In South African universities, a particular epistemic hierarchy exists within which African knowledge and resources are under-valued. This paper examines humanities courses that include content that deliberately aims to interrupt the existing knowledge hierarchies, through a qualitative analysis of spaces where African knowledge is granted importance. The paper provides a snapshot of the potentials for change in South African higher education today, and of the ways in which theories of Africa, for Africa, and about Africa, are being generated and taught.
Recent critiques voiced by students in both the Global South and North has turned attention to the ways in which higher education practices have been informed by, and continue to perpetuate, a series of assumptions that favour particular epistemological perspectives. Across the world, students have criticized universities for the content of their curricula and for their institutional cultures and pedagogic practices that perpetuate the attainment gap and exclusion. In response, curriculum and pedagogic change is being debated and promoted on campuses. This introductory article lays the theoretical groundwork for a special issue that brings decolonial theory into concrete engagement with the structural, cultural, institutional, relational and personal logics of curriculum and pedagogic practice. The article examines the relationship between decolonization as a theoretical concept, and the practices of decoloniality unfolding in pedagogical practice.
This ethnographic study explores forms of mutuality and conviviality between Shona migrants from Zimbabwe and Tsonga-speaking South Africans living in Giyani, South Africa. To analyse these forms of mutuality, we draw on Southern African concepts rather than more conventional development or migration theory. We explore ways in which the Shona concept of hushamwari (translated as “friendship”) and the commensurate xiTsonga category of kuhanyisana (“to help each other to live”) allow for conviviality. Employing the concept of hushamwari enables us to move beyond binaries of kinship versus friendship relations and examine the ways in which people create reciprocal friendships that are a little “like kin.” We argue that the cross-cutting forms of collective personhood that underlie both Shona and Tsonga ways of being make it possible to form social bonds across national lines, such that mutuality can be made between people even where the wider social context remains antagonistic to “foreigners.”
Drawing on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Musina and Cape Town, South Africa in 2010 and 2011, in this paper I present a qualitative analysis of the (largely illegal) means of entry of Zimbabwean research participants into South Africa, and their attempts to seek legal status once in the country. I present an ethnographic consideration of one woman’s experiences crossing the border, augmented with quantitative data gathered from a sample of 45 migrants, in order to discuss the socio-political construction of ‘illegality’ in South Africa. I argue that while migrants may have entered the country illegally, this was in a large degree dictated by structural pressures. Migrants’ attempts to legalise themselves are also structurally constrained: I, thus, argue that there is a need to unpack the socio-political process by which a category of illegality is made.
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