Introduction
The power of the archive for Mbembe (2002) is the power to silence other ways of knowing and present one version as the definitive one. In postcolonial contexts, there is an acknowledgement of how dominant colonial narratives were recruited to control and exploit the colonised, and how these narratives endure and frame civic life.
Mbembe proposes that these need to be balanced with lesser-told stories, for example, family histories or life in physical spaces that are still hierarchised. In educational institutions, aspects of the colonial curriculum arguably persist, and could be seen as operationalising the dominant archive. In response to the dominance of the colonial archive there have been recent calls to decolonise the curriculum across various parts of the globe. Reflecting on the colonial encounter and its effects, Santos (2014, p. 192) writes,
Unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it. In most extreme cases, such as that of European expansion, epistemicide was one of the conditions of genocide.
The annihilation of Indigenous knowledge or “epistemicide” was part of a ploy for the oppressed “to see their past as a wasteland” (Ngugi wa Thiongo, 1987, p. 4). The response to this erasure has often been a rejection of colonial artefacts because of their use to indoctrinate and force colonial subjects into servitude. The critique of colonisation thus became synonymous with challenging or erasing remnants of colonial history and the colonial archive in all its forms.
In the South African context, from 2015 onward, students’ nationwide call to decolonise the curriculum met with a similar response. The academic community largely confronted the “epistemicide” of African knowledges by calling for a decentring of Eurocentric knowledge and in some cases, for its erasure from the higher education curriculum. In Meda’s view, decolonisation is about “foregrounding African IK [Indigenous knowledges] and languages and theories in higher education rather than tenaciously adhering to a curriculum that was used during the colonial and apartheid period” (2020, p. 100; see also Mbembe, 2016). For Zembylas, this would be an example of “soft reform” where the current curriculum begins to incorporate Africa-centred texts. This type of reform is opposed to “radical reform”, which involves a rejection of norms, texts and practices regarded as Eurocentric. The third category of reform would be “beyond reform” calling for a revamping of the entire colonial higher education system (Zembylas, 2021, pp. 67–68). Here are some quotes from students and staff from media and scholarly sources capturing general sentiments around decolonisation.
University student: “The current curriculum dehumanises Black students. We study all these dead white men who presided over our oppression, and we are made to use their thinking as a standard and as a point of departure. Our own thinking as Africans has been undermined. We must have our own education from our own continent”. (News24.com)
Lecturer: “decolonisation begins in the minds of all participants. It means valuing what we, as Africans and South Africans have to contribute to world knowledge. It is the inclusion of indigenous knowledge, indigenous culture and the ways of our people. In educational circles, it is accepted that we move from the known to the unknown. In our curricula, we need to discover the ‘known’ of our own people, and not what is imposed on them as a ‘should’”. (Meda, Swart & Mashiyi, 2019, p. 150)
University student: “I strongly believe the current curriculum dehumanises us as Black students who study at a South African tertiary institution. We have to study a curriculum that has been taken from other European countries and so on. This means that we are made to study under a curriculum that suppresses our thinking as a standard and point of departure. That is simply wrong. If we are to achieve our goal of a decolonised curriculum, we have to study curriculum which is rooted in our own continent”. (Meda, 2020)
Lecturer: “I think it will start with the selection of readings. Who are we selecting and why [are] we selecting them … currently”. (Hlatshwayo & Alexander, 2021)
University student: “We cannot be free when our education still oppresses us. The African philosophy of Ubuntu shares the same ideas that we learned about from socialist-realism philosophy”. (Khuzwayo, 2021)
University student: “We are calling for free decolonised intersectionality education. This is uncontaminated education which speaks to blacks”. (Maringira & Gukurume, 2016, 38)
The lecturer’s comment about the selection of readings is important as it leads us to focus not only on “who” (origin of authors), “where” (text origin) and “what” (content and ideology), but also on “why” (the pedagogical reasons to include the text). If one were to purely question the who, where and what, then one would inevitably exclude colonial texts, without considering how they can be approached in alternative ways. Our understanding of decoloniality is that it is not only a practice of decentering colonial texts, but it can also be a practice of considering them for the purposes of critique.
The student’s quest for “uncontaminated education” when referring to decolonised education would suggest that European knowledge has largely been negative and harmful, and that precolonial African knowledges had not been in contact with ideas from other contexts. The dominant discourse of erasure therefore relies on stable categorisations of European and African knowledges. Also, one of the features of the decolonisation at institutions of higher learning is a politics of belonging, who belongs and who does not in terms of people, and what belongs and what does not in terms of artefacts such as texts and statues, as evident with the removal of the Rhodes statue.
While this response does suggest that literacy and therefore texts are ideological in nature, it seems to further the idea that the colonial archive and its texts have universal effects on people regardless of social context, agency and the ways in which the archive is and could be recruited and interpreted. Street (1993) and others (see Prinsloo & Breier, 1996; Kell, 2006; Gee, 1991) have refuted the idea that literacy and therefore texts have universal effects on people regardless of social contexts and the ways in which texts are recruited and understood in situated contexts. They argued convincingly that literacy is a social practice whose meanings, functions and consequences vary across contexts of use.
