultural knowledge, limits popular knowledge and gives them only eurocentric mainstream academic knowledge. We would argue in agreement with Banks (1993) that students need – indeed are demanding, think of the #RhodesMustFall movement – a transformative academic knowledge base that allows them to consider revised traditional canons and incorporate multiple ways of thinking and forms of knowledge construction for the sake of positively transforming society. Our survey of introductory philosophy courses in the major universities in South Africa suggests an ideal of an educated person who is not only male, but white. No matter how desirous of the ideal of equality such departments may be, their euro-westerninfluenced curriculum implicitly states that this is impossible. Banks (1993) informs us that only assimilation and accommodation to the dominant culture will allow students to become an educated person in such a course of study. People of different race, class and gender to the dominant cultural group must choose between their community and the dominant group, they must deny their cultural traits and languages, and they must be judged in relation to a white middle-class male, not based on their intrinsic worth. Banks (1993) cautions that similar derisive thoughts and ingrained feelings of inferiority might be felt because they do not see knowledge created in a way that incorporates traits of non-dominant group cultures; they do not see the contributions of people of different race, class and gender in the bodies of knowledge; they feel compelled to split their bodies from their minds; their homes from places of education; their individuality from their community. Kumalo (2018: 7) writes: In the process of commodification, consumption and erasure of Indigenous/Black ontologies the contemporary South African Indigenous/ Black scholar becomes a pariah because of her/his inability to navigate and belong to the South African landscape, owing to the demand that s/he assimilate into whiteness which ultimately rejects her/him, while alienating her/him from her/his native identity, subsequently creating the Native of Nowhere. This is exactly why we call for a second Enlightenment. Lack of representation, the creation of Natives of Nowhere, is causing an increasing disconnect for students who do not see themselves represented in the curriculum and experience a perpetuation of privileged status quo for those who do (Milner 2010). 136

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It is thus important to realise that the curriculum is comprised of the embodied4 teacher bringing their race, class, gender, and epistemological and pedagogical preferences into the class with them along with the texts they have chosen. Conversely, embodied students bring their own experiences and interpretations into the learning space. We will see that for the sake of being part of a continued process of decolonisation and revitalisation of African higher education, teachers will need to address and make explicit their positionality and welcome the positionality of their students to be part of the epistemological, curricular and pedagogical dynamic of the classroom (Freire 2017/1970). This positional approach wishes to: transform traditional relationships of power and domination, attends to the representative voices of historically marginalised groups, and calls for critical dialogue and the counterhegemonic action of principles that translate society and its institutions into democratic sites that are truly democratic, just, and humane. (Martin & Van Gunten 2002: 45) Instructors already taxed with heavy teaching loads, research agendas and budget restrictions in philosophy departments navigating policies that diminish the role of the humanities and favour the hard sciences are likely to react with sentiments such as: I agree with you in theory, but how do I realistically do that? We would suggest that the first place to start is with acknowledgement of positionality so that ‘[i]ndividuals can become self-interrogative by recognising that a eurocentric ideology is learned and can be imposed onto another through mechanisms in our society such as schooling’ (Patterson 1998: 120). By the acknowledgement of the tacit control that eurocentrism exerts, even in a (so-called) post-apartheid society, it is no longer ubiquitous and can be addressed. Self-reflection through the evaluating of positionality directly relates to epistemology. It has been noted that ‘position may be so important that it can be seen as an epistemological claim’ (Price 2004: 21) such as is made in standpoint epistemology. Being conscious of how we are positioned affects what we think can be known, and that ultimately determines how and what we teach. Therefore, intentionality is heightened exponentially as the background noise of positionality is brought to the foreground and made audible. Here, the work of equity and equality can begin in earnest; ‘[w]e now begin to probe other possibilities that will challenge institutions, regimes of knowledge and social practices that limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities’ (Madison 2005: 5).

A relational and ethical approach to epistemology Our positionality makes us aware that we are embedded and embodied in a particular time and place. These standpoints or particularities position us within our learning community, in a collaboration of knowledge construction that is always in process and in which we can never fully know the ‘view’ of the other, but we can seek to attempt to see another’s perspective and seek to learn together. This relational 137

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and ethical approach to epistemology causes us to embrace the way in which our embeddedness provides emotional, social, intellectual and relational context to our construction of knowledge. Appreciation of our situatedness is vital if we are to encourage sensitivity to diversity with the imperative of inclusion for equality by attempting to know ourselves, attempting to know others, and to create knowledge together. It acknowledges our positionality in that we cannot be detached from the knowledge we are making, but we are not limited to just our knowledge. We can, in relation with others, broaden our understanding of the perspectives of others (Thayer-Bacon & Bacon 1998). Not only does our embeddedness help connect us to others, but our embodiedness helps us to unite the parts of our individual identities (Thayer-Bacon & Bacon 1998). Acknowledgement of our embodiedness attempts to address the euro-westerninfluenced split of our minds from our bodies (Thayer-Bacon 2000) by connecting our objective and subjective and our productive and reproductive selves with each other (Martin 1985). Embodiment makes for a rich place for teachers and students in a democratic learning community to explore their personal positionalities, to develop a sense of self through relationships with others, and to enhance learning, as ‘we need a sense of self to become potential knowers’ (Thayer-Bacon & Bacon 1998: 56). Acknowledgement of embodiment is also a powerful tool in the dismantling of these splits, as they manifest themselves in oppressive racial, gender and class hierarchies. Within a democratic learning community enacting a relational and ethical epistemological stance, students will develop their ability to reason and care together by being constructive thinkers (Thayer-Bacon 2000).

Culturally responsive pedagogies5 Once educators are aware of their own positionalities, they can begin to develop the skill set needed to engage their students in a culturally competent way. We suggest that by harnessing the reach of euro-western-influenced teachers – regardless of their race or country of origin – through ‘a more central and explicit focus on sovereignty and self-determination, racism, and indigenous epistemologies’ (Castagno & Brayboy 2008: 941), strategies such as culturally responsive schooling will increase their impact. By open acknowledgement of identity and the vulnerability, discomfort and confusion that euro-western-influenced teachers feel as they ‘teach across difference’ (Toshalis 2010: 25), we must be careful not to sacrifice critique for the sake of safety and comfort, and we believe that the identity-perception gap that ‘forces teachers to relativise their experiences and question their perceptions’ (Toshalis 2010: 31) can be viewed as a resource rather than a hindrance to teaching. By purposely engaging the entire teaching force in a process of desuperiorisation, teachers can be guided in an understanding regarding the voices in philosophical canon whose racism, sexism, and classism have explicitly or inadvertently oppressed or indoctrinated students. By questioning the contexts of the philosophical canon, ‘paternalism, prejudice, harmful assumptions, low expectations, violence, and biased curriculum materials’ (Castagno & Brayboy 2008: 950) can be made explicit 138

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and their hidden curriculum exposed (Giroux & Penna 1979). Like educators in the United States of America, teachers in African countries need to be made aware of the fact that even though their nation was never ‘a white nation’, ‘white institutions and cultural norms have certainly held sway throughout most of the nation’s history’ (Perry & Fraser 1994: 9). Personal transformation of teachers needs to result in the utilising of theory and pedagogies to make structural changes (Nieto 2010: 155). This is vital for ‘diverse’ students who ‘have to suffer from the negative racial attitudes, actions, and events perpetuated by schools and society, not because of any specific behaviours they exhibit but simply because of who they are’ (Milner 2009: xxiv). To address the roots of inequity – myth of meritocracy, funding inequality, segregation, inequitable access to learning, underrepresentation of non-white teachers, practices of cultural assimilation (Nieto 2010) – and privilege, a paradigm shift is needed for all teachers. They need to see themselves as social reconstructivists, naming neglected histories and ways of being and thinking, and exposing superiorism in all its forms. Teachers need to understand that they are carriers of our very own societal normative selfunderstanding, our hidden curriculum. As Toni Morrison wrote, ‘one learns othering not by lecture or instruction but by example’ (Morrison 2017: 6), echoing Carter Woodson’s claim of almost a century earlier: ‘Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?’ (Woodson 2005/1933: 2). All educators need to teach their students, as teacher-educator and scholar H. Richard Milner (channelling his mentor Asa Hilliard) states, ‘how to dismantle systems of racism, inequality, and oppression’, to advocate for others, to ‘tackle issues of structural inequality’ and to ‘address apathy, ignorance, and racism wherever they exist’ (Milner 2010: xii). The question then remains as to how teachers can be prevailed upon to confront the educational setting, for it will ask much of them. They will have to acknowledge that at this point in our post-apartheid society, we still cannot escape the bounds of race, class and gender, and that it has become necessary to use one’s positionality to further the goals of educational equality and relevance. Members of a dominant culture must become allies (Titone 1998) and use their influence to trouble ‘collective positions of privilege’, to ‘identify actions we can take to share power with non-white people’, and to engage in ‘dialogue and coalition building’ (Sleeter & McLaren 1995). This will require euro-western-influenced educators to learn to step aside, listen, share, find ways to connect, for example with members of African cultures, in meaningful ways, and be students of culture and alternate pedagogies (Rehm & Allison 2006). The seemingly simple act of listening to criticism is part of the large-scale actions of engagement, empowerment and equity in educational contexts. Euro-westerninfluenced educators will need to engage in serious personal reflection in order to address the disconnect between liberal ideologies that support equality in education in theory, but, in practice, lead to self-interested educational choices, and confront their own ideologies that allow them to ‘bridge disparate streams of thought and salve the dissonance that results from the contradiction between their desired liberal

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identity and class positionality’ (Brantlinger, Majd-Jabbari & Guskin 1996: 572). Prevailing attitudes demonstrate that many euro-western people still believe that injustice can be rectified without altering their own status. As we have pointed out, without unwanting the colonial attitude, it will keep influencing our minds and actions (Ladson-Billings 1995; Milner 2007). Multiculturalist Gloria Ladson-Billings suggests a culturally relevant approach to counteract the lack of representation of marginalised cultures. To avoid an assimilationist approach to culture, she advocates culturally relevant pedagogy as a means to empower ‘students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to import knowledge, skills, and attitudes’ (Ladson-Billings 1994: 17). A teacher embodying this sort of pedagogy will have high expectations of their students and will believe in the potential of students to succeed. Teachers embracing a culturally relevant approach see their profession as an art and themselves as contributing members of a community. They have an epistemological mindset that sees knowledge as co-constructed and constantly being renegotiated. This sort of teacher draws on the experiences and knowledge of their students and assists students in making connections ‘between their community, national, and global identities’ (Ladson-Billings 1994: 34). Ladson-Billings (1994: 55) suggests that when culturally relevant pedagogy is in use, social relations demonstrate a connectedness, and she speaks of a ‘community of learners’. Relationships in this community are ‘fluid [and] humanely equitable’ (Ladson-Billings 1994: 55). This is contrary to an assimilationist view that sees relationships in a hierarchy in a classroom of individuals competing with one another in isolation. Teachers harnessing culturally relevant pedagogy encourage a critical stance while demonstrating passion for the content and encouraging their students to hone their skills and achieve their best – understanding the complexity of achievement and factoring in diversity and individual variations. This is, again, in contrast to an assimilationist view that sees knowledge as infallible and unchanging and conveyed by a neutral practitioner (for a critique of this alleged neutrality, see Boughey & McKenna 2016). The students are then expected to demonstrate comprehension of the knowledge within rigid parameters that fail to take into account diversity and difference in the student body. Teachers must, for example, ask themselves (Ladson-Billings 1994: 117–138): Are my students’ ‘real-life’ experiences valued as part of the curriculum? Do I value my students’ home cultures? Do we perceive classroom literacy as both written and verbal? Am I working with my students to challenge the status quo? Do I treat my students as competent? Am I scaffolding my students’ knowledge, moving from what they know to what they need to know? Is my course focused on instruction and extending students’ thinking and abilities? 140

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Do I know my material – both its assets and liabilities? Do I know the whole, unabridged story? Do I teach the whole story? Can I cope with the fact that the whole story might pressure me personally to find a new standpoint? Do I know my students? Finally, Angelina Castagno and Bryan Brayboy (2008) offer numerous suggestions and possibilities in their review of culturally responsive schooling of Indigenous North Americans that resonate with the needs of the African educational setting. In terms of pedagogy, they note that teacher-centred instruction often fails to meet the needs of Indigenous students, and they encourage methods that are more congruent with students’ cultural norms, citing improvements in academic attainment that accompany such moves. Castagno and Brayboy (2008) substantiate our contention that positionality determines how one learns, and this often determines how one teaches based on the norm of our own learning patterns. However, when engaging different cultures, they suggest that the learning styles of the students should be considered. Strategies such as cooperative, oral, hands-on, service, experiential and visual learning are recommended for a teacher’s pedagogical repertoire. Teachers are encouraged to be aware of proximity preferences, discussion styles and being flexible with pacing if wanting to embrace a culturally responsive teaching style (Castagno & Brayboy 2008). Positionality again comes into play when teachers’ attitudes, values and knowledge are seen as factors in student success. Teacher temperament, disposition, tolerance, flexibility, high expectations, caring and appreciation of communities and cultures are vital elements in school success for Indigenous youth. Teachers need to be interested in their students’ lives and authentically care for their students and expect the best from them. This will challenge the teacher to study different epistemologies and will hence lead to critical multicultural pedagogies, an adaptation of the curriculum, and a critique of euro-western normativity and structural inequity (Castagno & Brayboy 2008) in a conscious move to engage students who have become disenchanted with their educational institutions and who seek solutions to the challenges of their time.

Towards a balanced curriculum Kai Horsthemke (2008) offers us a way to view curriculum, while avoiding the pitfalls of superiorism, be it the valorising of euro-western or Afrocentric knowledge. It is evident that institutions need to work on more culturally equitable distributions of students, instructors and texts. However, there are genuine concerns associated with only focusing on representation and ‘reverse discrimination’ (Horsthemke 2008: 450), the cultural liabilities found in African culture, and the unfortunate victim or deprivation mentalities that have developed since colonisation was officially ended. Horsthemke (2008) offers Afrorealism as his alternative to the Afrocentric and Afrosceptic approaches to higher education. This pragmatic outlook suggests that poverty be addressed; that Africa should address its own unique economic 141

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reconstruction challenges, including those in tertiary education, and see the university as a contributor to the community in terms of considering how to solve the problems left in the wake of colonisation (Horsthemke 2008). We wish, here, to stress that our argument is in concord with Kumalo’s contentions in the fifth chapter in this collection. Indeed, education philosopher, Nel Noddings (2018: 38) notes that renown progressive philosopher John Dewey did not recommend abandoning the traditional subjects of the curriculum, but he wanted them to be taught in a way that makes them genuine subject matter. They should be presented so that students can use them in purposefully working through some problematic situation. Some philosophers of education today go well beyond Dewey in arguing that the traditional subjects are badly out of date (remember that they can be traced to Plato!) and that a new curriculum should be created [Afrocentrism]. Under Dewey’s plan, the old subjects would still be treated, but they would be part of the curriculum only as they were actually used by students in their inquiries. Curriculum, for Dewey, is not a body of material established before instruction. Instead, it is the material gathered, used, and constructed during instruction and inquiry. However, we must offer this caveat: as long as undergraduate students are not exposed to African scholarship, they will not become the graduate students and researchers that do the important work of reclamation and original philosophy that needs to and should happen in Africa. And as long as undergraduate students are exposed to eurowestern scholarship in a way that renders this euro-western tradition the only tradition of significance, all non-euro-western scholarship will be introduced to them as inferior, merely exotic, and ultimately useless. We suggest, in the vein of feminist thinking, a ‘both-and’ approach that values African contributions while utilising euro-western philosophy based on contextualised African needs. In the words of Yusef Waghid (2014: 14), we want to promote an ‘African philosophy of education constituted by reasoned, culture-dependent action’ for the sake of ‘developing a conception of education that can contribute towards imagination, deliberation and responsibility’.

An exemplar of enacting a responsive decolonial pedagogy and curriculum It may be helpful to close with a tangible example of responsive decolonial pedagogy and curriculum enacted by a euro-western-influenced postdoctoral researcher and instructor, Gregory Swer,6 at a South African institute of higher education. At the University of Zululand, the Bachelor of Arts philosophy degree is described as a three-year degree, the purpose of which is to prepare future African philosophers to become active role players in a variety of environments requiring critical thinking skills. Students

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will be equipped with transferable critical thinking skills, appropriate to the current African employment context, informed about the latest developments in the fields of philosophy and applied ethics, and involved in the process of knowledge generation through research in philosophy and applied ethics, and knowledge dissemination through research publications and scholarly debates at national and international levels. Students who complete the degree with Philosophy as a major will be qualified to take positions at academic institutions as well as positions requiring critical thinking skills in management, politics, administration, banking, journalism, education or social work. (University of Zululand: 2019: 41) The Department of Philosophy and Applied Ethics goes on to assert that they aim to ‘provide access to students from diverse backgrounds to an enabling and caring learning environment’ (University of Zululand 2019: 1). Clearly, these goals are demonstrative of the multicultural outlook we have recommended. First year philosophy students begin with a module called Applied Philosophical Reasoning 1. The overview outlines that the course hopes to equip students with the tools necessary to ‘deal with numerous philosophical questions about human existence, race, or politics’ (Swer 2018: 2). Students are introduced to various philosophical theories through the lens of the philosophy of Bantu Stephen Biko. The course develops the ‘skill of reasoning, critical thinking, and problem solving’ (Swer 2018: 2 [bold from original omitted here]) by having students compare and contrast these theories with a view to being able to ‘do the same while arguing in favour of the theories or assessing them critically from a philosophical standpoint’ (Swer 2018: 2 [bold from original omitted here]). The students have three male instructors, two black instructors from South Africa, one white instructor from the UK. These instructors do not limit themselves to direct instruction and use multiple pedagogical approaches to fully engage their students. They pay careful attention to the requirements of those with special needs and offer them accommodations where possible. Support groups and intervention strategies for struggling students are also offered. The instructors engage in summative and formative assessments that utilise both oral and written components and actively work to teach the students study skills such as note taking, citing, argumentation and so on. In terms of curriculum, this introductory course immediately exposes the students to ‘philosophical theories regarding human existence, race, and politics’ (Swer 2018: 5). The focus of the course is the Philosophy of Black Consciousness and traces how Biko utilises various sources in his writing. Swer (2018) writes: The whole idea of the course was to start the philosophical education of first year students with a figure that would be familiar to them, namely

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Biko, and whose work would be viewed as relevant to the present-day concerns of South Africans. After a few weeks [...] we moved on to specific themes in Biko’s thought; such as the politics of education, the nature of race, the role of capitalism. Each section of the course from this point on brought in new philosophers (Fanon, Freire, Marx, Sartre, Hegel, Appiah, etc.). My intention here was to undermine the academic tendency when it comes to African thought of going, 'Here is African philosopher X. S/He was influenced by European philosopher Y. For "influenced by" read ‘determined by’. Therefore, let us talk about Y instead.' All philosophers in the course, other than Biko, were introduced as relevant solely insofar as they help us get a better grasp of the function/levels/breadth of Biko’s own thought. The emphasis on Biko as primary, and all other philosophers as secondary characters in this narrative, was intended to demonstrate to students the extent to which philosophical innovation involves the critical appropriation and adaptation of pre-existing concept/theories to serve new/different needs/issues, as opposed to the slavish absorption and repetition of 'right answers' The course begins with student exposure to Black Consciousness and Critical Pedagogy. Swer (2018) reflects that [t]his was a deliberate choice to enable students to view the rest of this course, philosophy in general and their own tertiary education in a self-reflexive manner, with themselves as educational participants and knowledge creators, as opposed to passive information receivers. This critical attitude was reinforced by encouraging postgraduate students to regularly intervene in lectures to criticise and question the lecturer’s narrative, and culminated with a closing lecture by a [graduate student] in which she offered a gender critique of the entire course as I had presented it. This is not to say that the course was not a rigorous preparation for the rest of their studies. According to Swer (2018), the course was also designed to make students familiar with many of the key themes and philosophies that they will encounter as philosophy undergraduates at [the university]. Each of the philosophers or themes touched upon in the course’s analysis of Biko are those that the students will study in subsequent philosophy modules (metaphysics of race, Fanon, existentialism, critical theory). The idea here was that students would then encounter each new module with a sense of familiarity and confidence. And more importantly, it was hoped that students at higher levels of the undergrad degree would always be able to see, by recollection of the Biko course, how the theories and people under study (Marxism, phenomenology, dialectical progress) relate to concrete present-day concerns and have real world applications and relevance. 144

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The cultural competence and the multicultural transformative outlook of this course and its instructors is evident. Not only is this course an exemplar of a pedagogical and curricular enactment of cultural competence, desuperiorisation, and decolonisation: the course was successful. The students enjoyed it, the instructors were invigorated by it, and quantitative assessments revealed tremendous student satisfaction (Swer 2018).

Conclusion Embracing an ethical epistemological approach in African higher education begins with the need for philosophy departments to consider the full influence of euro-western philosophy in decolonial educative contexts. Our phenomenological exposition demonstrates a view of colonialism as a historical fact, but not an existential necessity, and we have suggested an approach to overcome colonial violence through a second Enlightenment. We have connected theory to practice in a process of praxis that urges philosophical practitioners in higher education contexts to enact a responsive decolonial practice by initiating an understanding of one’s positionality and a desuperiorising outlook. It is our contention that through reflection on one’s epistemological stance and the embracing of culturally responsive pedagogies and a more balanced (Afrorealistic) curriculum, an education system can be fostered that is actively decolonial and positively working towards creating African philosophers and change agents within the faculty and student populations of higher education institutions. Notes 1

We use the term 'euro-western' to denote the philosophical canon that originated from those of European descent, and purposely use the lower case to indicate solidarity with a decolonial agenda and to decentre this canon.

2

In this respect, we acknowledge – as does Lebakeng in the previous chapter and Mitova in Chapter 2 of this volume – the contestations that characterise the concept of epistemicide. We therefore use the concept to acknowledge the attempt at eradicating the ways of life of Indigenous people across the globe, owing to the colonial project of European nations.

3

In this sense, our theoretical claims are aligned with those of Lebakeng in this collection and in his previous writings, which have called for this move in the intellectual project of the South African context.

4

Embodied here means the individual’s race, class, gender and other personal identifiers that affect their epistemological standpoints. We couple this with embeddedness, the historical and cultural elements that impact knowledge and knowledge-making. The origination of these terms has been attributed to Benhabib (1992).

5

Much of this section was adapted from Franklin 2012.

6

We wholeheartedly thank Gregory Swer, PhD (currently postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal) for sharing his ideas with us and for allowing us to use his work as an example of responsive decolonial pedagogy.

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Decolonisation and displacement: Mbembe and decolonising the University Abraham Olivier

Introduction The harder I tried to make sense of the idea of 'decolonisation' that has become the rallying cry for those trying to undo the racist legacies of the past, the more I kept asking myself to what extent we might be fighting a complexly mutating entity with concepts inherited from an entirely different age and epoch. Is today’s Beast the same as yesterday’s or are we confronting an entirely different apparatus, an entirely different rationality – both of which require us to produce radically new concepts? (Mbembe 2016: 32) Achille Mbembe’s article, 'Decolonising the University: New Directions', puts the discussions on decolonisation on another plane. Mbembe (2016) argues that to decolonise the university today and ‘rethink the university of tomorrow’ demands a clear understanding of its present situation, particularly in an African place. This demand is pertinent to any colonised place where the displacement of subjects and their thought is an issue and transformation is demanded.1 Curiously, in recent discussions on decolonisation, the concept of displacement as such does not receive any in-depth analysis.2 However, the very predominance of the coloniser’s epistemic paradigm arises exactly through the displacement of the subjects that it colonises. Displacement therefore deserves more recognition as a seminal matter of concern in analyses of decolonisation, especially if we want to figure out our present situation and future directions. In this chapter, I propose a distopological approach towards decolonisation that concerns place and its inherent relation to displacement. In the first part, I discuss the problem, with respect to past and present concepts of decolonisation. In this regard, I treat these concepts in relation to Mbembe’s (2016) work. In the second part, I explore the concepts of place and displacement, and then propose a distopological focus on displacement towards the decolonisation of the university.

