Chapter 2 - Between Transformation, Deracialisation and Decolonisation

Summary

Today, these black men have fixed their gaze upon us and our gaze is thrown back in our eyes, black torches, in their turn, light the world, and our white heads are only small lanterns balanced in the wind.

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus

This chapter was written in the first decade after South Africa attained democracy and began to debate the making of a post-apartheid humanities and social sciences through the language in use at the time: transformation and deracialisation. My intervention through this chapter was to ask why transformation was understood as deracialisation, rather than decolonisation, and to explore the stakes in the difference between these terms. While decolonisation – as an epistemic project – is now a common way of addressing the challenge facing knowledge production, this was not the case in the mid-1990s or the early 2000s in post-apartheid South African debates on higher education. This chapter revisits a set of debates in South African scholarship, particularly debates that unfolded in South African historiography, to make an argument for why decolonisation has to accompany efforts to deracialise the production of knowledge.

THE PROBLEM OF ‘THE PROBLEM’

Debates about academic transformation have been present in the South African academy for decades. With the signals that a negotiated settlement was imminent, these debates took on a more policy-oriented tenor as the possibility of having to govern the process of transforming South African society drew closer on the horizon. It is worth revisiting the discussion on how the challenge of addressing transformation in the academy presented itself. Rather than presenting an exhaustive overview, I am interested in exploring the continuities and discontinuities in how the ‘problem of apartheid’ and knowledge production were and continue to be interpreted: what the key concepts are; what the contours of the constraints and possibilities are; what the horizons of the aspirations and the targets of the critical gaze are. More than three decades ago, the South African sociologist, Ivan Evans, set out the challenge in stark, yet now familiar terms: ‘The most obvious internal feature of the South African academic … [is] its disproportionately white character in a country whose “community folk” are overwhelmingly and almost exclusively black.’