Kulick and Stroud’s (1993, p. 30) study on literacy amongst the people of Gapun, a village in Papua New Guinea, found that literacy did not exert an automatic power over the villagers as intended by Christian missionaries. To the surprise of the Christian missionaries who wanted to convert the villagers, the villagers interpreted, understood and made use of the Bible and other religious texts in ways that were unexpected and unintended. The intentions of the missionaries remained unrealised as villagers brought their own social practices and ideologies to bear on the religious texts brought by the missionaries. Kulick and Stroud (1993, p. 55) concluded that instead of literacy “taking hold” of Gapuners as the missionaries and others had intended, the villagers recruited and interpreted religious texts from their particular social context.
We have chosen to draw on the idiomatic expression “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” to name our article and to capture the argument that we are making in this paper, an argument that is similar to that of Kulick and Stroud: Depending on social contexts, it is people who “take hold” of colonial texts and interpret them in various ways, often in stark contrast to how they were intended to be understood. For us “the baby” is a metaphor for the colonial text, in this case the Maskew Miller history textbook, while “the bathwater” represents the colonial ideology. Although colonial texts, such as the Maskew Miller history textbook were created during the colonial period to promote the colonial ideology, we argue that its intended meanings do not endure across time, space and amongst individuals (even when these individuals are subjected to such texts during their schooling). Like in the case of the Kulick and Stroud study, texts in their material form often endure across time and space, but the same can not be assumed about their intended meanings.
With this in mind, on the Writing Across Borders course, a first-year academic literacy course at the University of Cape Town (UCT), we offer an alternative response to that of erasure and universal outcomes of the colonial archive, by revisiting a particular colonial text, Maskew Miller’s Short History of South Africa (Theal & Young, 1909). Since the course does not reject colonial texts, its approach may be regarded as “soft reform” (Zembylas, 2021), though in this case, the “soft” is “radical”, because the colonial text gets recruited to mount a critique against colonial ideologies that existed and endure. Two of the authors are UCT lecturers and one of them is a professor based in Brazil’s Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa, who shadowed the course. What connects the three authors besides the course, is that our nations are products of over 300 years of colonial history, and our universities are reflections of that history.
The textbook, which is the present object of scrutiny, was a prescribed history textbook for high schools during the period when South Africa was still a British colony, and can be considered a proxy for subsequent history textbooks before the first democratic elections in 1994. Through the use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) we highlight, by juxtaposing the identity constructions of “the European” and “the Bushmen”, the contradictions in these representations. Although the textbook’s intention was to magnify the differences between the identities of “the European” and “the Bushmen”, we argue that these representations cannot be sustained in the history textbook and are contradicted once subjected to a CDA lens. By highlighting these contradictions in identity constructions in this paper, we demonstrate how we have recruited a colonial text differently from its initial intentions in order to do decolonial work in the academic literacy classroom.
Literacy Orientation on Writing Across Borders
The Writing Across Borders course is a blended academic literacy course launched in 2019 to orient students to academic literacy practices valued in the social sciences, targeting students who transition from first to second year. Most literacy interventions prior to that had focused on students’ transition from high school to the first year at university.
The role of academic literacy in the South African higher education context and elsewhere cannot be underestimated. Writing remains the main mode through which content knowledge is accessed and assessed, and National Benchmark Test (NBT) test reports from 2017 onward attest that the majority of humanities students would struggle without appropriate literacy support in their undergraduate years (NBT, 2017–2023). It is noteworthy that our view of literacy is underpinned by the New Literacy Studies approaches to literacy as social practice (Street, 1993). Thus, we steer away from the behaviourist model of inducting students or fixing their writing, but rather of co-constructing meaning by putting their life histories in conversation with academic theories. This approach to literacy as social practice enables students to take ownership of their writing and explore their voice in the academic space.
To inform our literacy intervention, we drew on interviews with staff and students across the Humanities in 2018, which confirmed that critical reading, writing and researching practices needed to be bolstered for students to succeed well beyond their first year. Surprisingly, the course saw enrolments from final-year students as well. Our interview with students suggested that they did not have access to such courses, that they viewed the course as part of the preparatory phase for their Honours degree and that they were interested in the subject matter. The diversity highlights Kulick and Stroud’s (1990) view that people take hold of literacy in different ways. In the classroom, this manifests through different perspectives students offer on the same reading, as they draw on their varied life experiences to make sense of the text.
In terms of content, the course revolves around the concepts of identity and migration, which serve to anchor students’ reading and writing practices in class. Students respond to the central question “What happens to identity as people cross borders?” by drawing on key readings and data from an interview with a former refugee. One of the prescribed readings is an extract from the history textbook Maskew Miller’s Short History of South Africa (1909), prescribed in schools during the time when South Africa was a Union under British rule. Using CDA as a lens to interrogate and lay bare the problematic identity constructions of “the Bushmen” and “the European” we recruited the textbook from this colonial period to do decolonial work in the academic literacy classroom. It serves as an illustration of identity theory by focusing on the linguistic moves to construct an “other” and to interrogate its very foundation.
