In an earlier post, I drew attention to conflicts within the Philosophy Society of South Africa (PSSA) that have arisen due to efforts on the part of philosophy students and faculty in South Africa to decolonize philosophy curricula and increase the number of black faculty and students in philosophy departments, as well as to improve leadership representation within the PSSA itself.
In the Discrimination and Disadvantage Facebook group today, Daniel Brunson posted an article from Quartz that provides updated, more comprehensive, information about the struggles within philosophy in South Africa. Entitled "Philosophy is the New Battleground in South Africa's Fight Against Colonialism," the article by Olivia Goldhill focuses in particular on Tony Shabangu, a black lecturer and Ph.D. student in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg, and David Benatar, a white professor and the chair of philosophy at the University of Cape Town, the latter of which has, in many respects, been at the centre of these uprisings.
Here is an excerpt from the Quartz article:
To study philosophy in South Africa today is to study a series of pronouncements from white, European men. Tony Shabangu, a philosophy lecturer and doctoral student at University of Johannesburg, has read them all. He’s looking for something new.
Six years ago, Shabangu was writing his master’s honors thesis on Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement that God is dead. It was the prestigious thing to do. But Shabangu, who comes from what he describes as “the hood” of Kwa-Zulu Natal, Pietermaritzburg, struggled to see the point of writing yet another article on the over-studied Western philosopher. It was difficult to feel enthusiastic about a thinker who had opposed the abolition of slavery in the United States and claimed that slaves came from “useless and harmful stock.”
Then, in 2012, Shabangu’s father died. This personal crisis led him to question his priorities. “It felt like I was doing philosophy for nobody’s sake, for nothing’s sake,” he says. And so he switched his focus to African philosophy.
Though he lives in South Africa, this was a fairly radical choice. To judge from the syllabi of many South African university philosophy courses, African philosophy simply doesn’t exist. And, for growing numbers of South African students, their universities’ Euro-centric presentation of philosophy is not a tangential product of colonialism, but core to the imperialist mission. Philosophy views itself as the science of thinking; it promises to teach students how to construct perfectly logical arguments. Colonization, too, controls and shapes the thoughts of all those under it. Under apartheid, which lasted from 1948 until it was dismantled in the early 1990s, South Africa’s education system was explicitly designed to justify white people’s domination. The remnants of this intensely racist system still run through much of South African schooling: Students are predominantly taught in English, rather than in local languages such as Zulu or Sesotho, and “African studies” is a small subsection of most universities. And philosophy, in South Africa, is the domain of white men.
‘Where’s African philosophy? We came all the way to Africa, where are the African philosophers?’But Shabangu says there’s growing demand for change, both from students in his country and visiting scholars. “More and more people would be like, ‘Where’s African philosophy? We came all the way to Africa, where are the African philosophers?’” he says, lifting his arms in an exaggerated shrug. Dressed in faded grey jeans, a baggy soccer jersey, and a baseball cap, he has none of the pretension or buttoned-up demeanor typical of academics. When he’s not smiling, he looks on the verge of a grin, the corners of his mouth tugging upwards in easy humor. He sees a very different future for philosophy in South Africa. “We have more than enough people willing to do this,” he says.
Where’s the African philosophy?
The dearth of African ideas studied in South Africa came to national attention in 2015 as students protested under the Rhodes Must Fall campaign. Students called for universities to stop honoring imperial leaders, to teach African thought in African languages, and to get more African professors on staff.
Since then, Shabangu’s department at the University of Johannesburg has shown signs of changing. There’s a lot of work to do. While more than three-quarters of Johannesburg is black, nine of 12 philosophy lecturers in Shabangu’s department are white. The vast majority of the thinkers studied are white Europeans.
On the upside, Shabangu sees an institutional desire to change. One of his professors, for example, now allows students to ask questions in African languages rather than insisting on English. “The change you see even in the way the students express themselves, the feeling in their answers, is amazing,” says Shabangu. “It’s very liberating.”
The process of incorporating more African philosophy into the curriculum isn’t simply a matter of swapping out the Western canon for an established set of African thinkers with equivalent honors and credentials. For centuries, academics have overlooked African ideas at the expense of Western ones, and so much of transforming the subject involves considering the question of African philosophy and how to relate it to colonialism. The term “decolonization” describes the attempt to address and rectify the lingering effects of colonial rule, and has been applied in all manner of governmental policies and across academia. In philosophy, the process involves reclaiming African philosophical ideas and rejecting unquestioned Western concepts.
Goldhill's article in Quartz is here.
posted by Shelley
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