The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
What began in 2010 as protests by poor and unemployed graduates in the Middle East and North Africa ended as the Arab Spring that dethroned a number of political regimes.
Right under the nose of the unsuspecting world, NATO allies took advantage of the protests to effect regime changes that they had always dreamt of, and to get back at such thorns in the flesh of Empire as Muammar Gaddafi.
While news and analyses of those historic events continue to emerge and circulate what remains in the dark is that the protests were connected to universities and the grievances of students and recent graduates that had been disillusioned by the shortage of jobs and therefore meaninglessness of their university education in the midst of biting poverty and social injustices. In that light the university protests and upheavals that are still, at varying intensities, going on in South Africa are not a really new development in the Global South.
The problematic historical and political position of the university and university education in developing countries of the South is not a new phenomenon but an enduring challenge.
Even in the Global North, such thinkers as German philosopher Jürgen Habermas spent a significant part of their careers deliberating on the role of the university in the political, industrial and cultural life of their countries and that of Europe at large. What complicates the problem of the university in the Global South is the history of the way in which the institution became complicit in the enduring colonial and imperial enterprise and the march of vampiric capitalism.
As a result, the model of the human being and structure of knowledge that the present university represents is western, colonial and imperial in the well-argued view of Mahmood Mamdani and a number of other African public intellectuals.
The westernised university and its scholars make grandiose claims to research and teaching, answering societal questions and supplying communities with fresh insights. Paradoxically, the university is not only failing to do that but it is unable to answer questions about itself and its university-ness.
For that reason, the westernised university is not only an outpost of Empire in the Global South but it remains an alienated and alienating place in its irrelevance to the life, experiences and condition of the developing world.
Far from being the provider of insights and solutions to social problems, the westernised university in the Global South has proven to be a principal problem in the way it fails to be awake to societal political and social needs.
What is in a Name?
The very name university serves as a misleading political ideology in so far as it makes the claim of universalism and inclusivity in the university as it is known and experienced in the Global South. Provincial Euro-American interests and neoliberal politics enjoy privilege and hegemony in the westernised university.
For that reason, peoples of the South find themselves and their history and culture marginalised in academic and intellectual institutions that are located in their lands and are funded from the national purses of their countries at dear expense and sacrifice.
Part of decolonising the university therefore, should entail the struggle to ensure that the university in Africa and the larger Global South achieves inclusivity and universality in terms of its knowledge production and the human diversity of the populations that circulate in staff rooms and lecture rooms alike.
Human diversity and epistemic variety should be the mark of the decolonised university in the Global South. The decolonial turn of the university should prioritise the inclusion of peoples, knowledges and cultures of the communities of the South without abandoning the gains of modernity, the wealth of ideas, and technologies that the imperial West has used its colonial privilege and ill-gotten industrial prosperity to bring to the world.
Decoloniality has never meant de-linking from modernity, abandoning civilisation and retreating into some mysterious existence, if anything, it has meant navigating and negotiating modernity with a liberatory political attitude.
The Troubled and Troubling Journey
It is a historical fallacy that the university is a Euro-American invention. Africa, for instance, had Sankore and Timbuktu Universities in ancient Mali, Alexandria and A-Azhar Universities in Egypt well before the colonial conquests. What Europe did in the Sixteenth Century, as it forcefully and imperial assumed global political and economic dominance, was to westernise the university and install Eurocentricism as a hegemonic and imperial knowledge regime. Like with many other inventions, the Europeans and Americans usurped and appropriated the university and instrumentalised it for their own imperial power and colonial interests.
After westernising the university in the world, the Euro-American Empire modelled a colonial university. Euro-American universities of the West established what were called university colleges in the colonies of the Global South.
The university colleges were outposts of western universities that were designed to produce skilled, disciplined and docile colonial subjects in the Global South that would serve Empire productively, mainly workers not really thinkers.
After decolonisation, liberation movements of the Global South tried to establish nationalist and Marxist universities that were modelled along the interests of emerging black governments and their developmental agendas, free higher education was in the offing, nationalist and Marxist values flourished while academic and intellectual freedom, sadly, went scarce.
Driven by the IMF and the World Bank, the Washington Consensus regime of economic structural adjustment programmes of the 1990s forced countries of the Global South to abandon the nationalist, Marxist and welfarist model of the university for a corporatised university that sold education as a commodity under the dictates of the market forces. Higher education became a preserve of the elite that could afford to buy it.
The marketed and commoditised education eventually became less intellectual and more academic. Scholars became less of intellectuals and more of academics and university workers that participated in academic rites and rituals of routine and repetition.
Invention, creativity and intellectual courage left the university with their rigour, leaving a suspicious creature called “quality education” that had little relevance to societies where the universities are located.
Except for a few brave and even suicidal public intellectuals, universities became populated by boring theorists and myth mongers, cold and dry parrots that echoed in Africa what had been uttered and written in the west word for word and sound for sound. Before we understand the decolonial turn of the university that decolonial thinkers are privileging, we need to reckon with the western turn, colonial turn, nationalist and Marxist turn, corporate turn and the academic turn that the university has taken for the worst in the past decades.
In these many turns of the university higher education lost its truth value for market value. University degrees became measured on their instrumentality in making money than producing usable ideas, fake universities, briefcase colleges and fake degrees flourished in the flea market of ideas and knowledge economy.
The Decolonial Turn in the University of the South
The present struggle is for re-turning the University of the Global South from the many toxic turns that it has previously taken and restoring it to inclusive epistemic and human diversity.
Far from villagising the university and reducing it to a pre-colonial vestige, the decolonial turn seeks to bring ecologies and varieties of human beings and their knowledges into the scheme of higher education. Western knowledges are supposed to share space and prestige with knowledges and sensibilities from other parts of the world in the decolonised university.
To totally banish whites and to ban Eurocentric knowledge systems in the university as some extremists masquerading as decolonists are saying will be equal to self-exploding fundamentalism. Walter Mignolo has described the decolonised university as a pluriversity where a plurality and diversity of peoples and knowledge systems can creatively encounter each other in the necessary competition and tension to produce new insights.
For this decolonised university to emerge education, in the historical scheme of the Global South, should be returned to being a public good in which national and continental financial investments are made. The model of education as liberation and humanisation that Paulo Freire wrote of cannot be realised in a westernised, colonial, corporatised and simply academic university.
Universities should be at the centre of political and social priorities of liberating and developing societies of the Global South. Decolonised universities and decolonised higher education should be marshalled towards the social and political justice struggles of freeing societies of the Global South from enduring coloniality and imperial domination.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa:[email protected]
