The Journal of Decolonising Disciplines examines the relationality between higher education and society, revealing their dialectical relationship. It provides an intellectually unique space for considering responsive and cutting-edge research across all disciplines, and centres higher education and its role in transforming and developing society. It is an open access journal and aims to probe, develop and critique decolonising strategies in the broader context of contemporary social issues. The Journal is dedicated to the theoretical development of decoloniality and Indigeneity in higher education and is constituted as a space that fosters and facilitates the decolonisation of all disciplines through rigorous intellectual work in the context of South Africa, Africa and globally. It addresses contemporary issues and their relationship to curriculum changes in higher education, while being responsive to the needs and political, social and economic challenges of Indigenous peoples of the global South. We encourage scholarly submissions from all disciplines, using a range of methodological approaches. As an intellectual community committed to decolonial and decolonising scholarship, the Journal encourages decolonial research in all areas in order to foster responsive pedagogies within the knowledge domain. Contributions from scholars working in the areas of decolonial studies, education, commerce, the sciences, legal studies, critical theory, postcolonial theory, epistemology, metaphysics and violence are encouraged to develop and frame the South African decolonial project in higher education. The editorial board will consider proposals for special issues relevant to the aims outlined above.
From indoctrination to education: Reflexivity and critique in decolonising knowledge generation and dissemination for Africa's people
Copyright (c) 2022 Journal of Decolonising Disciplines
Political Modernity and the Postcolonial New World Order
The current world order is organized into invented, self-contained modern nationstates in defiance of realities of globalization, planetary human entanglements and visions of a debordered, denationalised, and deterritorialized, pluriversal world. Modern self-contained nation-states are epistemically products of Euromodernity and ideologically products of modern methodological nationalism. Inevitably, at the centre of Euromodernity has been the unfolding of complex triple processes of nationstate making, colonialism and decolonization as simultaneously co-constituting and contesting phenomena. In the (ex)colonies of Africa, just like in Europe, poets, philosophers and historians actively exercised their minds in epistemic inventions of nationalism and actual writing of nations into concrete existence, with colonialism being subjected to resistance, subversion, critique, and decolonial visions of liberation. This short article calls attention to the crisis of political modernity and the limits of both global and national imaginaries and articulates the agenda of decolonizing the political community.
Borders recolonised – the impacts of the EU externalisation policy in Africa
This article examines the impacts of the European Union’s (EU) border externalisation policy and how it has contributed to prolonged refugee encampment in Africa. The EU signed interdiction and readmission agreements with a few African countries whereby refugees and asylum seekers en route to Europe are forcefully captured and refouled to Africa. The EU-Africa cooperation is often framed in humanitarian language as ‘development cooperation’, which characterises a neo-colonial engagement with Africa. There is a plethora of literature on the EU externalisation policy but largely written from a Eurocentric perspective as they glorify refugees and asylum seekers’ refoulement to Africa. Sadly, the majority of those refouled in the past two decades come from war-torn countries such as Somalia and Sudan where they faced torture and the death penalty. I advance an Afrocentric perspective to critique the EU externalisation policy which is largely focused on keeping African refugees in their region of origin. I deploy numerous theoretical frameworks, including Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholarship, Anibal Quijano’s coloniality theory, Frantz Fanon’s decoloniality theory, Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial theory and Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception to critique that the outsourcing of the EU’s immigration control to some of the poorest nations in the world is understood in the context of colonial relations to Africa.