The history textbook constructs sameness and difference by positioning the “Europeans” as more “civilised” and advanced than the local people of South Africa, referred to as the “Bushmen”. These constructions sought to justify colonial oppression and racial discrimination. These moves echo Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s (1987) thoughts in Decolonising the Mind, about the ravages of colonisation particularly at the level of the mental constructions of the master and the subject. He called this “the metaphysical empire” and discussed how it was promoted through a deliberate colonial apparatus, bureaucracy and related practices. He argued that schools imparted “cultural bombs” that decimated previous ways of knowing and colonised minds for people to willingly consent to their subjugation. This textbook could be seen as a product of particular colonial ideologies based primarily on the “othering” of the “native”. On the course, however, we explore the history textbook’s potential for decolonial work. In other words, the intention behind prescribing the history textbook is to provide one example out of many past and present texts steeped in colonial ideologies—and how they can be read differently, to surface and critique those ideologies rather than to let them insidiously permeate one’s psyche.
Critical Discourse Analysis and Dialogics
To demonstrate how we harness the history textbook for decolonial work, in this paper, we engage in a critical discourse analysis of this text using a multi-layered framework proposed by Fairclough (1992) where writing is analysed at the textual, discursive practice and social practice levels. We will be overlaying this framework with Bakhtin’s (1986) dialogics using concepts of “extraverbal context” and “textual chains” (Figure 1 Table 1).
Dimensions of discourse and levels of analysis
| Inter-related dimension of discourse | Level of analysis |
|---|---|
| The object of analysis (written, verbal, visual or combinations of modes) | Text analysis (description) |
| The processes by means of which the object is produced and received (writing, speaking, designing, reading etc.) by individuals | Processing analysis (interpretation) |
| The socio-historical conditions which govern these processes | Social analysis (explanation) |
Fairclough’s (1992) Model for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
At the textual level, the textbook excerpt can be analysed in terms of vocabulary, content and coherence. The textual analysis draws extensively on identity theory (Woodward, 2004) in order to show how the identities of “Europeans” and “Bushmen” are constructed using sameness and difference as a means to create polarised identities of these groupings. We argue that these polarised identity constructions serve to justify the colonial oppression and to give credence to the complex race science that developed at the time. Thus, by including this colonial text in a decolonial curriculum and conducting a fine-grained analysis of words and phrases used, we can interrogate the polarisations and essentialist notions of race that were valorised in the 1900s, but also how these have infiltrated our psyche, and persist even in certain responses and critiques of the colonial legacy. We argue that by highlighting these polarisations we can recruit colonial texts for a different ideological purpose, as opposed to its colonial function, namely as a means to interrogate colonial narratives and racial divisions that existed and endure in the postcolonial psyche. In this sense, we develop an analytical decolonial praxis since we analyse and attempt to overcome the logic of coloniality and the rhetoric of modernity present in the textbook (Mignolo, 2011)
At the discursive practice level, the excerpt can be analysed in terms of how the text is produced and interpreted and the positioning of and relations between the producer and interpreter. Fairclough acknowledges there may be ambiguity in interpretation, which can be narrowed through viewing the text in particular contexts. To achieve this, one can draw on Bakhtin’s concepts of “extraverbal context” and “textual chains” or what Fairclough refers to as “intertextuality” in the text. According to Bakhtin (1986) the extraverbal analysis underpins the verbal/textual choices made by the authors of a text. In addition, it involves both a broader and a narrower socio-historical context in terms of time and space. Thus, it is related to the wider and shorter socio-historical context, involving events and discourses produced far and/or close in time and space in relation to the production of the text. As Bakhtin says, one text (or discourse) is always in dialogical relations with other texts (or discourses) that came before and after in time and that come from other places. One text is always in dialogue with other texts, constructing a multidimensional chain of texts/discourses (Bakhtin, 1986).
At the social practice level, the excerpt can be analysed in terms of the extraverbal context, particularly the ideologies it reproduces or challenges. The emphasis is placed on how language is harnessed beyond communicating ideas, to influence readers’ attitudes towards dominant ideas and people. Of interest here is how the history textbook is being recruited on an academic literacy course, in a South African higher education institution for decolonial work.
The article draws on empirical data to offer a conceptual contribution in terms of how texts are produced, where meaning resides, how colonial texts can be harnessed in the classroom to interrogate and challenge the origins of colonial ideologies and their perpetuation in the postcolonial psyche. What follows is an excerpt from the history textbook analysed using CDA and Bakhtin’s dialogics.
The Extraverbal Context of the Textbook (Figure 2)
The extraverbal context offers the socio-historical conditions that led to the textbook’s production and dissemination. The first aspect of the extraverbal context that we would like to focus on is that in the year of publication of the book, 1909, European colonial oppression was dominant in Africa. It was underpinned by particular discourses viewing Africa as the “dark” continent in need of salvation, and of Africans as children, barbarians or witches (see Conrad, Rousseau and others on the representation of Africans). This period was especially marked by the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, 1 a conference where the European colonial empires divided African territory among themselves, in the name of Christianisation, civilisation and business. Those different colonial empires (Portuguese, French, British, for example) were supposed to promote the “development” of territories under their domination. The perspective of development applied meant “offering” to Africans: 1) educational systems, schooling; 2) scientific health assistance (in opposition to traditional medicine); and 3) transport and road building (to gain access to the interior of the colonies). This Conference determined the civilising mission of colonial domination since the main duty was to impose the European way of life, seen as “development”, to Africans (it was related to creating new consumer groups of the goods produced by the Industrial Revolution, in Europe).
