Academics must critically engage with their own assumptions if the drive to decolonise scholarship in African universities is to be successful, according to a former vice-chancellor.

Ihron Rensburg, who led the University of Johannesburg between 2006 and 2017, in a Times Higher Education interview?called for a ¡°bottom-up, academic-based movement, which sees individual academics really seize the moment, really step up and get their agency back¡±.

He was speaking during a visit to London to deliver the annual Higher Education Policy Institute lecture, in which how African universities could end the Western dominance of their curricula and instead adopt a teaching and research agenda characterised by ¡°global African perspectives and approaches¡±.

This goal ¨C which was put into sharp focus in the wake of the campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town¡¯s campus in 2015 ¨C would not be reached simply by adding a wider range of authors to reading lists or offering local case studies, said Professor Rensburg.

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Instead, the veteran of South Africa¡¯s anti-apartheid movement ¨C who spent much of the late 1980s detained without trial for his work with the United Democratic Front and spent spells of up to nine months in solitary confinement ¨C said that it demanded ¡°self-decolonisation¡±.

¡°Just because I¡¯m an academic or an intellectual, I can¡¯t just wake up one morning and say ¡®I¡¯m decolonised¡¯,¡± Professor Rensburg said. ¡°The first step is self-decolonisation. We carry the myths and misrepresentations propagated by colonialism within us, whether you are African or English, and we have carried them for generations.¡±

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In his Hepi lecture, Professor Rensburg called on academics to ¡°excavate and re-engage critically¡± with ¡°dismissed, suppressed, and denigrated global African philosophies, sciences and historicities¡±.

While the West has for centuries asserted the undisputed superiority of its philosophy and thought, this is a myth and a legacy of empire, said Professor Rensburg, who highlighted that Africa¡¯s oldest educational institutions far pre-date Europe¡¯s first universities.

By also critically re-engaging with Western scholarship and separating out ¡°that which is myth from that which is substance¡±, African academics could create syntheses?that would allow them to, for example, ¡°demonstrate a global African approach to engineering and mathematics¡±, Professor Rensburg said.

However, Professor Rensburg told THE that colonial myth-making and its destruction of the cultures, traditions, sciences and arts of the colonised would take a long time to unpick.

¡°We have to put those misrepresentations and myths in front of us and engage critically with them¡­we also have to excavate that which they have buried,¡± he explained.

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Professor Rensburg said that the process was not about spending breaks simply reading. ¡°It is a far more detailed and substantive process and hopefully at the end of that ¨C though there is no end of the decolonisation process ¨C one is far more confident and courageous about the difficult questions and issues,¡± he said.

The voice of students would remain important, while dialogue would take place between ¡°colleagues who will champion the cause¡±, Professor Rensburg argued.

However, decolonisation could not be led through ¡°edicts from above¡±, according to Professor Rensburg, who said that vice-chancellors and politicians might be able to achieve short-term change but would be unable to effect long-term transformation.

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¡°We don¡¯t want new regulations, we don¡¯t want a new accountability mechanism and we don¡¯t want the minister to say ¡®I want an annual report¡¯ ¨C although that is the default,¡± he said. ¡°The longer and further away politicians stay from the academic project, the better.¡±

Professor Rensburg added that, although his advice was mainly directed at South African academics, it could and should be applied around the world, including in the West.

¡°The colony and the metropole are linked; we can¡¯t speak decolonisation in the colony without speaking decolonisation in the metropole¡­it¡¯s equally relevant in the former colonial metropoles,¡± he said.

Regardless, Professor Rensburg argued that, in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, there could be no going back and African academics must focus their attention on decolonisation.

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¡°It would be absolute folly to go to sleep again, to simply revert to the status quo¡­we must seize the moment and the opportunity,¡± he said.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com