Academics' conceptions of higher education decolonisation

Abstract

The urgency for a decolonised university curriculum in South Africa, occasioned by student protests, demands interrogation of conceptions of decolonisation academic staff hold, seeing that the design and implementation of decolonised education rests largely with them. To determine the academics’ conceptions, the study adopted the interpretivist paradigm, using semi-structured interviews to solicit data from 13 purposively sampled academic staff at a South African university. Data analysis took a grounded analysis approach, where content analysed categories/themes emerged from the transcribed and coded data, not from apriori assumptions. Findings reflected both the conception of decolonisation as recentring and decentring. Findings also pointed to the ubiquitous use of the terms Africa and African(s) in defining decolonisation, conflating Afrocentric philosophy and Africanisation with decolonisation. Such findings represented the conception of decolonisation as a recentring of curriculum from the West to Africa as the centre. Other academics’ conceptions also represented a decentring of knowledge from Western hegemony without necessarily recentring it to African hegemony. Much advocacy was for achieving equality and parity between extant knowledges and hitherto marginalised local knowledges. There was also a manifest vacillation in respondents’ conception of decolonisation as they responded to the different questions, almost evincing a continuum between what can be termed a hard version and a soft version of the concept. The study recommends broader, intensive, institutional discussion of conceptual issues around curriculum decolonisation prior to implementation.issues around curriculum decolonisation prior to implementation.

Deconstructing Decolonising in the Context of a South African Higher Education Institution

“…Sibanda argues that from the research conducted by academics in South African higher education, four perspectives on decolonisation in higher education have emerged. 13 These are decolonisation as recentring, decolonisation as de-centring, decolonisation as unboxing knowledge, and decolonisation as facilitation of access to powerful knowledge. Decolonising as recentring focuses on the re-positioning of that which is sacred and home-grown.…”

“…17 Sibanda adds that the obsession to rid all vestiges of erstwhile colonial powers from university curricula is regarded as narrow and parochial and a plurality of ways of knowing, with each knowledge defining the limits and possibilities of understanding other pieces of knowledge in an ecology of knowledge is advocated. 18 As such the decentring perspective focuses on moving education away from the totalitarianism of Western hegemonic epistemologies to a democratisation of knowledge and a redress towards the previously marginalised knowledge and social justice.…”

“…Sibanda adds that this notion of the global north as the progenitor of all the privileged knowledge(s) in the academy is regarded as a myth. 21 The West "has just claimed, with impunity, the role of legitimating knowledge(s) that ascends the citadel of privilege and those that remain at the periphery or get obliterated. It decides what voices to muzzle and what voices to trumpet."…”

“…It decides what voices to muzzle and what voices to trumpet." 22 This means that the dichotomy in the body of knowledge with regards to who owns what knowledge or where what knowledge originates from is a fallacy. Arguing against this, Samuel that "we are diverse, multiple, and continually contested beings, as new internal and external dialogues about who we are and who we want to be, consciously invade our being.…”

“…Sibanda supports this by arguing that "boxing knowledge would render in-breeding knowledge coloured by habits, routines, and rituals, undesirable in the face of the porosity of borders that occasion fluidity as well as physical, methodological, and epistemological migration." 25 According to Samuel, "from this perspective, knowledge is located at the intersection of the "emic and home-grown culture-specific" and the etic, "generic, universalist" perspectives of the world we inhabit." 26 The composition of ideas precludes exclusivity and individualism and rather encourages pluriversalism especially because knowledge is not neutral and is constantly being influenced knowingly or unknowingly by alternative cultures.…”