Decolonising our minds
Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
Learning Curve : Perspective
New Sunday Times - 02-07-2011
Most academic knowledge has been hegemonised by the Western world
IT is rather apt that as we transverse the mid-point of the APEX (Accelerated Programme of Excellence) implementation programme at the end of June, the conference on Decolonising Our Universities was held last week.
IT is rather apt that as we transverse the mid-point of the APEX (Accelerated Programme of Excellence) implementation programme at the end of June, the conference on Decolonising Our Universities was held last week.
The conference was as transformational as the APEX agenda because it explicitly encouraged academics within the Global South to move out of a euro-centric world view in the sphere of knowledge production, and help regenerate or create fresh models of intellectual inquiry and research which fit their own realities and intellectual traditions.
It was premised on "an undisputed reality of our times that most academic knowledge has been hegemonised by the Western world".
The hegemony has "extended to even the perception of what constitutes knowledge".
This situation has existed for more than 200 years with the Global South paying a hefty prize by unquestioningly accepting "knowledge" and "education" as they are.
Even now, efforts to further expand and influence existing knowledge and education models and philosophy from European and American universities are almost unimpeded.
The aim of the conference was to provide a platform for scholars, researchers, policy makers, public intellectuals and activists to share work done individually or by their institutions on drafting university curricula, syllabuses and courses in teaching and research that consciously avoid, deny or reject the current framework that is impregnated by ethnocentric assumptions and orientations of the West.
The uncritical import of such framework of knowledge and education, like any other produce -- without being at all conscious of its consequences in generating the so-called "educated" population -- has come to a crossroad.
Speakers and commentators, from more than 20 countries, eloquently articulated evidences -- on practically all disciplines ranging from the Social Sciences and Humanities to the Natural Sciences and Technology -- that this tyranny has to end.
African universities, for example, are already beginning to challenge the propriety of teaching traditions of Western philosophy contaminated with racism!
In his keynote address, Indian writer-diplomat Pavan Varma lucidly argued the reasons why India, and other colonised nations, can never truly be free, what more to assume global leadership, unless they reclaim their cultural roots and identities.
In the so-called globalised era, this is even more urgent given that "the pressures of homogenisation and co-option by the dominant cultures of the West will only increase".
Pavan, who wrote Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity (2010), highlighted the stark reality by using the following observation: "For all our bravado as an emerging superpower, we remain unnaturally sensitive to both criticism and praise from the Anglo-Saxon world and hunger for its approval.
"And outside North Block, the headquarters of India's Ministry of Home Affairs, a visitor can still read these lines inscribed by the colonial rulers: 'Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing which must be earned before it can be enjoyed.'"
While it is fashionable to use the word "transformation" as a new endeavour to create change, the depth of action arising from it remains superficial -- and hardly transformational -- if we fail to transcend the euro-centric world view (which is coloured by "white studies") that pits itself against anything non-European.
It is worse if we are petrified to break away from euro-centrism for fear of not being "blessed" or ranked among the West!
Clearly then the failure to tease out the Western particularism, which has been paraded as universalism, is solely ours!
The conference, therefore, was not an exercise to reject wholesale anything that is Western but only in so far as the attempts by the colonisers to do so towards anything that is not Western, as in the case of multiculturalism in Europe today.
For universities in particular, they must then militate against the proven lies and fabrication of knowledge formation by the West, be it in research, publication, citation, and teaching and learning.
As remarked by many conference participants, this task will be impossible if universities in the Global South, in particular, prefer to remain as captives of the colonised and unsustainable world views.
Therein lies the challenge to decolonise our universities, which must begin with decolonising the minds of the high priests of the institutions, the APEX university notwithstanding.
* The writer is the Vice-Chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia. He can be contacted at vc@usm.my