adminIn a prize winning essay of 1759, Jean Jacques Rousseau condemned European education and knowledge production for being full of decoration but empty of meaningful understanding of the world.
In “Discourse on the Arts and the Sciences” Rousseau convinced the panel of judges that the beauty of European poetry, architecture and the flourish of its philosophy and science only served to conceal that the most gifted of Europeans did not understand the world and were bereft of knowledge of humanity.
As a result, Rousseau became a philosopher who despised other philosophers and resented books as objects that misled rather than led man to an understanding of man and nature. What perplexed Rousseau more was the origins of inequality in European philosophy, the production of philosophies of domination, conquest and hegemony that he saw as unnatural, evil and threatening to the planet. In a strong way, Rousseau foresaw that out of the love for power and greed for wealth, the Eurocentric mindset was bound to create such weaponry of mass destruction as the nuclear bomb that would threaten to demolish humanity and the entire planet at the press of a button. Just how man mobilised thought and creativity for purposes of violence, evil and death was to Rousseau the real fall of the European man from grace. Earlier than Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the 4th Century, Plato wrote that the European republic needed philosophers to be kings or kings to be philosophers so that society could prosper.
Knowledge and wisdom were supposed to be the property of a few powerful individuals that had divine right. Since then, European education has always created divisions between a few powerful and privileged people who know and the mass of society who do not have access to knowledge. It is for that reason that, centuries after Plato’s Academy in Athens, allegedly the first institution of higher learning in the world, westernised and colonial higher education in Africa still retains pretensions of the Platonian academy.
Knowledge and knowing, in the Eurocentric worldview, has not been separated from crusades of conquest and the genocides of domination together with capitalist accumulation and monopoly. The spirit of violence, domination, evil and death that possessed European knowledge and knowledge production is what drove humanists like Jean Jacque Rousseau insane with rage at how “the state of nature” was violated by those who claimed to know and to be inventors that were to help humanity to master nature in the name of civilisation and progress. Rousseau condemned the contempt, cynicism, vanity and hatred for the poor and powerless that was embedded in the Eurocentric mentality and sensibility. The vitriol of Donald Trump against refugees, immigrants and black people is not a new development but part of a long Euro-American tradition of evil and hate.
In South Africa today, the coldness of the University of Stellenbosch, the racist exclusivity of the University of the Witwatersrand, the systemic bigotry of the University of Pretoria are all vestiges of the Euro-American racist, capitalist and colonial education system that has contempt for black history, black people and black epistemologies. The increasing privatisation and commodification of education are not accidental but are part of an unfolding history of the westernisation of the world and erasure of other civilisations and traditions. The enslaved and the colonised, are supposed to be educated only enough to be good labourers and producers of goods and services in the capitalist economy, accessories of the system, not to be leaders, thinkers and inventors.
The Gesture of Socialist Education
Karl Marx, another western philosopher who frequently condemned philosophers of Europe for laziness and ability to only describe the world and not change it wrote of the need for “polytechnical education.” What Marx meant by that in the 19th Century was an education system that bridged the gap between those who laboured and those who thought. The education system was, according to Marx, supposed to produce a fully developed individual who was both a producer and a dignified consumer. A good Marxist education system was to be that which addressed first and foremost the problems of society before the profit and gains of a few. Similarly, to Mao Zedong in 1963, education and the production of an educated public was not separable from governance itself. It is from that Maoist idea that most political parties in the African liberation and decolonisation movement saw themselves as ideological schools that produced cadres that were ready thoughtfully and practically to lead revolutions. The trouble with communist and socialist education is that somehow it still retained the philosopher king and king philosopher tradition. Educated cadres saw themselves as an elite and informed vanguard that could think and lead on behalf of the mass of the population. Vanguardism carries Eurocentric eliticism, vanity and a tendency to domination. Eurocentric criticism of Eurocentricism almost always suffers that paralysis where its Eurocentricism overcomes it and limits its liberatory potential. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx were brilliant philosophers that in their different locations and generations saw the evil in European thought and condemned it, but however rich and liberatory their imagination, it could not and still cannot be sufficient in navigating peoples of the Global South from the historical mess that the Global North has put them.
Education as Liberation
As the universities are opening in South Africa they are immediately threatened with the prospect of closure as students have begun singing in protest, demanding curriculum changes, the inclusion of epistemologies of the south in the syllabi, elimination of epistemic racism and that fees must fall. Tired are the students of reading and being tested only on such thinkers as Plato, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and other epistemically privileged European dead men.
The students demand Frantz Fanon, Steve Biko and other thinkers of the South to be integrated into the curriculum to create cognitive justice and epistemic diversity.
If philosophers and theorists of the Global South are not brought into the conversation and mainstream higher education in South Africa the students promise to burn the libraries and render universities ungovernable. In a strong way, the humanities and social sciences that Rousseau condemned in 1759 are back on trial in the South African university, students are demanding the return of humanist and humanising education. Education should not continue, the students argue, to be a commodity that is left to the whim of the market forces, laws of demand and supply, but it should be a public good and service that is provided as part of society’s development and democratisation. The critical humanities that were championed by such thinkers of the Global South as Paulo Freire, he who claimed that “ education is the practice of freedom” and that “education for critical consciousness” is what the oppressed need are back in vogue.
Issues of class, race and identity that colonialism created are once again the heated topics that are arresting the attention of teachers and learners. Importantly, the students are not advocating for epistemic nativism, the total banning of European knowledges but they are asking for “ecologies of knowledges,” where all knowledges of the world, including African ones can be part of the universality and diversity of the university. While in the past, liberals and other, post this and post that, thinkers could claim that issues of racism and hatred were of the past; helpfully Donald Trump is providing evidence that the world is still made out of conquerors and the conquered.
The allegations that as a school of thought decoloniality was excavating problems of the far past and using them to achieve relevance in the modern university are falling flat on their nose, before plea, in a big way Trump gives decolonists currency and purchase in the global academy.
The tradition of the critical humanities, in the North and in the South has once again become the tradition of the moment. Critical humanities are back to demand the return to the human, a retreat from capitalist and racist knowledge production that valorises profit ahead of humanity and the planet itself.
Once again, Frantz Fanon captured the intellectual mood of this moment with pulsating prose “let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry, leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them… in all corners of the globe.” Donald Trump can lead the Euro-American Empire to where he wishes, after Fanon, some students in Africa believe that “Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss.”
In Donald Trump, the madness of the West is personified and dramatised and the sprint to the abyss is a spectacle.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail.
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