The second aspect of the extraverbal context is that in 1909 the British Parliament created the South Africa Act 1909, which aimed to unify different British colonies in this territory; some of them were previously Dutch colonies. To take possession of these colonies, the British fought against the Dutch in two wars (First Boer War 1880–1881; Second Boer War 1899–1902). So the unification of South Africa with the British colonies was a project to embrace relatively recent possessions and old possessions/domains. It is important to remember that, although the British won the war, the Dutch/Boer people still lived there and had relative power in government structures. The textbook published in 1909 seems to be aligned with this British Empire project, while its author and editor presented South Africa as a unified possession of what they referred to as “Europeans” (line 1 in the text), i.e., the Boer and British. While this article will refer to “Europeans”, it is noteworthy that Europe and Europeans were far from homogeneous, 2 and while its nations were busy annexing territories, internally they had to overcome their own challenges, e.g. poverty, class struggles.
The third issue of the extraverbal context is related to the interlocutors and the dialogue in the broader socio-historical context presented above. George M. Theal was a historian who produced many studies about the history of South Africa. Despite the fact that he wrote the manuscripts published as the book Maskew Miller’s Short History of South Africa, the proper organisation of it, “arranged for use in Schools” was made “by Thomas Young, M. A. Oxon and B. A. London, principal of the Sea Point Boys’ High School”, as expressed in the very first page of the book. The alignment of the book with the process of unification of South Africa was not produced only by the author, but also (or mainly) by the editor of the book. When Thomas Young stated that some contents of the book were completely new for teachers, we can understand that part of this novelty comes from the new political context of South Africa. He claimed,
As the result of all these researches [made by Theal] that have not yet been published, but have been largely utilised in the compilation of this manual, it will be found to contain information never before within reach of South African teachers. (Young, 1909, Preface)
The recent political unification of the British colony demanded that teachers could have access to new information and contents. We can read further in the book the following statement:
The birth of a new nation—the year 1909 will be ever memorable in South Africa as the date of passing of the Act whereby the different colonies are to be made one united whole, and as the birth year of the South African nation. (Young, 1909, p. 161)
This claim underpins our analysis that the book is aligned with the project of unification of South Africa as part of the British Empire. The concept of “unification” is quite potent. Who were ultimately “unified” and who were excluded? Were the local inhabitants consulted? It becomes apparent that their version of the story was silenced to homogenise the experiences of the “new nation”.
We would like to highlight that the author and the editor are responsible for the text. The editor selected and grouped the manuscripts of the historian Theal, thus Young acted as an editor, compiling the book. So he is also in charge of this text. And it is also important to remember that the book was written to be used by teachers and students, a group composed mainly of white people, Europeans or European descendants. The readership comprised white students but also those of colour. How might they have responded to such deprecating ideas? The genre of this text as a “textbook” seems to normalise, i.e. render them more accepting and credible, yet given that some perspectives were clearly dismissed or obfuscated such as those reporting previous civilisations on the continent, one could view it as a form of indoctrination, a mouth-piece of the dominant colonial ideologies of the time. “The birth of a new nation” also placed emphasis on racial segregation and the consolidation of educational policies for white people, with the limited access for Blacks, Indians and Coloureds (South Africa in the 1900s, 2017). The newborn nation was a nation for whites. Teachers and students were expected to learn about this white nation, including its history, which was written in order to construct and foreground this nation, justifying the domination over the land and the non-whites.
Since we have these three aspects of the socio-historical context of the text, we can relate them to the author’s and editor’s linguistic choices and the effects produced by these choices. We can also relate these effects to the identity theory presented by K. Woodward. Some features central to Woodward’s identity discussion are: identity is relational, multiple, fluid, contradictory, and is discursively constructed. Identities can also be symbolised and represented (Woodward, 2004, p. 20). Being relational, the process of producing identity implies that there are people and/or groups whose sense of self is determined in relation to others. In this relationship, othering, sameness, and differences are constructed. As Woodward states, “What we are is not given (i.e. there already), it must be created” (p. 14). In the same way, we create the other, who can be similar or different.
The textbook used some important linguistic resources to create sameness and difference about the “inhabitants of South Africa”, positioning themselves, the white teachers and the white students on one side, and on the other side, the non-white. Some of these resources take the form of the following: 1) they named the territory; 2) they named these two groups; 3) they presented characteristics of the land and the groups, representing land and people; and 4) they used pronouns, positioning “insiders” and “outsiders”, to refer to the territory and to the groups throughout the text. In relation to the perspective of identity presented by Woodward, naming is a form of symbolising. According to this author, “words operate as symbols” (Woodward, 2004, p. 20). She also claims, “Having the word allows us to talk and think about the object” even whether and when the object is not “within view” (p. 20). Relating to this perspective, we can understand that Theal and Young symbolise the land and the people, and this allows them to talk about the territory and the inhabitants and to represent them in some specific ways. They named the land as “South Africa”, and they named the inhabitants as “Europeans” and as “Bushmen”.
Representations of the Territory
Giving the name to the territory, they dialogue with the South Africa Act and produce the naturalisation or normalisation of the newborn unified territory. This is produced through the effect of naming the land without specifying its location. Theal and Young use “South Africa and its inhabitants” as the title of the text. In the initial lines they state: “Before its settlement by Europeans, South Africa was practically an unknown … land” (p. 1). They talk about the land considering that their interlocutors (teachers and students) know what they are talking about. Of course, they are writing to teachers and students who live in this land. So this name symbolises a specific territory known by their readers. On the other hand, this land is described/represented as previously “unknown” and “unexplored”. Another way used to describe “South Africa” is “a land closed to the rest of the world”. If teachers and students know about which land Theal and Young are talking about, it is because the “Europeans” settled in it. The term “settled” could be seen as a euphemism intent on masking the violence of the colonial encounter.
