ABSTRACT

While Africanisation remains a popular idiom for intellectual decolonisation, it raises difficult issues around citizenship, identity and belonging, alongside their constitutive dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Using the “politics of belonging” as a conceptual frame, I unpack the tensions involved in grounding decolonisation in a substantive insistence on Africanness. This lens centres important questions like who can successfully claim Africanity and what it means to be intellectually African. Reflecting on the former, both historically and in the aftermath of student calls for a decolonised African university in South African higher education, I show that Africanness is rarely settled by first principles. There are often competing claims regarding the African for whom representation is sought. I therefore contend that the intuitiveness of framing decolonisation as Africanisation elides the politics of belonging that characterises talk of making universities more African, which is sometimes shaped by exclusionary configurations of race, class, nation and indigeneity.

摘要

虽然“非洲化”仍然是知识分子非殖民化的流行用语，但它提出了有关公民身份、身份和归属感的难题，以及包容和排斥的构成动力。我以“归属政治”作为概念框架，解析了将非殖民化扎根于对非洲性的实质性坚持所涉及的紧张局势。这个镜头集中了一些重要的问题，比如谁能成功地宣称自己是非洲人，以及在知识上成为非洲人意味着什么。回顾前者，无论是在历史上还是在学生呼吁在南非高等教育中建立一所非殖民化的非洲大学之后，我表明非洲性很少是通过首要原则来解决的。对于寻求代表权的非洲人，经常存在相互矛盾的主张。