Critical Reflections on UNISA’s Decolonial Summer School: In Conversation with Rozena Maart

Abstract

The call to decolonise the university more broadly, and the curricula in particular, has sparked the need to interrogate what it means to decolonise. In this article I discuss the Decolonial Summer School held at the University of South Africa and offer existential reflections on my role as an educator within the team responsible for its organisation. The methodology employed in this article utilises a question-and-answer format to provide reflections on key questions that were posed to me by Rozena Maart in an attempt to engage me on the purpose, objectives, plans, and my pedagogical stance of the Decolonial Summer School. It is hoped that these reflections will offer insights into the reasons for hosting the Decolonial Summer School, the accomplishments, challenges encountered, and the possibilities for the future. At a time in the world where seeking answers to the question of what it means to be human has become more urgent than ever, a Decolonial Summer School offers the opportunity for those involved to be ‘armed’ and to sharpen their tools to respond to everyday challenges. The conversational approach in this article focuses on the overall aim of the Decolonial Summer School, which is to highlight its significance in forging ahead with decolonial thinking, not only in terms of thought production or curriculum adjustment and mindset, but rather in developing a language that one can use to challenge the very systems of thought, for example the very Eurocentric language and discourse, that one is against, and which leaves one outside of the process of knowledge production.