In this way, the textbook represents “Europeans” as agents who opened, knew and explored the land. The “Europeans” are represented as agents that had responsibility for the production of knowledge about the land, once that the land was said to be unknown and unexplored before them. They are also represented as agents opening this territory to the world. In this sense, it seems that the textbook aligns with the requirements established at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 because they represent the “Europeans” in charge of this land, as those having provided knowledge and development to this territory. This perspective is also present when the history textbook mentions a supposed Egyptian expedition that could have arrived till South Africa around the fifth century BC. They emphasise, however, that, whether it happened, “it certainly had no practical results either from a commercial or a scientific point of view” (lines 10–11).
We also find the authors dismissing other sources of information that could have suggested that the continent was highly advanced in terms of knowledge, skills, warfare and commerce, even before colonisation. This dismissal could be equated to some form of epistemicide (Sousa Santos, 2007). Promoting the idea that Africa was unknown and undeveloped, favoured the purpose of the Berlin Conference, which was to fragment the continent into European colonies to “introduce” commerce and science to those territories. The main focus of colonisation was hence the expansion of capitalism and ideas of modernity, which based development on a scientific view of the world. The expansion of capitalism is connected to the Industrial Revolution and the industrialisation of Europe, which underpin the Conference and the European domination of African, Asian and American people and territories.
Representations of the “Europeans”
Naming these people as “Europeans”, Theal and Young dialogue both with the South Africa Act and with the history of different groups of Europeans that colonised this land. Since the Act provided the creation of a unified (white) nation, the word “Europeans” refers to the British and Dutch as a unified white group, although the Act had been produced by the British Empire. The name “Europeans” produces an effect of unification of Dutch and British and, in this way, it produces the effect of sameness. One specific feature of this Act also responsible for producing the sameness is the adoption of Dutch and English languages with the same status as defined in the South Africa Act by the State: “In 1909—Section 137 of the South Africa Act of 1909 accords English and Dutch equal status (Kruger (ed.) 1986:126).” (Blumfield, 2008, p. 3). As language is a marker of identity, this equal status stresses the same status of the speakers of these languages. Sharing the same status is a symbol of sameness.
The construction of sameness in the book about the History of South Africa, can also be put in dialogue with the history of South African education. Since 1907 it is possible to observe an effort to bring Dutch and British people closer. And this proximity is part of a project of national construction, as we can see in the timeline of education produced by Blumfield:
In 1907—A new education act (Act 25 of 1907)—drafted by General JC Smuts—came into force on 1 October 1907. He saw it as a means to “effect reconciliation between Boer and Briton and to use education for the creation of a ‘new nation’ (Venter & Verster, 1986, p. 111)”. (Blumfield, 2008, p. 3)
On the other hand, the South Africa Act silences African and migrant languages used by Africans, Indians and Coloured people. In this sense, it creates difference and exclusion. Those are the two sides of the same coin: the production of sameness and the insiders (unifying and including Dutch and British) implies the construction of difference and outsiders (the African “natives”, the Indians and coloured). In its extreme form, this othering did lead to extermination, for instance, of the Xhoexhoe and San, as an ultimate response to difference.
On the other extreme, was a process of erasure and assimilation through Christianity, missionary education and language (both colonial languages and missionary-codified local languages), to create a third class of people, who would keep the colonial machinery well-oiled, and yet never quite fit in. In other words, what was achieved was a form of sameness tinged with difference and subordination reminding us of the Animal Farm classic quote, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (Orwell, 1996, p. 126). The flipside was that at different points in colonial history, this third class of people has attempted to overturn the dispensation. In addition to this, the word “Europeans” allows Theal and Young to talk about the Portuguese as another settler European group, from Chapters 3 to 5. Also in relation to the “Europeans”, it is important to observe that Theal and Young represent this group as settlers. The choice of the word “settlement” allows them to minimise the violence, the oppression, the dehumanisation that constitutes the process of “colonisation”. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, 3 the word “settlement” is related to “home”. And means “a place where people come to live or the process of settling in such a place”. In this sense, the “Europeans” came and chose to live in this land, transforming this land into their land. But this definition hides the despoliation, the exploitation, and the violence practised by Europeans against the Africans in order to construct their home on the African continent. Interestingly, presently the same dynamic seems to play out in reverse, where minority groups seeking refuge in other countries, particularly first world countries, in many cases get marginalised or viewed as a threat to the livelihood of the locals.
