A call to rethink African history and knowledge

What are the predicaments that hold us back from producing knowledge in African academic institutions? Is that something that lies at the heart of knowledge production or the accessibility of knowledge in Africa? And what is African knowledge?

- Ahmet Sait Akcay

Suren Pillay’s Predicaments of Knowledge: Decolonisation and Deracialisation in Universities seeks to answer these questions.

Pillay’s deeply grounded critical insights lead us to rethink the difference between accommodating knowledge and producing knowledge and what it means to engage with, or possess, knowledge in Africa.

Though it has a particular focus on South Africa, the core issues debated in the book deal with the impediments to the process of decolonisation in Africa and its challenges in the institutionalisation of knowledge.

The book is divided into six chapters, in which questions of modernity, the humanities, the university, epistemic injustice, anticolonial nationalism, justice, history and decolonial theory are discussed.

The study alerts us to instrumentalisation — the use of knowledge as a tool to serve specific agendas rather than for deeper understanding.

Drawing on Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, Pillay states that decolonisation is not reducible to identity politics and is about “justice”. He cautiously warns scholars not to get trapped in atavistic and cosmopolitan sentiments.