What a new university in Africa is doing to decolonise social sciences. By Jess Auerbach
It’s not often that
you get to create a new university from scratch: space, staff – and curriculum.
But that’s exactly what we’re doing in Mauritius, at one of Africa’s newest
higher education institutions. And decoloniality is central to our work. I am a
member of the Social Science Faculty at the African Leadership University. Part of our
task is to build a canon, knowledge, and a way of knowing.
This is happening
against the backdrop of a
movement by South African students to decolonise their
universities; Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; and in the
context of a much deeper
history of national reimagination across Africa and
the world. With this history in
mind our faculty is working towards what we consider a decolonial social
science curriculum. We’ve adopted seven commitments to help us meet this goal,
and which we hope will shift educational discourse in a more equitable and
representative direction.
Seven commitments
#1: By 2019,
everything we assign our students will be open source: Like most
institutions of higher education in Africa (and across much of the
world) ALU’s library is limited. Students often deal with this by flouting copyright
and piracy laws and illegally downloading material. We don’t want to train our
students to become habitual law breakers. Nor do we want them to accept
second-tier access to commodified knowledge.
Our aspiration is that
by 2019 everything we assign in our programme will be open source. This will be
achieved by building relationships with publishers, writers and industry
leaders, and negotiating partnerships for equitable access to knowledge. This will
ensure that a new generation of thinkers is equipped with the analytic tools
they need. It will also move towards undoing centuries of knowledge
extraction from Africa to the world that has too often taken place
with little benefit to the continent itself.
#2: Language beyond
English: Students who read,
write and think in English often forget that knowledge is produced, consumed,
and tested in other tongues.
We commit to assigning students at least one
non-English text per week. This will be summarised and discussed in class, even
when students are unable to read it themselves. Our current class comprises of
students from 16 countries who between them speak 29 languages. English is the
only language they all share. Exposing students to scholarly, policy, and
real-world work that’s not in English means they are constantly reminded how
much they don’t know. As we grow, students will also be expected to learn languages
from the continent: both those that originated in colonialism (Arabic, English,
French, Portuguese), and those that are indigenous such as isiZulu, Wolof, or
Amharic.
#3: 1:1 Student
exchange ratio: Having
cross-cultural experiences, particularly as an undergraduate, has become an important
part of demonstrating work readiness and social competency in a
“globalised” world. But scholars have shown that
globalisation is often uneven. Strong currencies enable such experiences, so
those who benefit usually come from Europe and North America. This has had huge
implications for higher education, where “student exchange” usually takes place
at a ratio of 10:1 – ten Americans or Norwegians, for instance, exploring South
African townships, for one Ghanaian who might make it to the Eiffel Tower.
In Social Sciences the
body is the research tool and the mind the laboratory in which experiments are
undertaken. We support as much exchange as possible across the broader
institution. But our commitment when it comes to student exchange is strictly
1:1 – one ALU student goes abroad for every one exchange student we welcome
into our classroom.
#4: Text is not
enough: Africa’s long
intellectual history has only recently begun to be recorded and stored through
text. If students are exposed only to written sources, their knowledge is
largely constrained to the eras of colonisation and post-coloniality.
To instil a much
deeper knowledge and more sensitive awareness to context and content, we are
committed to assigning non-textual sources of history, culture, and belief:
studying artefacts, music, advertising, architecture, food, and more. Each week
students engage with at least one such source to attend to the world around
them in a more careful way.
#5: We cannot work
alone: Social scientists often
assign themselves the role of deconstructor: unpacking power, race, capitalism
and consumption with glorious self-righteous abandon. My colleagues and I
recognise that we cannot work alone, and require our students to play a central
role in contributing to the university’s outputs.
We design our curricula
in such a way that students are compelled to create, iterate, work with
feedback, apply that feedback, and critically appraise it. We want them to
collaborate with as wide a range of other people as possible, stretching them
to use language and the tools of analysis that they acquire in their training
with real world implication. For example, students recently worked with our
legal, policy, and learning teams to write the university’s statement on diversity.
#6: Producers, not
only consumers: The students
who choose to come to the university bring with them tremendous insight and
experience. These are often developed and augmented by spending time in the
quintessential multi-cultural environment of the campus and dormitories. That
allows certain fusions, tensions and commonalities to emerge much more clearly
than they might in other places.
Working and living
within this environment, it’s essential that students start contributing to
discourses surrounding Africa as early as possible. It might take years to know
how to write a publishable scholarly article – but an op-ed, podcast or YouTube
video is not quite so demanding. This allows students to get accustomed to
their voices contributing to and shaping public dialogue in and about Africa.
#7: Ethics above
all: Social Sciences both
reflect and shape the world. Our programme, then, is committed to the principle
of “do no harm”, and also to be an impetus for good. Students will learn to
think and act to the highest ethical standards, and to feel confident in asking
the same of others working with them. This is essential in bringing into being
a world in which Africa’s place is both central – as it has arguably always
been to global capitalism – and also respected.
Collaboration: It’s early days at ALU. There’s a lot we still
need to do, and it will take time for us to build the institution into what we
collectively envision. These seven commitments are an important foundation for
the Social Sciences. We’re inviting responses and collaborations through our blog, through
email or through collaborations with our students.