Biopolitics and Im/Possible Citizenship: Gender, Epidemiology and ‘Panoptic Citizenship’ in India
This essay proposes to advance the discussion on the political implications of gender and its transgressive imperative, highlighting, further, the discursive and unsettled gendered positions. Proposing references with the entanglement of the epidemiological knowledge around gender(ed) politics in India, this work emphasizes the niche around claiming citizenship that is strengthened around health system paradigm. The globalisation of the identarian categories as a form of political identity as tied to the orthodoxy around the neoliberal norms of accountability. This essay thus foregrounds a subversive imagery in building theorisation around biopolitics and bio-citizenry, with a critique to the neocolonial allegory of the State, global health and International activism. Also, by bringing in the critical perspective on ‘sexuality’ and ‘equality’, this text debates the thematics of citizenship, that resides on a non-sovereign position -that is to say, the corporeal politics within biopolitical articulation. Also, the essay critically examines the biopolitics of citizenship with an analytical lens that is viable, de-medicalised as allowing the possibility to de-embrace technocratic and depoliticised sense of belonging.
The Writer’s Café: Foregrounding ubuntu, decolonisation and deconstruction
This paper offers a critical reflection on the experiences of facilitating postgraduate and undergraduate seminars in the field of sociology through a decolonial forum we term the Writer’s Café. The paper represents our attempt at grappling with issues of power by negotiating, distinguishing and finding our collective and acceptable regimes of truth through this forum. The frameworks of ubuntu and decolonisation became integral in the conceptualisation of the Writer’s Café, as well as its implementation. As researchers in the fields of sociology of health and sexualities and gender studies, the Writer’s Café offers opportunities to unpack the social and cultural bases of the subjects of both fields of study. Key to this analysis of the Writer’s Café is the emphasis on agency, inequality, change, and understanding connections between epistemologies. As an African philosophy and practice, ubuntu offers the student in sociology an integrated experience of two fields of study that are deeply embedded in the experience of everyday life while addressing African realities. We use critical reflection as a method of inquiry by situating ourselves as research participants, using examples from the Writer’s Café, as well as a selective review of literature on critical pedagogy and ubuntu to draw out the interconnectedness of both fields and their implications for decolonisation and a responsive pedagogy.
Now Turning to Our Tomorrows: Decolonial Futures in the Study of Islam
The emergence and growth of the decolonial movement in recent years has had a dramatic impact on universities around the world, inspiring new epistemic, political and ontological shifts across a wide range of disciplines. These shifts are broadly described as forming part of ‘the decolonial turn’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 261). As new generations of academics in the Study of Islam prepare to further the project of knowledge production in the context of post-Fallist universities, this paper seeks to address the following questions: What might it mean to decolonise the academic Study of Islam? How might decolonisation be consciously foregrounded as a future trajectory in the Study of Islam? After contextualising the academic study of Islam in South Africa and engaging with some of the major themes and concepts of decolonial scholarship, I review contemporary efforts to affect the decolonial turn in the Study of Islam through the initiation of summer schools and conferences. Applying what Sardar (2010) describes as ‘futures studies’ methodology, I propose ways to propel the decolonial turn as anticipatory intervention, based on an attempt to forecast the possible futures that await in the next five to ten years and beyond.
A Critical Reflection on Neoliberalism Policies and Neo-colonialism at African Universities
This article aims to explore the challenges that institutions of higher education in Africa continue to encounter following the implementation of neoliberalism policies, which brought major changes to the structure and management of higher education. The most notable changes were the re-conceptualisation of education from being a public good to a private good and the introduction of cost-sharing policies. This shift had implications for the funding and restructuring of higher education. Literature is replete with examples of a myriad of challenges faced by students and higher learning institutions due to the disruption. Besides, academic freedom has been compromised and at some institutions courses deemed ‘nonmarketable and less attractive’ have been terminated. Freedom to explore, think and educate has been hampered by impositions from donor nations. In view of this, the article argues that, although entrenching neoliberalism in African universities has changed the structure and management of institutions, it also resulted in an increase in the cost of education related businesses. The article notes that the policy shift continues to make higher education inaccessible to the majority of students from poor families. The trajectory of these changes started in the 1980s, when the World Bank championed a new economic model that introduced a new cost-sharing mechanism based on Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPS). The orientation of this shift was towards marketisation, and the privatisation of higher education affected students and universities in different ways. Outside pressure from multinational agencies continues to shape the operationalisation of higher education in Africa. This article views such pressure negatively as it is reminiscent of colonialism and can cause universities to lose their identities and autonomy. Based on a conceptual analysis of secondary literature and data, the article concludes that African universities have to problematise and engage critically with neoliberalism policies and resist secondary colonialisation by exercising greater autonomy regarding decisions that affect their constituencies, the courses being offered and the general goal of education to promote the public good. The disruption of academic programmes and needy students’ lack of access to higher education ought to be addressed.
