Paper long abstract:

The politics of activist knowledge in South African institutions of higher learning

Masixole Booi

Masixolebooi2@gmail.com

Abstract

The modern institutions of higher learning in Africa that were inherited from western imperial and colonial powers left most African scholars with a responsibility to re-centre Africa in the process of knowledge production and re-imagine African ways of thinking, knowing and being. For Africans, education and knowledge in general cannot be separated and understood in abstraction from their existential lived experiences. This clearly shows the close link between the ontological question and the epistemological question for Africans (See Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). This is succinctly illustrated by Falola (2001: 17) arguing that, "scholarship in Africa has been condition to respond to a reality and epistemology created for it by outsiders, a confrontation with imperialism, the power of capitalism and the knowledge that others have constructed for Africa. The African intelligentsia does not write in a vacuum but in a world saturated with others statements, usually negative about its members and their continent" (2001, p. 17). However, coloniality of knowledge create a false dichotomy between an African activist and scholar/intellectual. This is one of the colonial heritage that emanate from the Cartesian dualism that draws distinction between mind and body. This also highlighted by Mabogo More arguing that, "the is an ongoing tendency in certain quarters of locking Africa thinkers and their production in the biographical moments and their political activism" (Mabogo, 2008, p. 46). In this paper I argue that, the false dichotomy perpetuated in South African universities that view knowledge and action as two separate things, an activist cannot be a scholar and a scholar cannot be an activist. This compromise an activist role that can be played by scholars/intellectuals in their own political and socio-economic context and how activist scholars/intellectuals who transcends this false dichotomy experience institutional violence and other alienating and exclusive cultures.

Key words: politics of activist knowledge, , coloniality of knowledge, institutional violence, activist scholars/intellectual, decolonial education.