Liberating knowledge versus coloniality relics
A few days ago, the Njube High School students’ demonstration sparked so much social media rage.
Istill maintain that this demonstration was choreographed. How is it a coincidence that Zenzele Ndebele’s CITE, an online news outlet which is prominent for its antagonistic stance against the Government and the ruling ZANU-PF was on the ground to give full coverage of the demonstration?
As usual, most of our servile anti-establishment news consumers viewed the demonstration as an “innocent” outcry of the students to Government for contributing to the socio-economic collapse of the country.
The common celebration all over social media was that the protest was going to serve as an awakening to President Mnangagwa that he has failed the Zimbabwean education system.
Others went further to comically drawing parallels of the Njube High School demonstration with the Sharpeville protest of 1960 in South Africa. The attempt to link the Njube students’ demonstration to the phenomenal Soweto uprising falls short of many contextual correlating of issues. The Soweto uprising metaphorically challenged the system of inequality which was widespread across the entire colonised world.
On the contrary, the Njube riot did not even get a buy-in from other surrounding schools in the western suburbs of Bulawayo. To this day, the Sharpeville Massacre is celebrated as a Global South landmark symbol of epistemic freedom. Therefore, the Soweto phenomenon has given legitimacy to the ongoing struggle to decolonise the curriculum.
South Africa’s “Fees Must Fall Movement” categorically fits into this historically entrenched mandate to widen access to education. Likewise, our education policies in Zimbabwe have been deeply rooted in the idea of promoting equitable access to knowledge. This is a policy position which has triumphed over the bottlenecks which imperialism had embedded in our “politics of knowing”.
This is why one of our post-independence reforms was to widen public examination access. This way, the Cambridge examination system has been maintained as an alternative of our mainstream local ZIMSEC examination system.
Since its introduction after independence, the local examination system has produced intellectuals of profound reputation. As a country we have been an export hub for human capital in various disciplines courtesy of our local education system. This firmly substantiates the idea that our local education system provides professionally relevant skills at home and abroad.
However, there are some who are still stuck in the nostalgia of the colonially captured education system and its marginalising characteristics engrained in the antiquity of epistemic privilege. Prof Arthur Mutambara is one typical example.
In a recent article published on several online media platforms, Prof Mutambara expressed discontent at the high grades attained by some of our 2019 Advanced Level examinations candidates. This comes against the backdrop of rehearsed concerns of a collapsing education system. Now we are told that there is a “grade inflation” which de-markets Zimbabwean students from accessing international scholarships.
According to a post on his Facebook timeline, Prof Mutambara argues that:
“. . . there is a slight problem of grade inflation — a pernicious and ruinous national cancer. How do you get one school getting 79 students with 15 points (or more) out of 140 students? This is 56 percent of the students getting the same top examination outcome.”
Prof Mutambara contends that grade inflation is not a good idea because it is very tough to sell their outstanding results to great institutions outside Zimbabwe.
“Do you approach Oxford or Harvard with 1 000 such 15-pointers from Zimbabwe? It is a joke,” Prof Mutambara argues.
Sadly, the import of the learned Professor’s reasoning has the effect of exposing him as a caricature/relic of the coloniality of knowledge. He is still stuck in the archaic belief of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard being the epicentres of knowledge.
The idea of thinking that we should be producing few students with good grades perpetuates a culture of systematic monopoly and bottlenecks in the education sector.
Moreover, to even imagine that in 2020 someone still thinks merit should not be afforded to our learners in its abundance because the quality of our education will be deemed as substandard by some university in Britain or in America is quite disappointing.
At a time, we should be de-Westernising the politics of thinking and shifting the geography of knowledge, it is intellectually disturbing that we have an African professor who still thinks that our education system should pay homage to the dictates of the epistemic empire.
How can we produce African solutions for African problems when we are not producing more future captains of knowledge in Africa? Sadly enough, this is coming from an individual who was once the president of the Students’ Union at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) in the 80s.
Somehow his critique of the national examination merits attained by our students only indicates that the student riots he assisted in staging at the UZ were not premised on the need to encourage a decolonial learning system which has an empowering effect to the African people. His sentiments reveal that the intention of his demonstrations at the UZ was purely aimed at undermining the post-colonial Government.
Today when he speaks against the good passes of our academic patriots, he only exposes himself as a student leader who was entangled in the matrix of the coloniality of knowledge.