As By Fire: The End of the South African University PDF

Here is the transcription of the text in the images provided, formatted as a markdown document. # As By Fire: The End of the South African University 'This is what really happened, told with the clarity and compassion of a brilliant insider.' Don Pinnock "Exposing the nervous system of such deep-...

Here is the transcription of the text in the images provided, formatted as a markdown document. # As By Fire: The End of the South African University 'This is what really happened, told with the clarity and compassion of a brilliant insider.' Don Pinnock "Exposing the nervous system of such deep-seated misery requires a rare combination of surgical skill, courage and compassion - qualities that Jansen, easily the country's leading expert on education at all levels, has in abundance." Charles van Onselen What are the real roots of the student protests of 2015 and 2016? Is it actually about fees? Why did the protests turn violent? Where is the government while the buildings burn? Former Free State University vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen delves into the unprecedented disruption of universities that caught South Africa by surprise. In frank interviews with eleven of the VCs most affected, he examines the forces at work, why the protests escalate into chaos, and what is driving - and exasperating - our youth. This urgent and necessary book gives us an insider view of the crisis, tells us why the conflict will not go away and what it means for the future of our universities. Prof Jonathan Jansen is a leading South African educationist, commentator and the author of several books including the best-selling *Letters to My Children*. ## Chapter 7, Sense and Non-sense in the Decolonisation of Curriculum Ahmed Bawa left DUT in April 2016 to head up Universities South Africa (USAF) in Pretoria, a body representing the vice-chancellors of the country's public universities. Hell was let loose. - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o The year is 1968, five years after Kenya won independence from Great Britain. The setting is the University of Nairobi, and what was about to happen there would become known as a landmark event in the politics of curriculum. The head of the Department of English, in the process of making proposals to the board of the Faculty of Arts, introduced a set of uncontroversial initiatives but with a contentious phrase that would spark 'the great Nairobi literature debate.' The English department has had a long history at this college and has built up a strong syllabus which by its study of the historic continuity of a single culture throughout the period of emergence of the modern west makes it an important companion to History and to Philosophy and Religious Studies. However, it is bound to become less British, more open to other writing in English (American, Caribbean, African, Commonwealth) and also to continental writing, for comparative purposes. The italicised phrase sparked objections by three lecturers, including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, one of Africa's foremost writers and critics. Together these lecturers not only called for the closing down of the English department, but laid out a platform for a new curriculum with this provocative query: Here then, is our main question: if there is a need for a 'study of the historic continuity of a single culture, why can't this be African? Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it? This rejection of the notion that Africa is merely an extension of the West was an intellectual turning point in the postcolonial scene. What followed is encapsulated in this crisp observation by Ngũgĩ when he argued the case for curriculum change in his short but remarkable book *Decolonising the Mind*: 'Hell was let loose.' Indeed, calls for radical change to a university curriculum will always summon forth the forces of Hades, for curriculum transformation strikes at the very identity of a higher education institution by asking troubling questions about how a university sees itself in relation to the nation and the world. ### Thinking about the decolonised curriculum During my time at UFS, a prominent student leader, who was intellectually one of the best young university minds I had the privilege of engaging, regularly visited my office. He enjoyed stopping by simply to talk about what I called 'knowledge and society' questions. I relished the intellectual sparring with this talented student. 