Simbarashe Gukurume and Godfrey Maringira
ABSTRACT
The decolonisation of sociology continues to be characterised by debates on what it constitutes, in both theory and practice. While such debates are centred on a ‘radical decolonisation’, we argue that the decolonisation of sociological curricula is never final, but should be driven by and with ‘hybridised’ thinking on the knowledge which underpins the discipline. While the canonical thinking in sociology has come under serious critique, there ought to be ‘knowledge accom- modation’ combining Eurocentric and localised thinking. We focus on the ways in which sociology and sociological theory in particular have been criticised for being Eurocentric and androcentric, and the debates about decolonising it. This article draws on ethnographic research with sociologists and sociology students based at two Zimbabwean uni- versities, the University of Zimbabwe and Great Zimbabwe University.
This contributes to a growing body of research on decoloniality, by focusing both on attempts by some Zimbabwean sociologists to decolonise and localise the discipline, and on the ways in which academics and students advance and resist this practice. We argue that the decolonisation of sociology curricula and pedagogy should embrace transmodernity, blended knowledge systems, and border thinking. Following this, we further argue that decolonising sociology is never final and that there ought to be a ‘hybridised sociology’, which accommodates both canonical thinking and localised knowledge of the discipline.
Introduction
In this article, we argue that decolonising sociology is never final and that there ought to be a ‘hybridised sociology’, which accommodates both canonical thinking and localised knowledge of the discipline. To make this argument, the article examines scholars’
perspectives about decolonisation and the ways in which they resist and advance deco- lonial curricula and pedagogy in sociological courses in Zimbabwe. The idea of decolo- nisation has had multiple iterations, and remains open to scholarly debate (see Tuhiwai Smith, 2010; Mignolo 2011; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018). In this article, we purposively selected courses for our analysis that have strong Eurocentric roots and that draw on the Euro-American sociological canon, as well as those that are situated within
local contexts. This is because we understand that there is no single version of what it means to decolonise the curricula. We thus focus on the meanings given to ideas of decolonising curricula by students, academics, and those who lead university institutions.
The ways in which Zimbabwean sociology academics try to unsettle Eurocentric canonical knowledge in their teaching is the focus of the current article. The article is also based on a critical content analysis of some sociological courses and their respective outlines. Our article contributes to a burgeoning scholarship on, and debates about, decoloniality and decolonisation, and more particularly a post-colonial critique of sociology.
Decolonisation means more than changing university names
Decolonisation is more than just changing the names of universities and structures of colonial education which underpin knowledge production. Scholars such as Mazrui (1995, 28) emphasised that decolonisation does not necessarily follow from political indepen- dence. In his framing of decolonisation, he contends that decolonisation is not just achieving formal independence or the rising of a new flag and singing new national anthems; rather it is the disintegration of colonial structures. These structures include but are not limited to education. The question raised, therefore, is how can education structures be dismantled? While Mazama (2001) acknowledged that the challenge is monumental, Asante (1991) contents that the Afrocentric idea – one which places African centred thinking at the core of education – is in itself liberative. For Luz and Stradler (2019), decolonisation is that which enables the colonised to rupture colonial social norms and values in specific ways.
Across the British colonies, the approach and model taken to establish universities was the same, and relied on the idea that colonial universities should be carbon copies of British universities. According to Onwuzuruigbo (2018, 836), the British policy of providing higher education to its colonies assumed that the structure appropriate for London or Manchester was ipso facto appropriate for Harare (then Salisbury). In fact, Ashby (1966) cited in Onwuzuruigbo (2018) asserted that if the idea of a university was going to be exported to British colonies then they would of course have to be British universities, just like any other British exports. Hence, as colonies began to be administered through education, establish- ment of the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (UCRN) in 1955 was meant to create a predominantly docile administrative class of natives and space for producing and propagating British or Eurocentric knowledge, norms and values. For many years after its establishment, the university relied on expatriate European academics. Although later on a few African academics trained in Britain and Europe entered the university system, they continued with European modes of knowledge production.