Neoliberalism, public universities, policies, funding, challenges
Weaponising voices, language and writing in times of turmoil.
Copyright (c) 2021 Journal of Decolonising Disciplines
This paper considers impoverishment and its link to the notion of utopia. It proposes that a utopia can only exist in relation to a dystopia, and it considers how ‘poverty’ is the dystopic outcome in a capitalist quest for the utopia. It then proposes the waqf as a means of addressing impoverishment.
In an intertextual assessment of Jacob’s Ladder (1987) and The Resolutionaries (2013), we are conducting a post-colonial analysis with the aim of showing that the post-colonization systems of sociopolitical and economic organization in African countries has no other objective but spoliation and subjugation of African economies to Western countries. For these two writers, and especially Armah, the international meetings which often gather the great leaders of this world in Africa and elsewhere are only “bloody ritual” meetings organized to make sure that the system of pillage is working perfectly. In this work, our objective is to show how Williams and Armah make use of the power of the imaginary to open the way to development in Africa, specifically by shaping a new African leadership which is ready to challenge the devil plan of Western hegemonic powers with as defiant programs as Fasseke’s nuclear project in Jacob’s Ladder (1987) and Nefert’s plan of unified linguistic construction in The Resolutionaries (2013).
Drawing a line in the sand: social mapping of responses to calls to ‘decolonise the university’
The task of decolonisation is convoluted as the complexities of meanings as well as the multiple dimensions of decolonisation are vast and textured, depending on one’s vantage point and vested interests. This situation warrants a critical examination of what decolonisation has come to mean in the global South and how different subjectivities at a particular academic institution in the country are responding to the call for change. The academic, social and political movement of decolonisation evokes a variety of reactions, responses and repercussions from a wide spectrum of the university community and its stakeholders. Ranging from conservative to radical, these responses reflect the range of discourses, values, beliefs and actions that the academic community embraces and might determine the extent to which the decolonisation movement can in fact succeed in its goals. This chapter critically analyses responses to the calls for decolonisation of the academy by #Fallist student movement. The aim is to ascertain whether the vision for transforming a largely socially exclusive and unjust academic project into one that is socially just, inclusive and transformed can be actualised in spite of resistance from those who wish to maintain the status quo. Reproducing old ways and patterns based on views of gratitude and charity by some academics has become confused with a social justice agenda and needs to be called out. Drawing on the work of Andreotti et al (2015), the paper uses social cartography (Paulston, 2009) as a discursive and analytical tool to understand the vocabularies and imaginaries of decolonisation at a research-intensive, traditional university.
Did Ethiopia Survive Coloniality: Eurocentric colonial interpretations of Ethiopian history
What is unique about Ethiopia is, the history of survived colonial conquest. The Ethiopian patriotic forces defeated Italian army at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Ethiopia has a long history of voluntarily pushing modernisation in the context of development. The major drive of modernization aimed at transforming Ethiopia from feudal ‘traditional’ society to ‘modern’ society. Hence, Ethiopia has been in-charge of its development trajectory, compared to other colonised Africans. Ironically, alike other African countries Ethiopia is still struggling with challenges of development. This is historical, an interpretive and conceptual study, executed in thematic terms. Theoretically, the study predicated on decolonial epistemic perspective, that articulates application of modernization to development, as its units of analysis. The findings indicate the need for epistimic decolonization to avoid the invasion of cognitive empire with its modernist influences of civilisation and development.
