‘Decolonization after democracy’ is the provocative idea that the forms of knowledge that endure in higher education in South Africa, and other postcolonial countries, reproduce deeply rooted and pernicious colonial era assumptions and norms. This matters because these ontologies and their moral valence enabled colonial era forms of knowledge that serviced the oppression and exploitative of conquered peoples, and consequently are poorly equipped to support the inclusion and well-being promised by democracy.
Furthermore, these forms of knowledge endure in postcolonial contexts, not least due to their deep-rooted and ‘foundational’ nature in the basic categories of the social. Examples include both negative binaries such as ‘civilized and backward’, ‘modern and traditional’ and ‘rational and superstitious’, and also the positive conceptions of freedom, equality, justice, democracy, development, governance, nation and citizenship. Key here is the often-implicit assumption that the western experience is the norm and/or universal, from which other forms are imitations, deviations or pathologies.
There is much more, and better, that can be said about enduring forms of coloniality in knowledge, and much of this is found in the pages of this special edition. The range of arguments is great, covering gender and popular mobilisation, international relations, political thought, the curriculum and teaching of Political Science and critical reflections on how we think about ‘historically disadvantaged institutions’, clientelism and democracy, and land reform in South Africa. This acknowledged, hopefully my rough summary is enough to demonstrate the deep and profound questions that decoloniality poses for thinking about politics in South Africa and beyond.
At the same time, as workers in Higher Education in South Africa we all feel the decoloniality challenge as a political and a personal one too. This is because the decolonial idea is less an academic trend than a political injunction from the #FeesMustFall student movement. At stake here is the idea that inclusion in the higher education context is not just an issue of money, but of identity and culture too. Thus, decolonialisation emerges alongside demands for transformation and Africanisation in staff, syllabus and practice in constructing a new African university. It is thus students rather than staff who have set the agenda for re-imagining the University in South Africa, and who will ultimately adjudicate its successes and failures.
In recognition of this important moment in our history, the South African Association of Political Studies (SAAPS) hosted our 2016 national conference on the theme of ‘decolonization after democracy’ from 30 August to 2 September at the University of the Western Cape. The conference was a great success. We had more papers than ever before and unprecedented participation from young, black scholars in particular. The papers that follow were presented at the 2016 conference and offer a sample of the many excellent offerings on display. Harder to capture in a special edition are the intense, disruptive but productive debates that filled the plenaries and spilled into interstices of the conference.
In closing I would like to thank the contributors for making this special edition so remarkable; my colleagues at UWC for all the hard work that went into making the conference a great success; and the #FeesMustFall student movement for challenging us all to question our core assumptions. It has been a disruptive and uncomfortable experience, but equally a productive one, and not just intellectually, but politically and personally too.