Reconsider the decolonisation project

The exclusive focus on knowledge is prejudicial in that colonialism’s trauma and memory is underrecognised

Irecently edited a special issue for a journal on sexuality, capitalism and Africa. It was based on the topic that served as the Centre for Phenomenology in South Africa’s 5th Annual International Conference, which took place in Johannesburg in June 2018. There are several reasons we chose this as our theme for a special issue and conference, not least of which is the exorbitant value that has accrued to the idea of “decolonisation” in the past five years.

Everything must be decolonised today, from knowledge to the classroom to the orgasm. This call for transformation has been part of political culture since 2015 with the Must Fall campaigns in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Its targets include, among other things, racism and sexism, the survival of the colonial past in the present in various guises, and the underrepresentation of black minority groups in leadership positions.

It has been a central topic in the work of Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel since the 1980s, that of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak in the 1960s and, before that, that of Franz Fanon. It is only recently that it has entered mainstream philosophy. It has also recently found its way on the agenda of government policies on education, at least in South Africa, and on the mission statement of universities and professional bodies and associations.

Clarity and precision on what it means to decolonise has been sacrificed in favour of this unconditional imperative (“everything must be decolonised”). The underlying and troubling assumption seems to be that the injustices of the past that survive in the present are immediately transparent to everyone and that what is therefore required is not reflection but, rather, remedial action without further delay.

The superficial application of the idea of “decolonisation” is not the least of what is troubling. Speaking in reference to what I have witnessed in the past few years, tertiary education in South Africa has made decolonisation an integral part of its system, but the effect (if not the intent) has been to pacify middle- and lower middle-class black students aware of their grim future owing to increasing unemployment, and who already feel alienated from society. These students have heard stories about apartheid from their parents and extended family who lived through the terror. But the environment they live in does not reflect this past.

Apart from the Apartheid Museum, there are precious few things in Johannesburg that reflect these stories (other cities have even fewer tokens of remembrance). In Wilhelm Dilthey’s terms, the life — or historical context — of the young we teach at university has scarcely been objectified in works and institutions.

Robbed of hope and of a tangible future, they are equally robbed of an objective relation with their past. And if that is not enough, they are being misled by the government and its policies that promise transformation but that, in reality, lead to nothing but cosmetic changes.

In the last analysis, the academic institution, which is run today by the managerial class, pushes for the decolonisation of the university on paper or as a matter of policy. But in reality, it is not the students who are its beneficiaries. It is the managerial class and the university as a corporation and site for the reproduction of capital.

Let me cite an example in support of this view. It shows how the identity politics currently in vogue at university feeds the latter’s corporate interests.

The political culture that has developed in the past five years in the South African university is dominated by an identity politics that boils down to the idea that, for example, if you’re black and do philosophy, you ought to be doing work on African philosophy. This mentality is policed by students and staff alike. I once heard a philosophy student say to another, “Why are you working on Nietzsche? You’re African.”

This identity politics has opened the door to opportunisms of every kind. Anyone who publishes on African philosophy (say) is encouraged by the academic institution to set herself up as an expert to draw hordes of students to apply for graduate degrees, which increases the university’s revenue. Whether it is African philosophy, African law, African medicine, Afro-centredness is today one of the most profitable assets for a department or faculty to advertise as having. In addition to drawing students, it draws government funds.

This, in turn, plays into the hands of the managerial class that runs the show. It contributes to sustaining the pay gap between this class, on

A share of the trauma of colonialism lies at the intersection of three realities — sexuality, capitalism and Africa