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Decoloniality at large by Cetshwayo Mabhena
The University in Africa has a western problem. Out of many models of the university in Africa the Euro-American one has become hegemonic as it has in the entire Global South. As a result, we have not known any other form of the university besides the one that colonialism and imperialism imposed on us from the West.
It was not our choice that we found ourselves here with this system of higher education. What is variously called transformation of the university in Africa, decolonisation of the university in Africa and de-westernising the university are all attempts to undo the coloniality that comes with the history of the model of the university that has come with a stubborn higher education system in Africa.
The system was pressed down our heads as if there was no alternative to it. Like any other colonial imposition this model of the university was presented as a civilisational and modernisation gift from benevolent colonisers that had brought much needed life to Africa.
Behind this guise of the university as an agent of Enlightenment, in Africa there is the ugly truth that this university was complicit in the western project of conquest, imperialism, and colonialism.
Much like the Church, the university was weaponised against the natives of Africa and was used as an accessory to colonialism. It is for that reason that this westernised university in Africa is a crime scene and a kind of cemetery where African histories, knowledges and histories lie buried.
Indigenous Knowledge Systems, languages and histories have been murdered in this Eurocentric university. Epistemicides and linguicides have been carried out where western epistemologies and languages and histories have been afforded monopoly at the expense of the local and the regional. That is why African students and scholars are calling for the de-Westernisation of the university as part of the larger project of decolonising higher education. For that to happen, the genealogies and provenances of this model of the university must be understood.
The Ancient roots of the Western University
There was a time in the ancient West where truth and knowledge were the property of religious authorities. Truth and knowledge belonged to priests, prophets and kings that ruled by divine commission. Any other knowledge or theory could get the knower and the theorist crucified. The famous Socrates, for instance, was crucified for lecturing alternative ideas that ran against the grain of the time.
It was the Enlightenment revolution that overthrew the religious authority and monopoly of knowledge. That is why the Enlightenment is alleged to have killed God by displacing him from the political and the knowledge arena, secularisation of knowledge and politics.
The Enlightenment philosophers could then boast that man had come to be a master of the universe that can use science and reason to achieve dominion over nature, without resorting to the divine. Great ideas and great inventions came with the Enlightenment.
Some diabolic ideas too were born in the Enlightenment, and these included the idea of imperialism and colonisation where Empire-Builders, merchants and missionaries were to send explorers to explore how the West could expand into previously unknown geographies and locations of the world. These expansionists claimed to be bringing light to the darknesses of the Global South. They had insatiable appetite for gold and other special stones and possessions.
They were extremely violent plunderers that denied the humanity of the natives that they found in the new lands. The God that they had killed by not believing in they were willing to resurrect and impose on the natives. The education system, at the top of which was the university, was a theatre of colonial ideas and practices.
That is why today one finds statues of western enslavers, imperialists, merchants, missionaries, and empire builders almost in every university campus in Africa. The university curricular and architecture are westernised. As such, the universities are westernised universities in Africa, not African universities. They are colonial outposts. They began as university colleges, or campuses of western universities and are still modelled as such, many decades after African countries dethroned settler colonialism.
The danger of the disciples
The knowledge that is produced and circulated in the western university and the westernised universities in Africa has been partitioned into disciplines.
The problem with disciplines is that they do exactly that, to discipline the hearts and minds of scholars and students and keep them confined in narrow mind provinces that have strict maps and borders. The disciplines themselves are artefacts of power. They are weapons of authority and rule.
For instance, the French Revolution of 1789, changed society in fundamental ways. After the revolution a totally new world was born where there was a new market, new society, and the state. Power had to find new ways of understanding the different world.
The disciplines of Economics, Sociology and Political Science were born to respond to the changed world. Economics was to study the market, sociology studied society and political science studied the state and the people as the ruled. Here is an example of how academic disciplines were created for purposes of power and its interests.
Anthropology, for instance, was created by scholars of Empire to study the colonial other. Western anthropologists produced notes on natives that they observed, and these notes were given to colonial governors as handbooks on how to understand, know and cow the native.
Anthropology exemplifies how academic disciplines were created as weapons against the powerless. As such, academic disciplines are not innocent or are they neutral. They are instruments of hegemonic power.
Further, in 1945, the United States of America found itself in power on a world scale. The power of the USA was heavily contested by the Chinese and Soviet communist encroachment into the Global South that includes Africa.
A new discipline was invented in the American university to study economies of the Global South and to come up with ways of countering communist encroachment into the Global South and to protect US economic and political hegemony.
Up to today, Development Studies is not a discipline of the development but underdevelopment of the Global South. The academic disciplines of the westernised university in Africa tend to have colonial hidden agendas. That is another way in which the university in Africa remains westernised and needs to be de-westernised as part of its decolonisation.
The disciplines that were used in conquest and colonisation of the Global South may not be the same disciplines that will be used to imagine decolonisation and liberation. These disciplines need to be de-westernised and decolonised so that they can be re-purposed for Africa.
Besides de-westernising and re-purporsing the colonial disciplines there might be need to fashion new decolonial disciplines that are invested in the interests of African people with their long history of colonial wounding. Undisciplinarity is the approach using disciplines by disrespecting and undoing them to free them from their colonial hang-over.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from the University of Zululand, KwaDlangezwa Campus, Mpangeni, KZN, South Africa. This article is a simplified version of the panel presentation to the 28th South African Sociology Association Congress (SASA), 5 to 7 June 2023, University of Zululand. Contacts: [email protected]
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