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  • Humanities after Apartheid
  • Mamadou Diouf (bio)

In 2010, two South African sociologists, Ari Sitas and Sarah Mosoetsa, were commissioned by the Ministry of Higher Education and Training to develop a plan for revitalizing the country's humanities and social sciences programs. The report they published one year later involved a long process of consultation with "more than a thousand colleagues in all the institutions of higher learning, and interested parties in government and civil society."1 Examining critically the "singular emphasis" on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), contributors to a parallel study carried out by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) pointed to the progressive "corporatization" of higher education in the world system as a whole evidenced by the disregard for the humanities in society,2 as well as the diminishing role of humanities scholars in the "knowledge chain" and their weakening place in academia.3 At a conference held in 2012 after the release of the committee's report, the panelists settled on a series of recommendations and a timetable to reinvigorate the humanities and social sciences over the next six years.4

In many countries throughout the world, the perceived marginalization of the humanities and social sciences has led to innumerable initiatives, consensus studies, and policy recommendations. The situation was considerably more bleak in Africa than in any other region of the developing world for many reasons: the developing or (un)developed condition of the African continent, the predominance of research focused on economic growth rather than social development, and the effects of structural adjustment programs that have imposed drastic cuts in expenditure on higher education since the 1980s. The set of economic and political changes associated with the latter especially "have impacted negatively resource allocation by African government and aid donors to universities [and] worsened the context within which social sciences must develop in Africa."5 The dramatic increase of student enrollment, stagnation [End Page 117] or decrease in budgets and financial resources, and the absence of pedagogical resources in the humanities are the long-lasting consequences in the field of higher education.

Few African countries have conducted investigations into their higher education system and the place of the humanities in it. Though the crisis in the humanities is continental in scope, its manifestations differ slightly from one country to another. The enrollment in the humanities is declining in South Africa while it is increasing in Senegal, where understaffed humanities and social sciences faculties are enrolling more than half of the annual university-entering cohort. However, the overwhelming majority of humanities graduates are unemployed in Senegal, while in South Africa virtually all humanities graduates are either employed or self-employed.6 Nonetheless, all African countries share, among other things, falling graduation rates; decreasing government funding; intellectual stagnation; an aging academic and research workforce; and a limited number of new doctorate holders. The latter is particularly troubling, since it highlights the challenges of training the next generation of humanities scholars who are unable to complete their dissertation because of their heavy teaching load, with disastrous effect on the volume and quality of African scholarship.

The crisis is a complex product of the postcolonial moment. First, African literary and artistic productions have been reduced under the weight of ethnographic discourse to mere documents of difference, denied the status of literature or art, part of the implicit script that confines the black community to the margins of history and humanity.7 Second, the African renaissance reconstructed an African epistemology and reinstated intellectual and moral values essential to the recovery of political sovereignty, thus reestablishing the link severed by Hegelian thought between black ahistoricity with African history and civilization. This recovered history spans the origins of humanity to the destruction of African cultures and religions concomitant with the opening of the Atlantic world and the arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century.

Political and cultural recovery went hand in hand. In the humanities, history and literature became at once the weapons of criticism (l'arme de la critique) and the criticism of the weapon (la critique des armes). Because cultural practices were so intimately tied to politics, the humanities became the territory not...

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