Decolonisation The problem of decolonisation Let me start with a brief statement of the problem. In a special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy (SAJP) entitled ‘Africanising the Philosophy Curriculum in 151

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Universities in Africa’, Mogobe Ramose (2016) argues that the project of decolonisation has not been effective in fighting what he, after Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), calls epistemic murder, or epistemicide. Epistemicide is an illustrative term for the prevailing subjugation to the coloniser’s epistemological paradigm and concomitant displacement of African thought. In this vein, other contributions of the special SAJP also problematise the predominance of western philosophy in an African place. This epistemic hegemony is illustrated by data on the curriculum and other offerings at philosophy departments in southern and West Africa in a chapter on ‘The State of African Philosophy in Africa’ by Edwin Etieyibo and Jonathan Chimakonam (2018: 85). This, however, does not only go for philosophy. As Mbembe points out, the colonial past is clearly much alive in the way institutions and practices of higher education are westernised. These institutions are ‘“westernised” in the sense that they are local instantiations of a dominant academic model based on a [eurocentric] epistemic canon’ (Mbembe 2016: 32). This is a canon that privileges the western way of knowledge production and disregards other epistemic traditions (Mbembe 2016: 33). The ‘post-colony’, as Mbembe (2001) calls the post-colonial context, thus witnesses the ongoing hegemony of the western paradigm in its universities. Mbembe (2016) rightly says that there is an emerging consensus that our institutions must still undergo a process of decolonisation. This includes both a decolonisation of knowledge and of the University as an institution. The discourse on decolonisation is closely related to post-colonial discourse, which, as Paul Taylor (2015: 214) points out, endeavours to both highlight and fight the continued influence of colonial meanings and institutions on our practices. As Taylor puts it, the ‘post’ in post-colonial is not only about temporal succession, about identifying remaining colonial elements; it is also about ‘repudiation’, or what Kwame Appiah (1993: 156)3 calls ‘space-clearing’, that is, excavating and uprooting the ongoing, often covert or mutated, workings of the colonial regime.4 This goes not least for ‘societies where racial disparities are ostensibly deplored while being tacitly reinforced’.5 Mbembe (2016: 36) makes it clear: ‘[today], the decolonising project is back on the agenda worldwide’. However, so he argues, the project is different because the situation of the University is changing – it is in the process of being restructured, as we shall see in the section 'Decolonisation today', according to a western-based global neoliberal economic paradigm. The question is, how this change affects the problem of western epistemic hegemony. Thus the question ‘[is] today’s Beast the same as yesterday’s?’ This question requires clarity on the relation between past and present concepts of decolonisation. The following section gives a brief discussion of Mbembe’s view on two classic proponents of decolonisation, and the following sections explore of his assessment of the present situation and future directions of thinking.

Decolonisation and Africanisation Calls to ‘decolonise’ are not new, as Mbembe points out. Mbembe (2016: 33) refers specifically to African post-colonial projects in the 1960s and 1970s and says: ‘Then, 152

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“to decolonise” was the same thing as ‘"to Africanize". To decolonise was part of a nation-building project.’ Within this context, Mbembe singles out for discussion two classical advocates of decolonisation, Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who both contested the idea of understanding decolonisation as Africanisation (Mbembe 2016). Mbembe starts with Fanon’s view in The Wretched of the Earth (Chapter 3). He argues that, for Fanon, Africanisation was a political project with an ideological function; it was used to refer to nationalisation. But nationalisation means for Fanon that those unfair advantages, which were a legacy of the colonial past, were transferred into the hands of the native bourgeoisie. As Mbembe (2016: 34) puts it, ‘“Africanisation” was the ideology masking what fundamentally was a “racketeering” or predatory project – what we call today “looting”.’ Moreover, Africanisation was for Fanon akin to ‘retrogression’ in the sense that ‘the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state’. (Mbembe 2016: 35) The result was xenophobic or ‘Afrophobic’ attacks of Africans against fellow Africans. Thus, Fanon’s contestation is that Africanisation very often meant a shortcut from nationalism to a predatory neo-colonialism or to a regression into tribalism and xenophobic racism. Mbembe (2106: 35) consequently calls Fanon ‘the most trenchant critic of the “decolonisationas-Africanisation” paradigm’. Now to wa Thiong’o’s critique of the ‘decolonisation-as-Africanisation’ paradigm. In his Decolonising the Mind (1981), so Mbembe points out, wa Thiong’o uses the term ‘decolonising’ to refer not to the politics of African nationalism, but ‘larger politics’ – ‘not the politics of racketeering and looting, but the politics of a “liberating perspective”’ (Mbembe 2016: 34). More specifically, wa Thiong’o made a call for the liberation of the mind – or as he famously dubbed it: ‘decolonising the mind’. A major question for wa Thiong’o is: ‘What should we do with the inherited colonial education system and the consciousness it necessarily inculcated in the African mind?’ (Mbembe 2016: 35). Wa Thiong’o calls for ‘New Africans’ to view themselves in ‘Afrocentric’ terms. This is a project of ‘re-centreing’, which means a search for the ‘central root of Africa’s consciousness and cultural heritage’ (Mbembe 2016: 35). It is about breaking with the neo-colonial notion that Africa is merely an extension of the West. However, as Mbembe (2016: 35) puts it, ‘It is not about closing the door to European or other traditions. It is about defining clearly what the centre is. And for Ngũgĩ, Africa has to be placed in the centre’. Mbembe points out that wa Thiong’o actually wants to pursue an African connection ‘to the four corners of the Earth’ (Mbembe 2016: 36). He had the West Indies and Afro-America in mind, but the point is clear, for wa Thiong’o, ‘Decolonizing an African university requires a geographical imagination that extends well beyond the confines of the nationstate’ (Mbembe 2016: 36)). Wa Thiong’o is, in this respect, like Fanon, critical of African nationalism, and extends the liberation of Africa beyond segregationist and isolationist geographical and political borders to all humans who are oppressed.

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Notably, Mbembe points out that wa Thiong’o’s idea of decolonisation does not only include the liberation of all human relations from oppression but in a far-sighted way encompasses all relations on and beyond the globe, other species included. Mbembe (2016: 36) takes this idea to invite us to rethink ‘the spatial politics of decolonisation in so far as true decolonisation, as Dubois intimated in 1919, necessarily centres on “the destiny of humankind” and not of one race, colour or ethnos’ – or, as Mbembe might add – species. I come back to Mbembe’s position in this regard further on.

Decolonisation today To decolonise the University today and rethink the University of tomorrow calls for a clear understanding of its present situation. In the remaining part of his further on, Mbembe makes an analysis of the present state of the University and the possibility to decolonise it. Mbembe (2016: 39) argues in detail that currently ‘a global restructuring of higher education is taking place’, according to a paradigm that originates from AngloAmerica, and that has become attractive to many countries especially in Asia. This restructuring is closely related to the dynamics of global capitalism, or as it is often called ‘neoliberal globalisation’.6 This means, the University is being rescaled with the purpose of instrumentalising it as a knowledge provider for global markets in a knowledge-based economy. The knowledge-based economy depends on increasing the availability of knowledge in the form of the provision of information and high skills. This increases the need for ready access of information and skills by the business and public sectors across national borders (Mbembe 2016: 38). As universities are knowledge providers, and the provision of knowledge across borders is sought, a process of denationalising universities is taking place. Global capitalism thus requires a postnational or partially denationalised education space. Consequently, we see what is nowadays called the ‘fifth freedom’ in Europe – the freedom of the ‘movement of knowledge – knowledge in motion’ (Mbembe 2016: 38). The belief is that knowledge – including, information, competence, creativity, talent and abilities – is free for anyone to acquire, accumulate and use in an interchangeable market and meritocracy. As a result, close linkages are created between transnational industry and the University. The idea of a ‘fifth freedom’ has critical limitations. As Mbembe (2016: 37) points out, ‘global elites’ are invested in changing the University into ‘a new form of institution suited to privileged groups who are able to use aspects of globalisation to reproduce and fence off power and privilege’. The purported free, global access to knowledge – information, competence, creativity, talent and abilities – is confined to a privileged minority. The upshot is that those who are not privileged enough to be able to compete, are, as Mbembe calls it, ‘zoned’: Zoning is what happens to the losers in the unfolding global competition. For a university to be ‘zoned’ is like being parked in a reserve – to become 154

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what we used to call here a bush university. An entirely new era, that of global apartheid in higher education, is unfolding. (Mbembe 2016: 38) Mbembe reminds us to keep in mind that the global restructuring of higher education has its origin in Anglo-America, and has established itself as a western paradigm, even though it has become so popular in many other countries worldwide. This includes its global manifestations in large systems of access and management that have turned higher education into a marketable product, rated, bought and sold by standard units, measured, counted and reduced to staple equivalence by impersonal, mechanical tests and therefore readily subject to statistical consistency, with numerical standards and units. (Mbembe 2016: 30) The point is that we still witness an ongoing presence of western academic hegemony, of the colony in disguise, the disguise of neoliberal global capitalism, driving the restructuring of universities. Hence, Mbembe’s call to decolonise the University.

Deterritorialising the University How do we fight the global neoliberal restructuring of the University? Mbembe does not seem to volunteer to be a dragon-slayer. Instead of venturing to beat today’s Beast, he seems to suggest that we make use of it. How? By means of what he calls the ‘deterritorialisation’ of the University (Mbembe 2016: 41). The term ‘deterritorialised’ stems from Félix Deleuze and Giles Gauttari (1987). Mbembe does not explain the term any further, but it is helpful to make use of Bruce Janz’s adoption of Deleuze’s and Gauttari’s concept of ‘deterritorialisation’ for similar purposes (Janz 2015). In Janz’s use of the term, deterritorialisation refers to a movement that deranges molar or dominant territories by crossing their borders. More specifically, it refers to creative ways to undermine the territories of the molar (dominant) system of the neoliberal, instrumentalised (commodified and bureaucratised) University. One example of such subversion is to cross the borders of its molar territories through interdisciplinary ventures. The idea is not to counter one molar system with another molar system but rather to keep crossing the borders of the ‘cramped’ spaces which an oppressive molar system submits people to, and thereby to undermine its territorial control. The deterritorialisation or derangement ideally leads to a gradual reterritorialisation or rearrangement of territories. So the idea is to subvert any oppressive system by creative processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation within parts of and across the territories of the system. According to Mbembe (2016: 41), we live in an age in which most relations between academics are deterritorialised. This is in fact a result of the remarkable speed and scale of the transnational flow of knowledge, which characterises the western dominated neoliberal global system of higher education, or, as Janz (2015: 274) calls it, the ‘instrumentalised University’. Mbembe’s suggestion is, paradoxically, not to 155

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fight but rather to make use of this transnational flow of knowledge with the aim of undermining its territorial control. How is this supposed to work? Mbembe (2016: 41) seems to envisage a global movement of academic ‘diasporas’ building ‘diaspora networks’ that will undermine the dominance of the epistemic territories of the instrumentalised University. As an example of such diasporic networking, Mbembe takes the Chinese utilisation of the unprecedented current global mobility and educational migration of international scholars and students. In China, for instance, international scholars and students are regarded as ‘knowledge carriers and producers and as cultural mediators of interrogating the global through the local, in-between spaces not bound by nation-states’ (Mbembe 2016: 39). Such advocacy of what Mbembe calls diasporic networking, on the one hand, raises the desirability of uncoupling higher education from the cramped national education policy framework, and, on the other hand, subverts the notion of globalism as a western enterprise. The result is both ‘a shift in the gravity of innovation’ from national to international and from west to east (Mbembe 2016: 39). Mbembe calls this process the project of ‘reconceptualising diasporic intellectual networks’. Building diasporic networks thus serves as an example of how to deterritorialise and in this sense decolonise western epistemic hegemony. As he puts it: We will foster a process of decolonisation of our universities if we manage to build new diasporic intellectual networks and if we take seriously these new spaces of transnational engagement and harness the floating resources freed by the process of globalised talent mobility. (Mbembe 2016: 41) Hence, Mbembe’s suggestion is to foster a process of decolonising universities by making use of the very transnational flow that characterises the western-dominated neoliberal global system of education. This prompts the question: does this not after all just mean to use the trans-territorial flow of the global neoliberal movement to turn a western system into a dominating eastern or a southern system? Again, if I understand it correctly, the idea is not just to oppose one molar system with another. The idea rather is to use the global flow to rearrange academic connections in a way that subverts any molar system geared to taking territorial control. More precisely, the idea is to spread out connections (thus they are called ‘diasporic’, ‘spread out’) between all kinds of academic territories in order to prevent the dominance of any one of them. This understanding of decolonisation requires that the ‘obsolete article of faith’ in territorialism, for instance, nationalism, has to be revisited or discarded (Mbembe 2016: 41). We cannot afford to think in strict nationalistic terms anymore, for instance, in South-African-centric terms, says Mbembe. We have to ‘reconfigure our understanding of our own situatedness in Africa and the world’ in terms of setting up ‘diasporic knowledge networks’. Mbembe’s conclusion is that there can be no decolonisation of our universities without a better understanding of the complex dynamics of global transnational

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educational movements. The best way to respond is to make use of these dynamics and foster new intra-continental academic networks through various connectivity schemes, for instance, through diasporic networks. The hope is to deterritorialise and reterritorialise the dynamics of the transnational educational movement and break its neoliberal western hegemony.

Decolonising nature Mbembe ventures to take a seminal step beyond typical discussions on decolonisation. He extends the use of the term to what one can call the ‘decolonisation of nature’.7 This section offers a brief outline of his argument in this respect. Expanding on his discussion of neoliberal global capitalism, Mbembe (2016: 45) writes that the ‘domination of politics by capital’ has resulted in ‘the waste of countless human lives and the production in every corner of the globe of vast stretches of dead water and dead land’. In fact, we find ourselves, so he argues, in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, which is characterised by ‘human-induced massive and accelerated changes to the earth’s climate, land, oceans and biosphere’ (Mbembe 2016: 42). This calls for rethinking of the place humans claim for themselves on the globe, in particular from the perspective of our finitude and possible extinction. In this respect, my argument coincides with the reconceptualisation of the decolonial project as advanced in the second chapter of this volume by Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt and Cash Ahenakew. This is to suggest that decolonisation gives us the opportunity to imagine possibilities of thinking ‘rethinking thinking’ as argued by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018). Mbembe reminds us of the fact that humans are part of a history of entanglement with multiple other species with a history much longer than human history (Mbembe 2016: 42). We cannot do as if history is simply ours. The self-destructive effect of the Anthropocene teaches us that we are inextricably part of nature and natural history. This prompts us to question the conventional dualism drawn between the human subject and nature as its object, and the self-ascription of agency and power exclusively to humans. Mbembe consequently argues that we need to ‘shift away from the dreams of mastery’ and concede and extend agency and power to non-human others8 (Mbembe 2016: 42). This means that we need to overcome the notion of dualism and achieve a new way of thinking about our relationship with nature, which comes down to a new understanding of ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics. This can only be achieved ‘by overcoming anthropocentrism and humanism, the split between nature and culture’ (ibid). How does decolonisation fit into this picture? Again, I take the phrasing ‘decolonising nature’ from Louise du Toit (2019). She points out that in Mbembe’s view (Mbembe 2001: 1, 5), the double-edged designation of Africans as animals or beasts is part of the western colonial way to objectify, oppress and exploit human and non-human others (Du Toit 2019: 130, 138). It is important to note that one of the lexical definitions of colonisation is to appropriate (a place or domain) for one’s own use. One can say, by pursuing their dreams of mastery, humans have colonised nature – 157

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animals and the environment – by appropriating and subjugating it for their own gratification, with disastrous effects. Such colonial appropriation, subjugation and exploitation explains the need to call for a decolonisation of nature.9 The question remains, however, how the appeal to decolonise nature fits into Mbembe’s discussion of the decolonisation of the university. Mbembe is not clear on this point. A way to answer this is to recall that the idea of dualism and the dream of mastery were introduced by western academics, by ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato and modern philosophers such as Descartes. This dream is still particularly alive in the instrumentalised universities, serving the rule of the market and its exploitation of the natural environment. Thus, questioning this must, at the least, start among academics. Such questioning must be part of the project of decolonising the instrumentalised university as far as it is a major driver of the dream of mastery. The seminal part of questioning the dream of mastery lies in what Mbembe calls the need to ‘decentre’ the human qua subject, and to rethink it as object among other objects in their own right. In his words: The human does not constitute a special category that is other than that of the objects. Objects are not a pole opposed to humans. Humans are objects among the various types of objects that exist or populate the world, each with their own specific powers and capacities. (Mbembe 2016: 43) Mbembe makes clear that the project of decentring the human subject does not mean to degrade humans but to uproot the western colonial ideology of human mastery. Thus he states, ‘our world is populated by a variety of non-human actors’ and claims agency also to what is typically viewed as merely objects of nature without the capacity of agency (Mbembe 2016: 43). Subsequently, Mbembe (2016: 44) argues that overcoming dualism and anthro­ pocentrism has radical implications for the way race is understood. In brief, one such implication is a critique of the speciesist belief in the supremacy of the human race. Such critique brings the discussion of racism to a new level and suggests a strong connection between critiques of racism and speciesism. This means most basically, says Mbembe, that we need to question the belief in the incommensurable differences between us and other species and the prejudice of human supremacy. Hence ‘race thinking increasingly entails profound questions about the nature of species in general’ (Mbembe 2016: 44). Mbembe’s thought resembles wa Thiong’o’s far-reaching foresight: ‘In the last instance, non-racialism is truly about radical sharing and universal inclusion’ (Mbembe 2016: 44). In conclusion, Mbembe argues that non-racialism is the antithesis of the ‘rule of the market’, of the ‘domination of politics by capital’, which has resulted in the destruction of countless human and non-human lives and devastation of our natural environment (Mbembe 2016: 45). What shape can such an antithesis of the rule of the market take? Mbembe does not really tell. However, a good starting point seems to be his advocacy of the subversive use of the neoliberal global movement to set up

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diasporic academic networking as a means of alerting people to the fact, as he puts it, that we have to learn how to share our planet again among all humans, but also between humans and non-humans.

Decolonisation and displacement In this section of the chapter, I start with a discussion of the concepts of place and displacement and then show, in the remainder of the chapter, how an analysis of displacement can contribute to an understanding of some of the problems and prospects of decolonisation, which Mbembe explores.10 Typically, displacement is negatively associated with the enforced removal of subjects from a place. However, displacement also has the meaning of the enabling force of a movement that makes it possible for subjects to have a place. So the question is, how far can these seemingly contrasting dimensions of displacement be thought of as connected, and what would any such connection mean for the decolonisation of the university?

Place In order to understand displacement, we first need to explore its relation to place and the way our existence is bound to place. Typically, philosophers of place understand place in terms of the territory, situation or context in which we find ourselves and in which our experiences and actions are grounded. What exactly does it mean to be placed? Martin Heidegger (1962), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1958) were the first philosophers to give systematic analyses of place. Heidegger takes place to be our everyday world, Merleau-Ponty understands it as the field of our experience, and Sartre as our situation. Sartre’s illustrative account is helpful to start with. Elaborating on Heidegger’s concept of place, Sartre calls it a manifestation of our personal situation, and speaks of it as ‘my place’. Place indicates ‘[…] naturally the spot in which I “live” (my “country” with its sun, its climate, its resources, its hydrographic and orographic configuration)’. (Sartre 1958: 511) More particularly, it is also the arrangement of the objects, which at present appear to me – a table in front of the window, and beyond the window the garden and sea. I need some place to live in, but I am free to arrange it to be my place of choice. So our placement bears in itself a tension. We are always in a place, but we have the freedom to make it the place of our choice. For instance, we cannot but live in some country, but we are free to choose in which country to live, and if not, then at least how to live in it (Sartre 1958: 511). Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty agree that as situation, or field, or everyday world, place has a spatial and temporal component. Spatial is understood in terms of experiential, or, more particularly, functional, rather than physical spatiality. As such, so Heidegger (1962: 138ff.) points out, spatiality has the related characteristics of drawing close (‘de-severing’) objects and so arranging (‘directionality’) them for the sake of their possible use. For instance, I draw furniture together and arrange it

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in a way that makes a room my working place. The fact that place can thus be utilised to serve our possibilities clearly has a temporal component as well, for it situates us in a setting in which we presently arrange things, as we have done in the past, to serve future possibilities. It is significant that Sartre follows Heidegger in speaking of a place as ‘my place’ – my place of living and dwelling. Heidegger calls my place my home (Heidegger 1962: 79ff.). As far as a space is arranged in a way that serves our personal possibilities, we can identify with it and claim ownership; we call it our place, our workroom, our university, our abode, and we reside in it as our space of belonging and dwelling. It is important to note that Jeff Malpas (2004/1999) claims that the significance of place is not to be found in our experience of place so much as in the constitution of experience in place.The ‘constitution’ or ‘grounding’ of experience in place means that subjects are bodily ‘embedded’ in a place such that place enables them to relate and engage with things and others.11 The implication is that, as Malpas (2004/1999: 174) puts it, ‘subjectivity in general’, that is, a subject’s active experience (feeling, memory, belief, thought, action), and the ‘nature and identity of individual persons in particular’, is to be ‘understood only in relation to place, and in relation to the particular places in which the subject is embedded […]’ Thus, as Malpas (2004/ 1999: 191) puts it, ‘[…] persons are always and only encountered in and through the places they inhabit.’ So for instance, people are encountered in and through a particular country or culture or university or specific political situation, which shapes their experiences and what they are in diverse ways. In what follows, I connect place with displacement, first, with its enabling dynamics, which display features of deterritorialisation, and then with its destructive features, as instantiated by colonialism.

The enabling dynamics of displacement and deterritorialisation As I indicated, displacement is no central topic of concern among philosophers working on place. However, Malpas’ and Janz’ brief elaborations on the concept are helpful as a venture point to argue for the centrality of displacement in our understanding of place.12 Consider how one’s gaze moves over a place, say a room, and successively explores aspects of it. According to Malpas (2004/1999), displacement refers to the way one’s gaze constantly repositions itself to capture diverse, temporary appearing aspects of the room, thus it involves the shifting point of view of one’s momentary gaze. The movement or flux of one’s visual experience is only possible through the constant displacement of its instances. In short, displacement means the continuous repositioning of multiple instances that produces the temporal succession characteristic of the flux of any experience. If, however, our experience would consist of a constant displacement of disappearing instances, then we could not have any unitary sense of or grasp on things. Then, for 160

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instance, an object would fall apart in fluctuating adumbrations, a melody would disperse in singular tones, and a focused thought would lose itself in incoherent propositions. According to Malpas (2004/1999), the displacement of instances of experience can only form part of a unitary flux if they are juxtaposed, that is, if they are put side by side in a spatial order, and, in this way, are kept interconnected as a unitary whole. In this sense, displacement generates through constant repositioning a multiplicity of subjective aspects of experience, while juxtaposition interconnects these aspects and so allows for a unitary, objective grasp of things. I have argued elsewhere (Olivier 2019) that the term ‘superposition’ for displacement is actually more suitable than ‘repositioning’ to capture its meaning.13 Lexically, superposition refers to ‘[...] placing something on (or above) each other’. As such, superposition is appropriate to refer inclusively to the dynamics of both the repositioning and juxtaposition that characterise the flux of experience. I suggest, therefore, to take displacement qua superposition to entail the dynamics of both the repositioning through which a proliferation of multiple instances of experience is produced, and juxtaposing through which these instances are kept interconnected to offer a unitary grasp on things. Now back to the relation between place and displacement. I explained in the previous section that place situates subjects in a setting by arranging objects, or aspects of objects, in a spatial order for the sake of the possibilities that they temporally offer. My contention is that this platial (spatial and temporal) positioning of subjects and objects in experience relies on the dynamic repositioning and juxtaposing characteristic of displacement. Say, for instance, one’s gaze moves over a room, which one wants to furnish for working purposes. Only by continuously repositioning one’s gaze can one temporally explore possible aspects of the room, and only by juxtaposing these aspects can one arrange the furniture in a suitable spatial order. Thus, through the dynamics of repositioning and juxtaposing, displacement manifests as the force of a movement that makes possible one’s platial (spatial and temporal) positioning in relation to objects populating one’s experience. As its dynamics enable our temporal and spatial positioning in place, one can conclude that displacement must be inherently related to place. Now, there is a striking match between the enabling dynamics of displacement, repositioning and juxtaposing, and Deleuze’s and Gauttari’s (1987: 10) understanding of placement in terms of ‘movements of deterritorialisation’ and ‘processes of reterritorialisation’. Such movements and processes form ‘a plane of consistency of multiplicities’ or ‘rhizome’, which manifests in the way organisms such as cells, ants, orchids or human subjects continually derange (reposition) and rearrange (juxtapose) the multiple dimensions of their activities. The way displacement makes placement possible must also apply to the platial processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Consequently, one can say, repositioning makes placement possible both in terms of the temporary arrangement and derangement (deterritorialisation) of subjects or objects, and juxtaposition is needed for their spatial arrangement and rearrangement (reterritorialisation). 161

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In the section concerning ‘Distopology and deteritorialisation of the University’, I show how the enabling dynamics of displacement applies to Mbembe’s view of deterritorialising – and, so add, reterritorialising – the University. Notably, in Deleuze’s and Gautarri’s and also in Mbembe’s understanding, processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are not confined to the movement of human subjects, but rather include the way other organisms also continually derange and rearrange their activities and territories. As such, displacement can be well linked with Mbembe’s idea of subscribing to both humans and non-humans the agency of placing themselves. I return to his idea in ‘Distopology and the decolonisation of nature’.

