What is it like to be a Black postgraduate student in the United Kingdom (UK)? A simple question for an academic text to answer, you may think. What may seem straightforward on the surface, however, is anything but. The Black postgraduate student experience is a complex mixture of hope, audacity, expectation, disappointment, rage, sacrifice and dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled. It is also part of the wider Black community experience in Britain, one that has been forged over the centuries through blood, sweat and tears (Olusoga, 2016). As bell hooks outlines:

The Black PhD Experience: Stories of Strength, Courage and Wisdom in UK Academia is our collective endeavour to share the complex and multi- layered experiences of Black students in the UK as they go through the process of obtaining the highest academic qualification, the Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD). It is a book, but it is more than merely a text: it is an experience. As the pages move you will be drawn into an immersive, emotional kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and tangible expressions of Black humanity. We want you, as readers, to walk with us, to see the higher education system through our eyes and to understand where we have come from to reach this place. Ours is not a traditional ‘how to do x and y’ textbook; there are excellent works outlining the what, where and how of tackling institutionalised racism in higher education (Verma, 2022) and we will refer to them at points on the journey. There are, however, more fundamental issues at stake for us than just showing people how to treat us equitably in universities and colleges. The heinous murder of George Floyd in May 2020 in the United States of America (US) was a powerful wake- up call for Black people all over the world and had particular resonances for Black students and scholars in the UK.

This essay looks at my PhD journey undertaking research on Black women's experiences in prison. Firstly, I will discuss the decision to apply to study at the Open University, explaining the conscious decision to choose the Open University after studying at the University of Oxford for my master’s. The essay will discuss my supervisors as my main support mechanism; from building up my confidence as an academic to applying for access to the female prison estate. The final part of the essay will look at the struggles I have encountered, including negotiating prison fieldwork while pregnant, as well as reflecting on my positionality as a Black woman researching Black women in prison.

My journey is incomplete, but the support and challenges I have experienced thus far, combined with the important stories of the women interviewed, act as a driving force to ensure my PhD reaches completion and is heard.

My personal journey

Luck, determination, intelligence, motivation, strength, resilience, courage: these are the words that come to mind when I think about how I got to where I am today. I have earned my place as an academic, yet it is still something I have to negotiate and prove to both myself and the field I strive to be a part of.

My PhD journey has been one with challenges along the way, but I have received great support – from the application process right through to where I am today. The application process is a good place to start as it highlights the encouragement I received, and the ways in which two lecturers went above and beyond their role. Having nearly finished my master's degree at a top- rated university, I was feeling rather low in confidence about my place in academia, when in fact it should have been the opposite. Completing my master's at this university had shaken my belief in my academic ability; I did not feel a sense of belonging within academia. Additionally, I did not feel good enough to be in the same field as those who had taught me.

In 1950, my grandad boarded the SS Castel Verde at Port Royal, Jamaica. Two months later he arrived in England. Fast forward 70 years and here I am, the first person in our lineage to be awarded a PhD. Throughout the years I have experienced a lot of firsts. During the final year of my undergraduate degree, I applied for a range of PhD projects, which I mainly found on findaPhD. com. I utilised the resources that I had – the university careers service, my personal tutor, and my family. I chose my PhD project based on my passion for the project; however, if I could go back and do things again I would be more cognisant of the institution and supervisory team to which I was applying. I struggled through my PhD mentally, emotionally and academically. After suddenly losing my grandfather to cancer in my second year, I felt lost and broken. Imposter syndrome followed me around like a dark cloud. However, thankfully, I pushed my way through with help from my support system consisting of close family and friends. Almost one year since defending my thesis, I can look back and appreciate the journey.

When my paternal grandfather, Joseph Morris, left the sunny isles of Jamaica aboard the SS Castel Verde at Port Royal in May 1950, he was a teenager and one of the first from his area to embark on such a journey. In July he arrived in Southampton, UK, to a hostile and unfamiliar cold. For the first time in his life, he beheld the ‘mother country’. This is the story of just one of my grandparents. He, my maternal grandfather, Manzie Buchanan, and grandmothers, Gloria Morris and Pansy Samuels, faced many unknowns and difficulties coming to England from Jamaica in the 1950s and 1960s, but their bravery and perseverance made a way for me. My parents, Bernard and Maureen Morris, were born in the UK in the 1960s. They met and married in the 1980s and had three children, of which I am the youngest.

From the ages of 3– 18 I was schooled in White- majority environments. I have always felt different as a result. I was too ‘White’ for the Black kids but obviously still very much a brownskinned girl from a British Jamaican household.

