While the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements have ebbed, the desperately-needed debate on university transformation which they ignited has continued to rage. Its latest flashpoint has been the December 2018 report of the Curriculum Change Working Group (CCWG), which was convened by the University of Cape Town (UCT) to advance a conversation on making curricula more socially relevant. This essay is a response to that report offered from the perspective of former social science students of UCT.

Our own time spent at the university, while not devoid of inspiring moments, left us with an strong sense that it had not kept pace with the kind of transformation that should have been required of it. Cape Liberalism’s hegemony seemed undisturbed, while critical ideas and curricula were confined to the margins and far too little had been done to include black and poor South Africans. We thus reacted with enormous enthusiasm to the emergence of a movement arraigned against institutional racism and calling for the “decolonization” of the campus.

We have, however, become increasingly disturbed at the particular vision of decolonization that has taken hold among influential representatives of that movement. In this view, decolonization collapses quickly into civilizational binaries: conflict is viewed as originating in the inherent oppressiveness of ideas and subjectivities associated with “western modernity,” while solutions turn on promoting ideologies that are authentically “black” or “African.”

The nativist impulses that run through this way of thinking have diverse roots, some tracing to local nationalist traditions, but ironically their main inspiration is an intellectual movement that formed part of the postmodern turn in western universities, known as postcolonialism. Postcolonialism is a notoriously diffuse body of thought, but its central thread is the contention that western discourses, chiefly those linked to the Enlightenment, serve functions of social control and hence cannot be used to either understand or liberate populations that have suffered imperial domination.

Postcolonialism began in comparative literature departments but has spread much further afield, becoming and remaining enormously influential in history and social science. Until recently its influence within South Africa has been marginal, but that looks set to change dramatically in the wake of the student protests. To some extent the student’s affinity for postcolonialism is easy to account for. The theory makes the claim that hierarchies of race and gender are embedded into certain ideologies and bodies of knowledge as a result of their historical origins. Those ideologies continue to function as a major fulcrum of power—legitimating certain views and subjectivities and subtly excluding others.

Postcolonialism thus provides an apparently felicitous tool for understanding the informal and implicit—but nonetheless invidious—forms that racism often assumes at institutions like UCT. Moreover, by directing much of its energy at the symbolic instantiations of racism—as a postcolonial approach would advise—the student movement has become a cause celebré for postcolonial researchers abroad and at home.

Yet like some strands of identity politics, postcolonialism tends to disconnect symbolic and discursive concerns from material realities. This may account for why its diffusion, while widespread, has also been highly uneven—concentrated much more in elite universities. To the extent it has gained traction on poorer campuses, it seems to have done so by co-mingling more heavily with vernacular ideologies like Black Consciousness and Pan-Africanism. But since elite universities have tended to dominate in the coverage and outward representation of student politics—a source of much internal strife—postcolonialism has become disproportionately influential on the way decolonization is being articulated in spaces of power.

Arguably the subordination of the politics of decolonization to the academic agenda of postcolonialism reaches a new extreme in the CCWG report. The working group was given fairly broad terms of reference—to document and take forward existing processes of curriculum change, to provide an “enabling” environment for debate and ultimately to offer a framework to guide ongoing transformation. Official commissions of this kind tend to douse themselves in legalese and to offer findings which, however substantively political, make heavy overtures to objectivity and inclusiveness for all “stakeholders.”

One can’t help but admire the chutzpah with which the CCWG have absolved themselves of those dreary conventions. Their report is nothing short of a full-blooded manifesto for postcolonialism and its particular brand of decolonization.

Its first half is mainly devoted to an abstruse theorization of the historical significance of the student movement and the nature of power at the university, drawing on a set of metaphysical categories like the “coloniality of being” and the “coloniality of power.” This is laid out through a series of lengthy excurses into the theories of postcolonial luminaries like Nelson Moldonarro Torres, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. The finer points of this discussion are admittedly hard to appreciate since they are encased within a nearly inscrutable philosophical jargon, but the broad thrust seems familiar enough from postcolonialism’s standard repertoire: UCT is viewed as an institution molded by the “epistemic structures of Empire,” which valorize western modes of thinking while “marginalizing” and “erasing” both the subjects and forms of knowledge perceived to be outside its own canon.

Most of the rest of the report describes the work of the CCWG during its 18-month tenure, which mostly consisted of hosting a set of decolonial fora and seminars by prominent postcolonial academics. It concludes with various recommendations which are really a series of broad injunctions to be more mindful of the power relations embedded in knowledge production at the university.

Needless to say this approach has proved controversial. The report has been met with a fusillade of angry responses, mostly from liberals and conservatives who have intoned against its unregenerate relativism and crude “race-thinking.” Regrettably, critiques that begin from a position of support for progressive transformation at UCT have been much less audible, leaving postcolonialism to fill a growing vacuum on the left of the political space on campuses. We hope here to correct for this.

Since the CCWG report is so forthright about its own ideological commitments, it provides a welcome opportunity to evaluate the role of postcolonial theory in the broader movement for decolonization, particularly its more radical wing. We will argue that its current influence is undeserved—postcolonialism offers neither a realistic means of getting to decolonization nor an appealing vision of what it entails.

The considerable following it has already amassed owes in part to its having successfully posed as the heir of a radical tradition that runs through Biko to anti-colonial leaders like Fanon, Cabral and Du Bois before them. Our first aim is to show that this is largely a fiction: postcolonialism’s real point of origin is firmly western. We make this point not simply to highlight the irony of postcolonialism’s own fetishization of authenticity, but because we think its real biography is rather instructive. Postmodernism, of which postcolonialism is a close offshoot, took root in a period of unremitting defeat and demoralization of the Left, but its own effect was to entrench rather than alleviate that defeat. It acted either to belittle the struggle for radical social change entirely, or to shunt it into fruitless, mostly academic, avenues.

There is every reason to believe that postcolonialism’s effect in South Africa will be similar, certainly if the CCWG report is a reliable bellwether. We will try to show that the CCWG succumbs to a narrow academic tribalism—neglecting the practical support it could have offered to the movement for curriculum change in the name of advancing a misguided theory that mystifies the real causes of institutional racism and material inequalities on campuses and in the wider society.