Contemporary discourses to decolonise universities in Africa have revived Africanisation, an undertaking that is at the centre of Unisa’s efforts. To realise the decolonisation objective, the Department of Leadership and Transformation (DLT) held a seminar on the topic: "What does decolonising the university mean?"

Sandew Hira

In her official opening, Prof Grace Khunou, DLT Director of Scholarship Change, explained the objective of the seminar, emphasising the importance of having a conversation about decolonisation to excavate marginalised knowledges from South Africa and the African continent, and to enhance Unisa’s rich grounding in African epistemologies.

In his presentation, Sandew Hira, author of the book Decolonizing the mind: A guide to decolonial theory and practice, deliberated on the theme by characterising "civilisation" as a collection of societies with a specific cultural base, knowledge, ethics and views on how to organise and structure a society. Hira further referred to "colonialism" as a collection of global systems of economic, political, social and cultural institutions, which the Global North created to rule the world in a colonial civilisation setting.

Decolonisation is a concept of building a new world civilisation, specifically regarding knowledge production and transformation of societies. It requires new fundamentals of knowledge production that is free from infections of colonised knowledge.

Hira further explained that decolonisation is a critique of Eurocentric knowledge production on the level of distinctive disciplines. He elaborated: "It is not just a general critique; but it analyses the ways in which knowledge is colonised. Also, it evaluates concepts from other civilisations in all disciplines, together with Eurocentric concepts without the racist prejudice of superiority and inferiority that is embedded in the notion of modernity and rationalism."

Prof Nokuthula Hlabangane

Hira shared how colonialism created a specific form of knowledge production for the social sciences, mathematics and the hard sciences, producing distorted views of the world of humans and nature. He analysed the methods and mechanisms of knowledge production outside the West, and how colonialism created methods and mechanisms that instituted mental slavery in science. Comparing the relationship between mathematics, hard sciences and social sciences in non-Western civilisations, Hira explained how the European Enlightenment produced scientific narratives that are now presented as universal knowledge.

Further, he argued that there must be a comprehensive, integral and coherent framework for the decolonial theory to apply across all disciplines. For him, this would enable transition towards a new world civilisation through dialogues among thinkers of different civilisations.

Associate Professor Nokuthula Hlabangane from the College of Human Sciences’ Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, shared a seminal reading by K Wayne Yang that states:

"Decolonisation brings about the repatriation of indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonising discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonise our schools’, or use ‘decolonising methods’, or ‘decolonise student thinking’, turns decolonisation into a metaphor."  

Hlabangane remarked that the settlers’ colonialism is about owning land, where it becomes property. She added that, similarly, chattel slavery was meant to exploit captive labour for profit. She added: "Firstly, chattel slaves are commodities in the labour market and, therefore, slaves become excess. Secondly, unlike workers who aspire to own land, slaves’ presence on land is already an excess that must be dislocated." She continued: "Thus, the slave is a desirable commodity, but the person underneath is imprisonable, punishable, and murderable. The repatriation of indigenous lifeworld robbed the earth of its wealth, and called it gross domestic product, which is the logic of domination and extraction of colonialism."

Decolonisation is about re-humanising, it provides a new way of thinking towards higher education. To undo woundedness, Hlabangane argued that there must be confrontation on the universities’ role in causing and normalising it. She acknowledged the wholeness of being students and ourselves by weaving in beauty and life. In conclusion, Hlabangane questioned: "Is our university capable of doing this? Are we capable of seeing ourselves outside the frills of coloniality?"

The webinar showed the overwhelming hunger for knowledge in the sphere of decolonising epistemology, Africanising the university culture, systems, policies, and centralising Africa in general.

Click here to watch the seminar.

#Unisa150  

* By Gugu Masinga, Marketing and Communication Specialist, Department of Leadership and Transformation