The University of the Free State (UFS) is a medium-sized public university in the center of South Africa, and it features about midway in local university rankings. I begin this contribution by sketching some background images of the University. Then, through an ethnographic telling of my experience teaching and undertaking curriculum reform in the History department, I seek to elucidate some of the contests within that Department around curriculum reform, pedagogy, and the kinds of historical knowledge that are valued and taught. I also address some of the ways that the Department and students have responded to demands for decolonization in light of the #feesmustfall movement.

The UFS was founded in 1904 as the tertiary division of Grey College, an elite school for white boys established in 1859. From the outset, it was segregated, catering only for white students. As the century progressed, South Africa’s racial state morphed from segregation, where racial discrimination was sustained through a patchwork of fairly ad hoc laws and regulations, to apartheid. Under apartheid, Afrikaner nationalists, and the state they controlled after coming to power in 1948, undertook more concerted efforts to theorize and manage relations between the races. With this shift, the University moved from being more than simply a mirror of segregated society towards active participation in generating the knowledge that rationalized and elaborated the worldview of apartheid – and setting its discursive horizons. The UFS (then known as the University of the Orange Free State), along with Stellenbosch and Pretoria Universities, and the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education lay at the heart of the Afrikaner national ideological and intellectual project. Humanities disciplines were central to this work. History, within this intellectual firmament, emphasized nationalism as the foundational ideological and cultural expression of belonging. Historians also made much of South Africa’s unique place in continental affairs as a defender of Christianity, order, and western values. Moreover, histories written from within this canon tended to follow the white South African practice of regarding the majority of the population – those deemed not to be white – as “non-population.”Footnote ¹ For instance, despite claiming to be a History of South Africa, a volume written by twelve eminent Afrikaner historians declared quite unselfconsciously that its objective was to recount “the activities and experience of the white man over a period of nearly five hundred years in South Africa.”Footnote ²

After the democratic transition in 1994, South African universities went through several waves of transformation, all of which gradually changed the demographic makeup of the student body and, slightly more sluggishly, the faculty. Arguably, the UFS’ most bracing commitment to transformation came around 2010 when a new university president insisted that demographic transformation was shallow unless accompanied by intellectual transformation that connected local challenges, local phenomena, and local science to the very cutting edges of global knowledge.

These lofty aspirations did not always percolate down through the university hierarchy to academic departments. At that level, demographic transformation was often achieved via “Grow Our Own Timber” (GOOT) schemes. These initiatives identified talented candidates, usually Black, supported them through graduate programs, and then assigned them specifically funded academic posts (or sometimes those in junior academic posts but without doctoral degrees were given funding as well as other support to complete their graduate studies). GOOT schemes tended to reproduce the intellectual structures of the old regime. In History, this saw an ongoing emphasis on nationalism and on the old polarities of the Cold War and South African particularism in continental affairs; although, to be sure, the cast of heroes and villains switched roles.

Of course, not all in the Department subscribed to the kind of historical imaginary outlined above which, in its structure and historiographic assumptions, if not content, survived the formal end of apartheid fairly unscathed. However, a recent external review that honed in on the Department’s curriculum pointed out that it was these views that continued to dominate the curriculum.

I arrived in the Department in 2019, although I had worked previously in the University’s International Studies Group, a research unit made up of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in History. Some three months before, I had been invited to a Departmental workshop to fashion a Departmental response to the external review, and based on my experience in the dual fields of curriculum design and history, as well as the fact that I was fairly senior and an outsider, was asked to draft a framework for a new Departmental curriculum. With more zeal than wisdom, I presented this draft to the workshop. However, my prospectus was summarily turned down, and the emphasis of the workshop quickly turned from how to change the curriculum to how to retain it, despite the findings of the review. This occurred with no pause to consider what decolonization meant for the Department’s teaching and research, or relations between faculty and students. This episode was significant not only for my failed attempts to introduce a new curriculum but more for the manner in which it highlights the Department’s collective defense of a particular way of understanding and teaching history.Footnote ³

In the context of the tepid Departmental response to my proposal for curriculum change, I decided on a different, more incremental approach. The first course that I was assigned to teach in the Department that year was a compulsory senior undergraduate offering on African history in the age of independence. The course was microwaveable and came with voluminous PowerPoints.Footnote ⁴ Essentially, it was a political chronology set within a rather simply stated set of Cold War antagonisms. It contained very little about anti-colonial struggles, African politics or state formation, or the complexities of African everyday life. And the course material presumed a banking pedagogy where knowledge would be transmitted largely by the PowerPoint slides, banked, and then retrieved on examination days.Footnote ⁵

Working with a colleague, we redesigned the course around three classics of anti-colonial literature: Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Footnote ⁶ The ideas, dispositions, and politics of these texts helped to shape what knowledge was selected, how it was utilized and assessed, and how the course unfolded. These texts also prompted the central question that organized the course: is independence equivalent to freedom? This question was further broken down as we asked, on the one hand, the extent to which the great anti-colonial theses shaped the historical trajectories of modern African states and, on the other, when, where, and how Africans have used these very ideas to critique the societies they live in.