I was first introduced to higher education through the University College London Horizons programme, an outreach programme for underserved schools in London. Inspired by meeting Black students at Horizons, I applied for and eventually completed my Master in Science (MSci) in Biological Sciences. This experience is testament to how important the visibility of Black people in academic spaces has been to me since the beginning of my journey. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis during my master's and I am now completing a PhD. Being transparent and setting expectations has been paramount for my progress in academia as a Black disabled woman. I would not have been able to choose this path for myself without having strong support systems, which reinforced my sense of belonging when my educational institutions could not or would not.

My personal inspiration to succeed

I am a proud descendent of the Windrush generation, who uprooted their lives to provide opportunities for their children as economic migrants from Jamaica to the UK.

My paternal grandmother, Viola Webb (née Lawrence), was raised in Nine Mile in the heart of St Ann, Jamaica, where the soil is red and rich in bauxite. Viola settled a few miles west in Alva, where she worked as a homemaker and had 12 children, including my father, Lincoln. In my father's early 20s, he worked in electrical engineering, before transitioning into security work in the Jamaican capital, Kingston.

My maternal grandmother, Gloria Lee (née Meghoo), was raised in Kingston, but worked abroad as a typist in the USA and the UK for much of her adult life. Gloria first came to the UK as part of the Windrush generation in 1960, but her children, including my mother, Jennifer, were raised in Kingston. In my mother's early 20s, she's grew an affection for a security guard called Lincoln, whom she’d met on one of her regular solo trips to the local football stadium. They married in 1989 and moved to London with a small toddler in tow.

A few years ago, I had the satisfaction of watching one of the most powerful, inspiring, and touching speeches I have ever seen. Most probably, the reader will also have seen it, or at least heard about it, as it made the headlines around the world. I am talking about the speech delivered by the American actress Viola Davis after receiving the Emmy award for best leading actress in 2015. She began her speech quoting Harriet Tubman, who stated the following in the 1800s:

Viola Davis then complemented this by saying: ‘Let me tell you something. The only thing that separates women of colour from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are not there.’

Bringing this powerful speech into the context of the present essay is not only important but also highly pertinent, as its key theme intertwines with the scope of my personal account: the opportunity to display one's value, skills, knowledge, competence and potential. In the specific case of an academic career, without egalitarian opportunities it is impossible to cross the line preventing Black scholars from ever standing before a university classroom and/ or conducting research. Thus, in this essay, I present my perceptions and experience of trying to cross this line to reach the ‘green field’ of academia, which seems increasingly out of reach for Black scholars.

I am a Black man who arrived in the UK in 2014 from a developing country with the clear and well- defined goal of becoming an international- level social science researcher and lecturer. Within the timeframe of a year and a half prior to arriving in the country, I had applied to eight competitive programmes and was accepted for six. Achieving such a high success rate brought me great joy and satisfaction. It is well- known that, like the USA, the UK has an enduring and strong reputation for providing world- class education, especially at PhD level, along with a solid tradition of developing influential and high- impact research across a variety of disciplines.

There was certainly a noticeable absence of Black women in science, let alone Physics, who had graduated and went on to do PhDs. The prospect of that one day being me had never crossed my mind. When I arrived at university, I came into contact with many different types of students, but few who looked like me. For some of them, going to university, and maybe even becoming a lecturer, was a childhood dream or something they had already envisaged for themselves. Perhaps they had aunties or uncles who had graduated and become doctors, or family members who worked in academia. If you had asked an eight- year- old me, however, ‘What do you want to do when you’re older?’, I definitely would not have fathomed the idea of studying for a PhD.

That says a lot, given that I was an incredibly aspirational child growing up. My dreams ranged from wanting to be an author, to a food photographer, an athlete, architect or a graphic designer – the list goes on. I was the type of child who always wanted to try new things. But ultimately my dreams were limited by what I knew and saw around me. It speaks to the importance of representation and the effect it can have on what we perceive our potential futures to look like. Even if I had heard of doing a doctorate at that age, it probably would not have felt tangible, like it may have to others, because I had not seen people like me doing it. The image presented in books, films and TV is always of the ‘mad scientist’, with straight, white, spiky hair, big glasses and a lab coat; not someone that reminded me of my aunties, cousins or friends. Navigating that meant relying on self- motivation so that the inconceivable could one day become real – and that was ultimately the main thing that carried me through.

For me, school was a pleasant experience. I had positive feelings towards education throughout primary and secondary school. Growing up in a state school in London meant that I had friends and teachers with a mix of cultures, backgrounds and opinions.

