'Students must move beyond ivory towers of universities to effect change'

The constitution needs to be interrogated and students need to move beyond the ivory tower of their universities.

Senior lecturer in the department of jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria Dr Tsepo Madlingozi, was speaking at the Nelson Mandela University Art Gallery in Bird Street on Friday  on the subjects of  decolonisation and broader constitution.

Madlingozi, who has a PhD in legal philosophy from the University of London, said the institution of democracy itself needed to be disrupted.

“In a time where democracy and decoloniality have been diminished to a series of memes, buzz words, bumper stickers and meaningless metaphors – where decoloniality scholarship has been appropriated by university managers, careerist academics and advertisers – the time has come where decoloniality and democracy must be disrupted if they are to achieve the goal of human liberation,” he told his audience.

Madlingozi said the country had progressed from an era where tensions between democracy and capitalism had disappeared, to a situation where the  two ideologies were “singing the same tune”.

“The decolonisation approach to constitutional law gained visibility after the 2015/16 “Fees Must Fall” movement.

“We need to distinguish decolonisation from liberal approaches to constitutionalism as well as critical thoughts on constitutionalism.”

He said critical scholars believed that the constitution was incapable of undoing power relations that caused and sustained racism, homophobia and patriarchy.

“Critical scholars seek to rescue the constitution by reading it from a race, feminist and queer perspective in order to achieve social justice.”

He said the decolonisation approach to the constitution was a movement united by two pillars.

The first highlighted that 1994 did not herald a decolonisation era but rather when white domination transformed into white hegemony.

The second pillar  incorporated the theory that the ongoing conquest or neo-apartheid was constituted by post-1994 constitutionalism, he said.

“As a result, decolonisation scholars call for a post-conquest constitution.”

Scholars ought to move beyond the ivory towers if they were serious about contributing to the decolonisation of law, society and state, he said.

He said they could learn from social movements of impoverished people such as the struggle of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a movement of shack-dwellers in KwaZulu-Natal, which sought to disrupt and decolonise the law, society and ways of being in the world.