Representations of the “Bushmen”
Theal and Young also named local people, through which the author and the editor constructed the other. The “Bushmen” are different in relation to “Europeans”. It is important to highlight the main constitutive aspect of identity: it is relational. We create our identities in relation to an “other”. We can construct our identities through identification or disidentification with another person and, mainly, with a group. Naming the group calls it to existence and makes it possible for someone to be part of it and to identify with it. Naming is essential to refer to the object even if it is not within view, but naming also allows one to differ and to separate, and at the same time it allows one to put oneself in relation to an “other”. In Caliban’s Voice, Ashcroft (2009) details how naming creates a form of ownership or proprietorship, thereby Theal and Young create the “Bushmen” as subjects in relation to the “Europeans”. What the Europeans get to own here is a particular depiction and narrative of the local inhabitants, creating the impossibility for readers to view them in any other way. The inhabitants themselves get removed from decisions of how they choose to represent themselves in this text. Unlike the “Europeans,” the “Bushmen” were represented as “a race of savages” (line 16), whose descendants “once widely spread … are to be found only in small bands” (lines 24–25), comparable to animals. They are also represented as “a race of dwarfish savages”. They are described by what they seem to lack according to the point of view of the history textbook. So “Bushmen” did not build houses, keep cattle and till the ground (lines 30–31).
In addition, the chapter speaks of the Bushmen’s lack of knowledge about iron and “other metals”. The textbook looks at this group from their author’s experiences and points of reference. From this point of view, the difference/lack is constructed by drawing on what is considered civilised, dialoguing as well as the Berlin Conference goals. The European way of housing, getting food, using metals and weapons, and dressing serve as the parameter to value the other and to position this other on a “scale of civilization” (line 41). Since the Conference defined the obligation to civilise the Africans, it was important to define their position on this scale, in relation to the “Bushmen” who were positioned “so low”. That position (created by the Europeans) allows the history textbook to represent the “Bushmen” as savages, producing difference, and especially justifying colonial power under the banner of civilisation, that these “savage” people should be civilised in order to be rescued of their savagery. Also, it is alluded to that they should be Christianised, since they “knew anything about God” (line 47). The textbook created a narrative to justify colonial domination, related to Christianisation and to civilisation projects.
As we have seen above, naming and representing (describing or characterising the land and the people) are textual processes that relate to the broader extraverbal context. Another verbal process used in the textbook is the usage of pronouns. The pronouns “we” and “they” play a role in creating “insiders” and “outsiders” especially when these pronouns can include the author, the readers, and someone that the author is talking about. Thus it is interesting to observe to whom the pronouns are referring. The textbook uses “we” (line 28) “us” (line 46) and “our” (line 29). Who are the “insiders” in the sentence “we see our land occupied by a race of dwarfish savages”? “We”, who are also the owners of the land, include the historian, the principal, the teachers and students who were going to use the book. The insiders of this group are the white (male) producers and consumers of the book. The British and Dutch who lived and possessed this land (said “our land”). So “we” is used to produce identification and sameness, constructing a sense of belonging. Being “insiders” means belonging to this group. Who are the “outsiders” of this group? The “outsiders” are presented as “they” (lines 27, 30, 31, 33, 36, 40, 47, 48). “They” refers to the descendants of Bushmen, to the “dwarfish savages,” to the people that “knew nothing of God”. “They” is composed of the group of “savages”, while “we” is composed of the “civilised” European people. “We” and “they” create not only the “insiders” and “outsiders”, but mainly represent the sameness and the difference. The two different groups are constructed as internally homogeneous (sameness) and separated (difference) from the other by clear boundaries. The development and the civilisation separate “civilised” from “savages” just like Christianity separates Christians from Pagans.
One central aspect of the discourses of identity is that usually the more powerful group positions itself and the other. The group characterised as “we”—civilised, agents in opening this land to the world, knowledge producers, and explorers of the land—creates the other group, tells its story, describes it, and represents this other. This process is related to social structure and possibilities or limitations of agency in certain conditions (Woodward, 2004). The “Bushmen” were not allowed to tell their own story, consequently, the “Bushmen” were created and represented by the white dominant group that narrates a single story about the “Bushmen”. But this dominant group also narrates a single story about itself. This narrative usually does not represent the Europeans as a violent, oppressive, exploitative group.
The textbook narrates a single story of the European agency of development. It tries to silence many other perspectives and events in this narrative. Some of these silenced aspects still surface through contradictions in the text. For example, the textbook claims that the land belongs to the students, to the teachers, and to themselves (see line 29: “our land”). However, some lines prior, they state that this land belonged to “Bushmen”. They explain that “stronger races” killed and expelled the “Bushmen”, and “at length all the land left to them consisted of a few inaccessible places of refuge in the interior of the continent” (lines 20–22). We note how the concept of “race” is constructed through language for political purposes to divide groups along colour lines, and enact a race politics that would place one race above all others, to legitimise the colonial project. The word “few” here is significant as it implies that the “Bushmen” were scattered and did not have much of a presence in South Africa. They also affirmed that the Bushmen’s descendants lived “in the secluded retreats to which they have been gradually driven by their enemies”. The words “secluded retreats” link with the previous comment—as if the Bushmen had no presence in South Africa. Then the word “enemies” does not refer to the Europeans as they saw themselves as bringing the “light of civilization” to the African continent. We should ask: who are these “stronger races”? Since “Europeans” are presented as owners of the land, we can infer that the textbook viewed them as the stronger races that killed and expelled the “Bushmen” to encroach on their land.
