The case of Free Higher Education

Cetshwayo Mabhena

When a good question is put across in a bad way the answers to it are bound to come in all sorts of distorted and disfigured ways.

The revolutionary and even noble calls for free higher education in Africa were in 2016 given such a bad name in the way they were dramatised by the South African students’ movement. It was such a bad job for the Fees Must Fall movement to collapse such a big question of liberation for the poor in Africa to a small question of decolonisation and privilege for a few elites.

The very day Rhodes Must Fall became Fees Must Fall the struggle for liberation for the poor was narrowed and collapsed to a small battle for the privileging of the interests of a few favoured black elites. Similar to the way in which African liberation movements went to the bush to fight for liberation from colonialism and came back having won simple decolonisation and democratisation, the students movement in Africa is simplifying the struggle for liberation to a struggle for simple decolonisation of higher education at the dear expense of a societal revolution.

The reason why the call for free higher education ended up being a struggle of few students with the rest of the students and society at large watching in amazement is because the struggle for liberation had been minimised to a small battle of privilege for a few lucky students while the rest of society no longer saw how their own poverty and interests were to be addressed.

To start with, student movements and liberation movements at large in Africa must make peace with the truism that decolonisation of African countries did not lead to their liberation. Decolonisation enacted some myths, fictions and illusions of liberation that soon exploded and were exposed for the falsehoods that they are. In the like, simple decolonisation of higher education will not solve the problem of coloniality in Africa; it might just deliver a few favours like affordable education for university students and leave the rest of society asking what happened.

For the case of free higher education in Africa to be clarified and defended, it is important to note how it is a cause that is connected to the liberation of society at large. For that to happen, it is important for us to observe how the colonisation of education and colonisation of knowledges itself was part of the larger imperial project of the conquest and domination of the societies and communities of the South in the world. As a way foward, the idea of decolonisation must be discredited and dismissed as an exhausted slogan and liberation as the solution to domination at a world scale must be given its currency and importance.

The Colonisation of Knowledges
The Western model of the university came to Africa already carrying the problems of its history and birth. Traced to Bologna in 1088, Paris in 1150 and Oxford University in 1167, the Western model of the university became a corporate institution that packaged and sold knowledge and expertise as products in the market.

This marketisation of the university and commoditisation of knowledge was colonial, domineering and exclusionary in that the poor were peripherised from its benefits. In the 16th Century the University became complicit in the genocides and epistemicides (killing of other people’s knowledges) of conquest, enslavement and colonisation of the periphery. For that reason, the Euro-American model of the university that was forcefully imported and imposed onto Africa was a bloodied institution that had coloniality and conquest written all over its body politic and culture.

Wisdoms and knowledges of Africa that could not be marketised and commoditised were left to die slowly as oral traditions that were not fit for university education. Cognitive capitalism took over and the knowledges and ideas that are considered important in universities today are those that can be bought and sold, that can be translated to cash. The poor of Africa and their histories and knowledges are not needed in the university because they do not feed capital but are a possible expense.

For that reason, to liberate knowledges from a history of colonisation may not simply be a question of providing free education but also overturning the model of the university that we presently have.

Recovering education from being a good and a service in the market and restoring it to being a public good for societal development and liberation is a bigger struggle than Fees Must Fall is calling for. Decolonising higher education asks for more access to the university for black students and black teachers, for the inclusion of black knowledges and wisdoms in the curricular, which is good but it is not great. It is a demand for a change of the content of the university conversation but it is not a demand for the change of the terms of the conversation as Walter Mignolo puts it.

Enough lessons must have been learnt in that to put black governments in power and still leave the model of government and state colonial did not liberate African countries but sunk them deeper into dependence on and domination by those who designed the state and model of government in the first place. Decolonisation is happy to make a few reforms and impressive adjustments to the face of the system leaving its logic and purpose intact.

The Politics of Naming
When the students in South Africa called for the fall of Rhodes as a metaphor of changing the model of higher education they challenged Empire in its totality. Removal of the physical statue of Rhodes and the accompanying imperial tendencies of the university in Africa was a call for liberation. The enemy was the colonial empire and African governments and university administrators were supposed to be allies in the struggle and not the ultimate enemy. Rhodes Must Fall was a name of the struggle that came from the decoloniality of the African students against Empire.

Fees Must Fall was a name given to the struggle by Empire. Under Fees Must Fall, African governments and university administrations must simply enable free higher education or face the mob. Fees Must Fall does not care what happened and who did it while Rhodes Must Fall is clear about where the problems started and who started them. Part of the cry of Rhodes Must Fall was that the big businesses that benefited from the apartheid economy and that in actuality continue to benefit must fund free higher education as reparations for apartheid to poor blacks. Fees Must Fall simply demanded that the ANC government must provide free higher education. There is no asking why Rhodes Must Fall was a struggle so popular across society while Fees Must Fall became a fight for few fanatics in the streets.

The struggle for free higher education in Africa cannot, without betraying it, be separated from the struggle for the demarketisation and decommoditisation of knowledge as a public good. To simply provide free education for students and leave the university to be the same colonial institution that it ever was is to decolonise but not to liberate.

The Content of Liberation in Higher Education
Liberating the university and higher education in Africa is not simply villagising the university and practicing the nativism of replacing sciences with indigenous knowledges. It is also not populating the university with black Africans even if they are lazy and incompetent. As much it is not simply providing free higher education for the pleasure of some lucky students.

A liberated African university will be the one where there is an “ecology of knowledges” of the world in form of the sciences and the humanities from the East, the West, the North and the South. What the present model of the university lacks is genuine universality.

The Europeans and the Americans took their model of the university and called a university for the universe when it is a provincial university. To liberate the university and the knowledges within it entails creating a genuine pluriversity where the plurality and multiplicity of knowledges meet in dignity.

That Africans cannot afford the education provided in African universities illustrates the fact that these are Euro-American universities in Africa not African universities. When fees must fall it must fall together with Rhodes, with the entire imperial and colonial model of the university as a supermarket where degrees are sold to only those who can afford them at the expense of those who really need them.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: [email protected]