The destructive features of displacement and colonisation To resume, displacement has both the positive connotation of the enabling force of a movement that makes it possible for subjects to have a place, and the negative association of the enforced removal of subjects from a place. This close relation between place and displacement has radical implications for the notion of place as a space of dwelling. Consider the enabling aspect of displacement first. As I showed, the dynamics of displacement constitute place as a space of dwelling. This enabling feature of displacement holds a destructive feature. As a space of dwelling, place must be subverted by the change, alteration and disintegration that result from the constant repositioning and juxtaposing that are characteristic of displacement. In this sense, to dwell in a place means to be unavoidably subject to a destructive unmaking and undermining aspect of displacement. Then an abode, a home, cannot really be a completely secure refuge or shelter. Rather any place to settle carries with it the unsettling dynamics of displacement. Inherent to being at home is an element of homelessness. One can say, homelessness is an inherent part of, rather than the opposite pole of, homeliness.14 Thus far, my focus has been on displacement understood as the enabling dynamo of the movement that makes it possible for subjects to be ‘placed’ in and experience the world as a space of dwelling, no matter how unsettling. It is clear, however, that displacement has another, more destructive, meaning as well. This brings me to the second, destructive feature of displacement – enforced removal. There is a decisive difference between the kind of homelessness, in which one is embroiled while being at one’s home, and being homeless because one has no home, or because one is being forced to depart from one’s home. The latter, so I indicated, refers to displacement in its most common use: the forced removal from one’s place. This corresponds with one of the lexical definitions of displacement as ‘the enforced departure of people from their homes, typically because of war, persecution, or natural disaster’. Displacement is, as a force of movement, also associated with a movement of enforcement, as manifest in the enforced removal of people from their homes, a force associated with the atrocities of war, persecution and natural disasters; in short, with enforced homelessness. 162

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Indeed, this meaning of forced removal is mostly attached to displacement.15 It is clearly one thing to take the challenge and deal with one’s inherent displacement while having a place to stay, and another not to have any place, or to have no choice but to leave one’s place. This is the difference between having a choice to embrace the homelessness inherent to one’s dwelling, and having no choice but to face the homelessness of forced removal. There are several, complex ways of being forced to be homeless. The most obvious of these is, as the lexical definition indicates, the enforced departure of people from their homes because of war, persecution or natural disaster. However, one can be taken from one’s home, or one’s home can be taken from one, while remaining in the same location. An example of the first is slavery or the diaspora experience for many. The second is something more like colonialism or apartheid. So, forced homelessness can be more complex than literally taking one from one’s home. Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967) offers a classic analysis of the complex levels of such homelessness as an upshot of colonialism. A more recent reflection on the complexity of homelessness related to colonialism is found in Mbembe’s On the Post-Colony (2001). As Janz (2015: 283) puts it, Mbembe ‘[…] imagines a vulgar, cramped, violent space that faces inhabitants of African countries today, a space where flourishing seems all but impossible’. Mbembe’s question is here specifically how to learn to live and flourish despite the arbitrary and absurd conditions that make numerous post-colonial inhabitants of African countries experience forced homelessness in their own places of living. In such cases, inhabitants are often forced to stay in their homes where, due to unbearable living conditions, they can barely survive. To call these places homes of their choice seems absurd. In any case, one can argue that there is quite a dramatic difference between feeling homeless in one’s place of choice, and having no choice but to be homeless because one’s home is taken or because one cannot be at home in one’s place of choice or birth.

A distopological approach towards decolonisation To summarise, I have argued that displacement is enabling in that its dynamics of repositioning and juxtaposing make it possible for subjects to have a place of their own, a home, albeit in a way that remains unsettling. Displacement is destructive when it means the forced removal of subjects from their place, in a way that delivers them to homelessness. Colonised places serve as an example of such displacement. In the remaining discussion, I propose as methodological approach to displacement, and its relation to colonisation and decolonisation, what I call distopology. I start by introducing this concept. My concept of distopology is strongly related to an approach that Malpas calls ‘topography’ (2004/1999: 40ff.) or ‘topology’ (Malpas 2006: 2, 35, 219), or that Janz refers to as ‘taxonomy’ or ‘mapping’ (Janz 2009: 29ff, 81ff.). As I point out elsewhere (Olivier 2019), the common ground is that both topology and distopology study our

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grounding in place. However, the distopological approach differs mainly in three respects from the topological approach. Firstly, most basically and most obviously, topology concentrates on the study of place, while distopology has its focus on the study of displacement, and its inherent relation to place. Secondly, topology and distopology overlap to the extent that both involve reflection on our situatedness in the world, but each with a decisively different focus. Topology, as offered by Heidegger, Malpas and Janz, focuses on the condition of the possibility to position ourselves and be at home in a place, despite our vulnerability to the unsettling conditions, the ‘homelessness’, of displacement. Distopology has its focus on the unsettling conditions to which displacement subjects any place in the form of the dynamics of perpetual repositioning and juxtaposing, or else forced removal. Thirdly, distopology has a special focus on the challenge that the destructive dynamics of displacement involves, both as an enabling force and disenabling force. Given its focus, one can, to some extent, say that distopology is a heuristic approach, which enables us to see the significance of topology in its rupture, for distopology brings to the fore the misery of unsettledness, especially of forced removal, and the topological task to, as it were, find a home for oneself, or rather, homes for all of us. However, distopology challenges the very premise that there is a home at all for any of us, at least in the ideal sense of a settled space of safe dwelling, and calls for a disillusioned response to unsettling forces inherent to any place of living. The distopological approach is particularly well aligned to the phenomenological study of the way place constitutes experience in its widest sense – our perceptions, emotions, thoughts, beliefs and actions. But a distopological approach is not confined to any disciplinary approach such as phenomenology or, for that matter, philosophy. It is rather best suited to serve any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach that takes place and its inherent relation to displacement. It encourages any discipline, or for that matter, institution such as a university, to be receptive to challenges to keep repositioning and juxtaposing itself with regard to other disciplinary fields, methods, practices and institutions and to have greater awareness of the inherent forces of displacement (enabling and disabling) that are present in any place. As such, so I show in the remaining parts of this chapter, distopology is well suited to address issues of decolonisation. In the last two sections, I suggest some ways in which a distopological focus on displacement can serve to address matters of decolonisation as discussed by Mbembe. I focus on two main issues – deterritorialising the university and decolonising nature.

Distopology and the deterritorialisation of the University Let me recapitulate some of Mbembe’s ideas. Currently we still witness an ongoing presence of western academic hegemony, of the colony in disguise and the disguise of neoliberal global capitalism driving the restructuring of higher education

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worldwide. This means, universities are instrumentalised to serve as knowledge providers for global markets in a knowledge-based economy. As universities are knowledge providers, and the provision of knowledge across borders is sought, a process of denationalising universities is taking place.16 As a result, close linkages are created between transnational industry and the university. Mbembe argues that the best way to undermine the molar (dominating) system of the instrumentalised university is to make use of its transnational movement. His suggestion is that the university be deterritorialised, and one should add, reterritorialised. The idea is to subvert its molar system by creative processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation within parts of the system. Mbembe envisages a global movement of academic ‘diasporas’ crossing the borders of ‘cramped’ national academic spaces and thereby undermining their territorial control. As an example, he takes the unprecedented current global mobility and educational migration of international students, which has the potential to lead to a gradual rearrangement of university territories (reterritorialisation). Mbembe calls this ‘reconceptualising diasporic intellectual networks’. Thus, his suggestion is to foster a process of decolonisation of higher education by building new diasporic intellectual networks and taking seriously these new spaces of transnational engagement. I have introduced a distopological approach with the aim to show how, in the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the enabling dynamics of displacement (repositioning and juxtaposition) are at work. As I have shown in the section on ‘Place’, repositioning makes possible placement both in terms of the temporary arrangement and derangement (deterritorialisation) of subjects and objects, and juxtaposition is needed for their spatial arrangement and rearrangement (reterritorialisation). The distopological approach is geared to utilise the enabling dynamics of displacement to serve the processes of deterritorialising and reterritorialising professed to undermine the oppressive molar system of the instrumentalised university. This means, more specifically, that the dynamics of repositioning and juxtaposing structurally requires recognising, resisting and undermining any cramped parochial or autocratic epistemic or sociopolitical paradigms. With its distinctive emphasis on the fact that displacement is inherently at work in any place, distopology is, more decisively than typical topology, disposed to work dynamically towards the recognition, resistance and subversion of close-minded, oppressive paradigms. Its dynamic disposition is to work with the recognition and motivation that such oppressive paradigms must eventually succumb to the forces of displacement at work in any place, no matter how unyielding or powerful they might be. Such an approach is ideally suited to promote the idea of academic diasporas, who keep repositioning themselves by crossing the borders of cramped oppressive places and, through the juxtaposition of networking, undermine their territorial control. Distopology draws attention not only to the enabling but also, emphatically, to destructive forces of displacement. One such force is what Mbembe calls ‘zoning’. As Mbembe (2016: 37) points out, ‘global elites’ are invested in changing the university

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into ‘a new form of institution suited to privileged groups who are able to use aspects of globalisation to reproduce, and fence off power and privilege’. The upshot is that those who are not privileged enough to be able to compete will be ‘zoned’. The losers in the unfolding global academic competition are in many respects condemned to a ‘zone of non-being’, ignored and under-resourced. As Mbembe (2016: 38) says, global apartheid in higher education is unfolding. Market competition has forced some countries and universities into marginalised zones of non-being. One can speak of such zoning as a form of forced removal. In the competition of global capital forces, the losers are removed from the academic map. Distopology, more than topology, brings to the fore the destructive misery of forced removal and the topological challenge to find, so to say, ‘open access’ to an academic home for all of us, especially for under-resourced universities, academics and students in so-called underdeveloped countries. The idea of turning the university into a pluriversity seems to be a step in this direction. The idea is to acknowledge, as Mbembe (2016: 36) rehearses Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Enrique Dussel, ‘that knowledge can only be thought of as universal if it is pluriversal’. The pluriversity should not be mistaken for the extension of a eurocentric model reproduced globally through ‘commercial internationalism’ (Mbembe 2016: 36). Its focus rather is on epistemic diversity through the endorsement of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions and in a way that transcends disciplinary divisions and classist zones. As an approach, distopology seeks, moreover, a curriculum that reflects the dynamics of displacement in and beyond a place through constant change and diversity. For instance, a curriculum, which is Africanised by taking as a point of departure some African place, will be simultaneously challenged to diversify itself in juxtaposition with various other places – Chinese, South American, Indian, European schools of thought. It is significant that some contemporary proponents of Africanisation advocate exactly such diversification. For instance, Ramose (2016: 546) views Africanisation as the ‘[…] liberation from the bondage of an imposed epistemological paradigm’ towards what he calls a diversified ‘pan-epistemic’ education. Such pan-epistemic education is in fact to be offered, so Ramose says, at a pluriversity, appealing to diversity. A similar take on diversification is advocated by Etieyibo (2016, 2018) and Chimakonam (2016, 2018). Etieyibo (2016: 2) takes the transformation of the university to mean ‘undermining knowledge hegemony’ and the diversification of its curriculum. Such diversification requires a radical repositioning of the classist, instrumentalised university, one that will juxtapose it with the pluriversity in all its diversity of disciplines and zones – particularly the zones condemned to the non-being of bush universities.

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Distopology and the decolonisation of nature In the section on ‘Decolonising nature’, I argued that Mbembe takes a seminal step beyond typical discussions on decolonisation by extending it to a call for the decolonisation of nature. The double-edged designation of Africans as animals or beasts is part of the western colonial way to objectify, oppress and exploit both human and non-human Others. Such colonial appropriation, subjugation and exploitation explains the need to call for a decolonisation of nature. Colonisation is still particularly alive in the instrumentalised university, serving the rule of the market and its disastrous subjugation and exploitation of the natural environment. Thus, decolonising nature must at the least start among academics and be part of decolonising the instrumentalised university as a major driver of the dream of mastery. As Mbembe points out, the Anthropocene exhibits the destructive way we relate to our environment and conversely demonstrates our dependence on the environment as the condition of the possibility for us to have a place to live. As I pointed out in the section on ‘Place’, displacement is not confined to the dynamics of human placement, but rather it includes the way other organisms, such as cells, ants, orchids, continually arrange, derange (reposition) and rearrange (juxtapose) the multiple dimensions of their activities and territories. In fact, the territories that non-human organisms arrange, derange and rearrange in this way, grant humans the natural environment, which they can appropriate as a place of living, with its fauna and flora, climate, resources, its hydrographic and orographic configuration. As Mbembe reminds us, the human world is part of our placement in a much bigger and older natural environment. The demolition of our natural environment will result in displacement in its most destructive sense of the forced removal of both non-humans and humans. The Anthropocene reminds us exactly of the fragility and destructibility of our placement on the planet. With its focus on displacement, distopology seeks to account for the vulnerable way in which we are placed together with both human and non-human others, and how our agency is enabled and disabled by the dynamics of displacement. The recognition of our placement together with other organisms and species changes the discussion of race decisively. Non-racialism, so Mbembe argues, is deeply about radical sharing and universal inclusion. Once more, his view, like wa Thiong’o’s, indicates far-reaching foresight: ‘In the last instance, non-racialism is truly about radical sharing and universal inclusion. It is about humankind ruling in common for a common which includes the non-humans, which is the proper name for democracy’ (Mbembe 2016: 44). Again, Mbembe (2016: 45) argues that non-racialism is the antithesis of the ‘rule of the market’, of the ‘domination of politics by capital’, which has resulted in ‘the waste of countless human lives and the production in every corner of the globe of vast stretches of dead water and dead land’. He concludes that we have to learn again

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how to share our planet among all humans, but also between humans and nonhumans. The underlying premise is captured by the distopological claim that it is through displacement that humans and non-humans alike are placed in a situation in which they are necessarily interdependent in a way that can be either enabling or destructive. The neo-colonisation of this space by global market forces is an example of displacement in its most destructive sense, of a forced removal of both humans and non-humans from their places. An example of displacement in its enabling sense would be to advocate the subversive use of diasporic academic networking as a means to spread out and give shape to the message that we have to learn how to share our planet again between all humans and non-humans.

Conclusion It is apposite to close with a brief summary. Mbembe’s suggestion to decolonise the neoliberal instrumentalisation of the university is to deterritorialise it. He envisages a global movement of academic ‘diasporas’ crossing the borders of cramped provincial or national academic spaces and thereby undermining their territorial control. I have introduced a distopological approach with the aim of showing how, in the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the enabling dynamics of displacement (repositioning and juxtaposition) are at work and can be utilised to undermine the oppressive molar system of the instrumentalised university. Distopology draws attention not only to the enabling but also to destructive forces of displacement. One such force is what Mbembe calls ‘zoning’. Distopology is focused on bringing to the fore the destructive misery of forced removal and the topological challenge to find open access to an academic home for all of us. This calls for a diversification that requires a radical repositioning of the classist, instrumentalised university, one that will juxtapose it with the ‘pluriversity’ in all its diversity of disciplines and zones – particularly the zones condemned to the non-being of bush universities. Mbembe takes a seminal step beyond typical discussions on decolonisation by extending it to a call for the decolonisation of nature. Pursuing their dreams of mastery, humans have colonised nature by appropriating it, displacing non-human others and subjecting them to their anthropocentric use, with disastrous effects. Decolonising nature is part of decolonising the instrumentalised university as it is a major driver of the dream of mastery. Mbembe concludes that we have to learn again how to share our planet, not only among all humans, but also between humans and non-humans. The underlying premise is captured by the distopological claim that it is through displacement that humans and non-humans alike are placed in a situation in which they are necessarily interdependent in a way that can be either enabling or destructive. Now, it is as destructive as never before. As much as it is time to decolonise the university, it is also time to decolonise nature.

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Notes 1

As I shall explain in detail (under the section 'Decolonisation and displacement'), in this particular sense, displacement is negatively associated with the enforced removal of subjects from a place. Note, I shall argue that it also has the positive meaning of the enabling force of a movement that makes it possible for subjects to have a place.

2

See for instance, the recent special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy, entitled ‘Africanising the Philosophy Curriculum in Universities in Africa’ (2016), guestedited by Ramose. See also Etieyibo’s collection Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy (2018), and Tabensky and Matthews’s collection Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions (2015). The same goes for literature on the philosophy of place, where displacement receives surprisingly little attention. See, for instance, Janz’s recent volume Place, Space and Hermeneutics (2017). My own discussion of displacement will mainly draw from a related paper ‘Place and Displacement: Towards a Distopological Approach’ (Olivier 2019).

3

The reference to Appiah stems from Taylor (2015: 214).

4

As Taylor points out, important decolonial theorists such as Mignolo (2007) show that ‘… postcolonial theory has its own aversions and heuristics to uproot, beginning, one might argue, with its insistence on Eurocentric resources and frames’ and ‘taking on the baggage that comes with the invocation of postcoloniality as such’ (Taylor 2015: 17). Others, such as Bhabha (1994: 30ff.), conversely advocate the notion of the ‘hybridity of the postcolonial world’ with respect to the historical and cultural components of these societies. As my point of reference is Mbembe, I will resort to the term ‘decolonial’ instead of ‘postcolonial’. However, I hope to address both the concern to excavate oppressive resources and frames and the advocacy of diversity in the final sections.

5

This is cited in Lauer (2019: 34).

6

See also Gibson (2015) and Janz (2015) for similar analyses of instrumentalising the University according to a business-model to suit global neoliberal capitalism. I shall occasionally use ‘instrumentalised University’ to refer to the restructuring of the University.

7

Note, I draw the term decolonising nature from Du Toit (2019). I explain the use of the term later in this section.

8

My reader should take note of the difference in orthography in how I write others here. Throughout the volume ‘Other’ is written as capitalised and italicised. This is done to showcase the history of Othering and how this has been theorised in post-colonial literature. As I am arguing and using the concept in a sense that has in mind a world that has transcended these categories of thought, I have subsequently not used others in capitalised and italicised form.

9

One can object that Mbembe’s analysis of colonising nature does not account for complex issues such as the desires of development for those who have historically always been relegated to the margins, or for Indigenous studies on the redistribution of land and recovery of nature. I am indebted to Siseko Kumalo for this objection. Due to lack of space, I confine my own discussion to Mbembe’s text.

10 Note again, my analysis of displacement makes to a great extent use of my paper ‘Place and Displacement: Towards a Distopological Approach’ (Olivier 2019).

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11 See also Malpas (2004: 8, 11, 35, 36, 93, 136). 12 See Malpas’ Place and Experience (2004: chapter 7) and his Heidegger’s Topology (2006 chapter 5), along with Janz (2015). 13 Malpas introduces the term superposition but confines it to refer to repositioning, while I use it to include both repositioning and juxtaposition as I explain in this chapter. 14 See, for a more elaborate discussion, Olivier 2019. 15 Gschwandtner (2017: 173), for instance, refers to displacement as ‘loss of place’ as caused by ‘war, famine, and any other sort of disaster’ which ‘constitutes a significant harm to identity and self-understanding’; Harder (2017: 339) views it in terms of illustrations of our being ‘here and now’ but still ‘nowhere’. Blum (2017: 366, 377) regards it as the ‘drive of desire that everlastingly seeks to make over and exceed what is in place’. Aucoin (2017) applies displacement to the status of the refugee, Casey (2017) to environmental neglect, destruction, invasion and homelessness, and Bernasconi (2017) to race segregation. 16 I appreciate, as raised in the introductory chapter, that there are implications for this move. However, owing to the scope of my argument, I leave addressing the questions posed in the introductory chapter for the musings of another project.

References Appiah KA (1993) In my father’s house. New York: Oxford University Press Aucoin P (2017) Toward an anthropological understanding of space and place. In BB Janz (Ed.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Bernasconi R (2017) Race as a historico-spatial construct: The hermeneutical challenge to institutional racism. In BB Janz (Ed.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Bhabha HK (1994) The location of culture. New York: Routledge Blum A (2017) The mental life of the metropolis. In BB Janz (Ed.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Casey E (2017) Being on the edge: Body, place, climate. In BB Janz (Ed.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Chimakonam JO (2016) Can the philosophy curriculum be Africanised? An examination of the prospects and challenges of some models of Africanisation. South African Journal of Philosophy 35(4): 513–522 Chimakonam JO (2018) The 'demise' of philosophical universalism and the rise of conversational thinking in contemporary African philosophy. In EE Etieyibo (Ed.) Method, substance, and the future of African philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan De Sousa Santos, B. 2014. Epistemologies of the south: Justice against epistemicide. London: Routledge Deleuze G & Guattari F (1987) A thousand plateaus (trans. B Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Du Toit L (2019) The African animal other: Decolonizing nature. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24(2): 130–142

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Ellison R (2001) Invisible man. London: Penguin Classics Etieyibo E (2016). Why ought the philosophy curriculum in universities in Africa be Africanised? South African Journal of Philosophy, 35(4): 404–417 Etieyibo E (Ed.) (2018) Method, substance, and the future of African philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan Etieyibo E & Chimakonam JO (2018) The state of African philosophy in Africa. In E Etieyibo (Ed.) Method, substance, and the future of African philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan Fanon F (1967) Black skins, white masks. Pluto Press: London Fanon F (2005/1963) The wretched of the earth (trans. C. Farrington). New York: Grove Press Gibson NG (2015) Thinking outside the ivory tower: Towards a radical humanities in South Africa. In P Tabensky & S Matthews (Eds) Being at home: Race, institutional culture and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Gschwandtner CM (2017) Space and narrative: Ricoeur and a hermeneutic reading of place. In BB Janz (Ed.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Harder K (2017) When the ‘here and now’ is nowhere. In BB Janz (Ed.) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Heidegger M (1962) Being and time (trans. J Macquarrie & E Robinson). Oxford: Blackwell Janz BB (2009) Philosophy in an African place. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Janz BB (2015) Instrumentalisation in universities. In P Tabensky & Matthews S (Eds) Being at home: Race, institutional culture and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Janz BB (Ed.) (2017) Place, space and hermeneutics. Cham: Springer Lauer H (2019) Implicitly racist epistemology: Recent philosophical appeals to the neurophysiology of tacit prejudice. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24(2): 34–47 Malpas J (2004/1999) Place and experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Malpas J (2006) Heidegger’s topology. Cambridge: MIT Press Mbembe A (2001) On the post-colony. Berkeley: University of California Press Mbembe A (2016) Decolonising the university: New directions. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15(1): 29–45 Merleau-Ponty M (1962) Phenomenology of perception (trans. C Smith). London: Routledge Mignolo WD (2007) Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies 21(2): 449–514 Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ (2018) Epistemic freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and decolonization. New York: Routledge Olivier A (2016) The place of philosophy in Africa. Southern Journal of Philosophy 54(4): 502–520 Olivier A (2017) Understanding place. In BB Janz (Ed.) Hermeneutics, place and space. New York: Springer

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Olivier A (2018) The facticity of freedom. Religions DOI:10.3390, http://www.mdpi.com/20771444/9/4/110 Olivier A (2019) Place and displacement: Towards a distopological approach. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27(1): 31–56 Ramose MB (2016) Teacher and student with a critical pan-epistemic orientation: An ethical necessity for Africanising the educational curriculum in Africa. South African Journal of Philosophy 35(4): 546–555 Sartre J-P (1958) Being and nothingness (trans. JJ Barnes). London: Routledge Scarry E (1985) The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford: Oxford University Press Tabensky P & Matthews S (Eds) (2015) Being at home: Race, institutional culture and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Taylor P (2015) Towards a decolonial analytic philosophy. In P Tabensky & S Matthews (Eds) Being at home: Race, institutional culture and transformation at South African higher education institutions. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal University Press wa Thiong’o N (1981) Decolonising the mind. London: James Currey

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Funda-mentalities: Twists and turns in South African philosophy (of education) Ulrike Kistner

Introduction Since the early years of the twenty-first century, at the latest, calls for revision of curricula in education and in philosophy at South African universities have resounded (see, for example, vol. 18, no. 3 of the Journal of Higher Education of 2004). These calls partly converge with, and are variously amplified by, the demands articulated in the course of the student protests of 2015–2016, for decolonisation in/of education. South African universities are responding to these challenges in different ways. At the University of Pretoria (UP), a number of task teams were established to take up various aspects of ‘transformation’ for new policy directions. But beyond the work delegated to the task teams, we need to take a closer look at the relation of ‘transformation’ to knowledge. Lis Lange has identified three categories of knowledge(s) at the base of transformation in higher education: ‘knowledge of knowledge, which focuses on curriculum and epistemologies; knowledge of the self, which refers to institutional culture; and knowledge of the other which refers especially to students’ and staff ’s identity construction and formation within the university space' (Lange 2019: 85). The discipline of philosophy is willy-nilly the one most directly implicated, not simply because it is a matter of redirecting its focus and replacing curriculum content. Involving second-order inquiry – thought about thought, knowledge of knowledge – philosophy falls squarely into the first kind of knowledge at the base of ‘transformation’ identified above. By the same token, it is the discipline called to the task of investigating injustice in questions of power/knowledge; in the formation, justification, and legitimation of concepts and theories; and in the granting or withholding of credibility to/from the knowing subject. Yet, it is in relation to knowledge of knowledge that transformation presents the highest risk: the risk of seeing transformation as a place of arrival that, therefore, requires the suspension of critique, offering instead a new orthodoxy, the price of which is the depoliticisation of knowledge, and the death of the university as a place of contestation and public debate. (Lange 2014: 13) This risk becomes palpable if we consider calls for transformation historically, that is, if we examine the underbelly of the recent calls for curriculum revision.

