Political studies: An entry into ‘social science thought’ in the South African academy

Given the democratic breakthrough of 1994, the South African Humanities community is ideally placed to initiate public debates concerning which developmental path the country should take. However, while busying themselves with neo-liberal critiques (see Bond, 1999) of the ANC’s alleged 1994 class pact, it was the African National Congress (ANC) government that initiated a public debate on the notion of a developmental State. Part of this disconnection, however, emanates from the Humanities community’s inclination towards liberal critiques and so therefore its neo-liberal prescriptions, an inclination which the South African liberation movement is evidently uneasy with. More so, these critiques are no different from the Western Left’s critique of Global capitalism. To borrow from Nyoka, the deeper issue here is that “at the level of epistemology South African sociologists take the West as their main point of reference” (2013: 5).

This paper comprises three main parts. The first provides a descriptive overview of, specifically, the discipline of politics and, generally, the more systemic or ideological framework of the humanities in South Africa. However, writing about the humanities in general is too big an undertaking so this paper will specifically limit itself to the discipline of politics. The second part, which dovetails with the first, identifies some of the limits of this scholarship. The third and final part concerns itself with an epistemic turn occasioned by an increase in Black academics, albeit slowly.

Introduction to political studies at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) has historically begun with a mention of thinkers such as Aristotle, who was concerned with descriptive, or empirical, approaches to the study of politics. The other was Plato, who was concerned with theorizing about the ‘best’ form of government, the more normative questions involving politics and its concern with power. In many social science disciplines, these theorists, together with later thinkers such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Max Weber, John Rawls, Jeremy Bentham, Stuart Mill, Pierre Bourdieu, Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and many more, are erroneously etched in many South African students’ minds, at least in formerly white universities, as the founders of modern social science; effectively, these are positioned as the ‘classics’.

However, these ‘classics’ are underlined by ‘a spatial articulation of power’ (Mignolo, 2002: 2). That is to say, these men, and they mostly are white men, represent a geo-political locality, namely Euro-American power, yet occupy a ‘universal’ or canonical position in the academy, a possibility born out of coloniality which enveloped much of the Global South. To borrow from South African academic, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, coloniality is a ‘global power structure and central leitmotif of modernity that works through disciplining anti-systemic opposition forces… that began to expand into the non-Western world from 1492’ (2013: 199). In essence, this was and still is a violent imposition of Western modernity on African people, and so the canonical position of these classics masks this epistemic violence.

On the other hand, decolonial thought seeks to locate ‘the subject of enunciation’ (Grosfoguel, 2011: 15). Because knowledge is contingent on positionality, which is, itself, anchored by history and context, unravelling coloniality and uncovering the ‘subject of enunciation’ opens up space for a valid, universal, contestation of knowledge. Indeed, as coloniality unravels and its attendant canons are debunked, the ‘epistemic logic’ of South Africa catching up with the rest of the ‘world’ is interrupted. Without such a resistance, therefore, ‘Western interlocutors’ will continue to frame both the problem and its solution, as the current South African humanities curriculum encourages.

The danger with Western interlocutors, at least of the kinds that inadvertently or deliberately promote Western modernity, is that they proceed from an a-historical premise that Africa has no history prior to colonialism (see Mamdani, 1998); or, if it does, it is of no use to its contemporary problems. Some go as far as arguing that because current efforts to retrieve African history prior to coloniality involve reinterpreting this history through Western categories to suit contemporary struggles, African philosophy can therefore not escape the totalising effect of Western modernity (see Praeg, 2000). And so, inevitably, using conceptual tools of Western philosophy to critique Western modernity is evidently a contradictory exercise – the implied, and false, assumption being that Western modernity was and is a project independent of non-Western epistemologies.

Inevitably

the underlying theoretical prisms which underpin Western interlocutors, their attendant methodological tools and epistemic lenses on which questions are framed reflect this coloniality of knowledge. Subsequently, it is assumed that the problem is failure of democracy, deficit of good governance, one-party state systems, kleptocracy, lack of free market economies, weak market integration and weak civil society’. (SAAPS, 2015)

The framing, therefore, is diagnosed according to Western epistemic thought.