This future and many other possibilities are attainable with you at the centre. The young person of this story could be your child, niece or nephew, cousin, friend or you. Keep hope and unity alive, protect and empower each other and fortify our children for the road ahead. The stories that encompass this book are acts of resistance, defiance and triumph from Black individuals who, like you, are navigating societies that have continually maligned or hindered our progress.

Despite this, we are illuminating the path towards higher educational attainment and specifically the PhD. The strength, courage and wisdom shown here is within every one of us and has allowed us to push forward irrespective of the barriers placed in our way. We ask you to dream big, aspire for greater and invest in our children's educational journeys. We have no deficit and therefore no inferiority. Racism is the principal poison that continues to curtail our advancement within the UK and globally. One antidote to this is the liberty that can be found through education. Knowledge is power and has the ability to change the lives of many.

As we fight and change the status quo from within, pushing away various obstacles, we ask you to meet us at the door. Our knowledge is powerful, our contributions matter and our scholarship is valuable in cementing our own histories, realising our individual and collective success and shaping our own futures. Let us do this hand in hand.

The missing ones

They say ‘Knowledge is Power’ and I think that is where we, the Black community, in general, lose a lot of power. Whether it is a lack of knowledge about available opportunities and roles, not knowing where to look or being unaware of who can point us in the right direction, we usually seem to be on the back foot. Many of us tend to be first- generation graduates and there is usually no template or an idea of which career path to follow, or at least that is what I have found in my experience. Within my circle, I have found myself sharing the limited information I have attained in order to help guide others. I have taken on this role almost as a duty, because I realise how valuable this information could be to others, just as it was for me. It is, however, when I sit down to reflect, a role that I also find extremely frustrating, particularly because I recognise how many opportunities there are for us, but we miss out on because we do not know about it. If we know what is out there and decide not to pursue them, then that is our choice, therefore a very different situation. In a way, it feels like we are always one step behind.

As I share my story, I will highlight some opportunities and experiences I was fortunate to have, that helped shape my decisions and subsequently led to where I am now. I will also touch on why I am irritated by the lack of awareness of what is common knowledge in a lot of communities, but not in ours.

I have always been interested in school; I was very comfortable academically and personally. I went to quite a diverse secondary school and although there were not many Black students, many ethnic minorities were represented. I specifically remember an Indian teaching assistant who used to look out for the Asian students, and me, and tried to make sure we stayed on the right path. She encouraged me to pursue higher education and would try to convince me that I was intelligent enough to take my studies even further than A- levels. Teenagers tend to be quite impressionable; therefore having someone who believed in me and my abilities gave me the confidence to believe I was capable of more than I thought.

Across the continent, the humanities and the interpretive social sciences might best be summarised as a compound of three conditions: benign neglect, active marginalisation and a few exceptions of flourishing. In many countries on the continent the humanities, in particular, have suffered a fate that reproduces broadly the general problems of higher education but in the humanities, these are more acutely intensified within the general set of challenges. In this chapter I place particular emphasis on the humanities as distinct from the social sciences for reasons that will become apparent later. My perspective is anchored in recent southern African debates and to a large extent is overdetermined by the South African debate. That there is a South African debate at all, at the official level of state, in the universities and in the media, remains encouraging. South Africa is a society grappling with many tectonic shifts, finding its way in the world and on the African continent, where its position remains ambiguous. Officially, South Africa embraces moving its capital across borders, but is not so keen on other Africans moving their labouring bodies into South Africa. Internally, it is going through vexing contestations in direct and displaced ways that have to do with the racialised hue of privilege and inequality and its largely unspoken condition of settler coloniality and the effects and consequences that might flow from this recognition.

In the post-independence period in Africa, nationalist movements valued unity above dissent and knowledge in the service of the nation was to be imagined and constructed. As hope gave way to criticism, the often single national university created at independence became increasingly viewed as the source of popular opposition and a target of hostility. If the government was the state, the university was cast as its critical civil society. Dissent, critique and opposition to official narratives were often seen as working against, rather than for the developmental objectives of states strained by the disjuncture between their sovereign hopes and their actual lack of sovereignty structured by neocolonial relations. Against this predicament, as the Malawian scholar Thandika Mkandawire put it, African governments held up a sign that said, ‘Silence, development in progress’.

In 1955, the Asian and African nations gathered at the Bandung Conference solemnly condemned all forms of colonialism. Four years later, at the Second World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome from late March to early April, Aime Cesaire spoke of the ‘solemn hour’ when colonialism discovered itself to be ‘mortal’, ‘perishable’, having ‘lost its historical assurance’. He added: ‘And isn't the best sign of this the sudden success of a neologism that is now making its way into everyday vocabulary: decolonization?’

