A focus area of the CPUT project ‘Decolonization of the curriculum’ is on seeking cognitive justice and decentring Western knowledge through curriculum renewal activities. The Fundani Centre for Higher Education Development is spearheading this institutional project in collaboration with IMPALA. The centre is a strategic unit under the direction of CPUT Vision and Mission. It initiates and facilitates higher education development in alignment with international and national imperatives. During 2018 seminars and discussion forums are organised to be followed by a series of workshops.
3rd seminar on Decolonization
The Fundani’s 3rd seminar on Decolonization took place on 30 August 2018. Keynote speaker was Dr Joel Modiri, lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria. He and the respondent Asanda Ngoasheng, a lecturer in CPUT’s Media Department’s Journalism programme, were engaged in a lively conversation around the concept of decolonizing the university curriculum.
“We still need in this country an alternative historical perspective” said Modiri as he expounded on his experiment in theory building. “Rather than asking what has changed since 1994 we should ask what has remained the same since 1652. What has remained consistent? We are still people upon whom the world acts, not people who act in the world.”
Modiri wondered whether it was possible to ask a Eurocentric, neoliberal university to decolonize itself when this places the responsibility of change on the largely white professoriate who look at the world in a particular way.
“The decolonization of the university is unthinkable outside of the decolonization of South Africa itself. We are trying to decolonize at the wrong level and place, the university is a symptom of a problem. The real challenge is to decolonize South Africa,” was Modiri’s argument. He believes that any attempt at change must deal with the idea of conquest and that reducing decolonization to only an academic affair is not enough. “Decolonization is a demand for reparation, it entails an endless fracturing of the world colonization created”.
While Ngoasheng applauded Modiri’s take on a new way of looking at the world predicated on philosophies espoused by African thought-leaders she questioned why he would dismiss the concept of intersectionality. “Intersectionality is a theory developed by black African women and it I surprises me that the Azanian tradition does not include it when I know from my own life that my experience will differ from that of the black man, when I know that society will engage with me first based on my gender and then on my race,” said Ngoasheng.
For her the big challenge is how to begin the process of removing conditions that keep us unchanged.
“We can start by decolonizing the curriculum. This is how we understand the South African curriculum as flawed. South Africa is a flawed subject and you cannot solve what you don’t understand. Academics are in the business of thinking and meaning making. This is what we need in order to decolonize the mind of the African child who has to do the actual decolonization of society. “Children who continue to learn in the colonized system will never learn to stand up and say ‘this is who I am and who I am is valued, even if my experience is not reflected in your textbook’,” said Ngoasheng.