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By Dr Tshepo Mvulane Moloi

As part of my pursuit and ongoing advocacy to advance the decolonialisation of education, specifically within the context of our current national locality of South Africa, I propose to share my personal trajectory in academia.

The latter is undertaken to hopefully record and reflect about the epistimicide I experienced, in my scholarly trajectory as a "black" South African.

I completed my undergraduate (2002-2005) and honours (2006) degrees, at University of Zululand (UZ), one of the "historically disadvantaged universities" with political science as a major. I, along with fellow "black" South African classmates, observed that we were hardly taught, about "black" South African political scientists.

Oddly the aforesaid status quo incredibly prevails to date, across most institutions in South Africa. Why? Well, unbeknown to our credulous budding minds back then, we overlooked that the bulk of our lecturers were also colonised graduates, hired from other South African universities.

To be specific, the two lecturers who taught me political science were, namely, alumni of the universities of Pretoria (UP) and of Durban-Westville now University of KwaZulu-Natal.

As regards racial hue, the two lecturers who taught me political science were descendants of Afrikaners and Indians respectively.

Notably, emphasis on ones "race" in South Africa arose from absurd colonial bigotry, which climaxed post-inauguration of an apartheid regime, in 1948.

These two lecturers were (albeit differently from our "black" South African graduates), also victims. Their respective flaws, however, were consistent with the historical path imposed from a common inheritance, informed by racial prejudice.I wondered how come my lecturers, when they had an opportunity to address erasure, which is equivalent to "epistemic violence", when teaching such modules, did not do so.

They opted instead to basically continue with the earlier noted problematic status quo of dogmatic discourse, which merely renewed "epistemic violence", initiated by bygone colonialists of pre-1994 democratic South Africa. In retrospect, I recall that it is such an anomaly which inspired my eventual honours project to focus on ascertaining whether "South Africa had its own foreign policy".

To my dismay, the latter capstone by and large abhorrently magnified "white" (Afrikaans and English) scholars, as the mainly solitary scholars of South Africas foreign policy. A sample of their names included Deon Geldenhuys, Peter Vale and Maxi Schoeman.

Black South Africans who were featured appeared mostly as plenipotentiaries, as civil servants in the diplomatic corps since 1994. I only learnt later about Samuel Nolutshungu, Vincent Maphai and Tandeka Nkiwane.

As one may have expected, as a postgraduate student of political science post-2006 in South Africa, the latter incongruence worried me. The disturbing results of my study, inspired by recommendations consistent with an "epistemic break" from mainstream IR, as was explored in my doctorate.

Mindful of being a "black" South African, that is how I thus subsequently selected Eskia Mphahlele and the exploration of his Afrikan Humanism, as a possible African contribution to IR.

Both of my studies are freely available online.

Dr Tshepo Mvulane Moloi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study.

Excerpt from:

OPINION: It's disturbing that universities don't teach about black South African political scientists - Independent Online