"What to Teach the Native?": A Provocation for the South African Black Public Humanities

Taking to task the onto-epistemological aspects of coloniality as they find expression in University curriculums, this paper considers the different strategies available to black creatives and intellectuals to disrupt dehumanizing pedagogical practices premised on an anti-black, Euro-American worldview. Disrupting dominant economic narratives on South African students call to decolonize the university, this paper takes seriously the curriculum as a site of subject formation and epistemic warfare in which black students are demanding a theory and praxis which affirms their legibility and emancipatory aspirations. In what ways can the contemporary, ‘post-democratic’ curriculum be seen as an extension of that agreed upon at the South African Commission of Native Affairs in 1903? Put differently, to what extent have
black intellectuals been successful in creating the space for an emancipatory political imagination within their classrooms and course outlines? At the intersection of Soudien’s ‘What to teach the native?’, Woodson’s Mis-education of the Negro, Harney and Moten’s Undercommons and students claims of intellectual alienation in the classroom is a serious claim of the impossibility of restructuring western educational institutions in ways that betray their racist, capitalist foundations. If indeed the 2015 student movement created a potential moment of epistemic rupture, how do weaponise pedagogic tools to harness the moment into new educational practices grounded in a commitment towards creating the space for new epistemic paradigms that affirm black life, love, thought and existence?