Collectively, these questions shifted the focus of the course away from political chronology to a set of debates about change and continuity in African politics, development, and everyday life. Contextually, we situated our enquiry within a broader arc of Black critical traditions, stretching from at least the Haitian revolution that began in 1791 to ones posed today by movements in South Africa, such as #feesmustfall, which challenge the disjuncture between “independence” and “liberty.” In so doing we emphasized to students that the course should have a reach beyond a set of specified content material or the confines of an examination. Students’ particular place in this lineage of Black protest was marked by engagement with the idea of a generational mission. We compared and contrasted the challenges of their generation with those of earlier, “Struggle” generations – a distinction (and a form of recognition) that the majority of students found immensely appealing.

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was arguably the educational equivalent of those figures who wrote about anti-colonialism in Africa. We drew on his work to shape both the curriculum and pedagogy in ways consistent with the spirit of the texts that were at the core of this course.Footnote ⁷ Like Fanon, Freire was committed to breaking the legacies of colonialism and of lifting the pall of dehumanization that scarred victims of colonialism and was often passed down generationally. In particular, he was interested in the possibility of education to raise consciousness, generate critical literacy, and mobilize people.

The possibility of a democratic classroom featured prominently in Freire’s thinking. We took this ideal seriously in the hope that a more democratic classroom would allow students to express their agency, participate in the generation of knowledge, and thus reclaim some of the humanity, heritage, and culture lost under colonialism and the ongoing dominance of certain types of knowledge. Thus, students collaborated in selecting case studies and what they wanted to learn from each case study. In studying Pan-Africanism in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, for instance, they were more interested in persistent gender inequalities in the “new” schools than in heroic narratives of Nyerere.

Presuming the highest expectation of students, we expected them to read Fanon, Memmi, and Rodney in the original. And the class developed a strategy for this task, a profoundly democratic one. They divided into three groups, each of which read assigned sections of the book, and they then taught their peers. As I wrote to the class after their reading/teaching of Fanon: “I watched with delight as you took up the tools given to you by Fanon and saw the power of Wretched of the Earth come alive in your hands.”

We blogged about curricula decisions that we, as professors, had taken – acknowledging the fundamental contradiction as well as the idealistic quality inherent in the Freirean ideal of a democratic classroom. And recognizing another contradiction, that much of the secondary literature on modern African history is written and published in the Global North, we ran a competition for students to propose an alternate bibliography of novels, films, exhibitions, songs. In a sense, this exercise saw students declaring their own articles of decolonization. Use of these texts and other sources will change the texture of the course in future iterations.

It is noteworthy that, despite the persistence of historiographic and pedagogic orthodoxies in the Department, my colleague and I were allowed to experiment with curriculum design in ways that represented a significant departure from these canons. Opposition softened to a kind of skepticism and then grudging acceptance, probably helped by the fact that the course was nominated for one of the University’s major teaching awards. And over the course of the last year, several new (and imminent) appointments, all of historians who trained elsewhere, have diluted the historical common sense, sustained by GOOT, that represented the Department’s ethos.

The intellectual world of apartheid was narrow and insular, and those universities aligned with Afrikaner nationalism interacted with each other and a limited number outside of the country. After 1994, doors did begin to open internationally, but these opportunities tended to benefit individuals in the Department who were able to negotiate visits, sabbaticals, and other hosting arrangements with non-South African institutions, usually in the Global North. More recently, new kinds of international collaboration have emerged that are likely to have more significant impacts on the intellectual life of the Department as a whole.

So, for example, a professorial colleague at a major west African university and I have recently agreed to co-supervise each other’s graduate research students. This represents an initial sounding out, and as the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the move to online learning, we are also keen to use the opportunity which this offers to develop shared and co-taught graduate courses. If we succeed, this will bring students at our respective universities into contact with diverse historiographic and methodological traditions and, of course, history students from different political, cultural, and educational backgrounds. There are several other indicators of the Department’s growing pan-African connectedness. The more diverse the Department’s faculty become, the more they connect with an ever-expanding set of international, and particularly continental, networks. Further, the Southern Journal of Contemporary History, published at the UFS, also draws scholars with an interest in modern African history and the idea of a southern historiography into the Department’s orbit.

Despite the resilience of a historiographic orthodoxy in the Department and the absence of any meaningful or sustained engagement with the winds of decolonization, this ethnographic account of curriculum reform, juxtaposed with the emerging trajectory of external collaborations, points to an alternate future: one marked by the possibility of curriculum renewal, agency on the part of students, especially with respect to decolonization, and connection to valuable pan-African networks.