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’.

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.

In March 2015, student protests erupted at UCT – a prominent, formerly whites-only university in South Africa. They focused on removing a statue of the imperial mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes from its magisterial position on the campus. The moment and the Rhodes Must Fall movement quickly spread to other campuses across the country, finding resonance in other parts of the world as well. While South Africa had formally ended apartheid in 1994, the targeting of the Rhodes statue signalled that for this generation of students, the end of apartheid did not mean the end of colonialism. Colonialism as a problem in society and in the university was identified as an ongoing one, and therefore necessitated anticolonial political intervention to decolonise knowledge in the university. If earlier critical moments in the university found succour variously in Marxist, African anticolonial thought and postcolonial theory, this moment enabled some to introduce into the South African debates ‘decolonial theory’, a particular school of intellectual critique that initially emerged from scholars in Latin America and its diasporas. The movements referred to here – in Latin America, those focusing on the work of scholars associated with the theoretical programme called Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD), and the African movements such as the Africa Decolonial Research Network (Adern) – shared a concern with what the chapter describes as ‘the problem of colonialism’, expressed in this particular instance as the wish to undo the legacy of colonial education. The emphasis on ‘the problem of colonialism’ here is a way of drawing attention to how calls for the decolonisation of knowledge interpret the problem that is the target for these political interventions.

While previous generations may have turned to the pioneering writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, C.J. Chinweizu or Ali Mazrui, ‘the problem of colonialism’, as it registers in contemporary theoretical and political discourses of critique emerging from significant parts of Africa, is more influenced by the Latin American MCD conception of colonialism. This theorisation by Latin American decolonial theorists, taken up by some scholars in Africa, places an emphasis on assimilation as the essential feature of colonial epistemic violence.

The University, Then and Now

The modern university in its Western iteration has always been defined by a tension between its elitist historical role and its modernist imperative to democratise access and equality. The modern university in its colonial form before 1857 was created to form a comprador class of educated natives, along the lines of Thomas B. Macaulay's 1835 ‘Minute on Education in India’: ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ Whether directly created by the colonial state or by missionaries, its rationale was assimilationist.

After 1857, especially in anglophone colonial territories, the rationale changed – it was to create the personnel for native administration. The rationale was no longer assimilation and incorporation but administration, order and difference.

As a settler society, South Africa created both kinds of universities, which ran parallel to each other after 1950: a tier of universities with a civilising liberal or nationalist mission internal to white society, and a tier of universities with functions defined by the imperatives of indirect rule – not to be assimilated but to be deployed in racial enclaves, to administer own affairs, or in the bantustans to administer ethnicised political communities.

Post-apartheid South Africa inherited these two tiers of university systems, but politically tended to think of them not in terms of their different rationales, but in terms of their resource differences – as advantaged and disadvantaged. The question might have been how to reconcile the two tiers, with their different colonial rationales – did one become the ideal and the other the pathology needing to catch up? Or should there be a synthesis of these two inheritances in order to create something new? These were the choices after 1994. As I see it, policies opted for the former rather than the latter. Historically black universities were put on the catch-up route or absorbed, while the elite white English- and Afrikaans-medium universities retained their status and were normalised as ‘world class’.