Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: a view from the South

ABSTRACT

This paper was motivated by student protests at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where the Rhodes Must Fall collective called for the ‘decolonisation’ of the university’s curriculum. I deliberately adopt a ‘decolonial gaze’ to re-describe the structural and cultural conditioning of the post-colonial university and the contradictions it sets up for black students. Using Archer’s morphogenetic cycle and Bernsteins’s pedagogic device I tease out what contestation for control of the curriculum entails, with a particular focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. I identify three groups of students for whom the situational logic of the post-colonial university offers very different opportunities for agential development and therefore academic success. At the level of pedagogy, I suggest there may be a ‘collective hermeneutic gap’ between some academics and their students. Finally the paper makes some suggestions for what curriculum reform in a post-colonial Humanities and Social Sciences might involve.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• curriculum reform
• humanities
• decolonisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the category ‘professionally qualified and experienced specialist and mid-management’, which includes professorial academic staff, black males comprised 15% and black females comprised 11% (Employment Equity Report, University of Cape Town, January 2013).

2. Rhodes Must Fall Mission Statement, UCT, 25 March 2015.

3. Author's field-notes, Student Assembly, 25 March 2015.

4. Wherever Humanities appears, please read Humanities and Social Sciences.

5. This is summed up Cecil John Rhodes’ infamous statement ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ (Mamdani 1996, 17).

6. ‘Civil society’ is based on the Enlightenment ideal of popular sovereignty in which the nation-state guarantees political and civil rights to all its citizens. But in post-colonial states, while this ideal may be enshrined in a liberal democratic constitution, in practice only a small culturally equipped elite can exercise agency as citizens through in the institutions and practices of civil society (Chatterjee 2004).

7. ‘Political society’ refers to the under-privileged majority in post-colonial states who are not proper members of civil society. They remain subjects rather than citizens because they do not participate fully in a liberal democracy through the institutions of civil society. Instead, through the instrumental exercise of their votes and (often illegal) political mobilisation, this group enjoys only a political relation to the state; which in turn legitimates itself through the provision of (some) welfare (Chatterjee 2004).

8. See for example the continued use of the colonial four racialised groups to implement equity and redress policies by the South African state.

9. Student comments were selected from qualitative data sets gathered through interviews and survey questionnaires with first and second year students on the Extended Degrees Programme in the Faculty of Humanities, UCT (2012–2014).

10. This may also have something to do with student disillusion with the African National Congress (ANC)-dominated government and its neglect of Africanists traditions in its official narrative of the anti-apartheid struggle.

11. See for example the Catalytic Projects initiated by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on the research supported wholly by the National Research Foundation of South Africa [CPRR 13091339042 No: 91543].