With independence, however, there was a political impetus to challenge the nature and functions of universities in knowledge production. The dismantling of Eurocentric knowledge and the entrenchment of African-centred education is what Robert Mugabe, the former president of Zimbabwe, emphasised in the following speech given in 1980, the year of independence:
The modern African university is a creature of colonialism and in varying degrees bears the stamp of that genesis . . . We insist that the African university must not merely exist and operate in Africa. It must sink its roots into the African soil from which it derives its
DECOLONISING CURRICULA AND PEDAGOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 61
sustenance. The African university cannot be a mere carbon copy of alien institutions. Our university now twenty four years old, yet in many crucial respects continues to bear the imprint of its colonial past. We cannot brook for example, a curriculum that puts emphasis on the study of foreign people and institutions while remaining largely silent on the history and meaning of the Zimbabwean revolution . . . We insist that our own university shall convert itself from a university in Zimbabwe into a genuine and authentic University of Zimbabwe.
(Excerpt from a speech by former president of Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe, 1982)
The vignette above is an excerpt from a speech given in 1980 by the then Prime Minister of a newly independent Zimbabwe, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Mugabe delivered this speech at an international conference hosted by the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) on the ‘Role of the University and its future in Zimbabwe’. The university had just changed its name from the University of Rhodesia (UR) to the University of Zimbabwe. For Mugabe, although the name had changed the university’s institutional culture, curriculum, and pedagogy had not. In fact, it had remained intact from its colonial past. Mugabe’s speech therefore offered a powerful critique of the colonial university. Mugabe’s speech echoed concerns about the ways in which knowledge was produced at the new University of Zimbabwe and how it continued to be mediated through colonial modalities of power (see Collard et al. 2015).
The excerpt reveals that a post-colonial university should not be just about changing names as alluded above, but rather be about changing its everyday social and epistemic practices and activities. While Mugabe acknowledged the efforts being made to transform the institution (UZ) at the level of structures and in providing a new definition of its mission in the new Zimbabwe, he also bemoaned that the change which had been brought about to date fell far short of the ideal which his fellow nationalist leader, Kwame Nkrumah, portrayed as that of an institution that transcends its foreign origins and identity, and becomes fully integrated into its socio-cultural environment.
However, although Mugabe sought to decolonise the university, we argue that through successive Acts, he imposed a new form of coloniality where state surveillance (Gukurume 2019) and erosion of academic freedom accelerated in the post-indepen- dence era. For instance, in 1982 Mugabe repealed the royal charter and replaced it with a University of Zimbabwe (UZ) Act which made the state president the chancellor of all state universities. Therefore, these Acts put UZ and indeed other state universities under the firm and repressive grip of Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party and seriously curtailed academic freedom and university autonomy, all important ingredients of decolonisation.
In fact, Cheater (1991) asserted that the UZ Amendment Act politicised the university and knowledge production thereof, making UZ into a party university. In such cases, the questions around decoloniality of a university remain a debate because in seeking to transform a university, freedom of the local people is curtailed by politics. Thus, Mugabe’s tenure was characterised by complexities and contradictions pertaining to higher educa- tion policy and practices. In fact, we assert that state control and capture of the university personnel (Gukurume 2019) undermine(d) and contradict the process of real transforma- tion and decolonisation that Mugabe called for.
However, the excerpt from former president Robert Mugabe’s speech should be understood in the time and space that it was articulated. In spite of Mugabe’s incon- sistencies on higher education, his speech reveals that he recognised the need to decolonise the university and make it relevant to the contextual realities of the space in which it functions. In his speech, Mugabe further lamented that studies in African
sociology, geography, history, and other disciplines have their curricula and content so designed that they have served more the interests of imperialism and capitalism than the interests of Africa and Africans. For Mugabe, the change was not just about having African scholars engaging in understanding the problems of their respective disciplines.
Interestingly, Mugabe felt that many of these European/North American trained African scholars reproduce the hegemonic domination of the then colonial education. For Alatas (2000), this is a form of ‘academic imperialism’ in which Western education continues to dominate the ways in which knowledge is produced and mediated. For Mugabe, such academics represented what he called a ‘dangerous intellectual bourgeoisie’. Following this, some scholars assert that the major motive of perpetuating colonial structures of knowledge production was to maintain and reproduce colonial architecture of knowledge thereby keeping the mind and subjectivities of African scholars in uninterrupted confine- ment or captivity (Ake 1979; Alatas 1974; Mazrui 1988; Nyamnjoh 2019). To address this challenge, Mugabe urged academics and the university to develop curriculum and pedagogy that affirmed and emphasised national realities and problems in their broad diversity and interconnections.