Modernization, Development, Coloniality, Decoloniality
Human Rights in the zones of non-being: Lessons on [not] speaking about and on behalf of “others” from J.M. Coetzee’s Foe
One of the modern dictates of freedom is a human’s right to free speech as enshrined in the United Nations’ (2015) Universal Declaration of Humans Rights of 1948. The very concept of “universal” rights foregrounds the question on what and who is human. Following this universal doctrine, all freedoms, including the freedom to free speech translates ultimately to “beings” that are critically self-conscious, or at least beings who are regarded as human-beings, who are allowed to exist, to live, and to be free. Indeed, to examine what has happened to those who exist in Fanon’s (2008) zones of non-being who are denied their right to free speech even after the “universal” pronouncements of 1948 is equally important. In fact, all along and even today (and because of coloniality) the Third World citizens may still be denied their right to free speech, their right to be free from economic bondage or otherwise – which are, after all, their natural rights to be human. To be “free”, to be “human” or to “live” denotes that one has the ability to speak as the universal declaration accords. The voice (an ability to be heard) or its lack creates beings that are not regarded as human. Indeed, the effects of talking or not talking of the anthropos, or on behalf of them is explored, somewhat as the unreliability and the corruptibility of the authority of language and authorship. This is to say, the meaning and intentions (of the voice) that belongs to those in the zones of non-being are most often misunderstood, mistranslated and sometimes misread – stripping them of one of their essential human rights to be heard. The possession of language in the world where there are two zones, as illustrated in John Maxwell Coetzee’s Foe (1986) does not guarantee one to be heard or liberated.
Miseducation in South African Public Schooling: the case of To Kill a Mockingbird
A racial incident revolving around the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in a South African school has prompted this examination of how set works are implicated in the dissemination race-related beliefs. The way the book is taught, it is argued, cements the continuation of the alienation of blackness by affirming ubiquitous white normativity. It perpetuates the notion that the fault lies in an ‘existential deviation’ that inheres in black people. This examination highlights how, through the purposive propagation of white normality, the book exhibits anti-black sentiments. The sympathetic white psyche that subsists simultaneously with the continuing enjoyment of racial favouritism, is appraised. The stance of the book is confronted by noting the contrived largely absent voices of black people in the narrative. This book positions the black characters as props, for the absolution of the white protagonists (and by proxy sympathetic white people) during circumstances of the unremitting and deadly racial oppression.
Exploring disruptions of the coloniality of knowledge, power and being to enable agency as disciplinary activists for curriculum change
The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement of 2015 and 2016 challenged universities across the nation to interrogate how the curriculum serves as an alienating and marginalising device that stymies student success. Consequently, the HE sector has been challenged to respond to student calls for decolonisation by reviewing existing university curricula which promote forms of knowledge production that do not reflect an African worldview or a global South context. Academics have refocused their attention on exploring what an alternative, decolonial curriculum would entail. This paper reports on a professional development course, designed to support academics to ‘decolonise their curricula’, and explores what it meant to facilitate and participate in a course that disrupted who they were as disciplinary experts in the university. Drawing on decolonial scholarship, the authors use auto-ethnography to engage with two disciplines, namely midwifery and journalism, to see how the metaphors of (de)coloniality surfaced in these disciplines and how they were mediated through a decolonial approach to course re-design and re-imagination.
decoloniality, coloniality, activism, agency, community, delinking
Decolonising African vernacular rooted sculptures of selected contemporary Nigerian and South African artists
I am interested in a decolonial reading of African vernacular rooted sculptures of selected contemporary South African and Nigerian artists and compares them. Although vernacular arts were produced in indigenous or traditional African arts context, there are still several forms of vernacular art practices jostling for space with canonical modes in contemporary art in various African contexts. However, I argue that the contemporary representations of cultural imagery and symbols from indigenous cultures or urban areas in South Africa and Nigeria suggest a different mode of engagement, even though the term vernacular is used to narrate them as a rethink in narrating art practices. Therefore, my paper argues that even though contemporary artists from both countries continue to represent cultural imagery (vernacular) in their artworks, they are not a continuation of traditional African art. I adopt formal analysis, cultural history methodologies for the critical analysis of the works of two South African and two Nigerian artists that were purposively selected and compare the ideas that unfold from the interrogations for a wider continental understanding of contemporary issues and artistic trends.
