Chronicle Editor
Scholarship, and being a scholar, as an idea and a practice is perhaps one of the most used and abused social and political positionalities of our time. That the scholarly vocation has been colonised comes from many truths including that at a world, systemic and structural scale, conquest, power and domination have weaponised scholarship against social justice and political peace.
As a result, the idea and the practice of scholarship has circulated around the world and been experienced as what it is not, and most times its total opposite. The coloniality of scholarship is found in its captivity to and domination by power, and the way it is largely pretended, performed and not enacted and actualised as a grand vocation of human liberation and happiness.
When that which is supposed to be used in the search for human liberation, social justice and happiness is conquered, appropriated, faked and weaponised against its very original objectives serious trouble begins and does not end easily. The highest goal of scholarship and of being a scholar, which is intellectualism, is negated and betrayed when the coloniality of scholarship thrives.
What fundamentally is a scholar?
Going to school and having gone to school at some point does not naturally translate to one being a scholar. There is still being a pupil, a student and even a teacher and lecturer without one being anything of a scholar. Even being an academic, which is just one ingredient out of the full recipe of the vocation, does not guarantee one being a scholar.
But academics frequently mistake themselves and are mistaken for scholars. Being a scientist too, that is being scientific in reading and observing phenomenona, also does not guarantee one being a scholar, although like being an academic it is a big part of being scholarly. I can hazard the observation here that a scholar is a good combination of both the academic and the scientist. The academic and the scientist must come together in one body to make a scholar, and that scholar does not necessarily become an intellectual still.
In veracity, some scholars are intellectuals and some intellectuals are not scholars. There are so many disciplinary academics and scientists there who teach what they have been taught and repeat what they know, religiously, and that is it. Yes, learning, learnedness and teaching can make one an academic and a scientist.
Yet one can be a university researcher or lecturer that publishes in top drawer journals but still does not combine academicism and science in a mixture that makes a scholar. Disciplinarity, belonging to an academic field and using the science of that field can make a good professional in the academy, and that professional may still not be a scholar.
A scholar is a meeting point, in perfection and excellence, of an academic and a scientist, unencumbered by disciplinarity and professionalism. I isolate disciplinarity and captivity of the mind to it as the conquest and domination of the intellect.
The academic and the scientist
To justify my above allegation that a scholar is one person that is made out of an academic and a scientist in excellence and perfection over and above disciplinarity, I must be definitional of the academic and the scientist. The academic is one professional that applies theory to read and observe things to make arguments and conclusions.
Theory being the ‘spectacles,’ the lens of ideas and concepts that one puts on in looking at things, examining “data.” In other words academics look at things being studied and observed under the strict ‘intoxication’ or influence of theory. The scientist, on the other side is a methodist. Or a methodologist, it is methods that make studies scientific or not.
The scientist follows strict rules and designs, plans and directions, in examining things. Science as method takes the use of methodological tools in gathering and examining what is being observed. When the academic and his theory meets the scientist and his method in one person, in perfection and excellence, a scholar is born. When academicism and scientificity are combined only for working purposes, an academic and scientific professional can be found, a disciplined learner and teacher even, but not necessarily a scholar. Indeed one can be scholarly without being a scholar.
Things that are not and things that are
I frequently frighten post-graduate students with the paradoxical warning that if any of them dares write a good thesis or dissertation they should be sure not to succeed in their studies. They only get to relax when I add that they only have to write a good research report. Academics and scientists are trained to write good research reports, not dissertations and theses.
Research reports are works of good theory and method crafted by disciplined scholars that are operating from a defined academic and scientific discipline. Research reports, just like journal papers and book chapters, are not a test of intelligence or the novelty of mind of the writers. They are a test of discipline, the ability to use theory and method, following prescribed formats and styles of writing that are approved and recommended by authorities, police officers, magistrates and judges of the disciplines.
The ability to follow given theories and ordered methods, and to use prescribed formats and styles of thought and expression, to review recommended literature, makes a good academic and a scientist, and an excellent scholar for that reason. The coloniality of scholarship begins exactly in that it is a product of a disciplined system and order of thought and work that repeats what has been said and done before and follows recommended and approved approaches.
Theory and methodology work like maps and compasses that lead the scholar to a predetermined destination that is desired and permitted. Being disciplined, following instructions and belonging to an academic discipline, advancing the norms of that discipline is the scholarly thing to do for post-graduate students and their teachers to tick the boxes of scholarship. True dissertations and Theses are crafted by dissidents, outlaws and border jumpers of the system and power of disciplines and their laws.
Decolonising scholarship
Post-colonialists have been strong about multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as ways of freeing scholarship from encumbrances of the disciplines and their laws that hold scholars, the scientists and the academics, hostage and their potential limited. But to add inter and multi before the word discipline does not alter how, in practice the theories and methods of scholarly disciplines, negate progress and invention.
Some post-colonialists have been talking about mixed-methods and blended theories. Undisciplinarity however, as the undoing of disciplines in order to free the scholarly vocation and allow it to achieve its intellectual goals is the revolutionary and decolonial thing to do. Intellectuals are not those rare thinkers from another world but they are remarkable people from this very world who go to other world with their minds and hearts in search of new truths and insights.
Disciplines, the scholarly methods and theories, on the other hand keep scholars not only grounded but also rooted in the everyday world. Scholars can only reach the level of intellectuals by jumping disciplinary borders and trespassing out into the no go areas of research, thought and expression.
When Edward Said actually said that true intellectuals speak truth to power he also meant that they break off the chains and power of the controls of scholarly disciplines that limit intellectual novelty and invention. Decolonising scholarship, in other words, will allow scholars the freedom and liberty to be intellectuals.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, in Pretoria, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
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