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Much as the recent call for curriculum transformation at UP states an intention to break from its history, ‘including the corrosive legacy of Christian National Education and the University’s active role in the production and maintenance of the systems of colonialism and apartheid’ (UP 2016), a ‘break from history’ demands a reflexive return to history. It is incumbent on philosophy to critically examine, debate and disrupt the meanings of received knowledge, and to expose the sediments of the institutional organisation of knowledge within which it has become embedded. The changes recently visualised for the discipline of philosophy are far-reaching to the extent that they demand questioning its own foundations and positions; yet a historical perspective reveals that changes to the core of the curriculum in the discipline of philosophy are not unprecedented. There are a number of twists and turns that have historically set tracks deeply imprinted on the institutional organisation of knowledge, on modes of engagement, interactions, styles of teaching, learning and researching that have encased knowledge formation and transmission. The ‘winds of change’ blowing from different directions make UP ‘one of the major sites for confrontation of knowledge of the past, the present, and the future’ (Jansen 2009: 115). This is not to make an argument about continuities or about discontinuities in the University’s or its Philosophy Department’s understanding of its formation and its role. Eschewing both the pinpointing of the death of the old and the birth of the new order in the image of a ‘clean break’, and the drawing of sequences of succession mediated by the name of ‘transition’, I would want to propose an investigation of the jagged edges within and across ‘transformation’ discourses themselves.1 Considered from this perspective, claims of ‘transformation’ to uniqueness and moral indisputability would become open to question. It would then become a matter of investigating the configurations and re-configurations of elements of ‘transformation’ discourses. This is what I would like to embark on here, in the contexts of the roles of the Department of Philosophy in the history of UP. In particular, I would like to investigate some of the formations that have gained hegemonic status in philosophy and cognate disciplines at this university in the years 1948–1986, and their afterlife in some of the ‘transformation’ agendas of the 1990s and early 2000s. (The reasons for zooming in on this time period will become clear, I hope, in the course of this chapter.) The opening of this time window is shrouded in myth-making. Assimilating its origin to currently prevalent ‘transformation’ discourses, Pieter Duvenage marks the inauguration of a distinct form of philosophical inquiry at UP in post-World War II period as ‘post-colonial’ (or rather ‘post-imperial’), to the extent that it hives off from British (cultural) imperialism whose philosophical tentacles he finds in ‘British idealism’ and empiricism. Deprived of the ‘security’ of the imperial ‘moederland’, he says, Afrikaans-speaking philosophers were thrown back upon themselves. Putting their self-certainty and comfort at risk, they had to embark on existential searches for the relation between Africa and Europe in the course of their studies in the Netherlands, Belgium and/or Germany. What they brought back with them, so the legend goes, was 174

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formative, setting new tracks through the introduction of the vaunted ‘continental philosophy’ in the Departments of Philosophy at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria (Duvenage 2000: 735; see also Duvenage 2009). By this account, philosophy at UP was ‘post-colonial’ avant la lettre from 1948 onwards, reaching its height in the period of Oberholzer’s (1952–1969) and Dreyer’s (1969–1986) leadership, and meeting its demise in the 1990s, when all that was solid melted into air.2 If I choose this period as one of the focal points, it is not to tie in with this account, but to examine the way in which it has styled itself, in conjunction with the selfunderstanding of its educational-political mission. The official historiography of UP’s Philosophy Department (in the hands of its scribe, Pieter Duvenage, and of its compiler for the departmental website, as well as the numerous laudatios, obituaries, tributes and Festschriften, by which one hand was beholden to wash the other) is punctuated by three towering figures: Casper Hendrik Rautenbach, Carel Krügel Oberholzer, and Petrus Secundus Dreyer. The accounts given of the accession and succession of these three figures to the positions of lecturer, professor and Head of Department (in the case of Rautenbach, to Dean of ‘Lettere’ and Rector of UP in the years 1948–1970) read like a Biblical genealogy: And Rautenbach begat Oberholzer and Oberholzer begat Dreyer and, in a separate lineage branching out to Opvoedkunde, Oberholzer begat Landman who transformed UP’s Department of Philosophy of Education into the Departement van Fundamentele Pedagogiek and, in his turn, begat Oberholzer in another role in the Departement van Fundamentele Pedagogiek at the University of South Africa (UNISA). (Women academics do not feature in this lineage, except for one who was, in fact, begotten and made: Roeline Oberholzer, daughter of C.K. Oberholzer who, having completed her PhD under the supervision of her progenitor, taught in UP’s Philosophy Department between 1960 and 1962.) The sequence sketched here is not simply the mark of a genre of historiography organised around ‘great men making history’: this mode of historiography is underpinned by institutional structures, academic landscaping, networks of power and patronage, academic socialisation, moulding of the teaching-learning relation, intellectual traditions, interdisciplinarity between theology and philosophy and education, and subject interpellations between the state and the academy in tightly interlocking albeit internally conflict-riven networks. Against this backdrop, the three towering figures of Rautenbach, Oberholzer and Dreyer stand as a troika. Rautenbach and Dreyer were preachers in the Hervormde Kerk for varying periods, and for Oberholzer, the NHK was a close milieu.3 Oberholzer had been trained as teacher, and lectured at the Normaalkolleges under the Transvaal Onderwysdepartement before and during his appointment at UP. Rautenbach was a member of the Ossewabrandwag movement (Interview with H.M. Robinson, 7.3.1973) and Dreyer was a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond (Wilkins and Strydom 1978: A29; Duvenage 2016: 71). Between them, they actively spanned the disciplines of philosophy, education, and theology.4 In their roles

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as philosophy professors, they cultivated close associations with the Faculties of Theology and Education. Under their terms of office, Philosophy became a mandatory Bachelor of Arts subject for Hervormde Kerk preachers. Rautenbach and, after him, Oberholzer, in their positions in the then Department of Ethics and History of Philosophy, lectured on Educational Ethics, Pedagogy and Philosophy of Education in the Education Faculty. Rautenbach became a member of the university committee advising the Minister of Education. The glue that held this troika together across three generations lies in the common denominator of their religious, political and academic socialisation; an important additional ingredient is a certain kind of transferentially modulated discipleship. An account of Oberholzer’s teaching style is offered by his erstwhile student and later, successor, Dreyer, in a tribute to his magister: […] he inspired a great number of students to pursue graduate study under his direction. Because he was so strongly convinced of his own views his students often complained of a lack of freedom. To what extent this complaint was justified and to what extent such freedom must be granted to his students are questions that we leave aside. The strong impression that Oberholzer undoubtedly made on his graduate students resulted in a great number of his own ideas and work finding their way into theses and dissertations. (Dreyer 2007/1979: 1) The vector in the teaching-learning relation here is a unidirectional one, styled as the right and the duty to teach; ‘educating’ is ‘human onticity in its primordial relatedness’ (Dreyer 2007/1979: 3). ‘Educating is…given with being human; it is a mode or way of being human’ (Dreyer 2007/1979: 3). The ‘pedagogic interaction’ is one in which the adult has to give guidance and support to the child (see Cilliers 1975: 36; see also De Vries 1986: 84; Duvenage 2009: 226), for which the child, seeking security, has an existential need in turn. (Thus spoken in South Africa in the latter half of the 1970s, at the height of the struggles against Bantu Education and other apartheid laws, in the course of which school-going youth assumed politicalhistorical agency – see Enslin 1992.) ‘Being human is to educate.’ The unidirectionality of ‘educating’ is reflected in the tributes paid to Oberholzer by his colleagues and students, which are worth quoting at some length. In the ceremony organised around the award of the medal of honour to Oberholzer by the South African Association for the Advancement of Education in February 1977, tributes flowed in from various constituencies: First: the thankfulness of colleagues who by his influence have been lead [sic] away from the blind allies [sic] of naturalism, evolutionism, behaviourism and existentialism. Second: the thankfulness […] of those who have concentrated on providing commentary on Oberholzer’s views and in this way have tried to justify their academic existence.

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Third: the thankfulness of numerous students who have had and still have the privilege of sitting at the feet of the greatest authority and exponent in South Africa of phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, child anthropology, and phenomenological axiology. Forth [sic]: the thankfulness of hundreds of teacher-educators who by his analysis of the essentials of a view of life inculcated in them [sic] that educating is meaningful because in its deepest essence it is philosophy of life actualising. (Landman 1977, emphasis added)5 Adopting, adapting and aping the terms of existential philosophy, Oberholzer motivates his ‘turn’ to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology in the immediate post-War period in vicarious identification with the experience of the western European war generation – that is, in his words, an ‘unparalleled high tension on all levels, an unprecedented sense of insecurity, anxiety, guilt, anger, suffering, the absurd, the threatening other, and death as limit experience’ (Oberholzer 1949: 17; see also Duvenage 2009: 226). His successor, Piet Dreyer, returning from two-and-ahalf years of doctoral studies in Groningen in 1950, a bit more sober than his teacher at home, added science/technology-critical soundings.6 These half-critical tones did not prevent Rautenbach from appointing renowned Kant scholar, high-ranking collaborator in Nazi-occupied Belgium and fugitive war criminal Herman Jean de Vleeschauwer to the Merensky Library (1950-1951);7 they did not prevent Oberholzer from wanting to shield the Nazi regime from its critics (see, for instance, Oberholzer 1962: 7); nor did they prompt technology-critic Dreyer to question the beginnings of South Africa’s nuclear weapons research programme at exactly the time at which he laments its destructiveness. Nonetheless, there are some indications that some of the existential-philosophical concerns expressed by Oberholzer and Dreyer were coming into the philosophy curricula. In 1950, phenomenology and existential philosophy and dialectical materialism made their debut in the MA course, while the third year course contained a hefty chunk of Staatsfilosofie (‘Die Staat en die Etiek’, ‘Die Staat en die Reg’, ‘Die Verskillende Staatsvorme’, and ‘Die Staat as Kultuurverskynsel’).8 Over the next few years, from 1952 to 1960, phenomenology shot to prominence, moving from a rarefied offering at MA level to the second year of (undergraduate) study. From 1955 to 1962, ‘Value Philosophy’ and Philosophical Anthropology were added to the mix at third-year level. And Kant, who had commanded a great deal of attention under History of Philosophy and Epistemology until 1954, was relegated to the MA programme in 1955, and altogether eclipsed in 1956.9 How are these shifts to be explained? The obvious places to look – and this is part of the official historiography of ‘Afrikaanse Filosofie’ – are threefold: to the selfdeclarations of the great men to whom they are attributed; to the tributes paid to them by their colleagues and erstwhile students and professor-successors; and to the ‘influences’ on and of their thinking. Restricted as these sources are for an intellectual historiography, they do bear closer scrutiny. I would briefly like to single out two examples here. Piet Dreyer,

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having completed his doctoral thesis on ‘The Anthropology of Ludwig Feuerbach’ under Oberholzer’s supervision in 1951, puts his findings into an article published in 1954: The loss of ‘revelation’ (‘openbaring’/‘offenbarung’) which he attributes to Feuerbach, results in an insecure ‘Diesseitigkeit’ (‘this-worldliness’) (Dreyer 1954: 49). His peer in Systematic Theology, BJ Engelbrecht, together with whom he had ventured to study in Groningen in the late 1940s, embellishes this ‘loss’ in terms of ‘the tragic’ in an article written in high-pitched but broken German (1952: 176– 179).10 The experience of war had dispelled any notion of a transcendental authority and certainty, leaving humankind bereft, insecure and fragile, in search of answers to the meaning of life no longer given. Enter Existentialism and Philosophical Anthropology – with footnotes referencing Jean-Paul Sartre and Gerardus van der Leeuw.11 So much for the self-declarations and the ‘influences’, recited across the hagiographic accounts. However, Engelbrecht’s tragic-waxing account offers a further hint worth examining: in an unexpected turn, he concludes: here we have formulated it ‘classically’, not in Christian terms. The Old Testament and the New Testament have moments that may be termed ‘tragic’, but these cannot be called ‘tragedies’. They do not know anything about blind, inexorable fate, they only know God’s will…They do not know anything about life being cut off, they only know sin and guilt. (Engelbrecht 1952: 179; trans. U Kistner) The distinction drawn here between ‘classical’ and Christian, fate and God’s will, life broken and sin/guilt closely resonates with the division between Nederduitsch Hervormde (NH) theology and Nederduits Gereformeerde (NG) theology, institutionalised in the division in UP’s theology faculties, between Afdeling A (Section A) and Afdeling B (Section B), respectively. In their dual role as academic teachers in philosophy, and office bearers in, or close associates of, the Hervormde Kerk, the teachings of Rautenbach, Oberholzer and Dreyer were woven between these disciplines, albeit in a peculiar way. Upholding the Kantian distinction between (modern) philosophy and theology, the threesome were firmly set on keeping theology out of philosophy teaching.12 The reverse case did not pertain to the teaching of theology, though: courses in philosophy were mandatory for theology (Afdeling A) students. Philosophy teaching was to provide the ‘geestelike vorming en dissipline’ (‘intellectual formation and discipline’) for both theology and philosophy students. The separation between the ‘redefundamentalisme’ (‘reasonfundamentalism’) of philosophy teaching and the ‘belydenisfundamentalisme’ (‘confessional fundamentalism’) of theology was affirmed by Hervormde Kerk theology. Thus, Hervormdes would embrace modern philosophy, even if it meant cultivating intensively tense thinking postures,13 and shrouding themselves in ‘tragic consciousness’ elevated to a ‘life style’ by Oberholzer. For them, this was mandated by particular brands of phenomenology, existential philosophy (Jaspers and Heidegger), philosophical anthropology (Plessner), and later (post)structuralism and postmodernisme, whereas Nederduits Gereformeerdes would keep modern 178

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philosophy at arm’s length (Beukes and Van Aarde 2000: 16–19), recommending it as an optional subject for their students (see Dreyer in Duvenage 2016: 46). The curricular enthroning of phenomenology in UP’s philosophy department between 1952 and 1960 corresponds to the way in which the Hervormdes carved out their relation to ‘continental philosophy’ in the same time period. In the words of Johann Beukes and Andries van Aarde, describing the new course embarked on simultaneously in Hervormde theology and philosophy, by Rautenbach and particularly Oberholzer and in an attenuated form, by Dreyer, ‘Die redefundamentalisme van die moderne filosofie het in verhouding tot teologie ’n nugtere en saaklike bestendiging genoodsaak’ (‘The reason-fundamentalism of modern philosophy has imposed the requirement of a sober and concise consistency on the study of theology’) (Beukes & Van Aarde 2000: 17). Branching out from its formative role in Hervormde theology, phenomenology attained a base in philosophy in the 1950s. It connected with a particular philosophy of education, namely Fundamentele Pedagogiek, over the same time period. Oberholzer modified the Dutch version that he found in CJ Langeveld’s (1979/1943) practical-phenomenological approach in a distorting adaptation (see Suransky-Dekker 1998) in his own Inleiding tot die Prinsipiële Opvoedkunde (1954) (Introduction to Fundamental Education) which marked the arrival of Fundamentele Pedagogiek in South Africa14 at exactly the time when the Bantu Education Act (1953) was being implemented.15 ‘Fundamenteel’ became quite the buzzword at the centre of a self-referential system, as the Husserlian ‘eidetic reduction’ was pressed into the services of pedagogy and political rhetoric in an endless proliferation of tautologies.16 The ‘fundamentele’, ‘nugtere en saaklike bestendiging’ (‘fundamental’, ‘sober and concise consistency’) contributed to freeing the fundamentalistic founding fathers-brothers from religious-doctrinal shackles, while keeping a foot in the training of theologians and teachers. It allowed them to align their newfound way of philosophising with scientific reasoning yet grounded in philosophy, and to declare religious faith, world views, political commitments, and all manner of ‘-isms’ (except their own) as ‘prescientific’. Thus, in 1961, the first year philosophy course providing a ‘Systematic Introduction’ includes an entry termed ‘Philosophy as Science’ (‘Wysbegeerte as Wetenskap’). In this vein, philosophy styles itself as objective knowledge of history, culture, psychical states, etc. – what a historian of apartheid terms ‘ideologically salient basic knowledge’ (‘weltanschaulich bedeutsames Grundlagenwissen’) (Marx 2015: 727). At the nodes of new directions in theology, philosophy, pedagogy, and of politics and policy in these fields stood Oberholzer and Dreyer (the latter as epigone) in philosophy, and (again) Oberholzer and Landman (the latter as epigone) in education. Oberholzer had made his mark in two closely related claims to fame: as founder of phenomenology in South Africa, and as founder of Fundamentele Pedagogiek in South Africa, extending far beyond UP’s Departments of Ethics and History of Philosophy (such as it was between 1953 and 1960 under Oberholzer’s

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headship) and philosophy merged with education (such as it was between 1960 and 1969 under Oberholzer’s headship). Writing in 1992, Penny Enslin surveys its reach: [Fundamental Pedagogics] has been the dominant approach to the study of education in the Afrikaans-medium universities and colleges of education. More importantly it is also the dominant approach to education at the ethnic or black universities established in accordance with the Extension of University Education Act (1959), as well as the black colleges of education. These segregated black universities and colleges have been dominated by Afrikaner academics, who comprise the overwhelming majority of the teaching corps within these institutions. Their courses in educational theory have been taught almost exclusively through Fundamental Pedagogics…[Fundamental Pedagogics] is the discourse enunciated by those who control black and white schooling in South Africa. Most teachers in South Africa – and almost all black teachers – are educated within this approach. (Enslin 1992: 37)17 Monolithic as it may appear to many of its commentators and critics, the phenomenological fundamentalism yet underwent some changes. It was specifically the ‘post-scientific stage’ (understood as ‘the meaningful implementation of this body of knowledge in society’ –Viljoen & Pienaar 1971: 17) and its assignment to ‘unscientific’ status that had caused consternation (see Roos 1980), which was addressed by introducing notions from Lebensphilosophie. SG Roos, summing up the history of Fundamentele Pedagogiek at UP, explains: Since 1969 this view has undergone rapid change. It was indicated that there could be only one ontological category, namely, being-in-theworld. From this, anthropological categories were detailed […] Later, the dialectic and hermeneutic methods were increasingly used along with the phenomenological method to indicate the meaningful relationships among fundamental pedagogical essentials…It was realised that a philosophy of life had to be linked to all pedagogical thinking. Only in 1968, however, was the importance of a philosophy of life for pedagogical thinking described. Subsequently, it was also indicated that what was permissible according to a philosophy of life is equal in status to that of scientific necessity. (Roos 1980: 23–24)18 Once again, philosophy led the charge: the 1965–66 Yearbook entry indicates the introduction, under the heading of ‘Inleiding in die Metafisiese Problematiek’, of the items ‘kritiek op die metafisika’, ‘wêreldbeskouing’(‘world view’), ‘lewensopvatting en wetenskap’ (‘philosophy of life and science’), and ‘geloof en wetenskap’ (‘faith and science’) at first-year level. Oberholzer revised his earlier principles of pedagogy, re-casting Fundamentele Pedagogiek in the terminology of existential phenomenology. This revision narrowed the gap between the reformed denominations with respect to Fundamentele Pedagogiek – the NH Kerk (Oberholzer’s fold of Fundamentele Pedagogiek), the NG Kerk (Landman’s fold of Fundamentele Pedagogiek),19 and the 180

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Gereformeerdes (Christelike Hoër Onderwys) – in bringing philosophy, theology, and education closer together.20 Ostensibly building on the ‘gemeenskaplike agtergrond’ (‘community background’) that the Hervormdes retained even as they had previously eschewed a theological framing for the teaching of philosophy, ‘volk’, ‘gemeenskap’ (‘community’) and ‘kultuur’ became the mottos under which apartheid codified the ethnic divisions that structured education policy. Christian National Education as the overall frame was applied differentially to white, Coloured, Indian and ‘Bantu’ (black) education under the overarching precept of the particular ethnically defined ‘volkseie kultuur’ (‘identity and culture’) – ‘in accordance with the demands of the community and in compliance with the group to which the educator belongs’ (Viljoen & Pienaar 1971: 19). The rapprochement between the reformed denominations under the banner of ‘gemeenskap’ meant a closing of ranks in time for mobilising against ‘the Communist onslaught’, by which the Cold War was indigenised in the so-called South African Border War (closely intertwined with the Namibian War of Independence and the Angolan Civil War). Young, white, male conscripts were drawn into this conflict either before or during their years of tertiary education; Fundamentele Pedagogiek played its part in paraatheid training. SG Roos lists the Fundamentele Pedagogiek publications for the second half of the 1970s in close correspondence to the perceived ‘threat’: In the book, Geestelike weerbaarheid teen ideologiese terrorisme [‘Spiritual preparedness against ideological terrorism’] Roos (1979) looked at youth preparedness from a fundamental pedagogical perspective where the philosophical background of spiritual threats is considered. (Roos 1980: 18). In Die praktykwording van die fundamentele pedagogiek [‘The practical application of fundamental pedagogics’] the Marxist threat to Christian education is explained in detail. The significance of this for being a Christian educator is also explicated. (Roos 1980: 21) In the book (see above), the importance of Christian National Education for spiritual defence is pointed out. Also referred to are specific knowledge for a Christian defence against ideological terrorism as well as for the task of the Christian educator in this regard. (Roos 1980: 22) The Philosophy Department, in its turn, contributed a ‘Critical Introduction to Marxism and Communism’ in its ‘Sistematiese Inleiding’ (‘Systematic Introduction’) at first-year level in 1978. A much more differentiated entry, inflected by critical theory,21 features in the entry for the second-year course on ‘Geskiedenis van die Wysbegeerte’ (‘History of Philosophy’) in 1981, which remains on the books until 1987. Here, the orthodoxy (in the form of ‘the founders’ – ‘Die grondleggers [Marx en Engels]’ and ‘the high point’ – ‘Die hoogbloei: Lenin, Stalin en die uitbouing van die kommunistiese ideologie’) is contrastively followed by ‘renewal and decline’ – ‘Vernuwing en verval: Die Neo-Marxisme [Bloch, Horkheimer, Marcuse, 181

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Habermas en Kolakowski]’ – and ‘Ideologiekritiek’, concluding with ‘Marxisme en Christendom’. The third-level course of the same year includes course components on Hermeneutics and Theory of Literary Interpretation and Translation, Ideologiekritiek and ‘Maatskappykritiek’ (‘Societal Criticism’). These shifts and innovations in the curriculum coincided with a change of guard. Dreyer retired in 1986, and left the task of inspiring students with the ‘nuwerwetse goed’ (‘new-fangled stuff ’) to his younger colleague, Marinus Schoeman. How critical theory was taught at a university with an institutional culture, an understanding of its mission, with educational policies, and party-political and confessional affiliations and networks spanning the depths and widths of the apartheid regime at the height of the states of emergency in the 1980s, is a puzzling if not vexing question demanding a separate investigation. The textbooks prescribed for students at various levels of study, many of them written by academic teachers themselves and published locally by Van Schaik, Nasou and HAUM,22 are didactic and explicatory in style, barring any questions, once again distilling the ‘fundamentals’ that the diligent among the erstwhile students, as well-practised rote learners, can formulaically recite on prompting decades later.23 In abstraction from the contexts of the contestations of the student movement in Germany and France in the late 1960s to early 1970s, and in the absence of access to many of the primary texts (some of which were banned and not available to students, not to mention the reading public at large), the study of debates, arguments, concepts and theories would have been rather one-dimensional (Marcuse’s critique notwithstanding). Still, successive generations of students of philosophy at UP were inspired by the unprecedented curriculum and the idiosyncratic styles of their lecturers, recounted by alumni in countless anecdotes. Whether this was a ‘Sugar Man’ phenomenon24 is not for me to judge. The curriculum changes, markedly in 1981, and then again in 1988 (as I will explain below), take place at a time of heightened repression during successive states of emergency between 1985 and 1987; and at the same time, of moves of ‘toenadering’ (‘rapprochement’) between groupings of white South Africans – including prominent Afrikaner intellectuals and representatives of business, newspapers, opposition parties, universities, churches, and sports bodies – and the African National Congress in exile, with all the ambivalences about ‘change’, amid switching between conflicting loyalties and affiliations.25 Any retrospective excitement or optimism about an MA dissertation with the title ‘Die Swartbewussynsfilosofie van Steve Biko’ (‘The Black Consciousness Philosophy of Steve Biko’) completed in UP’s Department of Philosophy under the supervision of PS  Dreyer and submitted in 1986, to be followed three years later by the submission, by the same candidate, of a PhD thesis entitled ‘Black Consciousness as Revolutionary Philosophy’, might be found to be misplaced in consideration of the fact that the candidate proudly lists on his Curriculum Vitae the following positions held concurrently with his studies toward his MA and PhD degrees: – 1984–1992 Control Analyst at State Security Council – 1986–1988 Intelligence Coordinator in the Office of the State President. 182