'The problem, he told me on one occasion, is that we [students] seldom read beyond the first chapter of Fanon's books.' I offered to give him three classic works in exchange for a longer debate on seminal ideas in the anti- and postcolonial movements: Frantz Fanon's *The Wretched of the Earth*, Albert Memmi's *The Colonizer and the Colonized*, and Aimé Césaire's *Discourse on Colonialism*. For any student wanting to get a grip on the foundational ideas of the critics of colonialism, these were indispensable readings. None of these writers spoke at any length about curriculum, however. Theirs was a broader anti-colonial struggle against the occupation by colonisers of African and Afro-Caribbean countries. What contemporary scholars do is to infer from their work possible implications for the decolonisation of the curriculum. Nonetheless, if there was one arena within the broader student protest movement of 2015-2016 in which there was very little deep thinking going on, it was in the sudden, though certainly not unexpected, flag raising on behalf of an old culprit, the university curriculum. There is a reason why the curriculum always emerges as a rallying point in student protest movements: it carries symbolic value that far outweighs its instrumental functions such as the choice of subject content, teaching methods, and the acquisition of learning. The curriculum stands for something else. It represents a set of values, commitments, and ideals, and in its very constitution offers the most tangible evidence of what curriculum theorist Michael Apple calls the selective tradition. Put simply, those in power consciously select what is worth teaching and knowing and, in the process, assign value to what goes in and what is left out of the curriculum. That choice is a political act. Despite the predictable attention received by curriculum in social transitions or student protests, it is precisely because of its symbolic value that very little if anything in the curriculum changes once the shouting is over. The fact is, very few activists have the time, inclination, expertise, or support to 'make curriculum' differently within institutions. This is as true for the People's Education struggles in the 1980s as it was with the attempted radicalisation of the state curriculum in newly independent Zimbabwe, and as it will be with the most recent flag-raising moment: the call for the decolonisation of the curriculum on the part of South African student protestors. Little will happen because curriculum change is not really the point of the decolonisation rallying cry in today's campus struggles; rather, the purpose is to mount a hill, raise the flag of discontent, and then descend back into the realm of the settled curriculum. By way of illustration, consider a recent YouTube recording that went viral. A UCT student protestor speaking on a panel is captured on video railing against Western science as a project of modernity and concluding that 'science as a whole should be scrapped off, especially in Africa. Local belief was ignored, she said, as in the case of a community in KwaZulu-Natal whose members believe they can use witchcraft to summon lightning to strike somebody.' Then the student asks, 'Can you explain that scientifically? Because it's something that happens.' She goes on to point out that Newton saw an apple fall and created an equation, and only then was the concept of gravity established, regardless of what might have been observed earlier in parts of Africa. #ScienceMustFall became the new hashtag for the latest target of decolonisation. Mockery, memes, and mirth ('How can a Fallist be opposed to gravity?') took off around the world even as some rushed to offer a qualified defence. It is true that science, like all knowledge, is a product of society and therefore partial and incomplete. But claims that science is 'colonial' and needs to be scrapped 'as a whole', or that someone being struck with lightning is a victim of an African's wish, are, of course, ridiculous. But the facts do not matter to this non-science student and her supporters. In fact, her rant is not about science; it is about signalling one's opposition to enemy knowledge in the same way that marching armies raise a flag as they advance to battle. Science will not 'fall' for another reason, and that is because scientific knowledge functions within powerful institutions. Whether it was the push for Outcomes-Based Education advanced by South Africa's powerful trade union movement in alliance with the government's Department of Education, or the drive by the energetic minister of education, the late Kader Asmal, to overturn the religious prescripts of the school curriculum, or the efforts of the respected academic Mahmood Mamdani to Africanise the UCT curriculum – all these events demonstrate the deep complexity of dislodging what I have elsewhere called the institutional curriculum. This does not mean that there will not be a flurry of low-level activity, or some knowledge adjustments here and there, that appear to respond to the students' rallying call for decolonisation. In fact, most of the elite universities, in response to student pressures, have hurriedly assembled curriculum review committees, and alert academics have hastily cobbled together multimillion-rand research proposals in an effort to capitalise on the rare opportunity presented by the 'decolonial turn'. But this political moment will be short-lived and little different from routine curriculum review as student protestors graduate and the activist agendas shift their focus - until the next call for radical changes to what and how and whom we teach. ### What is this thing called decolonisation? On and off campuses, this is the question I get most often: what is decolonisation? As with any social science construct, there is no singular or fixed meaning of the term, and the best one can do is to try to make sense of decolonisation within the contexts in which the word is used. More than one source acknowledges that 'decolonization