SA must transcend Big Man politics

Simamkele Dlakavu, The Star

Johannesburg - It was one of those student protests, the kind of protests at our universities that have become a norm again in this country.

I don’t remember the exact issue of contestation that day, because they are so many. We might have been protesting against the financial exclusion of hundreds of students; or it might have been a protest against the dehumanising treatment of our outsourced mothers and fathers. Or it could have been another protest where we sought to be reflected in a curriculum that is still centered on colonial thinking.

Wits political studies post-graduate students: On a quest to revolutionalise the academy

Simamkele Dlakavu

Simamkele Dlakavu, The Daily Maverick

Our academic spaces in South Africa are often referred to as an 'extension of Europe': due to the settler colonialism we were not seen as an African state, but rather an extension of the European colonial project in which white supremacy still reigns supreme.

White supremacy says that African history, experiences, and thought are inferior compared to Western history, thought and experiences. Furthermore, it says, black African lecturers don’t have valuable contributions to make to the academic space, and the larger production of knowledge. One of the two important moments where this debate has formed part of mainstream public discourse in post-apartheid South Africa was with the 'Mamdani affair' at UCT and the 'Makgoba Affair' at WITS. Both these academics were challenging the post-apartheid academy and the ways it should reflect its African grounding in its curriculum.