Pub Date : 2018-06-01DOI: 10.22160/22035184/aras-2018-39-1/53-80
Leon Mwamba Tshimpaka
In South Africa, the question of whether a Western education system can lead to the achievement of equality among citizens is quite a problematic one. Thus, the question that has since the advent of the post-apartheid South Africa been a subject of contestation among scholars, is that of, how can the higher education system that was founded on colonial and apartheid white supremacy and hegemony be transformed into a transformative tool that addresses inequalities characterising South African society in the democratic era? This article seeks to provide a de-colonial perspective of how the higher education system of the post-apartheid South Africa can be transformed to address different developmental needs of a heterogeneous population. The purpose is not to dictate answers, but to create avenues of (re)thinking the knowledge production in the South African higher education sector in the quest for an equal and inclusive society. The article's key argument is that a higher education system such as that in South Africa which was founded on colonial and apartheid ideologies, interests and agendas needs a de-colonial transformation in order to respond to the developmental needs, challenges and aspirations of its heterogeneous population. After an engagement with the myths and assumptions of a decolonised world that conceals coloniality of knowledge, this article, delves into the South African higher education system and the quest for equality that confronts the country. The need to 'unthink' and 'unlearn' present forms of imagining higher education in South Africa is emphasised.
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Pub Date : 2018-06-01DOI: 10.22160/22035184/ARAS-2018-39-1/39-52
Martin Klein
Bruce Gilley has done the Africanist community a favor. In defending colonial rule, he forces us to define what colonial rule was really like. The problem is that he gets his facts wrong. He is right about a few things. For example, African nationalists often did not have massive support, colonial rule ended the slave trade, and Africans participated in colonial rule. That participation was because colonial rule was weak and under-funded. That explains its reliance on African intermediaries and its brutality. The notion that colonial rule was based on universal values is contradicted by the harshness of the conquest and its treatment of dissent. It relied heavily on forced labor. Colonial rule was racist. Colonial rulers ignored famines, and actually did little for health and education. Gilley sees colonial rule as training for self-government, but in most of Africa, there was little training and reluctance until the very end to think about self-government. Gilley ends with a program for recolonization which is in the interest of neither the former colonizers or the colonized. Particularly absurd is the notion of reengaging Portugal, the worst of the colonial powers.
{"title":"A Critique of Colonial Rule: A Response to Bruce Gilley","authors":"Martin Klein","doi":"10.22160/22035184/ARAS-2018-39-1/39-52","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22160/22035184/ARAS-2018-39-1/39-52","url":null,"abstract":"Bruce Gilley has done the Africanist community a favor. In defending colonial rule, he forces us to define what colonial rule was really like. The problem is that he gets his facts wrong. He is right about a few things. For example, African nationalists often did not have massive support, colonial rule ended the slave trade, and Africans participated in colonial rule. That participation was because colonial rule was weak and under-funded. That explains its reliance on African intermediaries and its brutality. The notion that colonial rule was based on universal values is contradicted by the harshness of the conquest and its treatment of dissent. It relied heavily on forced labor. Colonial rule was racist. Colonial rulers ignored famines, and actually did little for health and education. Gilley sees colonial rule as training for self-government, but in most of Africa, there was little training and reluctance until the very end to think about self-government. Gilley ends with a program for recolonization which is in the interest of neither the former colonizers or the colonized. Particularly absurd is the notion of reengaging Portugal, the worst of the colonial powers.","PeriodicalId":42732,"journal":{"name":"Australasian Review of African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48994082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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