Reviewing the South African Political Studies Curriculum: Evaluating Responses to Calls for Decolonisation

ABSTRACT

The 2015 and 2016 student protests amplified criticism of university curricula which protesters proclaimed to be ill-suited to our context. This paper engages with such criticism by evaluating the South African political studies curriculam it terms of whether or not it can be considered to be ‘decolonised’. I ask three questions, all of which arise from comments made by student protesters about the need for curriculum change: ‘Who is teaching our students?’, ‘Which scholars’ work is being prescribed?’ and ‘Which geographical areas receive attention?’ These questions are answered based on data gathered from undergraduate political studies course outlines from seven South African universities. In answer to the first question, I show that while white academics are still over-represented, the demographics of those teaching undergraduate politics are shifting towards demographic representivity. In answer to the second question, I show that our political studies departments still mostly prescribe the work of male scholars, white scholars and Western scholars. Responding to the third question, I show that politics departments include courses focused on Africa and particularly on South Africa while other regions of the world receive little attention. The paper concludes by raising some difficult questions with the hope of stimulating further debate.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the valuable research assistance I received from the following people: Gemma Hartley, Lelona Mxesibe, John Onokwai and Siviwe Rikhotso.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This section is adapted from my chapter in the book Reimagining Curriculum: Spaces for Disruption, edited by Lynn Quinn (see Matthews 2019).

2 This is taken from a poster used in the #RhodesSoWhite campaign at Rhodes University. The poster can be seen at https://twitter.com/Dear_Aza_/status/577966936857972737.

3 This quote is taken from a protesting PASMA student and is quoted in a chapter by Maringira and Gukurume (2017:33).

4 This comment is attributed to a student at the University of Cape Town, Lwazi Samoya, who is cited in an article by Foster (2015).

5 Comment made by a student during the curriculum review process of the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University.

6 The Open Syllabus Project can be accessed at https://opensyllabus.org/.

7 The OSP database is constantly evolving as new syllabi are uploaded. My claims here are based on the figures given on 20 August 2019 and available at https://opensyllabus.org/result/field?id=Political+Science.

8 The way I arrived at these figures was to work out the figures for each institution and then to average them out, rather than to place all the lecturers (and their prescribed texts) in a single pool. Note also that when calculating these figures, I including both black African and coloured lecturers in the category ‘black’. When I separated them out, the figures looked different and it was evident that black African academics were more likely to prescribe black authors than were their coloured colleagues.

9 I am grateful to participants at the Rhodes University CHERTL ‘Doc week’ (July 2019) and at the Nelson Mandela University’s 2019 postgraduate colloquium for these suggestions.

10 I chose to include the category ‘Coloured/Indian’ here (rather than group ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’ lecturers with ‘African’ lecturers together as ‘black) because some students had particularly mentioned the over-representation of coloured or Indian lecturers and so to group them with African lecturers would be to obscure this over-representation.