In light of a worldwide movement around decolonising Eurocentric institutions and barriers, Nelson Mandela University students have made one thing clear – they aim to tackle the mammoth task of breaking down centuries of a European-injected academic curriculum.
This was put on the table during a public discussion on Tuesday by Melz Owusu, a PhD candidate at Leeds University in the UK, in which she created a platform for a conversation – Decolonising the Academy: A Movement Without Borders.
Owusu – who is a leader in the “Why is my curriculum white?” initiative at Leeds, which challenges “the racist colonial education” at British universities – said this could be the starting point in trying to dismantle the only way of learning.
“We need to allow room for young people to open their minds, we need to work together to take down the ivory tower of colonialised academia,” she said.
“The problem we face, however, is that the world we live in is driven by Eurocentric ideas and thoughts, and trying to escape that is difficult – and because of this, the problem will always be there.
“It is a daily struggle because the world we live in was not created to serve the black person.”
Owusu said that while the movement is still in its infancy, there is no real explanation as to what a decolonised university means.
“Knowledge produced through feelings, emotions and spirituality is relegated to almost fictitious status and it is therefore imperative to our struggle that we must decolonise our own imaginations and strive to imagine the unthinkable, the impossible, the revolutionary.
“To look back from our ideologies, spirituality and traditions and to learn from the past what we can take forward in our struggle to decolonise our institutions and ourselves.
“However, we must ensure we take the proper care when doing this.
“Revolution and resistance must be reimagined – that will cause us to value these faculties and reopen paths of knowledge creation that are not validated under Eurocentric presiding systems.
“I often find myself flickering between believing universities must be abolished and hope that decolonisation can indeed be achieved within universities.
“To be honest, my answer to this question is that I simply do not know yet, but all we can do is try the latter, continue to struggle within and against our institutions until we see real structural change being achieved.”
BCom Law student Nangamso Nxumalo, 23, said during the discussion that this struggle had been highlighted at NMU by the #FeesMustFall movement – a student-led protest movement that began in mid-October 2015 in SA.
The goals of the movement were to stop increases in student fees as well as to increase government funding of universities.
“As someone who is deeply invested in decolonising, I feel there has been a progression since the #FeesMustFall movement in carving a way forward,” she said.
“We are very structured in how we think about decolonisation, and there are mainly three things we need to look at – the institutional culture of a university, the academics and curriculum within the teachings, and how to change the curriculum.
“I feel that we are only but scraping the surface and yet we are not interrogating real aspects of what this could potentially be.”
Owusu said it was up to the students to drive a new narrative and challenge the academia they were being presented with as a gateway into this form of activism.