Today, the success of what is no longer a neologism is undeniable. In the sense in which it is now mainly used – freeing the mind from the coloniality (another neologism) with which it has been inculcated – ‘decolonisation’ is a buzzword as well as a watchword. There is a global demand to decolonise the mind by decolonising art, museums, architecture, the imaginary, aesthetics, beauty … but, first and foremost, knowledge and consequently the university and its curricula.

The question then is: what does it mean to decolonise knowledge in a university?

One important lesson of Suren Pillay's Predicaments of Knowledge is that posing the question in such general terms runs the risk of being sterile and of limiting the reflection to the assertion, repeated in various ways, that the coloniality of so-called Western epistemology must be opposed by the resistance of so-called Southern epistemologies. On the contrary, the book shows, we need to take a concrete situation as the starting point for an analytical approach that can lead to a precise understanding of what a decolonised curriculum can look like.

Post-apartheid South Africa, analysed in this book, offers itself to reflection as both a concrete situation to think about and a case to consider as exemplary in the sense that it sheds light, beyond its particularity, on the general question of the decolonisation of knowledge. In a word, Suren Pillay's question of what a post-apartheid education might look like is the best approach to the general question of what it means to decolonise knowledge.

This chapter was written in the first decade after South Africa attained democracy and began to debate the making of a post-apartheid humanities and social sciences through the language in use at the time: transformation and deracialisation. My intervention through this chapter was to ask why transformation was understood as deracialisation, rather than decolonisation, and to explore the stakes in the difference between these terms. While decolonisation – as an epistemic project – is now a common way of addressing the challenge facing knowledge production, this was not the case in the mid-1990s or the early 2000s in post-apartheid South African debates on higher education. This chapter revisits a set of debates in South African scholarship, particularly debates that unfolded in South African historiography, to make an argument for why decolonisation has to accompany efforts to deracialise the production of knowledge.

THE PROBLEM OF ‘THE PROBLEM’

Debates about academic transformation have been present in the South African academy for decades. With the signals that a negotiated settlement was imminent, these debates took on a more policy-oriented tenor as the possibility of having to govern the process of transforming South African society drew closer on the horizon. It is worth revisiting the discussion on how the challenge of addressing transformation in the academy presented itself. Rather than presenting an exhaustive overview, I am interested in exploring the continuities and discontinuities in how the ‘problem of apartheid’ and knowledge production were and continue to be interpreted: what the key concepts are; what the contours of the constraints and possibilities are; what the horizons of the aspirations and the targets of the critical gaze are. More than three decades ago, the South African sociologist, Ivan Evans, set out the challenge in stark, yet now familiar terms: ‘The most obvious internal feature of the South African academic … [is] its disproportionately white character in a country whose “community folk” are overwhelmingly and almost exclusively black.’

The South African government defines a ‘historically disadvantaged individual’ (HDI) as a South African citizen, (1) who, due to the apartheid policy that was in place, had no voting rights in the national elections prior to the introduction of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1983 (Act No. 100 of 1983) or the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1993 (Act No. 200 of 1993) (‘the interim Constitution); or (2) who is a woman; or (3) who has a disability; with the understanding that any person who received South African citizenship on or before the introduction of the interim Constitution, will not be deemed to be an HDI. ‘A woman’ (in this context) refers to a female person who is a South African citizen. ‘Disability’ refers to a person with a permanent physical disability, mental disability, and/or awareness disability, which leads to confinement or disability, or the inability to perform bodily functions in the manner or within the capacity of a normal person.

I start this chapter with some fragments and snapshots of debates and crises of postcolonial citizenship across the African continent. I then describe the challenge of the making of the post-apartheid university by drawing attention to two colonial inheritances – discrimination against particular bodies and discrimination against particular ideas based on where they come from and who produced them. The latter problem is most often referred to as the problem addressed by the calls to decolonise knowledge. I refer to this as epistemic justice. The problem of discrimination against particular bodies falls within the corrective language of employment equity and affirmative action, or what I call demographic justice. My argument is that demographic justice addresses the problem of racial and gendered redress in relation to South Africans who have been historically disadvantaged and discriminated against in study and employment opportunities.