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The next set of marked curriculum changes comes in 1988. For the first time, proficiency in the German language is no longer an issue.26 But, more importantly, for the first time, there is mention of things ‘African’. After a first-year course providing ‘Introduction and History’ in the form of ‘Origins of Western Philosophy’ (which remains on the books until 2000),27 ‘Afrikadenke’ features in a course offered at second-year level under the heading of ‘World Views and Ideologies’, together with ‘nasionalisme, kapitalisme, sosialisme’. The same yearbook entry for the first time institutes ‘Political Philosophy’ (together with ‘Contemporary Philosophy’), dealing with the themes of ‘justice, freedom, violence, democracy’ at third-year level. In 1999, ‘Afrikadenke’ is lifted out of ‘World Views and Ideologies’ in the second year, where it had been slotted in for the past eleven years, and subordinated to ‘Afrika-Filosofie’, which for the first time attains a status, albeit tentative and unstable, of a subdiscipline of philosophy offered as an option to first-year students. The description that follows is instructive: ‘Probleme rondom die begrip van Afrika-filosofie: Bestaan daar iets soos ’n “Afrika-filosofie”, en hoe word dit van ander fielosofieë onderskei? Bestudering van die Afrika-wêreldbeskouing. Temas in die Afrika-filosofie soos epistemologie, etiek en politieke filosofie.’28 (The description of this particular option remains the same in the entry for the Yearbook 2000 – which, in the context of the admission of black students from the early 1990s, switches to English for the first time – except for ‘the study of African worldviews’, which is deleted.) Another first in the 1999 Yearbook are entries listed as options open to third-year students: ‘Postmodernisme, Etiek en Samelewing’ (‘Postmodernism, Ethics, and Society’) and ‘Waarheid en Eksistensiële Singewing’ (‘Truth and Existential Sense-Making’). It would seem that the instability that comes through in the formulation of the ‘AfrikaFilosofie’ entry is mirrored in the uncertainty expressed in the new and prominent role given to ‘Postmodernisme’. In the English translation (2000) of the Afrikaans first version (1999), the entry weighs up the pros and cons of ‘Postmodernism’: Postmodernism brought much that we wish to retain. It brought play and humour; more tolerance; a sharper awareness of economic, political and gender discrimination; a post-colonial consciousness of the hegemony (universalist claims) of western ideas on rationality; acknowledgement of the unfoundedness and unjustifiability of many of our deepest beliefs and assumptions; the unmasking of various utopias and ideologies; more freedom for the individual. But what is the effect? For the most part it results in relativism, indifference, cynicism, undecidedness and an inability to think and act further; loss of orientation and meaning; the undermining of authority and moral responsibility for the other; disruption of the moral and social ecology; widespread feelings of discontent, anxiety and insecurity. (emphasis added) Whereas the Afrikaans version of the year before had still held out the possibility of ‘a way out of the impasses’,29 the English version of 2000 stridently asserts: ‘This module aims to give an account of this ambivalent situation, and to explore the possibilities for sound, responsible decision-making.’ 183

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The course entry for ‘African Philosophy’ of 1999 (English in 2000), formulated in dichotomy with ‘western/European philosophy’,30 remains on the books unchanged until 2005; it was removed for years to come, in 2006. The jitters that had once more driven the previously encountered ‘tension’ to high-pitch, palpable in the ‘postmodernism’ course entries, seem to have subsided by 2007. Its intensity having been reduced to less than a sentence, historically and descriptively thematising ‘the postmodern mind and its challenges to the contemporary intellectual and political milieu’, ‘postmodernism’ was integrated into the second-year course on ‘Modern and Postmodern Philosophy’ from 2008 onwards, and did not make a comeback under its own name. There are several aspects that are incongruous here, calling for explanation. First of all, the question arises as to how and why ‘postmodernism’ comes into the ambit of philosophy and attains a prominent role there belatedly – long after it had run its course in literary studies in South Africa by the late 1980s.31 Secondly, it is noteworthy that ‘postmodernism’ appears when ‘African philosophy’ makes its entry; and it disappears after ‘African philosophy’ disappears. How could the appearances and disappearances be understood? It would seem that ‘postmodernism’ in philosophy takes up the moral charge that Fundamentele Pedagogiek had abandoned upon its demise. Fundamentele Pedagogiek slunk away from the devastation it had wrought, citing ‘postmodernism’ and ‘human rights’ as its sublation, as if it were simply a matter of the passing of an old fad upon the entry of a new one in the seasonal rhythm of fashions (see, for instance, Van der Walt 2005: 340). The ‘Postmodernisme, Etiek en Samelewing’ course description for 1999/2000 (remaining until 2007) demonstrates the burden that it took on from the expansive field vacated by Fundamentele Pedagogiek, particularly in the highlighted phrases – ‘loss of orientation and meaning; the undermining of authority and moral responsibility for the other; disruption of the moral and social ecology’. The perplexities evident in the formulation of the entries under ‘African philosophy’ between 1999 and 2005, conversely, seem to have been palmed off to UP’s and UNISA’s education faculties, where ‘African philosophy’ (of a kind) fell on fertile ground. In the ideological vacuum left by the decades-long hegemony of pervasive if discredited Fundamentele Pedagogiek – a vacuum that the first post-apartheid national curriculum introduced in 1997, Curriculum 2005, with its democratic values and learner-centred pedagogies, had the vision32 but not the theoretical clarity or the conditions (see Muller and Taylor 1995; Jansen 1999: 147; Jansen 2001; Taylor and Vinjevold 1999) to effectively fill33 – particular versions of ‘African philosophy’ stepped up to the perceived task. In contexts where the new curriculum directions, and particularly the principles of ‘learner-centredness’, were taken up uncritically and procedurally in bureaucratic implementations,34 some precepts of Bantu Education could survive intact. They found some application in arguments for including Indigenous Knowledge Systems in the curriculum, on the assumption of equivalences between different knowledge types – formal and informal (see Hoadley 2010: 161). In this context, ubuntu came into curriculum debates, primarily in education faculties previously aligned with Bantu Education, where it was touted 184

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as a basis for post-apartheid educational policy, styled into ‘ubuntugogy’ (see Van der Walt 2010a; 2010b). In the view of veteran UNISA Professor of Education Philip Higgs and his co-author, Stellenbosch philosopher of education Berte van Wyk, Higher education…in the traditional African setting cannot, and indeed, should not, be separated from life itself. It is a natural process by which members of the community gradually acquire skills, knowledge, and attitudes appropriate to life in their community – a higher education inspired by a spirit of ubuntu in the service of community. (Higgs and Van Wyk 2007: 185) Ubuntu and other articulations of communalism, described as ‘the root of African philosophy, the wellspring flowing with African ontology and epistemology’ (Ramose 2002: 320), were elevated to educational principles as ‘indigenous’ responses to colonial education (see, for example, Higgs 2003: 17; Higgs and Van Wyk 2007: 183–185; Ramose 2004: 158). The continuities with culturalistic assumptions of apartheid education policy are remarkable, particularly the notion of culture-dependent rationality expressed in ‘worldview’ (which also underlies the introduction of ‘Afrikadenke’ under ‘World Views’ in UP’s philosophy curriculum in 1988), the ‘gradualism’ of education and its communitarian grounding, and the emphasis on self-enclosed ‘community/‘gemeenskap’ and ‘communalism’. These continuities form the thread in the marvellous career of Professor Higgs (detailed by Horsthemke and Enslin 2009), who managed to navigate the changing ideological landscapes of Philosophy of Education with aplomb. An erstwhile proponent of Fundamentele Pedagogiek, he turned into its zealous critic, calling for a new philosophical discourse of education. In search of the latter, he first turned to postmodernism, in which he found ‘elements of an oppositional discourse for understanding, challenging and responding to changing cultural and educational shifts in the twentieth century’ (Higgs 1997: 105). In a further move, he came to embrace ‘African ways of thinking and relating to the world’ (Higgs 2003: 6; see also Horsthemke and Enslin 2009: 211-212). However, trajectories culminating in identification of and with ‘African ways’ were not limited to individual careers. In one of the darkest and most aporetic chapters of his book Knowledge in the Blood, Jonathan Jansen describes how elements of ‘frozen knowledge’ found their way into ‘transformation’ agendas: an ubuntu module, designed by two academics from UP’s Humanities Faculty, was introduced as compulsory semester course for students in the Education Faculty (Jansen 2009: 175–198), replete with unexamined, mythagogical stereotypes passed off as knowledge – in fulfilment of directives of ‘curriculum transformation’.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have offered a picture of what, in the context of transformation, knowledge of knowledge may look like. Considering the knowledge formations that

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emerged in the period 1948–1986, and their afterlife in the period between the 1990s and the early 2000s, through some of the changes in UP’s philosophy curricula, it may not be a matter of pure speculation to suggest that some of the ‘fundamentals’ are so hardwired into the institution that they have survived ‘Africanisation’ and ‘Transformation’ intact, without genetic modification. The question remains as to whether the so-called ‘decolonial turn’ can manage to break through such ‘frozen knowledge’ and challenge the institutionalisation of ‘transformation’. Its best hope, I would suggest, would lie in a critical engagement with ‘settled knowledge’, analysing its formations and deformations;35 in encounters with entangled knowledges (see Jansen 2017: 161–162, 171); and in generating knowledge. Notes 1

I am taking my cue here from Foucault’s account of ‘change and transformations’ (part IV, chapter 5) in The Archaeology of Knowledge: The idea of a single break suddenly, at a given moment, dividing all discursive formations, interrupting them in a single moment and reconstituting them in accordance with the same rules – such an idea cannot be sustained.…Hence phenomena of ‘fragmented shift’ […] (1982/1969: 175, 176)

2

It is not coincidental, I would suggest, that ‘Postmodernism’ became a preoccupation in UP’s Philosophy Department in the late 1990s; it provided the terms of the putative dissolution of its decades-long coveted avatars.

3

Among the referees in the CV accompanying his application for a lecturing post in UP’s Department of Philosophy, Oberholzer names ‘Predikante: so goed as almal in Pretoria’ (‘Ministers: almost all in Pretoria’) (Oberholzer File, UP Archive, 5.4.1948).

4

Having studied at Potchefstroom’s Normaalkollege and at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, Oberholzer’s first position was that of a school teacher (1927– 1938). He held the position of vice-rector of the Pretoria Teachers’ College between 1938 and 1948, and carried on lecturing in Theory and History of Education at the College long after his appointment at the University of Pretoria in 1948. Apart from a PhD in Philosophy, he obtained a PhD in Education. Having been appointed to UP’s Department of Ethics and History of Philosophy in 1948, he ascended to the position of Head of Department in 1953. Education was merged with Philosophy under Oberholzer’s headship (1961–1969). After his retirement, Oberholzer became affiliated to the Departement van Fundamentele Pedagogiek at UNISA (1971–1980). Willem Adolf Landman, an erstwhile student of Oberholzer’s, succeeded Oberholzer as Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy of Education, which he refashioned into the ‘Departement van Fundamentele Pedagogiek’. Landman was promoted to Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Education – a position he held until his retirement in June 1988. Between 1990 and 1993, Landman held a part-time position as researcher in the Institute for Educational Research at UNISA.



Under Oberholzer, the Philosophy Department became involved in teaching at the School for Gifted Children, in teaching personnel at the Military College and at the Waterkloof Airbase; the Philosophy Department also offered courses in the Departments of Economics, History, and Architecture.

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Against some aspersion cast on his admission, PS Dreyer was recommended for studies in Philosophy at Groningen University by Gerardus van der Leeuw, Phenomenologist of Religion, Rector of Groningen University and first post-war Minister of Education, who cultivated relations of ‘cultural understanding’ and academic exchange with Afrikaanslanguage institutions in South Africa (see Engelbrecht 1951: 1). Dreyer attended the lectures of Helmuth Plessner, along with a group of other students who had completed their undergraduate studies and MA degrees at UP (including Bert Meyer, BJ Engelbrecht, Floris van Jaarsveld and Wolfram Kistner). Dreyer obtained a PhD in Philosophy and a DD in Religious Studies; his publications are equally divided between these two disciplines. He brought his studies of ‘Philosophical Anthropology’ into postgraduate teaching in UP’s Departement van Volkekunde (under PJ Coertze) between 1955 and 1966. Besides his official position as lecturer in Philosophy, then Professor of Philosophy and Head of Department, he was a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond, and served on the Council of the University of Zululand, and on the Executive Committee of the Council for Scientific Publications. In the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk (NHK) van Afrika, he held a number of offices, as member of the Mission Board, and of the General Commission of the NHK; as member of editorial boards of several journals of the NHK, and of the Council of Publications of the NHK. He was a member of the Commission that convicted NHK dissident theologian Albert Geyser of heresy and resistance to ecclesial authority in a heresy trial lasting six months between October 1961 and May 1962 (see Wilkins and Strydom 1978: 306).

5

There were critical responses as well, but these were largely sidelined by the Afrikaner academic establishment. Bert Meyer’s was one of them. He speaks of ‘vreeslike sinne en sinswendinge’, ‘woordskittery’, and the ‘vreeslike hoogdrawendheid, wat onder invloed van Oberholzer soos ’n veldbrand deur onderwysers opgeslurp is…’ (‘horrible sentences and twists of sense’, ‘verbal diarrhoea’ and the ‘horrible grandiloquence that spread like wildfire under Oberholzer, being sucked up by teachers’). The jargon of students who did their PhDs with Oberholzer is worth a study in its own right, he admits. But the fact that this pompous mode of expression garners such influence is surprising to him: ‘Waarom was Afrikaners so vreeslik behep met hoogdrawende taalgebruik? As ek dink hoeveel onderwysers na Oberholzer gestroom het, en aan die aanmekaarsrywery van woorde, dan verbaas dit my.’ (‘Why were Afrikaners so terribly obsessed with grandiloquence? If I think of how many teachers flocked to Oberholzer, of the writing-together of words – it’s astounding.’) (Interviews with Pieter Duvenage, February–July 2004; December 2005. In Duvenage 2016: 78, 71)

6

Dreyer, having undertaken a study of nineteenth century materialism with his doctoral thesis on ‘Die Antropologie van Ludwig Feuerbach’ (UP 1951), was not as wary of Marxist Theory as Oberholzer expressed himself to be (Oberholzer 1981: 48).



He warned of the perils of modern science and technology in a way similar to that in which Oberholzer lamented the ‘geskonde en besete wêreld’ (‘flayed and possessed world’). Panning the wars of the twentieth century, starting with the ‘Tweede Vryheidsoorlog’ as first total and therefore ‘modern’ war in western history, Dreyer fastens onto the spectre of science and technology unleashing unprecedented destructiveness, with the atom bomb as prime example, against which he proposes to mobilise the Humanities (Geesteswetenskappe) as beacons providing orientation and guidance (see Dreyer 1952: 181–83, 191).

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7

De Vleeschauwer File, UP Archive. See also Dick 2002: 5-27; 2012: 83–89.



De Vleeschauwer’s book Grondbeginselen der Logica features as textbook for the second year of study in Philosophy in 1949 and 1950.

8

Staatsfilosofie (‘Die Staat en die Etiek’, ‘Die Staat en die reg’, ‘Die verskillende staatsvorme’, and ‘Die Staat as kultuurverskynsel’) (‘Philosophy of the State [‘The State and Ethics’, ‘The State and the System of Right’, ‘The different forms of the State’, and ‘The State as cultural phenomenon’]).

9

Kant and neo-Kantianism had held a firm place in the Philosophy curriculum between 1950 and 1954. In 1955, Kant studies moved to the more rarefied MA course offerings, under ‘History of Philosophy’, to then disappear altogether – following an instruction by the Rector, Rautenbach, to CH Oberholzer and Bert Meyer, to confine Kant studies to ‘a chronological sequence’ in the History of Philosophy, as Protestant theology had distanced itself from Philosophical Idealism (Letter 22 April 1954 – File Oberholzer, UP Archive).

10 ‘Tragic consciousness’ or ‘consciousness of the tragic’ – explicitly or implicitly associated with ‘the fate of the Afrikaner’ – has been a recurring theme in discussions and written submissions (essays and dissertations) in UP’s Philosophy Department ever since. 11 See note 4.

In Engelbrecht’s melancholy intonings: Die Untersuchung der menschlichen Position in der Weltgeschichte und in der Geistesgeschichte zeigt, dass alle menschliche [sic] Bindungen nach Oben durchschnitten und dass alle innerweltliche Stützsäule [sic] hinfällig geworden sind. Der Mensch ist allein geworden. Auf eigene Kräfte ist er angewiesen zur Wohlfahrt zu fahren [sic], auf [sic] eiegene [sic] Worten (nicht mehr auf [sic] alte, schöne oder heilige Worten [sic] zu antworten auf die entscheidenden Fragen seines Lebens. (‘An investigation of man’s place in world history and in the history of ideas shows that all human connections to the transcendental have been cut, and that all secular pillars have crumbled. Man has come to stand alone. He has to rely on his own strength to provide for his well-being, to respond in his own words (no longer in old, beautiful, or holy words) to the important questions in life.’) (Engelbrecht 1952: 176)

12 See note 9. 13 Danie Goosen speaks of ‘enorme spanninge met die teologie’ and ‘’n soort ongemaklike dialoog’ (‘enormous tensions with theology’ and ‘a sort of awkward dialogue’) (Interview with Pieter Duvenage, 22 July 2005. In Duvenage 2016: 234). 14 With no small dose of irony, Bert Meyer notes the influence of Langeveld on Oberholzer’s ‘pedagogy’: It was especially Langeveld who inspired Oberholzer – to such an extent that he invited him to give lectures at UP. The question was always: What is man? Then Roleen, Oberholzer’s daughter, went to Austria to find out what man actually is there, and then she also went to Utrecht to find out, once again, from Langeveld whether man really exists or whether he is perhaps rather to be found only at UP. (trans. U Kistner) (Interviews with Pieter Duvenage, February–July 2004; December 2005. In Duvenage 2016: 69)

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15 H.F. Verwoerd specified the ‘fundamental principles of education’ ethnically, in the parliamentary debates on the Bantu Education Bill in 1953: The common knowledge of the White child is different from that of the Bantu child. It is therefore correct to say that Bantu education must of necessity be different, because it has as its starting point other sources, and other kinds of knowledge…One should therefore not confuse fundamental principles of education which may be similar for all people, with the practical form which positively differs for different people. (Union of South Africa. Debates of the House of Assembly, vol. 82, 1953, col. 3585) Quipped education theorist Wally Morrow: ‘...framework by Pretoria, filling by locals [...] Pretoria will provide the "universally valid pedagogic principles" and various locals will translate them into "meaningful" educational policies in terms of their various "philosophies of life’.’' (Morrow 1989: 35). 16 The discourse of Fundamentele Pedagogiek, ensnared as it is in tautologies, is exemplified in one of the formulations of Landman-acolyte, Adam Erasmus Gerber:

In order to find an answer to the question: what is it that makes the reality of educating what it really essentially is[...] Landman directs himself to the reality of educating, as such, and to seek and disclose by reflective thinking pedagogical essences as realities of educating. Therefore, for Landman pedagogical thinking as disclosing pedagogical essences…is a penetration to [sic] the essence of the educative reality. This implies a rational deepening and purposeful being directed to uncovering pedagogical essences. (Gerber 2012/1988: 23)

17 See also the account of the development of Fundamentele Pedagogiek in UP’s Faculty of Education by SG Roos (1980: 17): ‘Personnel from other places such as the Transvaal Department of Education and the Human Sciences Research Council have also made contributions from which it is clear that the development in thinking has not remained limited to the University of Pretoria.’ 18 Thus, indeed, with apologies or kudos (as the case may be) to Abraham Olivier’s, ‘Heidegger in the Township[s]’ (2015). The scenario did not have to be imagined; it was historically politically enacted. 19 The NG Kerk supported the Christelik-Nasionale Onderwysbeleid adopted by the National Party in 1948; this policy institutionalised racial segregation in education. 20 Danie Goosen, quoted earlier on the high levels of tension generated by the Hervormdes’ relation to modern philosophy, registers a sense of relief upon the narrowing of the gap: ‘Dit sou vir my etlike jare neem om weer die onontwykbare grootsheid – intellektuele krag, skoonheid en goedheid – van die Christelike tradisie raak te sien, en tegelyk ook die ernstige beperkinge van die Nietzscheane.’ (‘It would take me several years to be able to realise the inescapable greatness – the intellectual power, beauty, and goodness – of the Christian tradition, and simultaneously also the serious limitations of the Nietzscheans.’) (Interview with Pieter Duvenage, 22 July 2005. In Duvenage 2016: 234) 21 In 1979, the book by Marinus Schoeman (who held various positions in the Department of Philosophy between 1974 and 2016) Waarheid en Werklikheid in die Kritiese Teorie van Herbert Marcuse was published, on the basis of his MA dissertation supervised by Piet Dreyer and submitted in 1976. From the early 1980s, it was a prescribed textbook for second year Philosophy students for many years to come.

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22 Bert Meyer recalls: ‘It seems like a professor expected you to study his books carefully and then to embellish them; but what that embellishment was supposed to be, how it was to be done, was puzzling to me.’ (trans. U Kistner) (Interview with Pieter Duvenage, February– July 2004; December 2005. In Duvenage 2016: 69–70). 23 Of PS Dreyer’s lecture notes on ‘Inleiding tot die Wysbegeerte’ in Philosophy I in 1981, for instance, an alumnus remembers the ‘drie wesenskenmerke van filosofie: radikaliteit, rasionaliteit, en totaliteitsdenke’ (‘three essential characteristics of Philosophy: radicality, rationality, and thinking in terms of totality’) 38 years later. 24 ‘Sugar Man’ is the signature song of Mexican-American singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez’s album Cold Fact (1970). An article in The South African explains: A bootleg recording of Cold Fact somehow found its way to South Africa in the early [19]70s, a time when South Africa was becoming increasingly isolated as the apartheid regime tightened its grip. Rodriguez’s anti-establishment lyrics and observations as an outsider in urban America felt particularly resonant for a whole generation of disaffected young people. The album quickly developed an avid following through word-of-mouth among the white liberal youth, with local pressings made…the…government banned the record, ensuring no radio play, which only served to further fuel its cult status…Cold Fact quickly became the anthem of the white resistance in apartheid South Africa. Over the next two decades Rodriguez became a household name in the country and Cold Fact went platinum. (‘The Rodriguez story: How they found Sugar Man’. The South African, 28.6.2012. https://www.thesouthafrican.com/the-rodriguez-story-how-they-found-sugar-man/) 25 Various ‘treks’ of this kind, more or less publicised, took place outside of South Africa between 1983 and 1990. For an account of these meetings, see Savage (2014). 26 For decades before, proficiency in the German language had been a requirement for postgraduate studies in Philosophy; in 1983, it was changed from a ‘requirement’ to a ‘recommendation’. 27 The epithet ‘Western’ was ubiquitous in UP Philosophy course titles. This is registered with dismay by Bert Meyer, a lone critic in the Philosophy fraternity at the time, who reflects on what is conveyed with it: ‘Die universiteite was juis Westers: Westerse sosiologie, Westerse teologie, Westerse jurisprudensie, Westerse maatskappyleer. Alles was Westers, en ek dink dat die beklemtoning daarvan ’n wrok by swart mense laat ontstaan het.’ (‘The universities were just Western: Western sociology, Western theology, Western jurisprudence, Western social theory. Everything was Western, and I think that the emphasis on Western is what caused resentment among black people.’) (Interviews with Pieter Duvenage, February–July 2004; December 2005. In Duvenage 2016: 77). 28 ‘Probleme rondom die begrip van Afrika-filosofie: Bestaan daar iets soos ’n “Afrika-filosofie”, en hoe word dit van ander fielosofieë onderskei? Bestudering van die Afrika-wêreldbeskouing. Temas in die Afrika-filosofie soos epistemologie, etiek en politieke filosofie.’ (‘Problems around the concept of African Philosophy: Is there such a thing as “African Philosophy”, and how is it distinguished from other philosophies? Study of African worldviews. Themes in African Philosophy such as Epistemology, Ethics, and Political Philosophy’.) 29 ‘’n Balansstaat [van die winste en verliese] van hierdie ambivalente situasie word gegee, en moontlike uitweë uit die impasses daarvan word gesoek.’ (‘A balance sheet [of gains and losses]

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of this ambivalent situation is provided, and possible ways out of the resulting impasses are being sought.’) 30 See note 27. 31 The swansong to ‘Postmodernism’ in South Africa was composed by Andries Gouws in a parodistic article entitled, ‘The Post-Modernist’s Progress, or: Bluff Your Way in Postmodernism’ (1988); it marked a point of no return – which does not prevent history from repeating itself, though. 32 C2005 was burdened with lofty goals and expectations: ‘cleansing’ and revising the curriculum; developing a core national curriculum; enshrining the values of democracy, non-racialism and non-sexism; being centred on the learner, with an emphasis on integrated studies and a shift from content to process (for example, lessening the importance previously assigned to exams and promoting the importance of continuous assessment); nationbuilding and forging a common citizenship; integrating academic and vocational skills. These objectives severally foundered on the introduction of neoliberal economic policy frameworks (since 1996), of a policy orientation toward human capital theory stressing efficiency and effectiveness (see Chisholm 2003: 268–269), and towards linking education with the economy. It took the C2005 Review Committee (2000) to officially state a critique of human capital theory and school effectiveness approaches, and to reaffirm the social goals of social justice, equity and development through critical problem-solving approaches to be enshrined in the curriculum (see Chisholm 2003: 277). 33 Moreover, as Linda Chisholm shows, the policy and curricula of C2005 and OutcomesBased Education (OBE) ran into problems of implementation: capacity, personnel and resources for training of teachers, and for learning support materials were inadequate (Chisholm 2003: 278-279) in relation to the aims. 34 Ursula Hoadley conceptualises the systemic nature of bureaucratic implementations in her category of ‘bureaucratic mode’, which she places alongside the ‘knower mode’, in contrast to the ‘knowledge mode’. The ‘bureaucratic mode’ is characterised by a bureaucratic relation to knowledge, treating the curriculum as a static artifact, a ‘given’, to be operationalised (Hoadley 2010: 157), and theories of education as techniques to be implemented (Hoadley 2010: 159). The ‘bureaucratic mode’ parasitically grafts itself on the ‘knower mode’, which provides the former with the terms for establishing political legitimacy (Hoadley 2010: 164). 35 In his article entitled ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, Antoine Berman identifies textual deformations in the process of translation, which prevents it from submitting itself to the ‘trials of the foreign’ (2000/1985: 286): rationalization, clarification, expansion, ennoblement and popularization, qualitative impoverishment, quantitative impoverishment, the destruction of rhythms, the destruction of underlying networks of signification, the destruction of linguistic patternings, the destruction of vernacular networks or their exoticization, the destruction of expressions and idioms and the effacement of the superimposition of languages’. (Berman 2000/1985: 288).

