Colonial Structures of Knowledge Making: The Micropolitics of Epistemic Conflict in the University of Cape Town
By: Lakshmi Bose
In 2015, a student movement called #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) erupted at the University of Cape Town (UCT) which both exposed and demanded the end of the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism in contemporary South Africa. This movement spread across the nation, eventually leading to a series of other movements including #FeesMustFall (#FMF) and #PatriarchyMustFall. Taken together, these movements challenged the ‘liberal’ foundations of post-apartheid South Africa by interrogating the relationship of the state to Higher Education (HE), the value and desirability of representative democracy, the ethnocratic legacies of the apartheid state particularly within elite HE spaces, the need for a decolonised university, the renewed securitisation of HE and student protest, the gendered dimensions of student activism, and the submission of ‘universal’ HE values to neoliberal logic (Bose, 2021; Cini, 2019; Kamga, 2019; Naidoo, 2016).
While unable to overturn the critiqued structural conditions, these movements nonetheless produced ‘epistemological ruptures’ that shifted the possibilities of what could be politically claimed, aspired to, and achieved within the context of HE (Platzky Miller, 2020). Key features of #RMF and #FMF were critical analyses of the primacy of historic knowledge production structures of apartheid South Africa (eugenics and biometrics) that led to the production and maintenance of political and material inequalities. These analyses led to a political emphasis on the role of epistemic injustice in ongoing nation-building efforts through “epi-colonial inheritances”, that is, “the features of coloniality that pervade and supersede systems and relations of power” (Kessi et al, 2020 p.271). However, these emerging perspectives on historic and epistemic injustice, and their causational relationship to contemporary racial inequalities, became a key point of conflict amongst students and faculty members at UCT. Typical of an ethnocratic state, these conflicts frequently revolved around a set of questions about whether such inequalities existed at all (i.e. ‘were Black students really policed more brutally’?), whether existing inequalities were a result of epi-colonial structures or an apparently functioning meritocracy (i.e. ‘why is there a smaller percentage of Black students at elite HE institutions’?), and whether such inequalities should be rectified by affirmative action or individual dedication (i.e. ‘should historically underprivileged racial groups be given adjusted entrance standards to compensate for lack of intergenerational cultural and socioeconomic capital, or should they study more hours’?).
These conflicts, how to solve them, and how sociological knowledge could both provide answers and the basis for shoring up political power, provides a groundswell for comprehending HE as resting on a post-colonial frontier and as a battlescape in which the fraught and paradoxical relationship between truth and politics is played out (Arendt, 1967). In what follows, through two examples I seek to illustrate the ways in which #FMF and the subsequent the post-revolutionary spaces were able to disrupt dominant ‘scientific knowledge cultures’ (Bacevic, 2017) at UCT, and how they were rearticulated through micropolitical contestations over notions of a just HE sector amongst student pressure groups. Importantly, these examples reveal larger conflicts and tensions between groups over the very practices and meanings attributed to nation-building, populist appropriations of historic and geopolitical grievances (Çapan and Zarakol, 2017), and the “performativity of knowledge claims” (Bacevic, 2019; 2021 p.395) as they live within HE activist communities.
As questions of epistemic injustice emerged through #RMF and #FMF, particularly in relation to UCT as an elite HE institution, additional discussions arose over what counts as knowledge, who determines it, and why. In a meeting debating these issues, a student proposed a new ‘Fallism’ as a solution to the Eurocentric domination of the curriculum, the denial of the validity of witchcraft and traditional belief systems in the academy, and the universalisation of Western knowledge systems: #ScienceMustFall (Ally and August, 2018; Heever, 2016). In a political call for Africanisation, the student explained, “Science as a whole is a product of western modernity and the whole thing should be scratched off. Especially in Africa”, citing Western science’s inability to explain, for example, black magic (Henderson, 2016). Importantly, these arguments for decolonising the curriculum were based upon a legacy of decolonial thinkers and theories that were repopularised amongst students during the protests including, for example, Fanon, Cesaire, and Biko. According to student activists, these claims catalysed a mixture of outrage, ridicule, political support for HE decolonisation, and for both the rejection and adoption of the claimed dichotomy between Western and African modes of thought.
The second example is a reaction to an institutionalised response to the student demands to decolonise HE. In 2016, a UCT Curriculum Change Working Group (CCWG) was set up to address the epistemological complaints of #RMF and #FMF, resulting in a public 64-page Curriculum Change Framework delineating a set of recommendations to launch ‘meaningful curriculum change’ at UCT. Underpinned by a utilisation of decolonial and critical race theories, the Framework sought to instate a required core curriculum, and a knowledge culture of epistemic plurality which “should be deployed to re-centre what it means to be African and to remember what it means to be human” (CCWG, 2018 p.59). The Framework was heavily criticised by some faculty and students in a series of public letters and Twitter threads – naming it ‘exclusive’, ‘against academic freedom’, and guilty of promoting a “hierarchy of epistemic authority” based on positionality (Hull, 2018). Additionally, Progress, a student pressure group (a group of self-professed ‘true’ liberals), in a critique of the shifting knowledge cultures, complained in a blog post: “One of the lies told by radicals at UCT is that ‘racism is all about ‘power structures’”, citing the overriding dominance of radical ideologies in lectures, at the expense of conservative, liberal or capitalist politics. In particular, Progress claimed to respond to an encroaching culture of identity politics on campus, often attributed to the populist tactics of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) student activists, that aimed to remake the image of the legitimate citizen in the image of the Black radical comrade (Bose, 2021). Their core complaint was against the transition of a ‘Leftist ideology’ into a form of institutionalised truth with the performative power to shift campus culture and material reality.
Together, both examples speak to wider contestations over “who has authority and sovereignty to name the current situation” (Heever, 2016 p.259), to claim knowledge as political truth, and “what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth” (Arendt, 1967 p.2) in a post-colonial frontier space. Such responses elucidate a public sphere still tainted with the “stubborness of race” (Walker, 2020), that is torn between rejecting the fictious premise of race or utilising it as a device to shore up national power in a polity still fractured by the traumatic marks of imperial and apartheid legacies of epistemic violence. Thus, the proposed solutions are alternately found in the realm of knowledge rectification, or in the dreams of a post-racial society beyond an obsession with ‘race science’ – in remembrance or forgetting. Ultimately, such conflicts are underpinned by varying assumptions on the ‘performative power of knowledge’ (Bacevic, 2021) and scholarly positioning, yet nonetheless remains focused on sociological knowledge as a key battleground for reorienting the future of HE and its associated knowledge politics. How, then, in an era often characterised as ‘post-truth’, is the realm of knowledge production intertwined with competing notions of politics, truth, justice and lies as it is articulated as a nation-building tool?
Further, how are shifting knowledge cultures and ‘epistemic policing’ (Bacevic, 2017) reflecting wider political conflicts over sovereignty, identity, the history of citizenship and their associated meanings? How do such knowledge claims shape the public sphere and the weight of epistemic authority in legitimising political aspirations to power? What claims to freedom and the right to ‘ugly freedoms’ (Anker, 2021) underpin the performativity of knowledge claims within contentious student politics? In other words, how does the refusal of pressure groups to share the same plane of reality shift the ‘conditions of felicity’ – that is, the conditions by which words have the power to act – (Austen in Bacevic, 2021) and shift the epistemological ground of political promise and 21st century notions of popular power and the ‘people’?
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