Making Knowledge African: Suren Pillay and the struggle to decolonise the university

Mail & Guardian

19-06-2025

What are the predicaments that hold us back from producing knowledge in African academic institutions? Is that something that lies at the heart of knowledge production or the accessibility of knowledge in Africa? And what is African knowledge?
Suren Pillay's Predicaments of Knowledge: Decolonisation and Deracialisation in Universities seeks to answer these questions.
Pillay's deeply grounded critical insights lead us to rethink the difference between accommodating knowledge and producing knowledge and what it means to engage with, or possess, knowledge in Africa.
Though it has a particular focus on South Africa, the core issues debated in the book deal with the impediments to the process of decolonisation in Africa and its challenges in the institutionalisation of knowledge.
The book is divided into six chapters, in which questions of modernity, the humanities, the university, epistemic injustice, anticolonial nationalism, justice, history and decolonial theory are discussed.
The study alerts us to instrumentalisation — the use of knowledge as a tool to serve specific agendas rather than for deeper understanding.
Drawing on Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, Pillay states that decolonisation is not reducible to identity politics and is about 'justice'. He cautiously warns scholars not to get trapped in atavistic and cosmopolitan sentiments.
To be wary of these pitfalls, one should accommodate self-critique to renew understanding of the humanities. As he rightly says, 'Without self-critique, renewal will not happen' and it won't be appealing to students who have to navigate post-apartheid politics because the lack of self-critique in South Africa leads to ethical and political challenges as well.
To create universality requires three commitments: 'an anthropological commitment to the particular; a philosophical commitment to the universal and historical commitment to the longue durée'.
Writing about transformation, deracialisation and decolonisation, Pillay engages with debate on knowledge production.
While the question of agency is a main part of the problem, he looks at the possibility of rewriting the African past, as the history of the continent is not recognised, and always dismissed in the world history books.
These unthinkable silences which form African history should be addressed carefully. That's why transforming and decolonising knowledge should go hand in hand with remaking agency.
The most compelling part of the book is the debate on decolonial theory. For Pillay, adapting decolonial theory in Africa, as many African scholars now aspire to employ Latin American experience in their reading, might lead to a deep epistemic discrepancy.
The main problem of colonial difference is very central to the African experience of colonialism, which is not given importance by the decolonial scholars. For the means of decolonising varies from one place to another. The specific ways necessitated in different places should be applied.
He argues that Western modernity is a European invention and dissemination of the Western knowledge should be questioned. For Pillay, Western modernity lies at a very specific historical conjuncture and animates in domination, so it becomes a means of power subsequently.
Since Western knowledge is an accumulation of ancient cultures, and is not only the 'product of a racialised European genius', it has to acknowledge and recognise other cultures.
If the West is the sole inventor and creator of knowledge, so is modernity. How can one debunk the whole knowledge to make it more accessible to Africa and the so-called Third World? It seems impossible even to challenge, since we are all bound by the very modernised school system.
To situate the local, common experience or knowledge in this hegemonic system requires more challenge. The important question here is how to insert African wisdom and knowledge into world knowledge or how to diversify modern knowledge and make it more accommodative.
It is important to rethink ways to navigate the norms surrounding the way we learn, the way we see the world and think of ourselves — even the way we treat each other.
The distinction Pillay makes between Eurocentrism and Western knowledge is important to mention. Because the Eurocentric point of view is racialised and it needs to be separated from the Western knowledge. This move can only be actualised through decolonisation, as he notes.
The book invites us to attend to the intricate dynamics of decolonising knowledge that requires confrontation with systemic knowledge inherited in colonial and modern institutions, not to replace but to revert the genealogy of knowledge in order to open up space to 're-narrate the history'.
Predicaments of Knowledge is very comprehensive, intellectually grounded and deeply engaged with social and critical theory.
Predicaments of Knowledge is published by Wits University Press.