Editorial: Decolonising Knowledge Production in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts in Africa

Abstract

Introduction

The current global system is characterised by a profound imbalance in the distribution of resources and opportunities, particularly between richer and poorer countries, as well as within those countries themselves. This imbalance is equally evident in the architecture of knowledge production, which was the subject of a colloquium in 2024 hosted by the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies (CGAS), Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Free State (UFS) under the theme ‘Decolonising Knowledge Production in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts (HSSA): Reflecting on a Decade of the Charter for Humanities and Social Sciences in South African Higher Education’.¹ The colloquium provided an opportunity to reflect and take stock of the state of the Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts within the broader knowledge production architecture governing the South African higher education landscape. The articles in this volume examine the embedded Eurocentric knowledge monopolies and enduring legacies from a decolonial theory perspective, as well as the challenges of combating the resulting inequalities and racial hierarchies.

The idea for the colloquium is traceable to four key moments. In about May 2024, I shared a 30 November 2015 Library Genesis letter titled ‘In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’ (Barok et al. 2015) with members of the CGAS WhatsApp Group. In this letter, the authors bemoan the superprofits the publishing giant Elsevier was making through parasitic practices that exploited authors and reviewers. This provoked discussions about the asymmetries in the production and dissemination of knowledge between the Global (minority) North and the Global (majority) South, as well as the academic capitalism and parasitism therein.

The second moment arose when Professor Hussein Solomon shared, in the same group, an article by Savo Heleta and Pedro Mzileni in which they ably demonstrated that the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) was reinforcing bibliometric coloniality in South Africa. Their analysis showed that the DHET’s list of accredited journals was dominated by journals from Europe and North America, a matter that the DHET ostensibly sought to address in its own Charter, which stated that knowledge production in Africa and on Africa must be responsive to local contexts.

The third moment was when Professor Stephanie Cawood shared, in the same WhatsApp group, an article published in The Guardian in which the author, Arash Abizadeh, argued and demonstrated that giant publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – operated a lucrative scam, bleeding universities dry while achieving profit margins that rivalled those of Google. The fourth and final moment was when the Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities, Prof. Mogomme Masoga, out of the blue, called the CGAS to say that if we could host a conference on decolonising knowledge, he could underwrite the funding. The rest, as the old adage goes, is history.