Chapter 3 - Provincialising Decolonial Theory: Comparing the Legacies of Colonialism in Africa and Latin America

Summary

In March 2015, student protests erupted at UCT – a prominent, formerly whites-only university in South Africa. They focused on removing a statue of the imperial mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes from its magisterial position on the campus. The moment and the Rhodes Must Fall movement quickly spread to other campuses across the country, finding resonance in other parts of the world as well. While South Africa had formally ended apartheid in 1994, the targeting of the Rhodes statue signalled that for this generation of students, the end of apartheid did not mean the end of colonialism. Colonialism as a problem in society and in the university was identified as an ongoing one, and therefore necessitated anticolonial political intervention to decolonise knowledge in the university. If earlier critical moments in the university found succour variously in Marxist, African anticolonial thought and postcolonial theory, this moment enabled some to introduce into the South African debates ‘decolonial theory’, a particular school of intellectual critique that initially emerged from scholars in Latin America and its diasporas. The movements referred to here – in Latin America, those focusing on the work of scholars associated with the theoretical programme called Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD), and the African movements such as the Africa Decolonial Research Network (Adern) – shared a concern with what the chapter describes as ‘the problem of colonialism’, expressed in this particular instance as the wish to undo the legacy of colonial education. The emphasis on ‘the problem of colonialism’ here is a way of drawing attention to how calls for the decolonisation of knowledge interpret the problem that is the target for these political interventions.

While previous generations may have turned to the pioneering writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, C.J. Chinweizu or Ali Mazrui, ‘the problem of colonialism’, as it registers in contemporary theoretical and political discourses of critique emerging from significant parts of Africa, is more influenced by the Latin American MCD conception of colonialism. This theorisation by Latin American decolonial theorists, taken up by some scholars in Africa, places an emphasis on assimilation as the essential feature of colonial epistemic violence.