In light of the above, South African academic, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, asks:

[H]ow can an African struggle for liberation and freedom that emerged as revolt against the inimical processes of slavery, Eurocentrism, imperialism, colonialism and coloniality, end up being celebrated in terms fashioned by liberalism and neo-liberalism cascading from European and American bourgeois revolutions that never questioned the edifice of Eurocentric modernity. (2013: 200)

To move away from this coloniality, from these theoretical prisms that form part of Western modernity, an African-centred curriculum which takes its departure of African history from before 1492 has to occupy a central position both in undergraduate and postgraduate study programs. However, part of the problem troubling the humanities academic community is that this community has been occupied by, in the main, white academics who take the West as their point of reference. As a result, Nyoka reminds us that ‘it has been suggested that the social sciences in South Africa thrive on essentially racist paradigms: that the black majority are either spoken of or spoken for (Sitas, 1998: 13). Therefore, for Mafeje, the epistemological basis for the social sciences has always been imperialistic (2013: 3).

To turn this around, to move away from a Western-centric politics discipline, the academic community is in need of academics who take Africa as their point of reference: Black academics, also, because they stand to bring in a set of alternative, as well as subaltern, life experiences. However, the increase in Black academics, in and of itself, does not mean a resistance to Western epistemic thought nor does it mean that those experiences will necessarily be brought to the surface. The contribution of Black academics arises rather because they occupy a position which Henry Giroux (1992) articulates as ‘border pedagogy’; where “power is inscribed differently on the body, culture, history, space, land and psyche” (in Ahluwalia, 2001: 70). As such, they have the potential to articulate what Walter Mignolo (2002: 72) later argues to be ‘border thinking’, where one speaks from the viewpoint of the ‘subaltern’ or the colonial difference while appropriating Western categories. In this schema, the former is a position and the latter is a discourse. To borrow from Ahluwalia, therefore, “the centrality of resistance does not entail a return to a past essentialised identity, for there is no possibility of such a return. Rather it is the continual reconstitution of identity under different circumstances which becomes important” (2001:71).

Inevitably, this has the potential to widen the diversity of intellectual thought. Thinkers such as Mahmood Mamdani, Frantz Fanon, Archie Mafeje, Ben Magubane and Steve Biko need to be growing entries in the discipline of politics across a number of South African universities. Certainly, Fanon, Biko and Mamdani have begun to take up their place in a number of curriculums in the discipline of politics. The “Thinking Africa” postgraduate project at Rhodes University offers reading of Mamdani, Fanon and Biko; at the University of Johannesburg a second-year course titled “Political Thought” offers the same kind of reading material, while in the new politics course titled South African transition to democracy, Mahmood Mamdani and Pallo Jordan are prescribed as essential reading.

Increasing the pool of Black academics, therefore, is not only about widening the diversity of intellectual thought; fundamentally, the pejorative narrative surrounding the idea of Africa and the epistemic marginalization that it has historically occupied in the South African humanities academy has to be confronted. For his part, Mamdani (2013), in his paper titled “Beyond Nuremburg: The historical significance of the Post-Apartheid Transition in South Africa”, reinterprets South Africa’s transition. Having observed the judicially based Nuremburg trials, he argues that the real triumph of the CODESA process resides in the fact that it reformulated the political community; that is, both the perpetrator and the victim are considered survivors of the horrors of apartheid, even though the former are beneficiaries of apartheid.

Contrary to liberal critiques concerning South Africa’s transition (see Bond, 1999 and Marais, 2001), or the ‘peace’ narrative surrounding the transition, even though thousands of Black people lost their lives during that time, Mamdani approaches the transition from a radically different point of departure. And this is one way in which the academy can widen its knowledge base and so be able to offer historically and contextually relevant, if not illuminating, solutions to the country’s and continent’s problems. And this is an important intervention in constituting alternative epistemic thought and resisting the dominance of the local manifests of Western epistemic thought in South Africa.

This paper has provided an overview of, specifically, the discipline of politics and, generally, that of the humanities in South Africa. Through Mamdani, it has argued that the limits of Western-centric approaches to intellectual thought in the academy has foreclosing effects for thinkers who seek to understand the country and the continent it occupies. And so one of the ways to avoid these pitfalls is to increase the pool of, generally, African-centred academics in the humanities, but specifically, Black academics. In its conclusion, the paper has specifically focused on those academics, promoting appreciation of a position and discourse that makes “visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from the right and the left, hid and suppressed” (Mignolo, 2002: 66).