5. 3. Response by Mr Siya Sabata: Curriculum Transformation: Fundani CHED

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forward without knowledge production. Nevertheless, there are still students who use only European knowledge in their dissertations – which is not to say that European knowledge should be rejected, but rather that a concerted effort must be made to ensure that curricula are African-centred.

Students should understand that over the past 400 years there has been a comprehensive, concerted effort to withhold the knowledge and history of South Africa from the masses and to withhold the history and knowledge of thoughts and ideas produced in other parts of Africa. So, for example, the roles of Africans in the development of mathematics and psychoanalysis have been quite overlooked. When we think about mathematics, do we think about North Africa or Egypt or Nigeria?

Similarly, when we think of the history of psychoanalysis, do we think of Egypt, and of Joseph who interpreted the dreams of Pharoah and so helped save the region which fed from the Nile at that time? Every African society has its own word for the unconscious – and the concept is integral to African societies, not as something to be revealed on the analyst’s couch for a fee, but as an expression of an individual’s relationship to the earth, to water, to the sun, to the moon, to their ancestors, and to a calling that comes. However, this is a history of the unconscious and of psychoanalysis that is generally not told.2

Against this background and in an effort to promote studentcentred outcomes in support of transformation, research centres, including at universities, should explicitly recognise the history of key contributors to knowledge production, thinking and ideas in South Africa, such as Lembede, Maxeke and Sobukwe, whose biographies and intellectual contributions have been neglected.

• Student-centredness

In speaking of the role of students in transformation, it is also important to acknowledge the roles that they have previously played in the country’s transformation as leaders in the history of the liberation struggle.

Contributions made the student leadership have included those of Mandela, Sobukwe and Biko. SASO was formed in the halls of the former University of Natal’s “non-

European section” medical school. Student formations in

South Africa have always been key to the thoughts, ideas and analyses that have informed contemporary thinking about liberation, freedom and what it means to be black.

Against this background, a student-centred analysis demands that we ask: Who is a student? What are the expectations of a student? How are students to be educated? And with which knowledge? And what is the expectation for a future South Africa that seeks to move forward in the best interests of our society and in the understanding that we have been shackled, oppressed, exploited and robbed of centuries of agency?

The process must be self-reflexive. It must be one in which we move forward in the knowledge of all of the ways in which the process may be undertaken – always considering the criteria for moving forward and being critical not only of the process but also of the ways in which we are engaging in it.

As part of such a process we need continually to consider: the terms of our discourse and our use of language (why we speak English, how we speak it); our knowledge or lack of knowledge of history, particularly in relation to South Africa; the factors masking our interpretation of the world in which we live; and the terms of our analysis, our critique and our knowledge production, including the intended purpose and recipients of the knowledge being produced and the conditions set by universities for the production of knowledge. In this regard, a key outcome for CPUT’s transformation programme could be this: raising consciousness of the history of the students’ lives and their existential experiences.

5.3. Response by Mr Siya Sabata: Curriculum Transformation: Fundani CHED

In considering the policies underpinning the present approach to transformation, including the Freedom Charter, the Constitution, White Paper 3 of 1997 and CPUT’s Vision 2030, we see a common thread in that they all seek to present an ideal world while, to a greater or lesser extent, neglecting or negating the historical reality of the oppressed. It has been argued that these policies, which are framed according to a racial, liberal philosophical framework, are constraining people from achieving the very freedoms which these documents idealise but which have not been realised by the masses.

The challenge for students then is to understand their role in engaging with these documents and policies, including CPUT’s

2 It is noteworthy that the pioneer of psychoanalysis in Europe, Sigmund Freud, returned at the end of life to the thinking of Moses, that is, the thinking of Egypt from which he led the Jewish exodus, and came to acknowledge how Egypt and the history of his people led to his own birth and informed his thought.

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Vision 2030, to achieve that which is envisaged under the transformation agenda – a world beyond the present. Several issues have been raised about the kind of world presented to CPUT’s community by its new strategic plan. Is it really an enabling tool or a constraining tool? Are the ‘oneness’ and ‘smartness’ that it promotes little more than concepts in the service of an authoritarian agenda which is seeking to “civilise” the so-called “barbarians” with education so that they accept, rather than resist, the structure and systems of oppression in which the students find themselves?

To ensure that such an agenda is not adopted, the question then becomes: What kind of radicalising education can we provide to enable students to imagine a better, different world beyond the present? In seeking to answer this question, it has been suggested that a new language of description be developed to unmask and reveal the contradictions underpinning the present curriculum, so that a different approach to education and different ways of thinking may emerge.

Key questions must be asked: • How is student engagement with the curriculum being undertaken? Whose voices and whose knowledge are being privileged in this process? How are students engaging with the continuing dominance of Eurocentric knowledge within academia and society?

Such questions, which need to be addressed as part of the transformation process, also require answers to counteract the academic tendency to use theories developed in a completely different historical and socio-economic context to solve problems for which they were not designed – that is, the dual problem of extroversion and alterity identified by South African scholar Archie Mafeje.

Meanwhile, pedagogy at universities is being hampered by an instrumental approach to education, under which the goal is to enable students to pass exams and acquire qualifications as if in a vacuum, away from any engagement in social relations in the context of the communities from which they come. In addition, higher education stands accused of perpetuating master/slave relations and new forms of racialised social structures which mask institutional coloniality in practices and activities.

In this context, the questions become: How are students being prepared to engage with the university to critique and dismantle existing authoritarian relations of power? And to enable the emergence of a student voice so that we can have a university based on ubuntu as an African philosophy of Bantu-speaking people?

Knowledge production is another vital issue. Universities are supposed to produce knowledge. But whose knowledge is actually being produced if we don’t privilege the knowledge of those who have been marginalised in society? The issue of the existentiality – the body and blood, the being of the student – has also been raised, with the question being asked: To what extent is the university prepared to actually accept students and allow them to reimagine the world from where they stand, taking pride in who they are and using their own languages?

Consciousness and agency offer two important paths towards a student-centred transformation of the university. Notwithstanding the different political formations to which they belong, students can find common cause in the quest for a just social environment for all at the institution. This quest, which would entail interrogating all social practices, should be based on an understanding of the nature of the struggle required to produce authentic transformation. For example, the struggle should encounter the myth of post-coloniality, that is, the idea that the country has moved beyond the inequalities of the past although we know that various forms and systems of oppression continue to be reproduced.

Similarly, students should understand the possibility of a better world but that this will require them to work towards dismantling the racial contract – that is, the present social contract insofar as this is the product of racism. It has been argued that if we as students and academics are not actively critiquing and engaging with policies such as Vision 2030, if we merely accept them without question as if they were set in stone, we will just be resigning the racial contract and perpetuating colonial inequalities.

Within Vision 2030 there exists the possibility of talking about the agency of students. Rather than merely seeking to train students for work, they may be trained to understand that they need to engage in a relational rather than latent ontological system if they are to contribute towards the knowledge of the world and solve the world’s problems. Vision 2030 promotes the notion that people need to understand how to engage with others who are different from them in a respectful way while also remaining firm in their own understanding of where they come from as social and political beings. Vision 2030 promotes a human-centred discourse of knowing and technological agency. Rather than presenting the idea of knowledge as if there were only one kind of knowledge that can solve the problems of the world, the strategic plan promotes the notion of the pluriversality of knowledge in an open system, placing the emphasis on technology as a source of tools that people may use as appropriate to solve societal problems.