Yet of importance here is that the Europeans are not referred to as enemies, while they dispossess the “Bushmen” of their land. Still, the Europeans can be seen as not owning the totality of this land, since the descendants of the “Bushmen” still maintain some (small) portions of the land. Woodward (2004) states that “information can be given intentionally or given off, where we might reveal things unintentionally” (p. 15). We understand that this image of Europeans can be constructed, but it was not the intention of the author to do it. These unintentional aspects emerge because identity is also contradictory. In this case, while intentionally seeking to stabilise the categories of “civilised” and “savage” as part of the extraverbal context of justifying the colonial project, the textbook inevitably contradicts itself, signalling the extent to which these identities are products of the colonial imagination. For instance, the Bushmen’s savagery is highlighted through their use of iron and bone weapons and poisoned arrows, as compared to the guns used by the “Europeans”.
Yet, the craftsmanship involved in forging iron and bone weapons, and the scientific knowledge required to produce poison are entirely overlooked. Thus, a critical reading of this evidence actually gives off the idea that the “Bushmen” were highly knowledgeable about science and warfare. Similarly, the construction of the European identity brings together both the development/civilisation and the violence/exploitation. That is what W. Mignolo calls the darker side of coloniality/modernity. While in Europe, the philosophers constructed the concept of Humanism, the Europeans dehumanised the colonised those that they constructed as “other”. While in Europe philosophers, scholars and politicians criticised the barbarians, in the colonies the Europeans committed acts of barbarism by killing, exploiting and despoiling the people (Mignolo, 2011).
Recruiting the History Textbook to do Decolonial Work in a Post-Apartheid South Africa
Back to the present, in the literacy classroom, we explore how colonial texts can be harnessed for an alternative purpose, to do decolonial work. Applying a New Literacies Studies (Street, 1993) lens to our understanding of academic literacy as social practice, we frame our lessons to emphasise that texts are not neutral but context-specific. Besides reading on the line, we develop literacy activities that allow students to unravel how the text has been composed in and for particular contexts, by analysing the writing but also the social conditions that informed text production and consumption. The classroom interaction puts into sharp focus the contradictions mentioned above and how social hierarchies were created in colonial texts through the polarisation of “European” and “Bushmen” identities using deliberate linguistic moves. A CDA of the textbook, as demonstrated above, interrogates how these moves obfuscated other ways of being and knowing that could reveal similarities or positive representations of the “other”. It questions how the polarising language mirrors the divisions and fragmentation of social groups along racial and class lines. It illuminates the extraverbal context and prompts students to trace the origins of existing racial and class ideologies and disparities back to the colonial encounter, and identify the rejection or perpetuation of those ideologies in present critical responses to the colonial legacy.
Glimpses of Practice—Guided Reading Video of the History Textbook
In line with a flipped classroom approach, students are given access to a guided reading video before class. One way of recruiting the history textbook has been to frame it very carefully to shed light on its discursive and social practices, and invite alternative readings of the text. By discursive practices, we mean how the textbook was produced and consumed, and by social practices, we mean the social conditions that influenced how the textbook was and could be interpreted. The framing is most prominent in the introductory and the concluding parts of the video. Here are extracts from both.
Analysing the Discursive and Social Practices Surrounding the Text (Figure 3)
The introduction offers an overview of how the history textbook was once recruited as part of the colonial archive to promote dominant colonial ideologies. The script highlights how the textbook invisibilised the presence of native inhabitants from the map. The conclusion highlights the role of schools as agents of socialisation to promote certain ideologies and how these can be challenged by consuming texts differently.
While the remainder of the video takes students line by line through two pages of the textbook with annotations, it is also interspersed with questions to engage students actively with the reading and encourage them to note their impressions. Thus, reading and writing practices cannot be extricated (Figures 4 and 5).
At the end, students are assigned a blogging task to reflect on how the reading relates to the central question of the course, “What happens to identity when people cross borders?” This task requires students to evaluate, extrapolate and draw conclusions from their interpretations to reflect on the consequences of border crossing on identity. For instance, the history textbook illustrates how the crossing of borders led to the constructions of new identities on both sides, of the so-called “settler” and “Bushmen”. The blog can elicit an interrogation of those constructions for the way they elevate the coloniser and diminish the stature and importance of the colonised.
Our decolonial approach to the history textbook can thus be extended to Appiah’s (1997) question: Is Afro-centrism Euro-centrism upside down? Appiah’s question is a warning not to fall prey to essentialist ideas of Africa or Europe, but rather, in response to the dominance of Eurocentric views, to take cognisance of diverse African perspectives. We note how the history textbook signals the author’s difficulty in sustaining stable constructions of “us” and “them”. We also note contradictions when the author tries to highlight the differences between the “Europeans” and the “Bushmen” as though they were fundamentally different. We thus invite students to consider not only the clash of civilisations, but also the “entanglements” of experiences during the colonial encounter, and the “sameness” of identities across racial or other kinds of boundaries, resulting in the impossibility of imagining narratives of “us” devoid of an “other”. We consider how the locals may also have aspired for territorial expansion, and how they developed sophisticated weapons and warfare techniques to do so.
In this manner, the course recruits the textbook to revisit assumptions about the “boundedness” of social identities created historically to highlight differences, and the dangers of maintaining these assumptions at present, in terms of how they might justify the alienation of a perceived “other” such as minorities and refugees. We use this text to demonstrate how the boundaries between “us” and “them” have been learnt, and can therefore be unlearnt, not to homogenise experiences or negate differences, but to appreciate points of convergence and possibilities for reimagining identities in their fluid manifestations. In the case of refugees, for instance, the need to reimagine identities lies at the heart of questions of belonging, which could either allow them to extend their idea of home, or feel alienated.
