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arguing that it takes ‘time’ to grow black academics if woefully little has been
done to put a system-wide programme in place to expand and nurture the
pipeline for black academics at all levels within higher education, and if artificial,
often racial and gendered barriers are not directly and firmly broken down within
that system. Our collective failure to create such a national system to date is both
an indictment and deriliction of duty by our leadership in toto, not only the
current, but also all past leaderships of higher education. The figures for disabled
staff and students are even worse; though some improvements are noticeable.

b. The expansion of the higher education system has not necessarily meant a
significant increase in the actual participation of African students in higher
education (CHE, 2007). ‘An analysis of the distribution of student enrolments by
race across major disciplinary fields shows some of the limitations that the
expansion of access has had in bringing about greater equity in the South African
higher education system. […] Black and, particularly, African students still
constitute the minority of the enrolments in Science, Engineering and
Technology and Business and Commerce, which raises the issue of the equity of
opportunity among different race groups. These figures suggest that the South
African higher education system has been unable to break substantively with pre-
1994 enrolment patterns’ (ibid). These patterns seem to project themselves into
the future (see CHE, Vital Stats, 2014). ‘Only 14% of African and 14% of
Coloured students are enrolled in [higher education institutions], as opposed to
57% and 58% for White and Indian students respectively. Black and female
students are under-represented in science, engineering and technology as well as
in business and commerce programmes; while postgraduate studies are
dominated by white males.’ (South Africa 20 year review; 49). Also, achievement
within the system remains racially skewed, by reproducing and feeding into
existing societal inequalities. The present focus on teaching and learning is a step
in the right direction but its impact will arguably be limited outside the general,
positive disruption of the social structure of the academy.

19. Knowledge and its disciplines

a. Higher education in South Africa and on our continent suffers a profound
constraint: the western disciplining of knowledge. Here one can summon
Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s argument that ‘the worst form of colonization […] on the
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continent is the epistemological one (colonization of imagination and the mind)
that is hidden in institutions and discourses that govern the modern globe’. The
lack of interpretive resources to cognise ‘black’ is thus structurally-anchored
within the disciplines; the very terms for decolonisation are prefigured in the
colonising knowledge project. This epistemic injustice features in our research,
teaching and learning and community engagement practices; they are discipline-

6 Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonisation. [e-book] Dakar: Council for the
Development of Social Science Research in Africa. Available at: http://www.codesria.org/IMG/pdf/2-
Coloniality_of_Power_Ndlovu_Chapter_2.pdf [Accessed on 20 November2013], p.63.
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