“Decolonise”: The Fall of a Colonial Statue, Student Protests and Trajectories of Anthropology in South Africa

This article presents a set of arguments about decolonization debates and practices in the South African academy, and particularly efforts by anthropologists based at South African universities to reinvent their discipline from a 21st century southern African perspective. I argue that the student movements of 2015 – 2016 were the primary cause of robust conversations about epistemological and pedagogical issues that had previously not been raised in the post-apartheid South African academy. Questions about the politics of knowledge and curriculum reform were forcefully put on the agenda by the massive movements and opened the space for intense debates about the decolonization of academic institutions and knowledge production in teaching and research. The discussion starts with an appraisal of the student movements that called for decolonization of teaching and research in South African universities. Debates and practical efforts of decolonizing South African anthropology will be presented against the background of past and present anthropological practice in the country. Corresponding to my argument that while decolonization is an indispensable response to colonialism and coloniality everywhere, the concepts of decolonization have distinctive meaning in different contexts, I contend that in South Africa, as a grossly unequal society, social justice is inevitably a key element of any discussion of decolonization. Inequalities likewise continue to manifest in and between post-apartheid universities, which I demonstrate through close descriptions of recent efforts to decolonize the production of anthropological knowledge in three South African institutions.