has multiple meanings, and the desires and investments that animate it are diverse, contested, and, at times, at odds with one another.' To begin with, the call for decolonisation - and for the decolonisation of curriculum in particular - has a long history, and not only on the African continent. Strictly speaking, decolonisation means 'the end of colony' and therefore refers to the period preceding the collapse of colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere. That in fact was the original usage of decolonisation and it made logical sense. Get rid of the colonial power as an object of anti-colonial struggles and in the quest for independence from the European colonisers. But following independence a movement arose, along with a persuasive literature, which argued that you can remove the colonial power as it retreats to France or England or Portugal, but its legacies - from how capitalist economies are reproduced, to how authoritarian politics are conducted, to how cultural preferences are exercised - live on in the now free territory. Furthermore, the colonial authority and the postcolonial state remain in an intimate relationship, tied together with social, economic, and cultural bonds that continue to express the power of the former coloniser ('the metropole, some postcolonial writers call it) and ensure the dependence of the colonised. In other words, the coloniser might have left, but colonial influences still determine how the new African rulers, in this case, exploit the people they govern and suppress anti-colonial ideas. In the realm of culture, African foods, hairstyles, music, and artistic works still show preferences for European rather than African traditions, styles, and values. The postcolonial critics therefore argue that the continuing strong connection between the colonised country and the newly independent country makes relevant the renewed call for decolonisation long after the retreat of empire. Unfortunately, the postcolonial critique of society is often so embedded in unnecessarily obscure and impenetrable language that most students and the public are left outside of this important debate on who we are and how we behave after our political freedom is achieved. There is an additional problem with this kind of critique in the South African context, as opposed to those African states where, in the words of social anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh, 'colonialism was non-resident.' The implication is that colonialism remained resident in South Africa, a conundrum once expressed in some political quarters as 'colonialism of a special type'. White South Africans are not colonial subjects, nor has South Africa been under the yoke of Great Britain since 1910. Following centuries of white presence in South Africa, 'settlers' became 'natives', as Mahmood Mamdani might have called our fellow citizens. It is not only hurtful to whole communities of citizens, but also historically incorrect and politically divisive to insist on this kind of settler-versus-native language as it relates to white South Africans. After many generations of co-existence at the southern tip ### Decolonisation So what does it mean to decolonise the curriculum in the wake of colonial rule or apartheid? There are at least six different conceptions of 'decolonisation' when it comes to the subject of knowledge as embedded in the school or university curriculum. But as these conceptions are introduced, it is important not to read them along ridges of sharp distinction, for there are proponents whose thinking stretches across more than one category. Ngũgĩ, for example, advocates decentring the European curriculum in his general argument but emphasises African languages in place of English as a commitment to Africanisation. The distinctions lie in the emphases of meaning in various works by recent curriculum scholars. ### Decolonisation as the decentring of European knowledge In this view of decolonisation, the problem is that educational institutions organise curriculum content around the knowledge, values, and ideals of Europe, the site of both colonial and postcolonial authority. Under apartheid, for example, South African students were likely to learn more about the European wars against fascism than about African wars against colonialism. Put differently, for the advocates of toppling Europe from the centre of curriculum, this recentring approach restores the place of the African and African knowledge at the heart of how we come to know ourselves, our history, our society, our achievements, our ambitions, and our future. In a sense, recentring can be seen as a soft version of Africanisation in that what changes is the relational position of an African-centred curriculum to the rest of the world, and the West in particular. ### Decolonisation as the Africanisation of knowledge Whereas the decentring position wants to exchange Europe for Africa (or Asia or Latin America) at the centre of the curriculum, the 'hard version' of Africanisation is about the displacement of colonial or Western knowledge and its associated ideals and achievements as the standard against which to measure human progress. The new word is supposed to do what the old one did not: namely, radically change society itself.