New Voice
The role of the
Humanities in
decolonising the academy
Arts & Humanities in Higher Education
2016, Vol. 15(1) 164–168
! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474022215613608
ahh.sagepub.com
Estelle H Prinsloo
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Abstract
This short paper argues that the #RhodesMustFall movement, which originated at the
University of Cape Town, has brought renewed attention to the need to decolonise the
academy in South Africa. It further argues that the Humanities are ideally placed to
engage with the intellectual problems and questions presented by the decolonisation
debate. Deep understanding of these questions are necessary to prevent more of the
same ‘techno-bureaucratic fixes’, which, until now, have left South Africa’s universities
largely untransformed. While seeking change, however, scholars should avoid performing what Tack and Yang call ‘moves to innocence’ – strategies that distract or deflect
attention away from conversations about decolonisation to assuage White guilt.
Keywords
Decolonisation, humanities, Rhodes Must Fall, South Africa, university
Few could have predicted the outcome of a group of University of Cape Town
(UCT) students throwing human excrement on a statue of the British colonialist,
Cecil John Rhodes, earlier this year (see Kekana, 2015). In addition to the statue
being removed from the university’s upper campus exactly one month later, the
students’ actions led to the formation of the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement.
Self-described as ‘[a] student, staff and worker movement mobilising against institutional white supremacist capitalist patriarchy for the complete decolonization of
UCT’ (UCT: Rhodes Must Fall, 2015), the movement inspired the formation of
similar groups at Stellenbosch, Rhodes and Wits Universities1 as well as the
‘Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford’ movement (see Ali, 2015). This short paper will
argue that scholars in the Humanities2 have an important contribution to make
in terms of supporting and driving the ensuing debate on decolonisation. This is
Corresponding author:
Estelle H Prinsloo, University of Johannesburg, PO Box 524, Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa.
Email: [email protected]
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Prinsloo
165
because Humanities scholars are equipped with the skills necessary to engage with
the questions that have been raised about the university in South Africa 21 years
after the end of formal apartheid. These are, as Mbembe (2015) and Pillay (2015)
have pointed out, deeply intellectual questions that require complex understanding
to subvert the current techno-bureaucratic approaches to transformation.
The Humanities, therefore, have a key role to play both in the academy’s evaluation of itself as a colonial project and in its remaking.
It has been noted since the ‘fall of Rhodes’ that decolonising universities is about
more than simply removing colonial and apartheid era symbols, increasing the
number of black academics and including African texts in the curriculum.
Decolonisation, as Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o (2004: 88) argues, is about rejecting the
centrality of the West in Africa’s understanding of itself and its place in the
world. It is about ‘re-centering’ ourselves, intellectually and culturally, by redefining what the centre is: Africa (Mbembe cited in Blaser, 2013; Mbembe, 2015: 17).
For Franz Fanon (1963: 36), decolonisation is similarly a process of remaking – a
violent phenomenon that has as its goal the creation of a new humanity.
