Executive Director of Change Management in the Vice-Chancellor’s Office at the University of South Africa, Prof. Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni says decolonisation of education needs to start in the mind.
There have been global calls for the decolonisation of education in countries such as South Africa, England, United States and in the Caribbean.
Last month, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga launched a ministerial report stating that History would be a compulsory subject in the final three years of high school from 2023 in a bid to decolonise the African mind.
In universities movements such as #Rhodes must fall, Decolonial winter school and Open Stellenbosch are attempting to decolonise education.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni says decolonisation is not an act of charity but it is an act of struggle.
“So it is not that people will wake up and everybody agrees that there is a need to decolonise. Some of them are colonised mentally and the success of colonialism is actually an invasion of the mental universe of the people. If you are invaded at the mental universe and sometimes you cannot see the collegiality. You will need to undergo a re-education out of miseducation and in that way you will begin to think anew about so many other things.”
He says decolonisation of education is a necessary movement to change from Euro centrism which claims that there is one knowledge and that knowledge comes from Europe and North America.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni says, “What decolonisation tries to do is to argue that Europe is a province of the world. It is not the world and therefore its knowledge cannot be the only knowledge for the world. So there are other knowledge’s which comes from other provinces of the world. But what Europe has done is that it has expanded from being a provincial part of the world and it becomes the centre of the world.
“What it has done is that it has deprofessionalised Africa, deprofessionalised Asia, deprofessionalised Latin America, deprofessionalised Carribean, deprofessionalised other important provinces of the world. What decolonisation is talking about is the multiplicity of knowledges which come from different civilisations so as to enrich the human experience.”
He says the entire system of basic education needs to be changed because it smells of modernist and Eurocentric tradition, and therefore it distances children at a tender age from their culture, knowledge and history.
“So what we need to do at basic education level, we need to change the education system itself to change the philosophy of education, we need to change the curriculum, we need to change the sources of knowledge we are using.”
Ndlovu-Gatsheni says the whole idea of university needs to decolonised.
He says, ”Modern disciplines emerged at a particular moment in history, they emerge at a particular moment in history to solve particular problems, which were faced by human beings, there is no natural discipline which came from a god, each discipline needs to be rethought throughout time whether the discipline is still relevant, whether people gain value for money.”