Some of these ‘deformations’ preventing exposure to the ‘trials of the foreign’ can arguably be identified in strategies that have congealed into structures of ‘settled knowledge’.

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References Berman A (2000/1985) Translation and the trials of the foreign. In L Venuti (Ed.) The translation studies reader. London: Routledge Beukes C & Van Aarde A (2000) CH Rautenbach, PS Dreyer, en CK Oberholzer: Hulle nalatenskap en die pad voerentoe. HTS Theological Studies 56(1): 1–37 Chisholm L (2003) The state of curriculum reform in South Africa: The issue of Curriculum 2005. In J Daniel, A Habib & R Southall (Eds) State of the nation: South Africa 2003–2004. Cape Town: HSRC Press Cilliers, JL le R (1975) Education and the child. Durban: Butterworths De Vries C (1986) Orientation in fundamental educational theory. Stellenbosch: University Publishers and Booksellers Dick AL (2002) Scholarship, identity and lies: The political life of HJ de Vleeschauwer. Kleio 34(1): 5–27. Dick AL (2012) The hidden history of South Africa’s book and reading cultures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Dreyer PS (1952) Die problematiek van die geesteswetenskappe: Rede gehou voor die Eerste Kongres vir Wysbegeerte in Kaapstad, April 1951. HTS Theological Studies 8(4): 179–191 Dreyer PS (1954) Die godsdienskritiek van Ludwig Feuerbach en Karl Marx. HTS Theological Studies 11(1): 33–49 Dreyer PS (2007/1979) CK Oberholzer as filosoof. In AJ Smit (Ed.) Die Agein perenne: Studies in die pedagogiek en die wysbegeerte (trans. G Yonge). Pretoria: JL van Schaik. http:// georgeyonge.net/sites/georgeyonge.net/files/Dreyer_On_Oberholzer.pdf Duvenage P (2000) Is daar ’n Afrikaanse filosofiese tradisie? HTS Theological Studies 56(2&3): 723–742 Duvenage P (2009) Die mens as deelname aan ’n ‘geskonde en besete wêreld’: CK Oberholzer, fenomenologie en Pretoria. HTS Theological Studies 65(1): 223–229 Duvenage P (2016) Afrikaanse filosofie: Perspektiewe en dialoë. Bloemfontein & Stellenbosch: SUN Press. Engelbrecht BJ (1951) Prof. Dr. Gerhardus van der Leeuw. HTS Theological Studies 8(1): 1–7 Engelbrecht BJ (1952) Das tragische und der mensch. HTS Theological Studies 8(4): 176–179 Enslin P (1992) The political mythology of childhood in South African teacher education. Discourse 13(1): 36–48 Foucault M (1982/1969) The archaeology of knowledge (trans. AM Sheridan Smith). London: Tavistock Gerber AE (2012/1988) W.A. Landman: Soeker, beskrywer en hermeneutikus in die fundamentele pedagogiek (trans. G Yonge). Pedagogiekjoernaal 9(1): 23–35 Gouws A (1988) The post-modernist’s progress, or: bluff your way in post-modernism. Journal of Literary Studies 4(3): 314–326 Higgs P (1997) A re-vision of philosophy of education in South African education. South African Journal of Education 17(3): 100–107

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Higgs P (2003) African philosophy and the transformation of educational discourse in South Africa. Journal of Education 30: 5–22 Higgs P & Van Wyk B (2007) The transformation of university teaching and learning: An African philosophical perspective. Indilinga: African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems 6(2): 177–187 Hoadley U (2010) Tribes and territory: Contestation around curriculum in South Africa. In WF Pinar (Ed.) Curriculum studies in South Africa: Intellectual histories and present circumstances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan Horsthemke K & Enslin P (2009) African philosophy of education: The price of unchallengeability. Studies in Philosophy and Education 28(3): 209–222 Jansen JD (1999) Why outcomes-based education will fail: An elaboration. In: JD Jansen & P Christies (Eds) Changing curriculum. Studies in outcomes-based education in South Africa. Cape Town: Juta Jansen JD (2001) Why Tukkies cannot develop intellectuals (and what to do about it). Innovation Lecture Series, 11 May, Pretoria Jansen JD (2017) As by fire: The end of the South African university. Cape Town: Tafelberg Jansen JS (2009) Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and the apartheid past. Stanford: University of Stanford Press Landman WA (1977) South African Association for the Advancement of Education: Medal of Honour 1977. Tribute to Prof Dr C.K. Oberholzer, delivered during a gathering of the SAAAE at the University of the Orange Free State, February 1977. South African Journal of Pedagogy 11(1): 1–3 Landman WA, Roos SG & Van Rooyen PR (1974) Die praktykwording van die fundamentele pedagogiek. Johannesburg: Perskor Lange L (2014) Rethinking transformation and its knowledge(s): The case of South African higher education. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) 2(1): 1–24 Lange L (2019) Curriculum in times of decolonisation: Reflections on knowledge, power and identity at the University of the Free State. In L Praeg (Ed.) Philosophy on the border: Decoloniality and the shudder of the origin. Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press Langeveld MJ (1979/1943). Beknopte theoretische pedagogiek. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff Marx C (2015) Wissen, nichtwissen und gewissheiten als grundlage der apartheid-politik in Südafrika. In M. Häberlein, W. Weber, S. Paulus & G. Weber (Eds) Geschichte(n) des Wissens: Festschrift für Wolfgang EJ Weber zum 65. Geburtstag. Augsburg: Wissner Verlag Morrow WE (1989) Chains of thought: Philosophical essays in South African education. Johannesburg: Southern Muller J & Taylor N (1995) Schooling and everyday life: Knowledges sacred and profane. Social Epistemology 9(3): 257–275 Oberholzer CK (1949) Oriënterende inleiding in die eksistensiefilosofie. Tydskrif vir Wetenskap en Kuns 9: 11–28 Oberholzer CK (1954) Inleiding in die prinsipiële opvoedkunde. Pretoria: JJ Moreau & Kie Oberholzer CK (1962) Verlofsverslag. UP Archive

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Oberholzer CK (1968) Prolegomena van ’n prinsipiële pedagogiek. Cape Town: HAUM Oberholzer CK (1981) Vyftig jaar kerk, teologie en universiteit. HTS Theological Studies 37(3): 43–48 Olivier A (2015) Heidegger in the township. South African Journal of Philosophy 34(2): 240–254 Ramose MB (2002) The philosophy of ubuntu and ubuntu as a philosophy. In PH Coetzee & APJ le Roux (Eds) Philosophy from Africa (Second edition). Cape Town: Oxford University Press Southern Africa Ramose MB (2004) In search of an African philosophy of education. South African Journal of Higher Education 18(3): 138–160 Robinson HM (1985) Interview with CH Rautenbach, 7.3.1973. In Herinneringe van Prof. C.H. Rautenbach (Vol. 23). Potchefstroom Roos SG (1979) Geestelike weerbaarheid teen ideologiese terrorisme. Pretoria: NG Kerk Boekhandel Roos SG (1980) The development of pedagogical thinking in the various part-disciplines of the faculty of education from 1930 to 1980: Fundamental pedagogics. Pedagogiekjoernaal 1(2): 101–121, also 23–24 http://georgeyonge.net/sites/georgeyonge.net/files/FundPedHistory_ Roos_a.pdf Savage M (2014) A chronology of meetings between South Africans and the ANC in exile 1983– 2000. Accessed February 2019, https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/chronology-meetingsbetween-south-africans-and-anc-exile-1983-2000-michael-savage Suransky-Dekker C (1998) 'A liberating breeze of western civilisation?' A political history of fundamental pedagogics as an expression of Dutch-Afrikaner relationships. PhD thesis, University of Durban-Westville Taylor N & Vinjevold P (Eds) (1999) Getting learning right: Report of the President’s Education Initiative Research Project. Braamfontein: Joint Education Trust Union of South Africa (1953) Bantu Education Act No. 47. Pretoria: Government Gazette Union of South Africa (1959) Extension of University Education Act No. 4. Pretoria: Government Gazette University of Pretoria (UP) (2016) Draft framework document: Reimagining curricula for a just university in a vibrant democracy:Work stream on curriculum transformation at the university of Pretoria. Accessed February 2019, https://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/9/HumPdf%20 docs/up-curriculum-transformation-framework-final-draft_23may2016_1.zp89110.pdf Van der Walt JL (2005) Ses dekades opvoedingfilosofie sedert J. Chris Coetzee: Waar staan ons vandag? Koers 70(3): 331–349 Van der Walt JL (2010a) Ubuntugogy for the 21st century. Journal of Third World Studies 27(2): 249–266 Van der Walt JL (2010b) Ubuntu values: Societal and educational expectations. Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 50(2): 229–242 Viljoen TA & Pienaar JJ (1971) Fundamental pedagogics. Durban: Butterworths Wilkins I & Strydom H (1978) The super-Afrikaners. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball

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Futurity, decolonisation and the academy – where to from here? Siseko H Kumalo

Introduction This book has framed decolonisation as democratisation in a bid to make an argument for the shift in our conceptual understanding of decoloniality in the academe. The proposition for this shift, through the arguments presented in this collection, has been predicated on the hope to have Black/IKS not only included, but substantively engaged, in the teaching, learning and research practices that define the sector. The substantive engagement of these knowledge systems is premised on the well-reasoned argument developed by Sharon Stein, Vanessa Andreotti, Dallas Hunt and Cash Ahenakew in Chapter 3 when they maintain the need to reconceptualise – and in some respects do one better, get rid of – the logics that govern this sector, globally. In the concluding remarks to this volume, I set myself the task of thinking through this objective in more detail. Put differently, as I am tasked with framing the concluding remarks to this collection, I seek to better situate the aims and objectives that should be informing our thinking when it comes to articulating the future of higher education in South Africa. These aims and objectives are informed by the multiplicity of perspectives that constitute the volume. The work of thinking through the future outlook of the sector is informed by the reality that the decolonial debate is not a new one – globally. While we might be rethinking, anew, the question of epistemic decolonisation, it is necessary to note that this question has been considered historically.1 This is to say that the reconsideration of the question refocuses the inquiry into the usefulness of said reconsideration; what does a rethinking of epistemic decolonisation promise us in our future understanding of the academe? How do we collectively imagine this institution? This task of reposing the question, and considering the implications thereof, comes as the contributions in this volume are mostly concerned with the task of thinking through and making sense of the future of the sector not only in the South African context but globally. This is to say that we are concerned with futurity. Insofar as the contributions to this volume consider the historical underpinnings of coloniality and colonialism, this is done with the intent purpose of thinking about the potential strategies of subversion that can be, should be and are being used against colonial logics. The desire to think through where the sector is headed is rooted in two motivations. The first speaks to an understanding of the sector, a redefinition as it were, that takes seriously the changing world we inhabit.2 To frame the work of this volume thusly comes from the ways in which a considerable number of scholars are preoccupied 196

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with the implications of the political contestations that define the knowledge project, as discussed and detailed in the introductory chapter. Put differently, knowledgemaking and the knowledge enterprise – systems that are institutionalised through and by the city state that is the University – are now pressed to confront and address the lived realities of the communities where the city state – the University – is located. This is more pressing for disciplines found in the humanities and social sciences; disciplines that have oftentimes absconded from their social engagement on the reasoning that they merely consider second-order questions that are not concerned with the political.3 The second motivation lies in the fact that this work is now required as a means of making good on the promise of what has been conceptualised in the literature as historical justice. As intellectuals and scholars globally, we recognise the injustices (political, epistemic, social and economic) of colonial imposition and we are now pressed to think critically and carefully about how to (write)/right these wrongs. This is not to say that we are obsessed with an historical gaze that is misplaced and unable to liberate itself from the shackles of memory and historical trauma. Rather, the objective here is rooted in Ann Cudd’s (2006: 4) suggestion when she writes, ‘the term “oppression” plays a rich and complex role in defining a fundamental social wrong. Its complexity will lead us to ask questions about the origin and maintenance of that wrong, as well as how it might be overcome.’ Our objective then, with the task of historical justice, lies in making good on the promise of democracy; as a democratic approach undertakes to overcome the maintenance of fundamental social wrongs. It is in the promise of overcoming the maintenance of fundamental (social and epistemic) wrongs, that the contributions to this collection give us the idea of decolonisation as democratisation. This chapter is preoccupied, subsequently, with detailing and thinking through these two motivations for the future direction of the sector, higher education – not only in South Africa but globally, and the objective of making good on the promise of historical justice. To do this work, this chapter begins by considering the historical machinations that have led us here. Simply, I begin by looking at decoloniality, and the task of decolonisation retrospectively. This is done with the sole purpose of highlighting and substantiating the claim made in note 13 of the introduction. Substantiating this claim is done with the intention of further driving home the point of the interlinkages between the political enterprise and knowledge-making, as institution.4 Highlighting the links between these two frames of reference serves the purpose of laying the foundation for the articulation of a future orientated conception of the sector. This is to also suggest that we cannot begin thinking about the functions that higher education should serve in society, without first understanding the historical function that the sector has served. Sketching this reality will allow for the articulation of ‘The future of the academy’ as detailed in the second section of this chapter. It is hoped these advisory remarks are read critically and thoughtfully, as the global academe tries to refashion itself in line with the objectives of correcting the fundamental social wrongs it has historically been a primary driver of.

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Retrospectivity in decoloniality and decolonisation In line with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2018: 23) recommendation, I here, do the work of ‘casting [a] light at last onto subjugated peoples, knowledges, histories and ways of living’ of those who have been denied justice (political and epistemic).5 This denial has meant a failure to recognise the knowledge systems of these people (Blackness/Indigeneity), while their rights, in this respect, have been delegitimised since the inception of colonial violence(s) in their territories.6 Decoloniality as democratisation, in respect to this reality – a reality of denial and displacement,7 takes its cue from Frantz Fanon (2008/1952: xv) when he argues that ‘[for] once, reality requires total comprehension. An answer must be found on the objective as well as the subjective level.’ To do this, this section is dedicated to two things. In the first sense, I sketch the realities that call into being the political situation such that we require decolonisation. Put simply, I inquire about the reason why there have been calls for decolonisation historically. In the second move, I detail the call for decolonisation as it has been seen in the South African context. This second move will act as a rejoinder to the introductory chapter that framed the South African epistemic decolonial turn as a move towards the legitimation and recognition of the educational desire of Blackness/Indigeneity. It is useful to consider the contemporary calls for decolonisation as situated in the historical machinations that define the contemporary world. To this effect, Costas Douzinas (2013), in his seminal essay 'Seven Theses on Human Rights', maintains that the very category of human rights has always been used as a means to exclude some, while conferring legitimacy and status on others. Douzinas (2013: 4) makes an interesting case for the use of the category of human in the undertaking of colonial enterprises across the globe. This category, Douzinas maintains is what led to the disqualification of some from the polis, and thus their disqualification from their entitlement to rights. Douzinas (2013: 8) frames this disqualification in the following terms, ‘he [the man without rights] does not have rights because he is not part of the state and he is a lesser human because he is not a citizen.’ Douzinas troubles the ways in which some people have been considered to be human, while others are denied this classification; a matter he troubles by way of reflecting on the debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda with respect to the humanity of the peoples of the South American territories.8 Douzinas’ (2013: 4) argument complicates the bifurcations of colonial logics by revealing how they operate and to what end they function to displace and negate Blackness/Indigeneity when he maintains ‘[at] one end, the (racial) other is inhuman and subaltern. This justifies enslavement, atrocities, and even annihilation as strategies of the civilising mission.’ The reader will recall that in the introductory chapter, this very reality is detailed in note 9 using the work of V-Y Mudimbe (1988) and his concerns around the justifications used by coloniality with respect to making of the savage African a participant in the project of civilisation. Mudimbe’s (1988) analysis, read in line with Douzinas’ (2013) treatise reinforces Bill Readings’ (1996: 67) claim when he writes that it was the project of the university to create ‘subjects’.9 As argued by Siseko Kumalo (Kumalo and Praeg 2019), these 198

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subjects were subjects of coloniality, as the university was transplanted from Europe to the colonies with the intention of creating colonial subjects. This matter is also detailed below in note 8 with respect to the role of Christianity in converting and supporting the colonial project in the South Americas. The university in this regard becomes the continued bearer of colonial culture and values, even in a (post)colonial context. In order to change this reality and have Blackness/Indigeneity taken seriously as a people with an ability to articulate their own desires and hopes, one needs to look to the work of Iris Marion Young (1990) when she writes about Justice and the Politics of Difference. Young (1990: 11) maintains that ‘[such] cultural change occurs partly when despised groups seize the means of cultural expression to redefine a positive image of themselves’. Young then moves on to lay the framework for the claim made by Ann Cudd (2006), when she argues (Young 1990: 15) that ‘social justice means the elimination of institutionalised domination and oppression. Any aspect of social organisation and practice relevant to domination and oppression is in principle subject to evaluation by ideals of justice.’ In this respect, the reader begins to understand and appreciate why it is that Cudd (2006: 4) maintains that ‘the term “oppression” plays a rich and complex role in defining a fundamental social wrong. Its complexity will lead us to ask questions about the origin and maintenance of that wrong, as well as how it might be overcome.’ In this regard, justice becomes pressed to deal with the question of historical and fundamental social wrongs. To demonstrate the point of these wrongs, it is useful to turn to Lewis Gordon’s (2014) analysis of the role of colonial dispossession. Gordon (2014: 84) highlights the deeply engrained social wrongs that were perpetrated against Blackness/Indigeneity when he makes the argument: Along with the expansion of Christian kingdoms into nation-states and their colonies, which resulted over the course of a few hundred years into European civilisation on a global scale, was also a series of epistemological developments that have literally produced new forms of life: new kinds of people came into being, while others disappeared, and whole groups of them occupy the age in an ambivalent and melancholic relationship by which they are Indigenous to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong to. With statehood derived from European impositions, consider Douzinas (2013: 5) when he writes, ‘social anthropology studies diverse non-western peoples, societies, and cultures but not the human species in its essence or totality. These peoples emerged out of and became the object of observation and study through discovery, conquest, and colonisation.’ In a contextualising claim, Douzinas (2013: 4) maintains that ‘[at] the other end, conquest, occupation, and forceful conversion are strategies of spiritual or material development, of progress and integration of the innocent, naïve, undeveloped others into the main body of humanity’. This reality is what defines the world we have come to know, and thus makes the case for our treatment of the question of historical justice. To treat historical justice in 199

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philosophical analyses is tied to the question of epistemic (and political) justice, as a move that contests European epistemic arrogance and preponderance. European preponderance is contested by Gordon (2014: 81) when he writes: The formulation of knowledge in the singular already situates the question in a framework that is alien to times before the emergence of European modernity and its age of global domination, for the disparate modes of producing knowledge and notions of knowledge were so many that knowledges would be a more appropriate designation. To this end, it is no question why these systems of domination and oppression have been challenged and contested in the contemporary university. In the South African context, these contestations came up as the resistance to continued colonial incursion and the preponderance of colonial values in the university. It is for this reason that Nomusa Makhubu and Khanyisile Mbongwa (2019) make the case for 'Radical Love as Decolonial Philosophy'. Their argument takes into account the struggles of Blackness/Indigeneity as it attempts to cling onto its educational desire as it wages the war of love against a system of indifference, ‘hate and racism’, as argued by Heidi Mirza (2006). This contestation is aptly described in the introductory chapter as the demand for the recognition of the ‘ontological legitimacy’ (Kumalo 2018a) of Blackness/Indigeneity. In this respect, educational desire gave us two underpinning values of decolonisation (democratisation and justice).10 It is for this reason that this volume frames much of the debate on decolonisation, in the South African context, as a pursuit of these values. To frame decolonisation as the pursuit of justice and democratisation is predicated on the arguments that have been made around decoloniality in the country. These arguments have concerned the use of African languages in the teaching, learning and research practices of institutions of higher learning (see Kaschula 2017; Maseko & Vale 2016; Mokoena 2009; Nyamende 2010). They have concerned – these approaches of decolonisation as continuously analysed – the question of curricula and what is to be taught in the contemporary lecture theatre in our context (see Kumalo 2018b; Lamola 2016; Metz 2016). These debates have also concerned the question of institutional governance and the trajectory of the sector, as it is debated by the leaders of higher education in our context (see Habib 2019; Jansen 2017). It is useful to note that these arguments take their lead from the historical sketch that has been presented above here, in this section that looks at the historical motivations of decolonisation in the country. It is for this reason that one should pay some mind to the future of the sector.

Concluding remarks: The future of the academy As indicated in the introduction of this chapter, the focus on the historical social wrongs that define the colonial project was developed with the intent purpose of highlighting the impetus for change in higher education in South Africa. The change that we desire is subsequently pegged on a clear understanding of the challenges that we have faced in the sector and continue to grapple with to this day. These

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challenges are summarised in the literature mentioned in the section above, with respect to where and how decolonisation and decoloniality have manifested in the past. Simply, the argument detailed above sought to showcase the reasons behind the need for decolonisation, globally. It is useful to consider this literature in more detail. As outlined in the debate on the intellectualisation of African languages, it is a debate that is somewhat curious as African languages have always been intellectual – for in the capacity to speak and make sense of the world a language is intellectual insofar as it allows for intellection. This reality, that contests claims of efforts at the intellectualisation of African languages as an example, it is foreseeable will press the city state that is the university to begin working towards the development of teaching and learning in the regional languages alongside the dominant lingua francae in our contexts. This comes as Pam Maseko and Peter Vale (2016: 81) note that ‘[the] two languages that are distinctly spoken in their regions are isiXhosa and isiZulu. In other areas, there is a conglomeration of these languages’. These dominant languages as they are spoken in their respective regions have already seen inroads made at institutions such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the University of Zululand11 and Rhodes University. The role of language plays a key function in undoing the historical injustices that were detailed above. I make this observation in light of the argument developed by Abner Nyamende (2010) in discussing the jurisprudential insights that might be gleaned from engaging and systematically treating the work of scholars and intellectuals such as SEK Mqhayi. Nyamende (2010: 21) notes, of the question of justice as this question is addressed by the title that u-Mqhayi chooses for his erudite analysis Ityala Lamawele, ‘[as] the title stands, it bears the principle that both the complainant and the defendant weigh evenly on the scale of justice and none of either of them is condemned before the trial’. This is useful insofar as it allows us insights into systems of thought that might assist us in dealing with the contemporary challenges that we are confronted with in the sector, both in the country and globally. The question of justice, as tied to the task of decolonisation, is focused on addressing historical fundamental social wrongs that have remained ignored since the inception of democracy in the country. They have remained ignored for the precise reasons detailed in the introductory chapter, wherein this white ignorance has been framed as moves that act as legitimating rationales for white innocence in our context. The challenge with leaving justice unaddressed is taken up by a number of scholars in our context who decry the problem(s) that it allows to ensue across all of society. In more simple terms, our obliviousness to the challenges of historical wrongs will come back to haunt us if they remain unaddressed, as we continue to live as if nothing is the matter in the sector. This reality has already showed its ferocity, even in a preliminary sense, during the #MustFall movements that swept through the higher education landscape of the country and continue to influence the trajectory of the sector. In simple terms, the picture emanating from the analysis presented by this volume suggests the need to act decisively and with leadership in attending to these historical fundamental social wrongs, if indeed higher education is to be used as the social institution it was envisaged to be in the White Paper 3 of 1997. 201

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Notes 1

The work of scholars such as Ali A. Mazrui has been useful in showcasing how epistemic decolonisation has been considered historically. Mazrui’s perspective, when contrasted with the writing of Zoë Wicomb, showcases the point that coloniality functioned differently in different contexts but was informed by the same logic(s). Penning the introduction to his seminal text, Mazrui (1978: 1) maintained that ‘[during] the colonial period in Africa, education served the purpose of creating not only a reservoir of qualified people which the government could use, but also a pool of potential qualified nationalists who came to challenge the colonial presence itself ’. The contrasting reality in the South African context is discussed by Wicomb (2018/1995) when she writes about the role of visual culture as used in response to the ways in which people were deprived of education in our context. In this respect, Wicomb lays the foundation for the premise of the claim detailed in the introduction suggesting that we have to understand the decolonial turn as educational desire in South Africa. To this end, Wicomb (2018/1995: 69) writes, ‘to focus solely on lack is a pessimistic view that overlooks the ways in which the nonliterate people of South Africa during the optimistic years of revolution have translated and transfigured that lack into a vibrant culture.’ It is useful to note that even as there wasn’t an ‘educated elite’ in the 1980s and 1990s in South Africa, as many such individuals were in exile or imprisoned for political crimes against the state, the nationalism that Mazrui mentions in his work continued to inform and define the struggle for liberation, even as this struggle was being undertaken by, what Wicomb calls, the nonliterate people of South Africa.

