Sylvia Wynter: No Humans Involved - An Open Letter to My Colleagues

No Humans Involved an Open Letter to My Colleagues by SYLVIA WYNTER by TigersEye99

Luister

Language Knowledge and Decolonizing the University

Decolonizing the University

Suren Pillay, Africa is a Country

This text is a transcription of a talk given at Azania House, Bremner Building, University of Cape Town, April 2015.

I want to thank you all for this wonderful invitation to be a part of the conversations you have been having here at UCT, and at Azania House. We, those outside your university, and at other universities, down the road and across the country, are watching with great enthusiasm and inspired by the courage and thoughtfulness with which you are conducting this moment of subversion. I have to say that I am in particular very encouraged by the connections you have made between subjections of different kinds, particularly two very neglected forms of subjection — in the sphere of knowledge production, and in the sphere of gender and sexuality. These are remarkable connections and the kind of leadership that is visible to those of us on the outside, shows a genuine effort to unsettle imperial hubris, but also patriarchal power relations.

Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive

Achille Mbembe - Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive by TigersEye99

Suren Pillay: Campaigning & Mobilising

Mabogo More: More than a Black Philosopher

 

Mabogo More

The Con

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign has shaken both the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University to the core. It has quickly become about a lot more than just a statute and name. Students are demanding the deracialisation and decolonisation of both institutions. As more and more stories are being told about the racism faced by workers, students and academics in these institutions, and its hold over curricula, the idea of the liberal university as a space of universal enlightenment and reason is being subjected to sustained and cogent critique. Much of this critique is, rightly, orientated towards the present and the prospect of a better future. But there is a long history of the systematic marginalisation of black South African academics, whether working at home or in exile, in both the liberal and radical wings of the South African academy. In 2015 students at a university like Rhodes are quite likely to graduate with a degree in the social sciences without ever having been asked to read people like Archie Mafeje or Sam Nolutshungu.

Achille Mbembe in Conversation with Rhodes Must Fall

Achille Mbembe: Decolonizing The University

Rattling the bag – Language Knowledge and the transformation of the university in South Africa and India: Dilip Menon

Dilip Menon, Kafila

Susa lo-mtunzi gawena. Hayikona shukumisa lo saka

Move your shadow. Don’t rattle the bag

JD Bold, Fanagalo Phrase Book, Grammar and Dictionary, the Lingua Franca of Southern Africa, 10th Edition, 1977

In the bad old days in South Africa, whites spoke English or Afrikaans, the languages of command. When they did engage with those that did not speak English, there was Fanagalo, a pidgin based on Zulu peppered with English and some Afrikaans. Fanagalo was developed in the mines and allowed directives, if not conversation. The struggle against apartheid produced its freedoms, its heroes and heroines and new dreams of equality. As Richard Pithouse in his article shows, twenty years down the line the sheen has worn. Unemployment, xenophobia, violence, crime and a seemingly entrenched inequality dog our dreams. We live with the constant premonition of becoming an ordinary country, a nation like any other.

South Africa in the Twilight of Liberalism

Richard Pithouse, Kafila

South Africa was supposed to be different. We attained our freedom, such as these things are, after everyone else but Palestine. It was late in the day but the afternoon sun was glorious and the best people, people who had passed through the long passage of struggle, told us that we would be able to avoid the mistakes made everywhere else.

There was a mass movement that, whatever its limits, had won tremendous popular support and carried some noble ideals through its travails. Its leaders cast long shadows. Our Constitution, we were always told, was as good as they get. Liberalism, apparently vindicated by history, had its evident limits but there was, it was said, lots of room for deft manoeuvre within those constraints. We were assured that there was room for everyone at what Aimé Césaire had called the ‘rendezvous of victory’.

Working while black at Rhodes

Vashna Jagarnath, The Daily Maverick

The extraordinary rejuvenation of student politics in South African universities has enabled a moment of real possibility. It is imperative that we seize this moment to have an honest conversation about racism in wider society, and in universities like UCT and Rhodes, and to act to effect real change.

I studied history at the former University of Natal in Durban where Keith Breckenridge and Catherine Burns built an extraordinary department, of the highest academic quality. The African experience was taken seriously, black thinkers were taken seriously and black students flourished. I am one of many black people that found my way into an academic life as a direct result of the space that was created in the Department of Historical Studies in Durban.

Post-Marikana SA, birthing the new student politics

Camalita Naicker, The Daily Maverick

The Black Student Movement has established a political praxis that shows marked breaks with traditional hierarchical student representative structures. This has serious implications for the post-Marikana student, who has seen the failings of the government, the party, and the leader, and who has witnessed popular mobilisations that break with traditional top-down politics; practices which have repeatedly failed to fix the problems of black and oppressed people in this country.

Anger over Rhodes vindicates Mamdani

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

IN 1998 eminent Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani put forward the following challenge to his colleagues at the University of Cape Town (UCT): "The key question before us is: how to teach Africa in a postapartheid academy?" This was in response to the hostile resistance he received when, as professor of the Centre for African Studies, he devised a curriculum that put at its centre African scholarship that many UCT academics had either never heard of, or whose significance they did not understand, largely due to the isolation of South African universities under apartheid.

S'bu Zikode on the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo (2007)

Black rage in privileged universities

Lieketso 'Dee' Mohoto', Mail & Guardian

On reading Xolela Mangcu’s article last year, “SA’s black academics are getting a raw deal” (Business Day, November 3 2014), it occurred to me that one of the things that keeps happening in the public discourse about black academics in historically white universities is that the texture and detail are being stripped from the experience of race in the academy.

What dominates is the problem of quantity – a bean-counting exercise.

No country for brilliant thinkers

Mabogo More

by Kwanele Sosibo, Mail & Guardian

The philosopher’s den cum-study-cum-living area simultaneously conjures order and chaos. The bookshelf behind his desk is lined with mostly existential philosophy tracts in logical order, so that he easily pulls out tomes by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and African-American philosopher Leonard Harris to chart his intellectual trajectory. His desk is covered in open, upended books alongside strewn academic papers, evoking his widely referenced, re-interpretive papers and essays.

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.

SA must see its talents in midst of its dysfunction

Nomalanga Mkhize, Business Day

ABOUT a decade ago, one of my childhood friends, Michael, called me to tell me he had made it into the SA-Cuba medical training programme. Finally he could ditch his job at a Nelspruit mall, where he worked as a low-paid casual behind a shop counter.

He should never have been behind that counter in the first place. Michael was smart, gifted but had no money to get to university and, in the adverse conditions of his rural high school, produced competent but not outstanding matric results. When he left for Cuba, it felt like he had escaped the social dead-end that was our Mpumalanga village by the skin of his teeth.

Ananya Roy on Patriarchy and Insubordination in the Academy