Decolonisation – Towards a more 'convivial' notion of HE

“When I went to school I had to divorce myself from my African identity. It was irrelevant – I had to relearn everything. That was my experience at school – it was even more so when I came to university.”

This observation from a South African student poignantly illustrated and humanised the North-South divide lying at the heart of a seminar held recently at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, by Catherine Manathunga, professor of education research, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, titled “Decolonising the curriculum: Reflections on transforming doctoral education through Southern higher education research”.

“We have to decolonise to allow the South to flourish,” said Manathunga, author of Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision: Reimagining time, place and knowledge. “And we need to strategise to do this. Then genuine decolonisation can take place.”

Such decolonisation requires self-reflection, and an understanding of historical processes as well as pedagogical restructuring.

Problematic terms

Manathunga acknowledges her own Irish-Australian heritage to which has been added a Sri Lankan connection via marriage along with links to North American First People through the marriage of a son. “This has led to a deep respect for indigenous people.” It also reflects a globalising world where notions of identity have become increasingly hybrid and fluid. “Terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’ are highly problematic – they make no sense in my family.”

Higher education was no stranger to the Global South prior to colonisation. Using Africa as an example, Manathunga cited Egypt’s museum library complex in Alexandria dating back to 332 BCE; the Al-Azhar University in Cairo founded in 970 CE, the oldest continually operating university on the planet, and the University of Sankoré in Timbuktu, Mali, dating back to the 12th century.

Following conquest and the imposition of the colonial system, there was a break in the continuity of these and other institutions, most of which were closed down. “Thereafter racism inherent in the colonial system prevented the genuine development of African universities.”

Colonial strings

As an African elite gradually emerged it was often prevented from gaining political and economic opportunities, not least by education, as after independence “former colonial powers put in place strings that would bind the former colonies to the metropole”.

“We still see this in higher education today aided and abetted by institutions such as the World Bank,” said Manathunga, and it also evident in the dominance of American journals in academic publishing and the contentious university ranking system. “The centre of knowledge production continues to be in the North. Furthermore, we have seen the entrenchment of English as the language of academic discourse.”

Which all begs the question: who put the ‘post’ in postcolonial? “Many indigenous scholars are troubled by the post in postcolonial. Ongoing neo-colonial treatment continues to be a powerful, lived experience for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

Drawing on various sources, Manathunga suggested approaches to decolonising both individuals and institutions by accessing indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing. The African theorist Francis B Nyamnjoh, based at the University of Cape Town, has suggested South Africans adopt the position of amakwerekwere: “a derogatory word for ‘undeserving outsiders’ or strangers in South Africa … which takes account of the multiple mobilities that make up our identities”.

Exporting Western knowledge

Manathunga said colonisation involved not only physical, military and economic invasion but was accompanied and justified on the basis of exporting Western knowledge, technologies and cultural beliefs to the world. “Colonial systems of power sought to eradicate indigenous systems around the globe. Learned societies and universities are heavily implicated in this.”

This resulted in the North being regarded as the location of knowledge and theory while the countries of the South functioned as giant laboratories.

In order to decolonise knowledge and education, Manathunga said there was a need to bring Southern and Northern theory into dialogue; to respect difference rather than always trying to integrate knowledges and to engage in a respectful critique of Southern knowledge theory.

Doctoral education

Decolonising doctoral education means engaging in a critical dialogue with difference in which a first step would be to acknowledge black pain and anger throughout the postcolonial world. The North needs to listen.

“White people, including myself, need to learn about truly effective deep listening techniques from Asian and indigenous cultures,” said Manathunga. “Developing listening techniques will assist white people to move beyond our unconscious experience of privilege so that we can come to understand more about the impact of centuries of oppression on black people throughout the world.”

Manathunga said it was important to avoid essentialism in order to “engage meaningfully with the multiple cultural interfaces that each of us represent and to both acknowledge and appreciate difference while also seeking to build commonality and trust”.

Another strategy was to develop a transcultural awareness and identity by drawing on the experience of those who have crossed cultural and geographical boundaries – a not uncommon contemporary experience.

Re-reading the canon

With regard to the tertiary education curriculum, Manathunga said there was a need to deconstruct Northern knowledge and theory: “We must critically re-read the canon and the archive against the grain to highlight exactly how black, cultural minority, Eastern, Middle Eastern, Latin and South American indigenous peoples and indeed women have been and continue to be systemically ‘misrecognised’ and marginalised in universities.”

According to Manathunga, it’s not simply a case of removing the Western canon: “If you did that it would not be possible to identify, analyse and critique the colonial and neoliberal operations of power that have caused and continue to cause black pain and anger.”

“Unless these histories and texts are systemically critiqued and deconstructed, their effects will continue to remain unresolved in the future.”

Such historical deconstruction would trace the extent to which the West “begged, borrowed and stole from Eastern, African, Middle Eastern and indigenous civilisations through cultural exchanges made possible by their trade networks”.

Critical whiteness studies

The application of Critical Whiteness Studies would “assist white students to begin to appreciate the privileges they have been accorded simply because of the colour of their skin. This is vital decolonisation work … it’s important that black students do not have to carry all of the emotional load of this deconstructive, decolonial work.”

In parallel would be the reconstruction of Southern, Eastern, African, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Pacific and indigenous cultural histories, languages, knowledge systems and theories.

And we can learn from our students, said Manathunga. “This involves us as teachers learning from our culturally diverse co-researchers and students and learning from the theorists from their Southern contexts and regions. Northern theorists – including ourselves and our Western students – engage respectfully with Southern knowledges.”

Manathunga advocated a South-South Dialogue. “As a settler/invader scholar, I feel I have a particular responsibility as a member of the Global South but as a privileged Irish-Australian to invest my energies and resources in working with colleagues in indigenous, migrant and refugee communities in Australia, in South Africa, in Latin America, in the Pacific and in Asia.”

Finally, Manathunga, drawing again on the work of Nyamnjoh, suggested the implementation of his notion of conviviality. “It takes us beyond some of the elitist exclusions lurking beneath the traditional university concept of collegiality, which really mean collegiality for white male middle-class professors only. Conviviality involves emphasising our relationality and interdependence and the need for dialogue between knowledge systems.”