The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
African media scholar, academic institution builder and administrator Tawana Kupe and international relations guru Gilbert Khadiagala are spear-heading a provocative initiative in the study of the world from African perspectives, at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
This novel intellectual initiative is decolonial in that for a long time now Africa and Africans have been studied by the world and never the reverse.
For centuries now Africans and their world have been reduced to objects and subjects of study and investigation by scholars and journalists from the Euro-American world.
Curious minds from the West, from theologians, anthropologists and historians to journalists and travel writers have trooped into Africa to observe and write on the lives and the world of Africans.
Western conquerors, empire builders, merchants and missionaries have always been interested in knowing the African and understanding his world and its many meanings. In the present, western states and nations have entire institutes and centres whose specialty and preoccupation is to compile data and knowledge of what exactly is happening in every African state and nation.
Western diplomatic missions are not in Africa only to build international relations and interstate friendships but also to purely spy on Africa in the interests of the West and its states.
In a way, to know and understand the African has been a powerful way of dominating and also marginalising him as the knowable other in world affairs.
For that reason, a big part of decolonising the world, decolonising knowledge and also liberating Africa is the critical effort by Africans in studying and understanding the Global North and mastering how the world works so as to know how to navigate and negotiate life and existence in a world where the Euro-American Empire has made itself a government of the planet.
In engineering and launching the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the university of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa, mobilising other centres and organising different scholars from different institutions and disciplines in South Africa and beyond, Kupe and Khadiagala are in many ways opening new decolonial vistas for African critical understandings of how the world works.
Historical and political misunderstandings between the Global North and the Global South, unequal power relations and the long history of colonialism and imperialism have created economic, political and cultural gaps and tensions that make the world not only an unstable but also a truly dangerous place of conflicts and hostilities.
Scholarly and intellectual research and debate between and among scholars of the South and the North can go a long way in helping politicians and policy makers of both hemispheres to make educated, and empowered decisions in governing the world.
How to Study Empire?
The United States as a nation and also a society has since 1945 become the centre and the face of the New World Order, and an engine of the Euro-American World System. To critically study the United States of America from African epistemic locations and perspectives is to importantly, not only turn the tables of power, but also to creatively provoke a rich world conversation that can illuminate new global futures. In the present, Tawana Kupe notes “there is an urgent need for Africans to turn the critical analytical gaze on one of the nations and societies that exercise, in varying degrees, world domination and has been and is an actor on Africa’s present and futures.” Asymmetrical power relations between North and South cannot, it appears, be decolonised and humanised without the decolonisation of knowledge relations first.
To know and to be known in the world is for the African as important as existence itself. The production of young graduate and postgraduate African students in different disciplines and subjects that understand historical world relations between North and South is to build a platform of Afrofuturism.
African states, governments, nations and multi-lateral organisations such as Sadc, AU and ECOWAS that are grappling with the elusive liberation of African economies and polities in a difficult world stand to benefit from a bank of information, ideas and knowledge that the centre aims to generate and to archive.
Exchange programmes between scholars of the West and those of Africa are as old as higher education itself but those exchanges that are specifically critical and decolonial are something new that this envisaged centre is to promote.
Such strategic academic themes as Politics and Society, Foreign Politics and Geopolitics, Law and the Judiciary, Economics, Business and Society, Communications Media and Culture, Technology and Society, Climate Change and Climate Justice are some of the areas that the centre aims to explore.
Higher Education, Public Health, Youth and Futures, and Science and Society are also not going to be left out as academic provinces that are central in the pursuit of inventing alternative futures for peoples of the Global South.
Beyond simple interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches that are presently fashionable in the world academy, the new centre considers undisciplinarity itself, where separate and different academic disciplines are to be brought into dialogue in the university.
Coming at a time decolonisation of knowledge and that of higher education has reached a new vogue the centre is energised to experiment with epistemologies of the South and to domesticate global knowledges for local development and liberation.
A “graduate” said Kupe “who understands himself and his location but does not understand the world context is an uneducated graduate,” true knowledge is that which is rich both in the local and the global.
Decolonial initiative and invention
As a critical scholar and also a university administrator Kupe has been very close to struggles for transformation and decolonisation in the university in Africa. Kupe has journeyed from being a lecturer in media studies to a Dean of Students, Head of School of Literature and Language, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities to his present position as the Vice-Principal of the University that is presently the acting vice-chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand.
Combining academic responsibilities and administrative duties in the university puts one in the hot seat of agitations, anxieties and struggles that accompany present university work and life.
Intellectually, Kupe’s contributions to research and publications have been in the areas of Media, Development, Democratisation and Globalisation, which are academic areas that are central in cultural and political studies.
Khadiagala who directs the new centre is a widely published International Relations scholar and lecturer that has previously headed the Department of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand.
What Kupe and Khadiagala are doing from the University of the Witwatersrand provides an answer to the question of how exactly a university in Africa can set afoot mechanisms for the decolonisation of higher education and the university.
The idea of bringing together scholars from the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities in pursuit of common goals in research and the invention of new relations between the North and the South is more than simple scholarly collaboration but it is also political solidarity.
The interest that has been taken by international embassies, non-governmental organisations, public organisations and private companies in the new centre signals a refreshed decolonial interface between the university as a knowledge producer with larger society as a knowledge end user.
The decolonial university of the future and the Afro-futurist university is one that will not be the usual ivory tower but an institution that has its feet firmly planted in the societies and communities that benefit from the knowledge that it produces.
The university that simply produces elite experts and professionals who are ignorant of how the real world works is truly, it appears, a university of the colonial and imperial past in the Global South.
The decolonial and Afrofuturist university will be a centre for the liberation and rehumanisation of the peoples and communities of the Global South in the present world. Relevance to time and to place is the principal quality of a decolonial and Afrofuturist university.
-Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Johannesburg, South Africa: [email protected].
