Decolonisation, Africanisation, and Epistemic Citizenship in post-Rhodes Must Fall South African Universities

Abstract

Having received renewed intensity from student movements across the South African higher education landscape, decolonisation, as an intellectual project, remains a popular emancipatory framework within universities, disciplinary communities, scholarly networks globally and in South African higher education. In South Africa, demands for a decolonised African university are not new and are often inscribed within multiple genealogies and intellectual traditions that examine the relationship between colonial formations and the politics of knowledge production. Given this historicity, there is often a rich inheritance of diverse frameworks, idioms, and vocabularies that articulate collective efforts to transcend what decolonial theorists call the ‘coloniality of knowledge’. Given this historicity, there is always a pressing need to continually interrogate these inheritances in the ever-changing world in which they are deployed. One such idiom of decolonisation is Africanisation, which it conceives as a project of making X— disciplines, universities, knowledge about Africa, etc—more African. Among advocates of intellectual decolonisation in African Studies, Africanisation intuitively registers discourses of Africa-centredness and African renaissance as avenues to epistemic justice and relevance. It is a process of attenuating the extent to which universities and disciplines, as sites of discourse on and about Africa, are overdetermined by Western discursive formations. Although much has been done to advance this project, it often raises questions riddled with tension, particularly around the issue of identity. Although an intuitive concept on the surface, the grammar of Africanisation raises complexities pertaining to the subject of decolonisation—that is, the African for whom representation is sought.

Locating my discussion in the post Rhodes Must Fall context in South African higher education, I participate in ongoing conversations around decolonising the university by asking, in a dual sense, whether decolonisation is Africanisation. Firstly, the question is descriptive, and examines the dimensions in which decolonisation is premised on the insufficiently African character of universities in South Africa and what this means. The more critical dimension of this question is normative and interrogates the perceived limits of Africanisation as an idiom of decolonisation. By employing the interrelated notions of citizenship and belonging, I develop a concept of epistemic citizenship to explore the boundaries of Africanity within the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion observable in efforts to decolonise universities in South Africa. Building on debates in the University of Cape (UCT) Town and Stellenbosch University (SU), I argue that while an inclusive Afropolitan sensibility and epistemic identity exists as an intellectual aspiration, one also observes contestations over perceived exclusions along configurations of race, nation, and indigeneity such that within the decolonisation-as-Africanisation paradigm, successfully claiming Africanity is far from a fait accompli.