The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
It is with a compelling kind of propaganda that the University has installed itself in the world as an oasis of knowledge in a desert of ignorance. Society at large is assumed to be enveloped in ignorance and blindness. Once in a while a few hard working and exceptional young people qualify to enter the university to acquire the immense knowledge that it provides.
Throughout the modern, colonial and imperial world the university has managed to erect itself as a magnificent factory of wisdom where experts, specialists and professionals are produced for the betterment and enlightenment of society. Contrary to his teacher, Socrates, who believed that ordinary men and women could acquire knowledge through asking questions and reflection, Plato projected knowledge as the property of a few exceptional and inspired men. Since then, one of the strongest ways in which the Eurocentric tradition has colonised knowledge is the confabulation that knowledge is scarce, mysterious and can only be attained through rare intellectual gifts and extremely hard work.
Plato’s argument that “until philosophers are kings or kings become philosophers, there will be no end to troubles in society” sought to create a tyranny of philosophers and intellectuals who would impose themselves as rulers of society by virtue of the scarce wisdom that they possessed. At that point, knowledge and education did not only assume some political value but it also gained some market value where those rare knowledgeable men and women are supposed to be paid for their scarce intellectual gifts and the service of enlightenment that they render to society.
Up to this day, and this era where the decolonisation of the university and the decolonisation of knowledge itself have become a rallying cry in the Global South, the University has remained a multinational corporation that exercises a kind of institutional philosophical kingship over society. It is in the days and tradition of Plato again that knowledge was not only classified and isolated to a chosen few but it was also categorised according to gender.
Women had to be kept away from the weighty matters of sensing, thinking and knowing. Slaves and servants were kept far away from texts and scripts, or any deep discussions on life. Eventually, blacks and other peoples of colour were also demoted from the hierarchy of sensing and knowing and categorised as incapable of reason and invention.
The university in Africa and elsewhere has not recovered from the classification of knowledge and the categorisation of peoples. What decolonial thinkers call coloniality of knowledge is exactly that knowledge has remained white, male, western and infected with kingly pretensions.
The University: A place of disqualification
Ordinarily we see the university as that exalted place where hard working men and women attain qualifications. In actuality, the university is a cruel site of disqualification. Syllabi and curricular as methods of classifying knowledge were invented to exclude other ways of knowing and thinking, and to privilege one hegemonic Eurocentric way of understanding the world and life. The syllabi, curricular and even the reading lists, recommended texts that the professors give are highly political and colonial inventions that ensure that many other thoughts, ideas and knowledges are disqualified and excluded from the teaching and the learning processes. Mathematical formulae and scientific methods are ways of leading our minds to an answer that some dead white man created long ago to the disqualification of other possible answers.
The Europeans have the answers, and the measure of our education is to use Eurocentric methods to discover the pre-established answers. What French philosopher Michel Foucault called “subjugated knowledges” are those knowledges that the modern colonial university does not want known and understood and will use any excuse to exclude and disqualify from the syllabi and the curricular. What the able philosopher, Achille Mbembe has described as “statistical reason” is that colonial invention of disqualification where knowledge is quantified according to percentages of pass and failure, years spent studying, the number of books and articles published, number of words and pages of a dissertation, all of which are ways of restricting, confining, prohibiting rather than enabling creative free thinking in knowledge production and circulation.
Qualifications are granted based on how far a candidate has complied with the conventions, limits, methods, theories and the disciplines that restrict thinking to very narrow terms. Specialisation; instead of signifying depth of understanding of a subject actually refers to how far one has ignored the rest and concentrated on one narrow way of seeing things. Professionalism is a reference to how one has dedicated all his or her life efforts to the pursuit of one discipline and its slender occupations. Expertise, in the colonial intellectual logic is referred to as rich knowledge, but in reality it is that one big thing that one knows to the exclusion and ignorance of the many other things out there. Until the university is effectively liberated and knowledge decolonised, as sites of sensing and knowing, universities will remain places where many other knowledges and peoples are disqualified and excluded.
For that one proud graduate who is capped, there is a million bodies out there with feelings, experiences, emotions, dreams, ideas and insights, instincts even that will remain unknown because they are not in the syllabus and are outside the perimeters of the imperial curriculum, and their rich life conditions and stories are not in the reading list.
The present modern and colonial university purveys what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the “single story,” one strong but blind way of seeing the world. The theoretical frameworks that we adopt and deploy are not innocent objects but are living mental prison bars that rigidly stop us from seeing beyond their limits. The university does not only ignore much other knowledge and many other peoples but it is indeed a site of reproduction of ignorance and narrowness of knowing.
Oh my body: Towards the familihood of knowledges
Within and outside the circles of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), before and during the present calls for the decolonisation of the university in Africa, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has talked about a “student archive.”
By that, Gatsheni refers to the fact that the students who traffic into the university from their communities are feeling, thinking, sensing and knowing bodies that bring into the university a wealth of experience and knowledge, and do not innocently come to consume what knowledge has already been produced for them. Human beings are living universes that carry a wealth of knowledge. Similarly, Boa Ventura de Sousa Santos, he of the “epistemologies of the South” fame has called for an “ecology of knowledges” where the university can allow an extended family of different knowledges to compete and co-exist under conditions of enriching cognitive justice. A huge part of the agenda of decolonising and liberating the university is acknowledging that the world is far too big for one rationality, one knowledge and one thinking. The paradigm of the one is a colonial and imperial paradigm that relishes in ignoring other people and other knowledges and pretending that Europe, that one province of the world is actually the world.
The African bone thrower, that healer who deploys traditional African spirituality to fathom the past, decipher the present and predict the future, the man and woman who arrests the powers of plants and of animals and mobilises them to shape realities is reduced to a “witchdoctor” because his and her worldview is not in the syllabus, is not classified and so can be ignored. The very colonial architecture of the university, the scattering of the campuses with statues of European ancestors valorises Eurocentric memory while disqualifying African past heroes as demons whose images are disqualified from decorating university grounds.
Frantz Fanon ended his Black Skin White Masks classic with the prayer, “Oh my body, make me always a man who questions.” It is easy to see Fanon as the self-loving self-anointed and self-styled philosopher with enough ego to pray to his own black body. The ignored truth is that our very bodies, their experience of the weathers and climates of life in this colonial and imperial modern world order are sites of sensing and knowing. The ability to ask questions and to probe received wisdom and distrust handed down ideas is the ability to know. The liberated and decolonised university in Africa should recognise the many bodies of people and of knowledges that circulate in our world.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic who writes from South Africa. [email protected]