Decolonising universities is essential if we are to rethink ourselves and cultivate
African epistemologies. But, and here is where Humanities scholars can pay a role,
to decolonise the university we firstly need to be clear on what the university is
(Mbembe, 2015: 8) or, as Stefan Collini (2012) asked, what it is for. We need to
understand what the effects of the ‘Westernised University’ and the knowledges it
produces in an African context are. This will require that academics confront the
epistemic violence inherent in these knowledges which ‘authorizes thinking about
Others in ways that enables political and economic violence to be enacted on the
bodies of subject men and especially women’ (Pillay, 2015). It will also require that
scholars confront the dominance of the Eurocentric canon in the academy and their
complicity in marginalising epistemic traditions that take the African context seriously. Equally important as an analysis and critique of the university is the study
of what decolonisation is and how it differs from other social justice frameworks
(Mbembe, 2015; Tuck and Yung, 2012). We cannot decolonise universities or the
country, for that matter, if we do not adequately grapple, in greater numbers than
we are currently, with the idea of decolonisation. And we cannot envision the shape
that it must take if we do not, as Franz Fanon (1963: 36) would say, call into question
the particularities of colonialism in South Africa. In other words, we need to analyse
the ways in which our colonial and racist past continues to inform economic, political
and social realities and, with reference to universities, how it shapes institutional culture, values, practices, processes, appointments, curriculum planning, standards, etc.3
Much intellectual work, therefore, is needed. However, while seeking and working towards change, we should guard against decolonisation becoming, as Tuck
and Yang (2012) argue, a metaphor. Decolonisation is not a ‘swappable’ concept
nor does it have a synonym. It is disruptive and uncomfortable and scholars, particularly White scholars, should avoid performing what Tuck and Yang (2012) call
‘moves to innocence’. Moves to innocence refer to the subtle ways in which ‘settlers’ in the United States (as they are called in their paper) distract and divert
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Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 15(1)
conversations away from decolonisation. These strategies serve to assuage settler
guilt without them having to give up power or change very much. An example
applicable to South Africa is the idea that decolonisation is achieved through ‘decolonising the mind’. While curricula and pedagogical practices that critique European
epistemologies and search for new ‘ethics that reject domination and exploitation’
(Tuck and Yang, 2012: 19) are necessary, one should ask who these initiatives serve if
critical consciousness does not translate into change, especially with regard to the
land issue. Another example of moves to innocence are White scholars who engage in
conversations about White privilege while avoiding ‘any kind of discussion about
building the kind of alliances and taking the kind of action that could achieve real
change’ (Jagarnath, 2015, my emphasis). Without real action, the performance of
White guilt to demonstrate a seeming dilemma with one’s position in society does not
challenge the dominance of Whiteness, it simply presents it as ‘benevolent’.
The Humanities, as Premesh Lalu (2009: 269) points out, are indispensable ‘for
thinking our way out of the legacies of authoritarianism’. These legacies have
created universities in South Africa that alienate, marginalise and discriminate
against black students and staff in ways that are both obvious and subtle
(see Jagarnath, 2015; Mangcu, 2014; Mohoto, 2015). This is because universities
reproduce the idea that ‘to be human is to be white’ (Schutte, 2013), and to be
White is to be, among other things, competent, efficient, scholarly and trustworthy.
Like the RMF movement, we cannot leave this idea unchallenged, nor can we leave
our own disciplines untransformed. Universities are not static nor are they simply
‘ideological zombies’ that only serve the dominant powers (Pillay, 2015).
Universities are also sites of ongoing critique, renewal, innovation, subversion
and debate (Pillay, 2015) – all the things that are necessary for change. A great
dept is owed to the RMF movement for brining renewed attention to the need to
decolonise the academy and for demanding that academics and university management take the concerns of students seriously. This paper has considered some of the
ways in which we, as Humanities scholars, can begin to grapple with these concerns. Let us not fail another generation of students.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Notes
1. The Open Stellenbosch movement, which is based at Stellenbosch University, is ‘[a] collective of students and staff working to purge the oppressive remnants of apartheid in
pursuit of a truly African university’ (Open Stellenbosch, 2015). Similarly, the Black
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Student Movement at Rhodes University is ‘a group of students concerned about the
institutional culture of Rhodes University’, which ‘is exclusionary to the disadvantaged
and marginalised students. . .’ (Black Student Movement, 2015). TransformWits is based
at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and is constituted by ‘students concerned
and dissatisfied about the slow pace of curriculum and staff transformation at WITS.’
(TransformWits, 2015).
2. The term ‘Humanities’ in South Africa refers to the ‘traditional’ Humanities disciplines,
the Social Sciences and the Arts (ASSAf, 2011: 19).
3. The latter is based from a comment made by the South Africa public intellectual and
academic, AC Fick, on social media.
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Author biography
Estelle H Prinsloo works as a research assistant in the Johannesburg Institute for
Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg. She holds a MA (cum laude) in
Political and International Studies from Rhodes University.
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