Nonetheless, contemporary sociological epistemes remain intrinsically replete with coloniality1 and hierarchisation. Indeed, at many universities in Southern Africa, there is a very specific ‘epistemic stratification’ in which local knowledge systems and ways of knowing are not only suppressed and under-valued but also misrecognised (Morreira 2017). The idea of ‘epistemic stratification’ is imperative in understanding the ways in which forms of knowledge are structured in post-colonial universities. We therefore assert that the ‘stratification of knowledge’ sustains the imperial knowledge system which continues to exist in and within the structures of the universities, including curricula and pedagogy. Hence, the ‘epistemic values’ of knowledge are derived from the perceived sources and ‘origins’ of knowledge, deemed to be of the West, filtered and filtering through and mediated even by scholars manning African post-colonial universities.
This assertion was also echoed by Higgs, Higgs, and Venter (2003) who note that key to the epistemological domination by Western knowledge is the negation and devaluation of African indigenous knowledge systems. Under such circumstances indigenous ways of knowing are interpreted through the post-Enlightenment and Euro-American forms of universal truths and ways of understanding, imagining and interpreting the world (Mignolo 2000; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). The consequence of this hegemonic dominance of the Western episteme was the progressive erasure of the rich indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing that defined the African people (see Higgs, Higgs, and Venter 2003).
It should be noted that we use the concepts ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ with caution here given the complex entanglements of knowledge forms in a globalised society.
Therefore, we acknowledge the fluidity of these concepts in both theory and practice.
Following this, Onwuzuruigbo (2018) has argued that in Nigeria there is a growing objection to Eurocentric knowledge production because of its tendency to undermine attempts at indigenising Eurocentric disciplines like sociology. In fact, Onwuzuruigbo (2018) deploys Alatas’ (2000) concept of the ‘captive mind’ to frame Nigerian universities and academics as purveyors of Eurocentric knowledge. Once the mind is captured, there is an experienced life and living of unconscious being whereby the person whose mind is captured does not even understand the realities of what constitute a ‘free mind’. Such
‘captured minds’ have been viewed as driven by and embedded in ‘academic DECOLONISING CURRICULA AND PEDAGOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 63
dependency’ (Alatas 2000). The practice of ‘depending’ hinges on the West/North America, and breeds and produces certain mentalities which view African education as one which is at the margins. Consequently, the mindset of the ‘captured intellectual’ is a serious obstacle to African-centred education. Hence, ‘intellectual captivity’ settles in the mind and becomes a field of colonial practice, transposed, and habituated in the African university to perpetuate Western thinking. In light of this, Wa Thiong’o (1986) made a strong case for the decolonisation of the mind. Similarly, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) observed that institutions of higher learning in Southern African countries like Zimbabwe should therefore engage in real epistemic transformation as a way of dealing with their colonial past and influence. However, the idea of what constitutes real educa- tional transformation seems to us different from decolonisation. This is so because the transformation of education involves transforming those who teach and the structural systems in which they teach.
While the essential tenets of ‘real transformation’ may speak to the social and political underpinning of decolonisation, we contend that the two need separation even while they borrow from each other. For Ndlovu-Gatsheni, real transformation of the university should try to blend Euro-American and African epistemologies, while simultaneously acknowledging the necessity to decolonise the university curriculum and pedagogies.
While the idea of blending sounds sympathetic to forms of knowledge which have been dominant over the years, blending does not necessarily mean balancing the two: colonial and African centred education. The idea of blending diverse ways of knowing emphasises the ‘incompleteness’ (Nyamnjoh 2017) of epistemic and knowledge forms in their totality.
Instead of assuming Western knowledge to be universal, it highlights the complex entanglement of power and knowledge in a Foucauldian sense. Thus, colonial and African centred education interact even while they collide in terms of ideological and epistemological foundations. This is what Foucault (1984) refers to as the ‘archaeology of knowledge’, i.e. forms of knowledge are embedded in different historical epochs. This reveals the centrality of the ‘loci of enunciation’ that is the contexts of knowledge production. Interestingly, in this ‘archaeology of knowledge’ production, local or
‘African’ knowledge and epistemologies remain marginalised and become what Foucault (1984) referred to as ‘subjected/subjugated knowledges’.