2

This matter is treated by at least three chapters in this collection, a matter that considers the task of rethinking thinking itself. These are the chapters penned by Stein et al. (Chapter 3), Pirbhai-Illich and Martin (Chapter 4), Freter and Freter (Chapter 7), and Olivier (Chapter 8). The objective of rethinking thinking is outlined by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018: 23) in these terms, ‘[it becomes the task of] casting of light at last onto subjugated peoples, knowledges, histories and ways of living [and] unsettles the toxic pond and transforms passive analysis into a generative force that valorises and recreates life for those previously museumised […] it is a process of engaging with colonialism in a manner that produces a program for its dislocation.’ In making the case for decolonisation as democratisation, the volume takes seriously the task of ‘casting the light […] onto subjugated peoples [and their] knowledge(s)’.

3

As Hannah Arendt has written about this matter, to the extent that Villa (1998: 164) makes the claim that ‘[yes], the philosopher must concern himself with politics, but only to ensure that philosophy itself will not be banished or destroyed, reduced to ideology or propaganda’, it is useful to consider how effectively the philosopher concerns themselves with the political and to what end. Arendt (1994) has given an answer to this question in her timeless essay titled 'Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought'. She writes ‘[what] we political scientists tend to overlook is that most political philosophies have their origin in the philosopher’s negative and sometimes even hostile attitude toward the polis and the whole realm of human affairs. Historically, those centuries prove to be richest in political philosophies which were least propitious for philosophizing, so that self-protection as well as outright defense of professional interests have more often than not prompted the philosopher’s concern with politics’ (Arendt 1994: 428).

4

Mazrui makes this point quite extensively in his introduction, when he thinks through the implications of the relationship between education (knowledge and knowledge-making) and

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politics. He argues, ‘political life and the political system of the country are in turn affected by the education process. The quality of leaders who find their way to responsible political positions, the kind of political values which activate policy and behaviour, the class structure in the country, the system of occupational rewards and social prestige, are all factors deeply influenced by the educational system of a country’ (Mazrui 1978: 1). 5

The denial of rights, and in turn dignity and the status of human, is rooted in the historical scorn – theorised in the introduction using Biko’s analysis (2004/1978). Biko calls this reality ‘a white greed’. Jean-Paul Sartre on the other hand calls it a ‘selfish scorn’ (1965/1964: 19) when he writes, ‘[but] since the selfish scorn that white men display for black men – and that has no equivalent in the attitude of the bourgeois towards the working class – is aimed at the deepest recesses of the heart, black men must oppose it with a more exact view of black subjectivity; consequently race consciousness is based first of all on the black soul, or, rather, – since the term is often used in this anthology – on a certain quality common to the thoughts and conduct of negroes which is called Negritude [sic].’ In this respect then, we begin to see the historical nature of the resistance of Blackness/Indigeneity in all contexts where this subjectivity is located.

6

This act of delegitimation and the denial of rights is taken up in this chapter’s analysis using Gordon’s (2014) essay, when he writes about people who ambivalently occupy a world by existing illegitimately in a place where they are native. This illegitimacy is seen in their being cordoned off into reserves and Bantustans in the case of South Africa, with the rest of their territories being taken up by colonial settlers.

7

Displacement is used in its negative sense here, as detailed by Olivier in Chapter 8 when he writes, 'Typically, displacement is negatively associated with the enforced removal of subjects from a place […] There is a decisive difference between the kind of homelessness, in which one is embroiled while being at one’s home, and being homeless because one has no home, or because one is being forced to depart from one’s home. The latter, so I indicated, refers to displacement in its most common use: the forced removal from one’s place.’

8

With respect to this remark, it is useful to once again underscore the reality that while coloniality left different legacies in the different locales of its operation, it functioned (irrespectively) with the same logics. This is seen in the argument developed by Ramose (2002: 464) when he writes of European coloniality ‘[having] thus made the exclusive claim to reason, the conqueror argued that one of the competences of reason is to conquer nature […] this line between civilisation and barbarism was an extension of the boundary between reason and unreason. The conqueror claimed the status of being the possessor of a superior civilisation. Accordingly, when the conqueror encountered the African, their respective competences, rights, and obligation were already predetermined. The conqueror was civilised and the African was barbarian.’ It is this very logic that defines the debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda in the America’s, with Las Casas arguing for the Christianisation of the people. Douzinas notes (2013: 3–4), ‘[his] [Las Casas] arguments combined Christian theology and political utility. Respecting local customs is good morality but also good politics: the Indians would convert to Christianity (las Casas’ main concern) but also accept the authority of the Crown and replenish its coffers, if they were made to feel that their traditions, laws, and cultures are respected.’

9

It is interesting to note how the category of ‘subject’ – one who is able to claim rights from the state – also relegates the white womxn to a place outside of the political arena as curated

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by European modernity. This caveat is useful in substantiating Douzinas' (2013) analysis, insofar as it allows for an intersectional reading of decoloniality in allegiance with the feminist tradition(s). (My orthographical choice in representing the word women/woman with an 'x' is deliberate and aligns my scholarship with the work of Black feminist thinkers, activists and creatives who – in representing 'woman' as womxn – contest the dual sex binary that aims to obfuscate womxn as citizen in her own right. Womxn is deliberate in that it specifically addresses Black womxn, and where I write about the category, woman, as inclusive of white feminist struggles and traditions, I represent the word in its accepted orthography as 'women'. In this respect, my orthography aligns itself with the core purpose of my argument, showcasing how womxn have historically represented themselves and theorised their lived experiences outside of the strictures of masculinist understandings of womxn, and the desire that womxn assimilate to white feminist discourses and struggles.) 10 In view of this formulation, further research and philosophical theses should be devoted to an analysis that explores the link between these three concepts: decoloniality, democracy and justice. Kumalo and Praeg (2019) have already given some thought to the concept of decolonisation as justice a priori. To follow in their line of thinking, a treatment of ‘Decolonisation as the Facilitation of Democratic Principles Rooted in Just Participation in the Polis’ might be useful. However, as I am concerned with the concluding remarks of this volume, I cannot pay too much mind to this question here. I leave it for consideration in another project. 11 This is already seen in the work detailed in Chapter 7 by Freter and Freter who make the case for responsive pedagogics using the case of the course taught by Gregory Swer at the University of Zululand.

References Arendt H (1994) Concern with politics in recent European philosophical thought. In Essays in understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, exile, and totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books Biko S (2004/1978) I write what I like (edited by CS Stubbs). Johannesburg: Picador Africa Cudd AE (2006) Analyzing oppression. New York: Oxford University Press Department of Education (1997) Education White Paper 3: A programme for the transformation of higher education. Pretoria: Government Printers Douzinas C (2013) Seven theses on human rights. Critical Law Thinking 23: 1–26 Fanon F (2008/1952) Black skin, white masks (trans. R Philcox). New York: Grove Press. Gordon LR (2014) Disciplinary decadence and the decolonisation of knowledge. African Development 39(1): 81–92 Habib A (2019). Rebels and rage: Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Jansen JD (2017) As by fire: The end of the South African university. Cape Town: Tafelberg Kaschula RH (2017) Intellectualisation of isiXhosa literature: The case of Jeff Opland. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 54(2): 5–25 Kumalo SH (2018a) Explicating abjection: Historically white universities creating natives of nowhere? Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) 6(1): 1–17

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Kumalo SH (2018b) Defining an African vocabulary for the exploration of possibilities in higher education. Alternation 23: 197–223 Kumalo SH & Praeg L (2019) Decolonisation and justice a priori. Journal of Decolonising Disciplines 1(1): 1–9 Lamola JM (2016) On a contextual South African philosophy curriculum: Towards an option for the excluded. South African Journal of Philosophy 35(4): 501–512 Makhubu N & Mbongwa K (2019) Radical love as decolonial philosophy: In conversation with Khanyisile Mbongwa. Journal of Decolonising Disciplines 1(1): 10–26 Maseko P & Vale P (2016) The struggle over African languages. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15(1): 79–93 Mazrui AA (1978) Political values and the educated class in Africa. San Francisco: University of California Press Metz T (2016) Teaching African philosophy alongside western philosophy: Some advice about topics and texts. South African Journal of Philosophy 35(4): 490–500 Mirza HS (2006) ‘Race’, gender and educational desire. Race Ethnicity and Education 9(2): 137– 158 Mokoena H (2009) An assembly of readers: Magema Fuze and his Ilanga lase Natal readers. Journal of South African Studies 35(3): 595–607 Mudimbe V-Y (1988) The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy and the order of knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Ndlovu-Gatsheni SJ (2018) Epistemic freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and decolonization. London: Routledge Nyamende A (2010) The conception and application of justice in SEK Mqhayi’s Ityala Lamawele. Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 42(7): 19–30 Ramose MB (2002) I conquer, therefore I am the sovereign: Reflections upon sovereignty, constitutionalism, and democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa. In PH Coetzee & APJ Roux (Eds) Philosophy from Africa: A text with readings (Second edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press Readings B (1996) The university in ruins. Chicago: Harvard University Press Sartre J-P (1965/1964) Black Orpheus (trans. J MacCombie). The Massachusetts Review 6(1): 130–152 Villa DR (1998) The philosopher versus the citizen: Arendt, Strauss and Socrates. Political Theory 26(2): 147–172 Wicomb Z (2018/1995) Reading, writing and visual production in the new South Africa. In A van der Vlies (Ed.) Race, nation, translation: South African essays, 1990–2013. Johannesburg: Wits University Press Young IM (1990) Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press

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Afterword The decolonial turn in South Africa: Joining the rebellious gathering

Introduction When I was asked to write an afterword for a book on Decolonisation as Democratisation, I was confronted with at least three dilemmas. The first concerned how the afterword must draw out the implications of the work that the editor and authors have put together, which I had the privilege of reading. The second was what could be otherwise said that had not been said in the text itself, or what would be achieved by emphasising what had already been said. The third was a consideration of my own stance on the decolonial turn as a researcher with an interest in decolonising thought and de-imperialising the world in the hope that my thoughts would generate afterthoughts for book readers who read a book sequentially from beginning to end or fore-thoughts for those who read books from the back. An afterword, should in my view, not pretend to be a chapter in the book as it was never intended to answer – at least directly – the questions that the book seeks to respond to. It should also not create a new stream of thought of its own, unrelated to the gist of the book as if a rival with the various strands of discussions in the book. It must, however, provide some space for readers to think about the context of ideas in the book and open up some room for debate on the central ideas behind the book. The best way to resolve my dilemma, therefore, was not to choose one of the three options, but to weave the three in a reflection on what I think about the family of ideas and thought that this book might be read with, at the back of our minds. So below, I briefly reflect on the decolonial turn in South Africa and its implications. To do so, it must present a simple argument, which is the fact that a South African decolonial turn is not a thing in and of itself, but it is a function of the attempts to alter the geopolitics and biopolitics of knowledge the world over, especially knowledge as seen from the dark underbelly of the global neoliberal, neo-imperialist, racist, and ethnocentric world knowledge system. I will, therefore, argue that the understanding of the epistemic decolonial turn in South Africa is, in fact, part of continental and global efforts at epistemic justice.

The prism and position Neither the authors in this book nor I, writing on a subject of this nature, should pretend to be writing from nowhere or from a fictitious God’s-eye view that the

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myth of objective rationality we have learned from eurocentrism has taught us. This is well known already, yet we still see a lot of pressure on thinkers, especially here in the global south and in Africa to conform to subtle commandments of eurocentrism, including: ‘Thou shalt endeavour to be objective and rational in your conversations, reflections and meditations.’ We are being asked to move into an epistemic trance, a position where we should disconnect ourselves from the implications of our thoughts and our experiences – with that which we are writing about. While the end of positivist traditions of eurocentric thought has been declared and the realisation that we are entangled with that which we are speaking about cannot be denied, the old is battling to die and the new is struggling to be born, to use Gramsci’s observation. In the interregnum between the old and new, morbid symptoms on in-betweenness, uncertainty, disjuncture, ambiguity and such abound. I write to reflect the fact that I think as a black male with a working-class background, but living a middle-class, semi-elite life. This positionality gives me certain advantages, but, from it, I also inherit some limitations. What I say must not be assumed to be a universal position, as there is no such thing anyway – given the realities of all of our positionalities. I am ideologically committed to the death of the hegemony of Euro-American modernity in all aspects of life, including in the area of knowledge, as I join Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o both in the commitment to decolonising the mind and thought and in the pursuit of a fundamental change in the world system to a pluriversal political end and globalectic epistemic utopia(wa Thiong’o 2012). The way to get there, I believe, is a painful, complex and systemic process of decolonisation as liberation. We have to move the centre in order to make possible a world of many centres interfacing in dialectic, conflictual and dialogic ways with one another in ways that make equality of beings, equity of power and justice in knowledge possible (wa Thiong’o 1993). In this process, we must be ready to unlearn in order to relearn and to rethink how we think about our society and ourselves (Odora-Hoppers & Richards 2011). We may have to accept that there is no political or economic liberation without epistemic freedom (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). I, therefore, position myself as thinking, learning, speaking and acting from a decolonial prism of being, power and knowledge. This vantage point on life is born of the margins, of the experience of oppression, of the unending reality of anti-black racism on a world scale, one that necessitated a people who are black to proclaim that 'black lives matter' in a protest movement that spread through three continents in the early part of 2020. This world view is conscious of the fact that the injustice needs to be fought and ended, and takes place at the level of being, of power and of knowledge. Therefore, seeking victory in one pillar of coloniality without fighting for freedom in others, only leads to shattered aspirations and deferred dreams (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). It accepts the black feminist reading that enduring structures of oppression felt most acutely by black womxn are entangled and intersected, and therefore responses to them must also be intersectional or multi-dimensional (Barriteau 1990). For me, decolonising or transforming knowledge and life fundamentally is therefore not some abstract endeavour in which evocative wordsmith trumps truth-telling, 207

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conventions of modern writing matter more than evoking the kind of sentiment that should cause a freedom-loving and justice-seeking person to say: up to here and no further!! It is not that fashionable new academic area of interest that makes me sound different from the rest, but it is an opportunity to combat and defeat coloniality in knowledge, in ways of being and in modes of powers all around me. This is why a decolonial position is one that entices me into the warfare of one form or another, not in order to be seen as radical but in order to breathe as the proverbial knee of western colonial modernity is on our neck. Like Sylvia Wynter (2003), engaging in combat breathing is not an option, but an historical necessity and a duty to humanity. We have to end the idea of a super-human, an omnipresent imperial being whose ubiquity suffocates life out of us. We want to breathe as humans again. Like Pixley ka Isaka Seme on a podium in the US in 1906, we want to insist on speaking to the world as who we are, as Africans, and as he said, to do so against hostile opinion (Seme 1906). Like Thabo Mbeki (1999), we want to be unashamed in the process. So our ontological position is combative not out of choice (Mafeje 2011), but as a result of an historical imperative and due to our invidious positions right now as dark clouds of eurocentric rationality cast shadows over our very being. The decolonial turn begins with critical reflexive thinking about who we write as, from which positions relative to others in the modern world. I am a member of the African Decolonial Research Network, a group of largely young scholars and activists engaged in dialogue, writing and activism in search of decolonial futures in Africa.

The epistemology The acceptance of what is wrong with pervasive coloniality of thinking that ubiquitous eurocentrism epitomises is an important starting point. It is now obvious that the epistemology of alterity (Adesina 2008) cast us as outsiders in narratives about the very societies and the environment we live in. It taught us to look at ourselves and our conditions from outside, often through borrowed lenses, theories, concepts, rhetorical devices, disciplines, themes and methodologies. We have forgotten the old African saying that goes: ‘Borrowed waters won’t quench your thirst.’ The wise of ancient Africa knew that borrowed waters may fill one’s stomach and create the illusion of being satisfied only for pangs of thirst to reappear. Borrowed epistemic lenses only put us in an illusion of thinking freely when we are disembowelled, deceived and mummified in the continuing theft of history (Goody 2006). A decolonial turn happens when we engage with our uprootedness, the sense that we have been uprooted from where we are supposed to think from. This happens when there is a disjuncture between our location physically, culturally and historically, on the one hand, and the location from which we think, the epistemic location, on the other (Grosfoguel 2009). So, our locus of enunciation, which informs what we choose to study, how we study and speak about, and what we say is often disconnected from our physical and cultural location (Asante 1987) (see how Asante justifies a new theory of change). This sense of alienation from our history, culture and other conditions that give rise to what we say and how we say it, is all too obvious around 208

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us, both in academic and non-academic discourses about the African condition, the South African situation, the black world, the global south and other matters concerning the subalterns of the coloniser’s world (Blaut 1993). It is not hard to notice that this way we as Africans get to see the world, through the eyes of European philosophers, theorists, concept creators, narrative-inventors, forces us into mimicry. Paulin Hountondji (1997) invites us into combat with extraversion, by which he means the deeply unequal relations between Africans and modern knowledge, its disciplines and practices. This is evident in the fact that African empiricists often collect data in Africa and on Africans in order to validate, prove, contextualise, apply and impose European theories, concepts and philosophical views. African theorists Africanise eurocentrism so that we have African realism, African liberal theory, African state theory, African critical feminism, African Marxism and so forth. African philosophers may be found engaged in debates to prove to European philosophical platforms that Africans too can reason (Táíwò 2008). All of this makes the European locus of enunciation ever more of a standard, a central point of view and a dominant lens of analysis. Resisting the devil of alterity and extraversion is not a question of proclamation and declarations, but a matter of practice and conviction visible also in how we write. In undertaking a decolonial turn, we are invited to what wa Thiongo (2008) calls re-membering, which is the reversal of our dismemberment from our location in history, from our cultural setting, from our ways of knowing, from our land and so forth. Re-membering entails what Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (2013) calls de-centring the west in our story in order to enable us and our historical position to take centre stage in how we are thinking about our conditions and the world. This re-centring is what Archie Mafeje (2011) explained as insisting on being rooted somewhere, for, in his view, if we are sufficiently authentic in our locus of enunciation, the international implications of what we say will not be lost on others. This moving of the centre is a moving of the locus from which we enunciate, debate, think, fight, shout and do our other forms of agency (wa Thiong’o 1993). Delinking in political and economic terms in the pursuit of a polycentric world (Amin 1990) requires a shift in the geography of the reason towards thinking otherwise for a world otherwise (Escobar 2007). It is to make possible knowledge cultivation as ‘a gathering’ (Outlaw 1996) in which we are able to situate voices, writings, works of art, actions that collectively liberate Africans and the world as a whole. This is in contrast to knowledge boxed in disciplines and conventions designed to imprison the world under the gaze of the imperial man, what Lewis R. Gordon (2011) says leads to disciplinary decadence that marks the knowledge systems we use in universities and schools today.

About South Africa There are many points in epistemic struggles that have taken place in South Africa that translate to what might be described as a staggered process of negotiating a decolonial turn or perhaps decolonial turns. I will not even attempt to name them

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one by one, but point to those that, to me, are critical for they signified interest in undertaking the task of re-memberment – under conditions that history permitted. Those who were engaged in primary and secondary resistance to colonial conquest were not just in physical combat with forces that sought to end the freedom of Indigenous peoples of Africa, but they also were in spiritual, psychological and epistemic defence of their right to be themselves. This was the bloodiest of all decolonial efforts in this region, one whose record would die with many who perished under conditions of conquest and dominion, while some bits would pass down through generations through oral traditions. Some of this is recorded in early works of or about Africans who wrote in the nineteenth century (Ndletyana 2008). In part, this corpus spans the precolonial to the early colonial period (Fuze 1922). An element of the early African elite, despite what we all know about the ambiguities of their location in the colonial structures of power, left records that help us understand how they sought to defend not just themselves but their kind of world against a coloniser’s world. We now know about what Queen Mantantisi of Batlokwa, Mzilikazi ka Mashobane, Kgosi Kgamanyane and Princess Mkabayi ka Jama thought at the inception of the colonial turn to reconstruct their voices for the gathering of thoughts needed for the decolonial turn to succeed. Shula Marks (2016), for instance, discusses extensively what she thought were ways in which the African elite at the dawn of twentieth-century South Africa dealt with, both structural contradictions in the organisation of the early colonial society designed to disadvantage Africans and the conjectural ambiguities of proletarianisation. She uses the examples of the likes of King Dinuzulu, a king who marshalled communities to prevent complete disintegration of his nation; John Langalibalele Dube, a converted Christian and mission-educated Indigene who would come to lead one of the most well-known liberation movements; and George Champion, an African propertied peasant who would be a Marxist and a leader of one of the radical elements of the liberation struggle in the early twentieth century. There are other critical voices that insisted on interpreting the making of the idea of South Africa in ways that reflected their changing cultural settings and historical responsibility to free black people from colonial domination. The works, words and activities that the likes of Sol Platjie, Enoch Sontonga, Silas Molema, Sebele Sechele, James Moroka and Isaiah Mbelle deserve revisiting in order to give context to the current phase in the long duration of the South African epistemic decolonial turn. Their voices are needed in the gathering. For instance, Silas Modiri Molema wrote a book entitled The Bantu, Past and Present, published in 1920, to defend the idea of Africans as a people with a history, a people with a present yoked unjustly under white control and a people with a future, as a liberated people. They saw themselves as writing back to the empire from their position as Indigenous people whose story, past and present, was being doctored to rationalise colonialism (Starfield 2007). Their writings were instigated by the love for their people, commitment to freedom and their hope for liberated futures. This is a critical context to the decolonial turn, this love for the people that drives people to speak truth to power, sacrifice personal advantages and seek to build futures in which all thrive again. 210

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We must be able to understand these and the voices that emerged during apartheid using the power of the pain, imagination and persuasion to re-member the story of the oppressed against adversity as what may be called epistemic uprisings. These uprisings evident in the works inspired by Black Consciousness, black Marxism, African nationalism, pan-Africanism, black theology and later broader leftist thinking from other parts of the world increased both in frequency and the intensity during apartheid. These have been interpreted as ways of refusing to be consigned into colonial margins amid liberation struggles and were modes of defending political imagination beyond the confines of colonial strictures (Peterson 1990). The indigenous language and English-language black newspapers, theatre, music and fine art became critical in these epistemic uprisings, often with many ambiguities as has been pointed out by the likes of Bhekizizwe Peterson (2006). As early voices in the gathering, they transcended disciplines and forms of arts and science in order to insist on speaking the way they wanted to, raging by ‘black bulls’ against the consolidation of colonial power in their communities (Peterson 1991). In the process, the ties that bound the struggles of the oppressed in South Africa with those across the seas, especially in the black Atlantic, were formed, reformed, consolidated and redefined continuously. These ties are apparent in the works of early twentieth-century Africans like John Dube as it is for a whole host of others who grappled with the national and global questions from the positions affected by the intersection of African thought and black thought from the black Atlantic throughout the twentieth century (Maguba 1987) or works that made apparent the convergence of thought across the black world. The voices of Phyllis Ntatala, Mazisi Kunene, Lauretta Ngcobo, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Miriam Tlali, Bernard Magubane, Absolum and Herbert Vilakazi, Ntongela Masilela, and others about whom much still has to be written as we trace the long duration of the decolonial turn, remind us that this turn has been long in the process. James Cone’s rebellious theological prism against the colonisation of the idea of God spiritually found resonance with the liberation/black theology of Bonganjalo Goba, Mokgethi Motlhabi, Itumeleng Mosala, Allan Boesak and others, and all make up an important segment of the gathering of voices for the world otherwise.

