3.5. Key remarks from the President of Central SRC: Nanga Codana

from Final Annual Transformation Report 2021

by Cape Peninsula University of Technology

ACRONYMS

SECTION 3

In seeking to shift the geography of reason for students, it is crucial that they come to know African thinkers. They will be better equipped to be producers of knowledge if CPUT lecturers have considered the buried history of South Africa and seek to share this understanding with them – an intellectual history that may be found in the thinking of Steve Biko, Anton Lembede and Charlotte Maxeke, and the pan-Africanist political philosophers who inspired them, including WEB Du Bois1 and Frantz Fanon.

Similarly, in the present debate on decolonisation, it is important that we ask ourselves why we are engaging in this process, or in other words, from what and from whom are we seeking to decolonise ourselves. Questions must also be asked about the nature of the process, that is, how the decolonisation efforts are being undertaken. In whose language? And framed by whose culture? Such questioning is crucial, given that, to date, decolonisation efforts have failed to remove the coloniser.

We need to think about how we think. How are we making meaning of the world? As we reposition ourselves, what are we repositioning from? What does repositioning mean? Transformation has and will always be an aspiration, particularly for those who have committed themselves to changing their universities through changing the ways that they teach and the ways that students learn. In looking at transformation in the tertiary sector, it is important to consider the components of education and how these should be reshaped so that better thinkers are produced.

In this regard, CPUT should create an educational setting that actively fosters the values that it espouses: unity, restoration and technological progress. The aim should not be merely to equip students with a degree certificate, but rather to offer genuine education. This must entail recognising that students should learn their own history. To this end, the university should seek to establish an archive where students can go and take out a box, file or row of articles written by key African thinkers such Kenyan environmental and feminist activist Wangari Maathai or Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani. Such thinkers should not only be invoked as the heroes of student protests, but they should also be studied and their thoughts extracted as the basis for the further development and expansion of African knowledge.

In a sense, the task for CPUT is to move beyond seeing itself only as a university of technology and instead to expand the thinking of its students more broadly, while retaining a focus on technological development. If higher education is framed in this way, the power struggles over the mission of higher education which have divided universities in South Africa may be resolved. In addition, the existing gatekeepers of the curriculum would no longer be able to denounce thinking by students with which they disagree. Indeed, their power as gatekeepers, which is founded on an exclusionary historical model for education, would be eroded. Instead of being criticised by lecturers for engaging in “unfeasible” forms of analysis, students would be invited to undertake their intellectual and educational journeys in the context of their own identities, cultures and histories.

Adopting a critical thinking approach, the university would have to be radical in its implementation of its One Smart Vision 2030 strategy. For example, critical pedagogy demands that the buried history of South African scholars who are not generally taught must inform the curriculum. African thoughts and ideas can only be cultivated if the ground for the creation of such knowledge is prepared. However, a better future for higher education can be achieved if we provide the right spaces and materials and if we put our minds together and ask ourselves critical questions about our history and our present – recognising that to create a better future, we cannot forget our history.