Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university

ABSTRACT

While Africanisation remains a popular idiom for intellectual decolonisation, it raises difficult issues around citizenship, identity and belonging, alongside their constitutive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Using the “politics of belonging” as a conceptual frame, I unpack the tensions involved in grounding decolonisation in a substantive insistence on Africanness. This lens centres important questions like who can successfully claim Africanity and what it means to be intellectually African. Reflecting on the former, both historically and in the aftermath of student calls for a decolonised African university in South African higher education, I show that Africanness is rarely settled by first principles. There are often competing claims regarding the African for whom representation is sought. I therefore contend that the intuitiveness of framing decolonisation as Africanisation elides the politics of belonging that characterises talk of making universities more African, which is sometimes shaped by exclusionary configurations of race, class, nation and indigeneity.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonisation
• Africanisation
• belonging
• Africanity
• South Africa
• indigeneity

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This paper draws on doctoral research undertaken by the author at the University of Cambridge for which departmental ethical approval was granted. The research project involved a combination of semi-structured interviews among 31 graduate students and academic staff, participant observation, and analysis of the rich archive of university documents, academic and grey literature on decolonisation. All research participants gave informed consent prior to being interviewed and are anonymised. When participants are cited, they are referenced by a code that contains their pseudonym, university and year in which the interview was conducted. Permission was also obtained to cite non-interview materials (letters, emails) cited in the dissertation, and the referents are anonymized in this article. The research participants were selected from Stellenbosch University (SU), University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of the Western Cape (UWC), although the bulk of the interview data is from UCT. The initial motivation for these universities was a canvassing of different racial institutional histories. However, the dominance of qualitative data from UCT is a SARS COVID-19 related fieldwork constraint. Interviewees were initially contacted through snowballing from personal connections, particularly at UCT where I previously studied. Through participant observation, I became aware of several networks where decolonisation was debated from which I recruited participants. In addition, I also contacted scholars working on themes related to intellectual decolonisation at these universities. This was done through a Google Scholar search.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh

Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh is a Senior Research Officer at the University of Cape Town with broad interests in the politics of knowledge production and African intellectual history. His current research explores how theoretical and empirical knowledge from and about Africa could inform the ethical questions posed by new and emerging technologies.