Decolonial, Contemporary, African, Vernacular, Cultural Imagery, Sculpture
Tracing Histories of 'Black' Servants at Zwartkoppies Farm through Narratives
The purpose of this study was to trace histories of black individuals who were employed at Zwartkoppies Farm by the Marks family. I refer to them as servants as they spent their lives serving the Markers. Although it is apparent that Sammy Marks had both white and black servants, little is known about the black servants. Here I also deal with the issue of child labour and forced removals and discuss how the colonial and apartheid laws were enablers in violating black people' s human rights. I do so within the context of oral histories provided through interviews with descendants of 'servants' conducted between August 2018 and March 2020. This study is part of a masters research project entitled " Un-Silencing Histories of Black 'Servants'at Zwartkoppies Farm: A Transition from the Sammy Marks House to the Sammy Marks Museum", (2020).
Sammy Marks, Zwartkoppies Farm, Servants, Oral History
In July 2019, the University of Pretoria, in association with Wits, UFS, Rhodes, UKZN, UWC, Stellenbosch University and UCT, its partners inthe Mellon programme titled ‘Unsettling paradigms: The decolonial turn in the Humanities curriculum at universities in South Africa’,hosted a conference on the theme ‘The decolonial turn and the humanities: Prospects, practice and interventions’. A number of papers were subsequently reworked as articles and submitted for peer review with a view to their publication in this second issue of the first volume of the Journal of Decolonisng Disciplines (JDD). The six articles selected for publication speak to some of the broad themes of the conference, butwhat binds them together is their shared focus on pedagogy, practice and interventions—some of the core issues underlying the quest for the decolonisation of the humanities curriculum.
Copyright (c) 2019 Journal of Decolonising Disciplines
Social unrest in South Africa has been characterised as nihilism. The injustice of racism and separatism in its historical and contemporary guises has diminished the sense of being fully human in the world. Racial and consumerist economic categories have become ways of determining the right and access to life. Such a dehumanising history, founded on hatred, can only be confronted through understanding the significance of justice. In this interview with renowned curator Khanyisile Mbongwa, we discuss the ways in which systemic violence and dispossession affect one’s sense of being. Mbongwa argues that it is only through self-love and mass political action against racial injustice that black self-realisation and liberation can be achieved. In some ways, Mbongwa’s work on South African townships as transitional spaces brings attention to the essence of South Africa’s politics: the animosity arising from severed social bonds and the corrosion of the love ethic. Love, as decolonial philosophy, is key to political solidarity.
This paper advocates for the value of research into rurality in southern Africa as a means of contributing to the reversal of the geopolitics of knowledge on teaching and learning in higher education, which traditionally favours the global North. A strong qualitative research method facilitating this exploration is the use of drawings in a method known as participatory learning and action, which is appropriate in resource-constrained environments such as those found in southern Africa. We first discuss literature on rurality and the use of drawings as research techniques, after which we consider the research settings (southern African higher education), with a short comparison between conditions in various countries. We conclude with a detailed presentation of an experiential session with five members on the use of drawings, providing examples of the value as well as the challenges of this participatory research method.
A social realist ontology for developing Afrocentric curricula in Africa
This paper applies a social realist ontology in conceptualising Afrocentric curricula in South African universities. The analysis considers South African media reports related to students’ demands for decolonised curricula. The methodology involved textually analysing various historic educational incidents in South Africa, as well as theories associated with Afrocentrism. The analysis highlights that to develop decolonised and Afrocentric curricula, simultaneous consideration is required of the powers of social structures, including race and class, African culture, as well as the agency of students and academics. The analysis concludes that for Afrocentric and decolonised curricula to emerge, it is essential to incorporate the histories, aspirations and cultural affiliations of Africans, who were previously marginalised in the nation’s tertiary system. Furthermore, this research highlights that within structures of academic disciplines, it is essential to incorporate African academics and students in developing curricula to create learning experiences which enable a sense of belonging for all students in our universities.
