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Global Perspectives on Decolonisation
We asked an international host of experts about how they understood decolonisation and its importance. This is what they told us.
What can we understand by ‘decolonisation’? Why is it important? Decolonization is such a loaded word these days and it’s one that feels culturally divisive. I don’t think it necessarily should be because really when you get down to brass tacks what it essentially means is that we understand knowledge not just in a one-dimensional way
but that we give it context: historical context, social context, cultural context, and that we understand knowledge exists within cultures. It’s shaped by the cultures that it comes out of and if we’re going to appreciate that then we need a broader understanding of where ideas come from. Science is a valid way of knowing but is not the only valid way of knowing. There are other ways of knowing and even science, as a valid way of knowing, should be scrutinized. So there is no relativism here.
That is not to say that everything goes or all kinds of knowledge are equally valid, no, they are valid for different purposes. And that’s why science has to be also submitted to these second criteria which is that which kind of science for which kind of purposes. So basically and of course indigenous knowledge it cannot be a good kind of knowledge to take me to the moon - is a different object. Probably it is very good for ecological struggles because it brings me into harmony with mother earth, with nature, which probably western-centric knowledge will never do that. It’s a multi-dimensional approach to teaching and learning as much as it is about re-engaging with the content that we’re using to teach.
So it’s about first of all understanding how the practices of teaching and learning have led to a curriculum that is colonial in essence, and how we can work together to try and first of all critique it dismantle - it doesn’t mean destroyed it means dismantle it, unpack it if you would - and then understand those mechanisms, and then introduce the kind of literature and bibliography that is in par with our imperatives and our changing society. So it’s about unpacking and introducing material that are relevant to our to our communities, and I mean communities - the global community really. Decolonizing the curriculum is a process of struggling fundamentally
over the dominant epistemologies and traditions of thought that have continually been placed at the center of the knowledge project of the university. You know, it’s for me this process of properly and justly constituting what we could call an assembly of mind. I think that in trying to move away from the over-articulated cannons of the remnants of the colonial university, it’s this notion of an assembly of mind that is properly constituted in its worldly dimensions, that one is looking for here. And the last thing I’ll say for now is that in thinking about that assembly of mind, we know that one of the most excluded parties
and misremembered forms of knowledge are african knowledge systems and histories of black thought. I think that colonialism is one of the three metrics of contemporary society, the other two being capitalism and patriarchy, and therefore doesn’t make any sense from my point of view to tackle one without confronting the other two. That is to say, we decolonize to the extent that we decommodify the university and to the extent that we de-patriarchalize the university. Decolonizing separated from entitled capitalism or anti-patriarchalism is a very weak type of struggle in my view.
We have been accepting the way we do certain, the way we teach certain disciplines, the way we do for example history. And this has resulted in the exclusion of part of the communities that make
that make several countries. So, if we look at Britain, that has excluded extra-european literature and bibliographies and knowledge-based expertise as well. So it’s very important to address these issues and to respond to the vibrant changing faces of our communities. If you don’t have a good thorough historical and cultural framework for science then you become prone to committing the same kind of mistakes that scientists have made in the past. So we know that scientists, for example, had very damaging, dangerous and fallacious ideas
about human difference in the 19th century: sexist ideas, racist ideas that now we understand were wrong but scientists are still at risk of falling into those logical traps again. If they understand those mistakes that were made in the past, then we can make sure that that doesn’t happen again. Of course the curriculum and the pedagogy have to change because we cannot teach the same type - different types of knowledge through the same pedagogies. But it is most of the non
western-centric knowledge is oral knowledge, so we have to have other forms of teaching, of learning: the circles of conversation, the other forms the of more collaborative, more horizontal forms of co-learning. What Paulo Freire called the Pedagogy of Liberation or the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We’re dealing with a scale of inequality both here and across the world that is somewhat unprecedented.
And certainly racial justice has a key part to play in that context, but I wanted to find a language in which we could think about the redistribution of multiple dimensions of the university, because after all the university is such a complex entity and so one that speaks to economic pressures, racial injustice, but also, Madhu, in many ways you know notions of how we might redistribute the the sense of belonging in an institutional context, the sense perhaps we could we could refer to as ‘habitability’, the capacity to be listened to. And so all of these things start to feed into what I think university ought to be.
And part of that process for me is resting it away in a de-colonial manner but also in a broader manner, not only from the remnants of the colonial university but also from the languages of the technocratic and neo-liberal university which really doesn’t want us to think about these questions of symbolic injury, belonging, economic justice, and some kind of system of reciprocities which I think also has to be at the heart of a university.
Decolonisation is often a misunderstood and sometimes a contested word. To get a better sense of what it entails, and why it is important especially in education, we asked a host of international experts about their views on decolonisation.
The international experts in the video, who you will see again later in the course, are:
Angela Saini, science journalist and author of Superior, the Return of Race Science published by Estate
Boaventura de Sousa Santos Professor and Director of the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal
Sarah Nuttall Professor of Literary Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand , South Africa
Olivette Otele Professor of History of Slavery and Memory of Enslavement at the University of Bristol
This article is from the online course:
Decolonising Education: From Theory to Practice
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Decolonising Education: From Theory to Practice
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