Confronting the Colonial Library: Teaching Political Studies Amidst Calls for a Decolonised Curriculum

ABSTRACT

This paper engages with Mudimbe's concept of the ‘colonial library’ with the aim of using this engagement to contribute to current debates about decolonising South African university curricula. The term ‘colonial library’ refers to the body of texts and epistemological order which construct Africa as a symbol of otherness and inferiority. Mudimbe shows that even the most determined attempts to resist the colonial library draw on this same epistemological order. This presents a profound challenge for attempts to decolonise university curricula as it suggests that the colonial library's reach extends into attempts to dismantle it. In response to this challenge, I discuss ways in which we can oppose epistemological ethnocentrism and argue that we need to be open to the possibility of the emancipatory reappropriation of aspects of the colonial library. The paper concludes by relating the foregoing discussion to the South African political studies classroom.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Note that there are many possible ways to illustrate the point. The examples given here have been chosen as they should be familiar enough to those in the South African academy and so may be helpful to the intended audience of the paper. A longer illustration of the problem of the colonial library is provided by Mudimbe (1988, 98–134) in his discussion of the legacy of E.W. Blyden.

2 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing these particular limitations out and for drawing my attention to Kane's valuable work.

3 See Palincsar (1998) for a summary of the social constructivist approach to knowledge.

4 Harding (1991, 152–156) makes a distinction between historical relativism, which she thinks is acceptable, and judgmental relativism, which she rejects. The former simply involves accepting that different social groups will tend to have different perspectives and that we ought to attend thoughtfully to these different perspectives. However, judgmental relativism is the belief that there are no grounds for judging between these different perspectives and thus that all are equally valid.

5 Mudimbe does not, to my knowledge, discuss this concept at length anywhere, but he indicates that he gets it from Gaston Bachelard (Mudimbe 1993, 147; Mudimbe 2012, xiv). Of relevance here are Bachelard's ideas about epistemological breaks and obstacles (see Bachelard 1947) and Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron's related discussion of epistemology and sociology (see Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1991). Both of these discussions emphasise how careful we should be in going about making knowledge claims.

6 The excluding essentialism I discuss here seems, for example, to be present in the views of University of Cape Town student activist Athabile Nonxuba (cited in Evans 2016) who lists as one of the current problems at his institution as being the fact that there are white lecturers teaching African music. Implied here is that only Africans can legitimately teach African music and that no white person can be an African.

7 In so doing, such students also suggest that whites cannot be African. The question of the possibility of white Africanness is a complex one, which I have touched on elsewhere (see Matthews 2011, 2015), but which I will not attempt to tackle here beyond acknowledging that it has some relevance for debates about decolonisation especially in the South African context.