This special volume, guest edited by RhodesMustFall, provides the first ‘live archive’ of a movement born at the University of Cape Town that has now reached other South African campuses and is clamoring for the decolonization of knowledge and of the university. Twenty years after the formal ending of Apartheid, South Africa has reached the kind of threshold so vividly foreseen by Frantz Fanon in his famous chapter, “Pitfalls of national consciousness” (The Wretched of the Earth). As the former national liberation movement – now the ruling party – keeps extolling the virtues of accommodationism, a massive anger, even rage, is mounting especially among the ‘born free’ and the multitudes of the disenfranchised.
Did things have to come to this? How can we explain the persistence of white supremacist attitudes in almost every sector of life? What does it mean to be black in post-Apartheid South Africa? Is the post- in ‘post-Apartheid’ the same as the post in ‘postcolonial’? Shouldn’t we be thinking, rather, in terms of ‘decolonization’? How would a decolonized university look like once the strictures of Eurocentrism are destroyed?