Prior to reading the history textbook, students encountered Achille Mbembe’s (2005) text, Afropolitanism. The central thrust of his work is the fact that African identity is not restricted to the Black native, but also available to those in the diaspora, and those from elsewhere residing in Africa. This expanded or “broad-minded” view of African identity allows Mbembe to challenge narrow, bounded understandings of belonging, which arise from a “nativistic reflex”, to interrogate the historically inherited categories of “us” and “them”, and to envision the possibilities of belonging both here and there. Applying Bakhtin’s concept of textual chain here, by situating Mbembe’s work alongside the history textbook, one acquires a certain sensitivity and set of conceptual resources from Mbembe’s text to level a critique against the restrictive framing of particular identities as fixed and oppositional in the history textbook.
This stance is bolstered by a critical examination of how the dominant story of “unification” created sameness and difference by silencing the experiences of “non-whites”. Students analyse the history textbook alongside Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk “The Dangers of the Single Story” where the negative consequences of dominant narratives are discussed. Adichie also highlights how “Nkali” or power plays an important part in foregrounding and silencing specific versions of history. This becomes pertinent in students’ analysis of the extraverbal context, particularly why the history textbook favours a version of events during the colonial encounter, as a first step to unlearning the colonial ideologies that we have internalised and continue to perpetuate. The history textbook can be seen as a window illustrating how race ideologies came into being for expansionist ends and how they were reinforced through a colonial schooling system. It can also be seen as a mirror reflecting back to ourselves our enduring racial biases, and to interrogate them.
Conclusion
At the beginning of Maskew Miller’s Short History of South Africa (1909), the textbook constructed the identities of “Europeans” and “Bushmen” and produced definitive narratives, pitting them against each other to exaggerate the semblance of difference. The “short” history also signalled the fact that some perspectives were truncated, not for the sake of brevity, but to foreground the victors’ version of history and the centrality of their identities in the narrative. To think about identity, we related the analyses of this initial text to the identity discussion provided by K. Woodward. As we pointed out in the article, when the textbook positioned “Europeans” and (or in opposition to) “Bushmen”, it constructed sameness and difference.
Though constructed as savages and underdeveloped, there is some indication that they had some human capacity, for example “considerable artistic ability”, which apparently, the “Europeans” could further develop. Also while the “Bushmen” were depicted as not knowing God, they were shown to have some spiritual knowledge, which could be oriented towards Christianity. Therefore, the colonial enterprise was available to introduce the “Bushmen” to modernity. The group set to achieve this feat was led by white male historians, teachers and students.
These constructions in the history textbook mainly served to justify colonial domination and racial discrimination. In so doing, the text contributed to producing the conditions for coloniality, to validating the colonial/modern parameters of human beings, of what counts as knowledge, and of power. These three parameters worked together, since valid knowledge contributed to creating the ideal developed and civilised human being, who was able to exercise power over other underdeveloped and uncivilised creatures dispossessed of knowledge. The way that the textbook represented the “Bushmen”, constructed them as undeveloped and uncivilised creatures without valid knowledge but able to ascend to the stature of human beings under the supervision of the “Europeans”—civilised, developed, scientific (thus, valid) knowledge producers. Due to that, they were able to exercise power over the “Bushmen” and to position themselves and the “Bushmen” as different. To analyse the skewed representations of “Europeans” and “Bushmen”, we proposed subjecting the text to a critical discourse analysis (CDA), but also establishing dialogical relations between the text and other texts and discourses produced before the book.
In a post-colonial higher education setting, this layered analysis of the history textbook can be used to illustrate how polarised identities were constructed for political reasons, thus offering the possibility to challenge their present articulations. The textbook can also serve to highlight the practical impossibility of sustaining the illusion of bounded identities of “us” and “them”, and the dangers of doing so in the present context even if the objective is a critical response to previous colonial polarisations. More broadly, the use of a colonial text for decolonial work can go against the grain of the widespread assumption that “decolonising the curriculum” requires an outright rejection of Eurocentric texts.
What the CDA exercise demonstrated is that more important than the origin of knowledge is the lens through which it is viewed and understood. Conversely, an emphasis on Afro-centric texts may achieve little in terms of “decolonial work” if the lens and knowledge frames used for sense-making remain Eurocentric. The main argument of our paper—do not erase colonial texts and analyse them critically—focuses on decolonial education. If we erase these texts, we are not able to understand the discursive basis of persistent coloniality in our post-colonial societies. Unpacking and dismantling these colonial discursive structures through dialogic engagement with colonial texts could be a productive way to decolonise our minds and education.
The main thrust of this article is not about the selection of a history textbook for a South African higher education literacy curriculum per se, but about ways of sensitising students to how texts are produced, the different ways in which they can be interpreted and recruited in particular contexts, and the asymmetries of power involved in the production and circulation of texts. This understanding can be applied to other texts that students encounter, as well as the ideas that they may have internalised. The paper complicates the link between texts and the politics of colonial dissent or “epistemic disobedience”, by signalling that texts in themselves are perhaps not carriers of colonial or decolonial thinking, but that decolonial work depends largely on how texts get recruited, how they are positioned alongside other texts to form textual chains, and how they are harnessed in classroom discussions to generate varied responses to past and present questions of identity and belonging.