Soyinka’s novel idea for tackling hatred
Writer Wole Soyinka suggests students should spend their first year at university learning the value of humanism in order to better fight the toxicity of zealots and fundamentalists
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says the decolonisation of SA’s university curriculum will take time, just as it had in his home country Nigeria.
Speaking on the fringes of an education summit at the University of Johannesburg last week, the 82-year-old playwright, poet and political activist described curriculum transformation as an “unending process” that requires constant effort.
“You need to expand and diversify all external information coming from institutions across the world, until there comes a time — and it will come — when the word colonialism doesn’t even feature when you look at the curriculum. It will become obsolete. But it takes time.
“Even in Nigeria, the curriculum is not entirely decolonised. But it is drastically different from when I began teaching immediately after independence (in 1960),” he says.
SA is still in its infancy in its attempts to decolonise education, Soyinka says, “but the direction is good”.
“During a recent visit to the University of Cape Town, where I had discussions with the vicechancellor, I could see that the decolonisation of the curriculum is happening. It’s going in the right direction.”
On the issue of fees, Soyinka says while he has sympathy for students across the world who are lobbying for free tuition, the debate needs an injection of realism. He has been a visiting academic at some of the world’s top universities during his decades-long career, among them Harvard and Oxford.
“I can understand parents and students who are pushing for free education. It’s not just a South African problem. We have it in Nigeria and in countries all over the world.
“It’s an ideal I appreciate. But at the same time, realism cuts across that ideal. Education will never be altogether free. But it should be as close to being free as is possible.”
Soyinka, the first African to win a Nobel prize for literature in 1986 and who is often described as the continent’s greatest cultural ambassador and critic, delivered the keynote address at last week’s Brics and Emerging Economies University Summit, facilitated by Times Higher Education and hosted by the University of Johannesburg.
In his address, he argued that zealotry and religious fundamentalism were sweeping across the world and introducing an “antihumanism” that was corrupting academies globally.
He drew on Nigeria’s experience with Boko Haram and how it “crippled intellectual life across huge swathes” of the country a decade or more ago, with lasting effects.
Religious fundamentalism is not confined to Nigeria, he warned. The entire continent is “under threat by al-Shabaab on the one side and Boko Haram on the other”. If the crisis is to be arrested, the minds of young students need to be “inducted” and “weaned off” intolerance at a very early stage.
Soyinka proposed that the first year of university life should be given to this induction phase and during this time, students set aside their books and focus purely on the importance of learning from a humanist perspective, drawing on the experiences of early scholars.
Only after students are grounded in the genuine pursuit of learning and the advancement of ideas do they embark on their chosen study paths, Soyinka proposed.
This was met with applause by University of Johannesburg vice-chancellor Ihron Rensburg, who described the proposal as a sweeping but welcome critique of university life which points to shifting beyond the pursuit of academic excellence towards something more holistic.
However, Soyinka’s somewhat lofty proposal suggests learning is confined to traditional universities at a time when most young people have access to a wealth of unregulated information and data on the internet, and which potentially has greater influence over young minds than any university could hope to have.
Though Soyinka admitted the internet and online learning — formal or otherwise — posed a challenge to his proposal, he said it was “not beyond a solution”. But he failed to describe what that solution might look like.
Soyinka was also challenged about the danger of his proposal creating a different kind of ideology, if not a “sameness”, among the student population.
On the contrary, he argued this radical period of induction would encourage free learning and “allow students to make their own discoveries”, free from the prescribed and sometimes rigid views of textbooks and teachers.
Soyinka said that while he was mindful his proposal had limitations, the antihumanist drive was now so grave that “it is time to forget political correctness”. Universities needed to learn how to “detoxify religious zealotry” and curb the “gene of intolerance”. Radicalism has become a global concern and manifests itself in various ways, he argued, “not just through religious views”.
He pointed to the rise of right-wing politics and tendencies sweeping across the US and Europe and how they were opening up spaces for hate speech — another form of antihumanism — to become normalised.
After Donald Trump was elected to become the next president of the US, Soyinka, who had lived in different US cities for more than 20 years, tore up his green card and moved back to Nigeria because of what he called “a horror of what is to come with Trump”.
“I did it in the privacy of my office, not in front of the TV cameras,” he said. “I tore it up into small pieces.”
Though he is no stranger to SA or its politics, he refused to be drawn on the country’s political state of affairs.
“I read and I follow what is going on in SA. But it is not for me to judge. SA must sort out its own problems, just as we are trying to do now in Nigeria,” Soyinka said.