Achille Mbembe* and Sarah Nuttall at Indexing the Human

Potent calls in recent weeks to decolonise South Africa’s universities open many new avenues for debate and action. These include: what is the relationship, now and historically, between decolonisation and Africanisation? How is the nature of the ‘colonial’ that decolonisation invokes different from an earlier period? Is decolonisation the right term of critique and opposition? To which archives can we turn to  produce the future university? How does the decolonising paradigm relate to global re-scaling of higher education and its increasing transnationalism? What are the multiple layers of transformation that South African universities need to take on?

The text of Achille Mbembe’s recent lecture Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive via WISER

This document was deliberately written as a spoken text. It forms the basis of a series of public lectures given at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), at conversations with the Rhodes Must Fall Movement at the University of Cape Town and the Indexing the Human Project, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. The nature of the events unfolding in South Africa, the type of audience that attended the lectures, the nature of the political and intellectual questions at stake required an entirely different mode of address – one that could speak both to reason and to affect.

*Professor Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996).  On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation has been published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001.