An ongoing debate among scholars and educational activists remains concerned with the meaning of colonialism as a problem in the present. For some, colonialism was a relatively truncated historical experience defined by a diversity of haphazard, contradictory and incoherent efforts by some European states to rule the world. In this view, colonialism's reach may have been globally ambitious, destructive even, but its depth was extremely uneven. In addition, they would argue, it was unsuccessful in its long-term ambitions to rearrange the consciousness and comportment of the colonised in any enduring way. Understood in this way, colonialism has had a limited cultural and political effect on previously colonised parts of the world, even if its enduring economic effect remains palpable. On the other hand, there are those who argue that European colonialism fundamentally reconstituted the worlds it encountered and has subsequently authored the dominant forms of cultural, political and economic sensibilities that we call modernity today. In this view, European imperial and colonial rule dominated the worlds of the colonised through force and modes of governance aiming to rearrange the way the colonised thought of their history, themselves and others. In this argument, colonialism was a formative moment starting at least in 1492 with the conquest of the Americas and it was both geo graphically expensive and culturally and politically formative, to the extent that modernity itself could be described today as colonial modernity. In this view, the legacy of colonialism in the present is anything but superficial, limited or anachronistically situated in the past. On the contrary, proponents of this view argue that colonialism has authored the most vexing ailments in the modern world, whether these be the structural economic relations between the Global South and the Global North; inherited forms of fractures, fissures and violences; or its haunting racialised ontologies of being, the legacies that continue to structure the calculus of whose lives matter more on a global scale.

These two ways of thinking about colonialism in the present staged the grounds for predicaments taken up in this book in the field of public higher education. As either/or choices, the view that colonialism has little relevance in today's world and the inverse view that colonialism means everything in today's world might feel like zero-sum choices.

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first section, I describe a project to rethink political theory and political philosophy. It is a project partly responsive to the questions that have been raised over the last years in South African universities, about rethinking the curriculum and ‘decolonising knowledge’. The second part offers a description of a course that I have been teaching at Honours and Master's levels on political violence and the modern state. In recounting these two projects, I wish to offer outlines of possible ways to reconstitute an account of the genealogy of the modern state in Africa, and to think about how this might be done in a less Eurocentric way. It is therefore a theoretical-political argument as much as it is also a pedagogic enterprise.

I commence with a short observation about the concept of decolonisation as it is currently deployed in the political discourse of contemporary South Africa. Decolonisation in its current usage is often no longer a reference to political decolonisation, that moment of decolonisation that transferred political sovereignty from the colonial empires and produced what has been called ‘flag independence’. Talking in the present about decolonisation in the university is more usually a reference to questions of epistemology or knowledge, as distinct from political or economic decolonisation. My own wager is that what is often named as a problem in current discussions about decolonisation in the universities, and in the curriculums of the disciplines specifically, is the problem of Eurocentrism. To be more precise, discussions about decolonisation are often a proxy for calling into question and responding to the problem of Eurocentrism. There are many ways we might understand Eurocentrism. My use is aligned with Adam Sitze's formulation, in his important book on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, The Impossible Machine. Sitze defines Eurocentrism as follows: ‘The mark of Eurocentrism, to be clear, is not that a discourse should happen to look at, or speak of Europe … It is that a discourse should, whether explicitly or implicitly reify the experiences and events of European politics into coherent and self-evidently desirable philosophical norms, in relation to which the often-violent experiences and events of colonial politics figure as empirical deviations, pathologies, perversions, or imitations.’

In discussions with university policy-makers grappling with what it means to decolonise the curriculum in South Africa, one sometimes encounters the view from partisans that the aim is to expunge the West's influence, or that the objective should be to displace Western knowledge and replace it with African or Afrocentric knowledge. And, on the other hand, those sceptical of or opposed to the need to decolonise knowledge refer to this aim as a kind of parody, articulated as a lament that describes the problem with injunctions to decolonise knowledge. This latter view would then go on to describe, perhaps with more nuance than expressed in the above-quoted tweet by the former leader of the official opposition party in post-apartheid South Africa, how colonialism gifted the colonies technology and infrastructure, healthcare and the rule of law. Let us not, these voices would warn, throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater. The assumption is that despite the violent history of colonialism, without that intervention there would not be a modern society. As an argument, it offers a defence of the legacy of colonialism based on the benefits of technology. In turn, technology is assumed to be an achievement of scientific thinking, which in turn is understood to be a gift to humanity from Western civilisation. This chapter problematises various assumptions in this argument about Western knowledge and also some of the ways in which it is critiqued by some proponents of decolonising knowledge.

As a reaction to the kind of thinking expressed by those who defend colonialism as a bad but ultimately good fact of history, the sentiment that displacing Western knowledge with African knowledge would, on the face of it, make sense as a decolonial act.