Colonial and post-colonial universities
Over the last few years, calls to decolonise the university and curricula (Maringira and Gukurume 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Zondi 2016; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Parker 2016; Hendricks 2018; Connell 2018; Le Grange 2016; Luckett 2016), including decolonising disciplines such as sociology (Go 2017; Connell 2018; Onwuzuruigbo 2018) have gained more traction. The University of Zimbabwe (UZ) is a colonial university, established in 1955 as in principle a non-racial island of teaching and learning in the racial Rhodesian state. The university was established through a royal charter as the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (UCRN), for all former British protectorates or colonies. In fact, the construction of UCRN was largely funded by the British govern- ment and Queen Elizabeth officially opened the UCRN in 1955. UZ was established through a special relationship with and as an affiliate college of the University of London (Gukurume 2018). In addition, the medical school at UZ was opened in 1963 as
an affiliate of the University of Birmingham. Although it was established as a non-racial institution (Gelfand 1978; Gukurume 2018), its student body and faculty were predomi- nantly white, with a few black and upwardly mobile students. However, at the dawn of independence, this racial demographic began to change rapidly. From the mid-1980s there was a steady increase in black student enrolment while many white students left to study at South African universities like Rhodes, the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand among other universities.
This racial shift in the composition of UZ’s student body occurred simultaneously with a shift in the composition of its academic and administrative staff. In a way this post-colonial shift could be viewed as the beginnings of the decolonisation of the university governance structures and faculty. However, some white academics in the department of sociology had already begun to teach content and adopt pedagogies that contested the hegemonic Sociology of the nineteenth century. For instance, in 1989, Angela Cheater, a lecturer in the department of sociology at UZ wrote that she radically altered her courses and deliberately ignored the sacred cows of traditional canons in sociology and social anthropology. By so doing, she prioritised her students’ needs first. She transformed content, pedagogy and ways of teaching sociology and social anthropology so as to address contemporary contextual realities and local experiences. Similarly, academics like Michael Bourdillon and Diana Patel also redesigned their courses in the 1980s. They sought to teach in a way that made sense to local students, needs, and realities. For instance, Bourdillon began teaching on and about the Shona people, cultures, and rituals, while Diana Patel’s course on social policy was designed in such a way that it engaged with local problems and realities. Against this background, it should thus be underscored that at UZ attempts at decolonisation and localisation are not new, and neither are they an entirely post-colonial phenomenon. In fact, during the final years of the Rhodesian regime academics like Terrance Ranger and other individuals advanced a pedagogy and curricula that was more radical and critical of the colonial state. A meticulous review of their course outlines reveals that they sought to teach a radical comparative sociology and historiography.
Given its British historical legacy, UZ had appropriated a colonial pedagogy and curriculum since its establishment. As such, like many other colonial African universities, UZ followed Euro-American construction of disciplines, research methods and practices of publication and recognition (Connell 2016). Similarly, its teaching and curricula have largely been constructed and modelled along that of universities from the north.
Indeed, decolonising Sociological knowledge has remained elusive at the university to date. In the first author’s correspondence with Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni, himself a former academic at UZ, Ndlovu-Gatsheni asserted that;
Zimbabwean academics are British at heart, having said that, the curriculum still desperately needs decolonisation. The success of Zimbabwe’s education is due not to decolonisation, but radical emulation of British colonial standards.
Indeed, UZ did not only inherit and maintain the British colonial standards but also the material structure of the university. To date, UZ still has student hostels named after Rhodesians such as Swinton, Manfred-Hodson, Carr-Saunders and lecturer theatres such as Beit Hall, and Luwellin lecture theatre among other names. This clearly reveals the continuities with the colonial architecture of knowledge. Indeed, Hendricks (2018) asserts that many African universities are ‘rigged spaces’ in the sense that they are (re)fashioned in the image DECOLONISING CURRICULA AND PEDAGOGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION 65