The Fallist moment The ideas of black power, Black Consciousness and pan-Africanism would converge to inspire many to think through the liberation, emancipation, renaissance and renewal of Africa as a key element of the liberation of South Africa. The voices of Steve Biko interfaced very well with those of Frantz Fanon in the 1970s and 1980s as they have again in the epistemic uprisings taking place in the 2000s, including during the Free and Decolonised Education campaigns by university students in 2015 and 2016. The voices of Charlotte Maxeke and Harriet Tubman, those of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Assata Shakur converged to give these campaigns a radical black feminist element. Who can discount the epistemic rebellion of Chabani 211

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Manganyi paralleling with the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre on questions of being black in the world, negating nothingness (Manganyi 1973)? Therefore, the upsurge that has gained momentum with the realisation that the freedom expected when South Africa transitioned from apartheid to black-led multi-party democracy remains elusive and is not new in content and intention. The growing demand for decolonisation, de-imperialisation, Africanisation, diversification, de-patriarchisation, and fundamental transformation of education, knowledge, disciplines – alongside decolonisation of the state, its economy and society – invite us to draw from a long tradition of critical and revolutionary thought in South African speech and writing for inspiration, lessons, and guidance. In the Fallist movement at universities in South Africa and the rest of the struggle for decolonisation of knowledge and education, we are being invited to connect what we do about the still-colonial university, college and school within a still neocolonial state and economy to efforts of many before us who sought to exorcise these institutions of the demons of the empire that continue to haunt them (NdlovuGatsheni & Zondi 2016). The South African (epistemic) decolonial turn is, therefore, nothing if it is not seen in that long duration of epistemic struggles and the massive range of efforts in Africa and the rest of the black world seeking full liberation. The decolonial turn means ending the colonial binaries, the navel-gazing, the silences, and the hierarchisation of things that remain apparent in our works as evidence of what Kwasi Kwarteng (2012) calls the ‘haunting ghosts of the empire’. The discussions preceding this afterword have to be read against the history of rebellious revolutionary thought and action, and decolonial love that connected people with a shared traumatic experience of western modernity across the oceans, summoning them to the gathering of voices seeking decolonial futures. This commendable work needs to inspire many to revisit these epistemic struggles we only briefly touch upon in this piece. It should cause some to look into individuals and groups of individuals that have engaged in efforts that seek to remember the dismembered African people, memory and soul. It must lead to more debates about what decolonising thought, being and power entails in the current moment. It may also lead some to think through how we got here. They will discover that below the lofty claims of western modernity and its colonising logic, lies a gathering of rebellious thoughts and practices that seek to liberate the oppressed in order to build a pluriversal world governed by a globaletic logic. There are gatherings of thought that began at conquest and never ceased to grow. The duty to join it in the pursuit of an epistemic decolonial turn is an historical imperative. Professor Siphamandla Zondi Department of Politics and International Relations, Senior Research Fellow, Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies University of Johannesburg

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Peterson B (1991) The Black Bulls of H.I.E. Dhlomo: Ordering history out of nonsense. English in Africa 18(1): 25–49 Peterson B (2006) The Bantu world and the world of the book: Reading, writing and 'enlightenment'. In K Barber (Ed.) Africa’s hidden histories: Everyday literacy and making the self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Seme P kaIsaka (1906) The regeneration of Africa. African Affairs 5(XX), 404–408 Starfield J (2007) Dr S. Modiri Molema (1891–1965): The making of an historian. PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand Táíwò O (2008) Africa and her challenge to modernity. Kingston : University of the West Indies wa Thiong’o N (1993) Moving the centre: The struggle for cultural freedoms. London: James Currey wa Thiong'o N (2009) Something torn and new: An African renaissance. New York: Basic Civitas Books wa Thiong'o N (2012) Globalectics: Theory and the politics of knowing. New York: Columbia University Press Wynter S (2003) Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337 Zeleza PT (2013) Banishing the silences: Towards the globalization of African history. Working Paper, Dakar

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List of contributors Ahenakew, Cash, PhD, is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples’ WellBeing and an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is Cree and a member of Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation with the ceremonial name pii tai poo taa (flying eagle). His research is based on a commitment to the development of Indigenous theories and mixed methodologies and addresses the complexities at the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges, education, pedagogy, methodology and ceremony. Andreotti, Vanessa, PhD, is a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on analyses of historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of knowledge and inequalities and how these mobilise global imaginaries that limit or enable different possibilities for (co)existence and global change. She is a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective. Freter, Björn, PhD, received his doctorate in philosophy in 2014 in Berlin, Germany. He is now working as an Independent Scholar based in Knoxville, Tennessee, US. His main research areas include political philosophy, anti-colonial philosophy, animal ethics, African philosophy and phenomenology of normativity. Freter, Yvette, PhD, was born in California to South African parents. Travelling to South Africa shortly after her birth, Yvette was raised and educated in Cape Town. She matriculated from Wynberg Girls High School and proceeded to get her teaching qualification from Cape Town Teachers’ Training College. After extensive travelling, she went to Maryville College, Tennessee, on an academic scholarship and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education. Yvette holds a Master’s in Cultural Studies in Education and a Doctorate in Learning Environments and Educational Studies from the University of Tennessee. She teaches philosophy of education and history of education courses at the University of Tennessee and Tennessee Technological University and is a full-time high school teacher, while pursuing her work as an independent researcher. Hunt, Dallas, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literature in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation). His research interests include Indigenous literatures, Indigenous theory and politics, Canadian literature, speculative fiction, settler colonial studies and environmental justice. Kistner, Ulrike, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria. Her research and teaching interests converge on political philosophy and psychoanalytic 215

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theory. Recent publications include a collection, Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon (edited with Philippe van Haute, 2020); and articles on Marx’s conceptualisation of ‘race’ and ‘class’, and on Carl Schmitt’s ‘Nomos’. Kumalo, Siseko H holds a Master of Arts (Cum Laude) in Political Philosophy from the University of Pretoria’s Department of Political Sciences. He received his formative training from Rhodes University where he read in Political and International Studies, Anthropology and Philosophy. His research and teaching interests centre around themes of education decolonisation in the South African academe. He served as the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Decolonising Disciplines, a journal dedicated to decolonising disciplinary knowledge across faculties in higher education. His research aims to substantively engage Indigenous epistemes in the South African university through focusing on the intellectual contributions of Indigenous intellectuals such as SEK Mqhayi, WW Gqoba and Mazisi Kunene. Siseko serves on the Literary Association of South Africa’s Executive Committee and is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2017). Lebakeng, Teboho J, PhD, is research associate at the University of Limpopo, South Africa. He obtained his BA from the American University in Cairo and MA from the University of Dar es Salaam, both in Sociology. He has published extensively, including recent articles: 'The Legislature and the Challenges of Re-imagining South Africa', Strategic Review for Southern Africa (2020) with KM Matebese-Notshulwana; Authentic Interlocutor in the Quest for Justice and Truth. , in H Lauer and H Yitah (Eds), The Tenacity of Truthfulness: Philosophical Essays in Honour of Mogobe Bernard Ramose (2019); 'Constraints and Prospects for Legislative Oversight in Emerging African Democracies: The Case of South Africa, in O Fagbadebo and F Ruffin (Eds), Perspectives on the Legislature and the Prospects of Accountability in Nigeria and South Africa (2019) with KM Matebese-Notshulwana; and 'Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe: Acknowledging the Legacy of a Pan-Africanist Hero', Africology: Journal of Pan African Studies (2018). Martin, Fran, PhD, is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, UK. She has worked in education for 40 years, first as a primary school teacher and then, since 1993, as a teacher educator in the higher education sector. Fran has a background in geographical and global education and for the last six years her research has focused on critical interculturalism and de/colonial pedagogies. Mitova, Veli, PhD, is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. She co-founded the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science and is the South African team leader for the Geography of Philosophy Project. She obtained her PhD from Cambridge, and her BA, Honours, and MA from Rhodes University. Before joining the University of Johannesburg in 2015, she taught and researched at Universität Wien, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, and Rhodes University. She works at the intersection of epistemology

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and ethics. She is the author of Believable Evidence (2017), and the editor of The Factive Turn in Epistemology (2018) and Decolonising Knowledge (a Special Issue of Philosophical Papers, 2020). Currently she is working on epistemic decolonisation and epistemic injustice, under the auspices of a Newton Advanced Fellowship for the project Epistemic Injustice, Reasons and Agency. Olivier, Abraham, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare and Visiting Professor at the University of Bayreuth. He is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa and former Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Philosophy. He is the author of Being in Pain (2007) and editor/co-editor of several special journal issues, including Phenomenology and Naturalism for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2016), Identity and Difference for the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (2016), The African Other for Angelaki (2019), and Philosophy and Laughter for the Southern Journal of Philosophy (2020). He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on topics relating to phenomenology, philosophy of the mind and African philosophy. Pirbhai-Illich, Fatmakhanu (Fatima), PhD, a transnational feminist, is Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. She has worked in tertiary-level teacher education for over 25 years and her community-based research focuses on social and human justice. Over the past decade, Fatima has been working towards de/colonial pedagogies in language and literacy education. Stein, Sharon, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, and a Research Associate with Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University. Her research examines the role of higher education in society, especially in relation to internationalisation, decolonisation and sustainability. She is convenor of the Critical Internationalisation Studies Network, and a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective.

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Index

Please note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures or tables. Notes are indicated by the letter n. A absolutist rationale 24, 38, 41, 43 abyssal thinking 61 academe 4, 8, 9, 14, 15, 93, 94, 196, 197, 208 academic freedom 94, 95, 96, 100, 104, 105, 106 definition 101, 103, 107 academics 90, 94, 95, 104, 129, 155, 158, 166, 167, 178, 185 see also educators, teachers Afrikaner 7, 90, 180, 182 women 118, 122, 142, 175, 207 academy 4, 6, 9, 16, 115, 116, 175, 196 African 119, 120, 121, 122 future 200–201 Africanity 121, 123 Africanisation 91, 152–154, 166, 186, 212 African knowledge systems see Indigenous Knowledge Systems African languages 116, 120, 200, 201 African philosophy 132, 133, 142, 144, 152, 173, 184, 185 Africans (people) 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 26, 95, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 132, 136, 153, 157, 167, 198, 208, 29, 210, 211, 212 South 2, 6, 8, 72, 129, 144, 182 African thought 26, 105, 132, 144, 152, 211 African University see university afrocentric 141, 142, 153 alienation 5, 119, 120, 208 Anthropocene 15, 48, 157, 158, 167, 158 apartheid 7, 90, 96, 97, 98, 100, 106, 107, 163, 174, 176, 179, 181, 182, 211, 212 global 155, 166, post- 96, 97, 137, 139, 184 arrogance 5, 6, 12, 92, 130, 200 B Bantu education 176, 181, 184 Bantu Education Act No 47 (1953) 7, 106, 179

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Black/Indigenous 3, 11, 90, 92, 93, 7, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105 see also Indigenous/Indigene people dehumanising/inhuman 93, 94, 97, 115, 117, 121, 129, 198 Black/Indigenous knowledge systems see Indigenous Knowledge Systems Blackness/Indigeneity 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 198, 199, 200 bush colleges 7, 90, 91 C capitalism/t 49, 50, 51, 57, 58, 73, 144 neoliberal 12, 15, 56, 58, 152, 154, 155, 157, 164 colonial violators 128, 129, 131 colonial violence see violence colonialism see also settler-colonialism, superiorism diagnosing 5, 49, 127 effects of 3, 4, 11, 35, 37, 52, 63, 117, 127, 129–132, 160, 163 epistemicide 24, 26, 27, 30, 39 historical facts 70, 128–129 colonies 8, 12, 48, 54, 164, 199 colonisation 3, 24, 26, 2, 54, 82, 92, 114, 115, 118, 12, 136, 141, 157, 167, 168, 199, 211 destructive features of displacement and 162–163 diagnosing 49–53 complexity 13, 60, 61, 70, 91, 140, 163, 197, 199 complicity 49, 52, 57, 60, 61, 62 conquest 2, 114, 117, 118, 120, 131, 199, 210, 212 critical thinking 142, 143 cultures 12, 24, 33, 34, 36, 66, 70, 71, 72, 80, 90, 91, 92, 99, 118, 123, 130, 134, 139, 140, 141, 208 African 6, 116, 139, 140 peripheral 91

INDEX

Culturally Responsive Literacy Education (CRLE) course 77–84 commitment 84 summary 84 culturally responsive pedagogies 73, 80, 134, 138–141, 145 curriculum/la 8, 12, 43, 73, 103, 104, 115, 119, 120, 135, 200 see also disciplines, universities African history 103, 122 African scholarship 122, 142 Africanising 27, 31, 166 balanced 134, 141–142 Black studies 57 culturally responsive 119, 134, 138–141 decolonising 13, 16, 24, 37, 38, 84, 128, 136, 137, 142 diversification 166 Indigenous studies 57 Philosophy department/discipline 13, 136 University of Pretoria 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 181–182, 183–185 University of Zululand 142–145 Social Sciences and Humanities 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 197 D de/colonial 9, 66, 77, 82, 83, 84 decolonial agendas 1, 7, 10, 13, 16, 95, 98, 106 decoloniality manifestations in Canadian 48, 54, 55, 63, 82 South African 209–211 United Kingdom ch4 decolonisation see also reform approach, universities africanisation 152–154 distopological approach 151, 163–164 epistemic 25–26 interpretations 55 nature 167–168 problem 151–152 perspectives 54–60 process 5, 12, 48, 49, 54, 60, 82, 123, 132, 134, 137, 152, 156, 165 retrospectivity 198–200 diaspora/ic 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 128, 156, 157, 159, 163, 165, 168 disagreement see no-disagreement problem

disciplines see also curriculum inter- 7, 16, 155, 164, 165, 175 displacement 151, 159, 160 see also homelessness, place destructive feature 162–163 (en)forced removal 159, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168 diversity 27, 58, 91, 92, 121, 132, 134, 135, 138, 140, 166, 168 domination 14, 55, 83, 94, 137, 165, 180, 199, 200, 210 of politics by capital 157, 158, 167 western 73, 132, 135, 155, 156 E economy affective 49, 52, 56, 61 colonial 52, 54, 55, 56, 70 intellectual 49, 58, 61, 62 knowledge production 106, 119 material 49, 53 modern 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61 relational 49 western based 152 education(al) see also curriculum, universities desire 1, 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 198, 200 higher 3, 6, 9, 14, 16, 48, 60, 90, 92, 93, 104, 152, 154, 156, 166, 185, 197, 200, 210 African 127, 137, 141, 145 South African 13, 106, 142, 196 models 12, 18 process 133–134 relationships 66, 73, 75, 77, 81 83 relevant 120–122 spaces, places, boundaries 66, 73–76, 80, unabridged 132–133 educators 132, 134, 138, 139, 177, 181, 216 see also academics, teachers embedded(ness) 6, 34, 60, 77, 97, 99, 122, 135, 137, 138, 160, 174 embodiedness 12, 13, 52, 137, 138 embodiment 114, 138 enlightenment 50, 57, 118, 133, 134 second 127, 131–132, 136, 145 epistemic justice 6, 102, 114, 120–122 see also injustice

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epistemic relativism see relativism Epistemic Relativist Rationale 4, 24, 31, 39, 40, 41 see also Rationale, relativism epistemicide 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 114, 121, 122, 123, 127, 152 anatomy 116–120 epistemology 116, 117, 122, 127, 133, 134, 137, 157, 185, 208–209 onto- 9, 75, 76, 83 relational and ethical approach 137–138 erasure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 14, 70, 76, 116, 136 ethnocentrism 114, 117, 118, 206 eurocentric/eurocentrism 25, 51, 117, 121, 123, 128, 133, 136, 137, 152, 166, 207, 208, 209 Extension of University Education Act (1959) 106, 180 F fallist movement 211–212 First Nations 66, 67, 69, 70, 77, 81 frameworks 3, 9, 27, 32, 37, 39, 43, 61, 83, 94, 121, 156, 199 epistemic 5, 6, 9, 39, 42, 43, 95, 98, 102, 127 decolonial 10, 77 conceptual 33, 34, 36 competing 6, 41, 42, 97 knowledge 6, 100, 101 freedom 6, 26, 68, 70, 75, 95, 115, 116, 159, 176, 183, 208, 210, 212 see also academic freedom epistemic 25, 207 fifth 154 unfreedom 6 H hegemony 27, 55, 62, 152, 156, 157, 166, 183, 184, 207 western academic 12, 155, 164 higher education see education, universities Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) see also universities #FeesMustFall 91, 92, 107, 118 #MustFall movements 91, 201 #RhodesMustFall 118, 133, 136 corporatisation 91 historical commitment 90, 103, 106 educational relationships 83–85

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relevant education 120–122 transformation 56, 57, 93 historical injustices 92, 96, 98, 201 Historically Black Institutions (HBI) 90 Historically Black University (HBU) 90 Historically White Institutions (HWI) 5, 12 Historically White Universities (HWU) 90 “home” 67, 71–72, 75, 93, 160, 162, 163, 164 ownership 72–73, 76 relation to 67, 68, 81 homeless(ness) 5, 162, 163, 164 see also displacement, place house modernity built 50 –53 see also modernity I ideologies 5, 95, 100, 101, 114, 135, 137, 153, 158 IKS see Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) inclusion 9, 13, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 62, 63, 138, 158, 167 Indigeneity studies 13, 55 Indigenous African knowledge systems see Indigenous Knowledge Systems Indigenous African languages see African languages Indigenous inclusion 48 Indigenous/Indigene people 4, 15, 48, 54, 55, 69, 71, 76, 114, 116, 134, 210 see also Black/Indigenous Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) 1, 2, 26, 27, 37, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123, 184, 196 inequalities 6, 26, 52, 139, 141 inferior/isation 10, 11 13 41, 43, 103, 116, 117, 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 139, 142 injustice 14, 56, 97, 105, 114, 115, 116, 118, 122, 123, 135, 140, 173, 197, 201, 207 see also epistemic injustice institutions see universities K knowledge see also modes of knowing African 26, 116, 121 decolonising 24, 35 ecology of 49, 61, 62, 68 economy 10, 154, 165 globalisation 4, 25, 26

INDEX



non-western 62, 63 political contestations 2, 5–7, 197 production 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 62, 95, 103, 106, 115, 116, 118, 119, 152 provision 15, 154, 165 providers 15, 82, 154, 165 western 12, 54, 61, 62, 116, 118, 134 knowledge-making 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 134, 197 L land(lessness) 11 land relations 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76 liberation 7, 134, 135, 142, 153, 154, 166, 207, 210 M meta-physical relativism see relativism Métis 66, 77, 81 Métissage 66, 67, 78 modernity 49, 208 see also economy, house modernity built Euro-American 207 European 10, 115, 117, 123, 200 western 212 modes of knowing see also knowing African 105, 115 colonial 4, 11 molar system 155, 156, 165, 168 myth/ology 2, 3, 5, 11, 26, 114, 116, 117, 129, 131, 132, 139, 174, 185, 207 N Native of Nowhere 5, 103, 116, 136 nature decolonising 157–159, 164, 167, 168 distopology 167–168 neo-colonial/ism 75, 153, 168 neoliberal global capitalism see capitalism no-disagreement problem 31–32, 34 non-racialism 158, 167 O occlusion 2, 3, 102 ontological legitimacy 3, 10–13, 119, 120, 129, 200 ontology 120, 121, 123, 157, 185 oppression 12, 96, 100, 133, 139, 154, 197, 199, 200, 207

othering 76, 83, 117, 139 ownership 53, 68–69, 75, 76, 77, 84, 160 see also white possessions property 52, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76 P pedagogics fundamental 7, 180, 181 pedagogies 52, 73, 128, 132, 134, 145, 184 culturally responsive 138–141 perspectives colonial 28, 35, 41, 77 epistemic 24, 25, 27, 29, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43 hegemonic 27 perspectivism 28, 29, 30, 35 philosophers 15, 16, 33, 128, 132, 133, 144, 158, 159, 160 African 142, 144, 145, 209 Afrikaans 174 185 educational 4, 16, 26, 142, 185 philosophy see African philosophy, curriculum place 159–164 see also displacement, homelessness positionality 61, 67, 78, 127, 134–137, 138, 139, 141, 145, 207 possession 66, 69, 83 see also white possessions dispossession 11, 51, 54, 76, 94, 98, 100, 105, 199 possessive 9, 10, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77 post-apartheid see apartheid post-colonial 91, 100, 102, 103, 115, 119, 120, 152, 174, 175, 183 R rapprochement 66, 181, 182 Rationale 25, 26–28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 41 see also Epistemic Relativist Rationale reconceptualise/sation 13, 15, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 156, 157, 165, 196 reconciliation 54, 58, 63, 66 reform approach see also decolonisation radical 55, 56, 58 soft 55, 56 beyond 58, 59

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relativism 30–34 see also Epistemic Relativist Rationale conceptual 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 43 decolonising knowledge 35–37 epistemic 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 metaphysical 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 43 partial 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 43 relativist conceptual 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 43 decoloniser 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39 epistemic 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 renaissance 134, 211 Rhodes University (RU) 90, 201 S self-refutation problem 32–34 settlers colonial 3, 16, 48, 54, 68, 69, 71, 72, 106, 114, 128, 130 colonies 48, 54, 164 indigenous 67, 68, 70, 71 nations 68, 70 white 8, 15, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 79, 80, 82 settler-colonialism 54, 128 sociopolitical 2, 14, 93, 94, 98, 101, 103, 165 Socratic Social Criticism 6, 7, 15, 90, 94, 95, 106, 107 struggles 4, 9, 63, 122, 176, 200, 209, 212 decolonial 13, 14, 119, 123 liberation 210, 211 superiorism 11, 12, 36, 37, 38, 83, 114, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139, 141 de- 119, 127, 133, 134, 135, 138, 145 syllabus see curriculum T teachers 15, 69, 77–82, 83, 127, 133, 137, 138– 141, 178, 179, 180, 182 see also academics, educators theology 7, 15, 94, 114, 127, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181, 211 thought 10, 15, 26, 27, 29, 75, 166, 173, 206, 207, 210, 212 African 105, 144, 152, 211 European/Western 122, 131 Western 61, 116, 119

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transformation 25, 27, 139 societies 14, 130, 136, 137, 145 Treaty 4 66, 80 U Ubuntu 103, 184, 185 undemocratic 6, 7, 8 universities see also curriculum, decolonisation, higher education institutions African 92, 93, 119, 153 autonomy 96, 104, 107 culture 5, 6, 7, 16, 90, 122, 173, 182, 199 decolonisation 8, 9, 16, 24, 37, 48, 49, 52, 53, 63, 90, 92, 93, 94, 104, 107, 121, 122, 137, 151, 152, 154–155, 156 demands 16, 54, 90, 92, 96, 97, 98, 104, 107, 151, 173, 174, 181 denationalising 15, 154, 165 deterritorialising 155–157, 160, 161, 162, 164–166, 168 historical definition/conception 91, 92, 98, 99 modern/colonial 49, 212 multicultural 58, 134, 135, 141, 143, 145 post-colonial 100, 132 public responsibility 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 121 reconceptualization 15, 95–100, 196 responsiveness 8, 54, 73, 80, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 107, 121, 127, 128, 138–142 restructuring 12, 152, 154, 155, 164 role of 7, 48, 90, 94, 97, 98, 99, 174, 217 South African 4, 14, 102, 103, 106, 107, 173 students 4, 5, 16, 36, 77, 80, 81, 82, 91, 98, 103, 120, 137, 138–145 see also curriculum – University of Pretoria African 119, 121, 122, 136 International 156, 165 transformation 6, 1, 48, 59, 93, 100, 116, 118, 120, 151, 166, 173, 174, 175, 185, 207, 212 westernised 2, 9, 92, 118, 152 University of Cape Town (UCT) 90, 93, 129 University of Pretoria (UP) 7 15 16 90, 94, 173, 174, 175, 180, 182

INDEX

University of the Western Cape (UWC) 90 University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) 90 University of Transkei (UniTra) 90 University of Zululand (UniZulu) 90 V values 7, 12, 33, 42, 50, 101, 104, 105, 116, 132, 142 human 27, 32 organisational/institutional 54, 55, 90, 184, 199, 200 view-from-nowhere 5, 14, 24, 34, 39, 41, 42, 43 violence 3, 4, 14, 15, 52, 60, 62, 77, 81, 94, 97, 118, 138, 183 colonial 10, 12, 52, 127, 128, 129–131, 134, 145, 198 epistemic 115, 119 violent benevolence 114 W white greed 2, 3, 8–10 opposed to democratisation 8–10 White Paper 3 of 1997 6, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 102, 103, 106, 201 white possessions 66, 72–73, 76, 83 see also possession, property ownership whiteness 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 55, 76, 82, 96, 97, 103, 106, 136 X xenophobic/afrophobic 153

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