Education for public good in the age of coloniality
This paper critically reviews the theoretical foundations of the concept ‘education for public good’, revealing its analytical and practical limitations, inadequacies and detrimental effects in South Africa. The paper shows how an uncritical embracing of this concept in the education discourse continues to undermine hard-earned democratic gains. Coloniality, I argue, continues to ‘devour’ all well-intentioned postcolonial/post-apartheid educational policies. A truly decolonial project has the power to dismantle pedagogical practices and classroom traditions that evolved in the west to favour the elite while marginalising the majority. An alternative to education for public good is thus presented: education for common good. The Reading to Learn pedagogy is presented as an ‘offspring’ of the ‘education for common good’ concept. I highlight how this position engenders classroom practices that create conditions for epistemological access to success for all learners, regardless of their socioeconomic background.
‘Some of the following was previously published’
This paper considers the domain of subjectivity and knowledge in the colonial matrix of power and its relation to the university. It explores how this subset of the said matrix has led to the (social) death of students, specifically Black students, within the contemporary westernised university in the South African context. I maintain that the colonial matrix of power which defines the westernised university gives rise to violence, as students attempt to escape (social) death and regain their humanity. Furthermore, student responses to institutional violence (symbolic, systematic and subjective), which imposes a state of (social) death on Blackness, are delegitimated through the discourse of irrationality and vandalism, and reproduce the problematic discourses that relegate Blackness to the social position that imposes (social) death in the first place. My aim in this paper is thus to explicate this colonial matrix of power as it plays out in the university context.
Decolonising legal education in South Africa: Is it time to press the reset button?
South Africa has, like many other African countries, inherited a foreign legal system. The democratic Constitution of 1996 altered the country’s legal framework such that it became reflective of societal change, while recognising plurality in South African legal culture(s). Owing to the 2015‒2016 #FeesMustFall student protests, another ideological shift in legal education is being precipitated by the changing socio‒political landscape of the country. This shift is framed as decolonisation, which entails shedding the colonial yoke of exclusive western ideologies and thinking, thereby requiring an inclusive educational approach. Such a transformed education would incorporate local African traditions, customs and ideologies that existed prior to colonial imposition. Legal thinking and culture is dependent on legal education, and legal education is consequently reliant on the legal framework. Considering this chain of influences, I argue that decolonisation cannot be achieved merely as a change in legal education alone: it requires an ideological shift in the country’s legal framework.
Morena Mohlomi le Badimo: reading decolonial articulations into the intellectual property law curriculum.
The Council on Higher Education (CHE) expresses itself cogently in affirming the validity of the calls to specifically decolonise the LLB curriculum. Public discourse and the CHE report present an emerging clarion call for the academy to critically engage the question of decolonisation of the curriculum. This paper proposes Transmodernity as a methodological endeavor towards engaging African epistemologies in an effort to find alternatives in teaching various intellectual property law concepts. To tease out the fundamental decolonial question of how the dismembered can be re-membered, the paper tests the theory of Mohlomism and its applicability to the intellectual property law curriculum. Mohlomi was a mentor to the king of the kingdom of Lesotho, Morena Moshoeshoe I. He would travel around Southern Africa teaching society about his philosophy of truthfulness, justice, peace, the love of man and for sane humanism. Re-membering the Being of the proverbial “other”, reverses the effect of the prevailing legacy of epistemicide in the curriculum and may gradually lead to a transformed legal pedagogy. The paper discerns decolonisation as a project that inter alia seeks to create a pluriversal intellectual community that embosoms the epistemic traditions of the global South.
Decoloniality, Intellectual Property Law, Mohlomism, Badimo, Transmodernity.