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The decolonization of higher education in South Africa: Luke’s writing as gift

Hilary Janks

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

I consider myself fortunate to count Allan Luke as one of my professional friends, despite the fact that we have not actually spent time together in the same space very often or for long periods. Our paths have crossed at curriculum meetings, teachers’ conferences, academic-research conferences, perhaps a dozen times in all. I met him for the first time in 1995 at a symposium on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) at the University of South Australia, arranged by Barbara Comber to introduce their graduate students in literacy education (and me) to Australian academics that she admired. I was pretty nervous. So as it turned out was Allan. We have been friends ever since.

In 1995, I had just completed my PhD. Compared to Allan, I felt like a novice. I remember clearly the gift Allan gave me during that first encounter. I had finished my presentation, which included a slide showing how I had summarized John Thompson’s (1984) modes of operation of ideology as part of my theory chapter. I had missed its practical significance and given it short shrift. Many academics that I know would have delighted in telling the audience that this was more important than I had realized and gone on to show how it could be used or developed, thus claiming it for themselves. Instead Luke made it clear to the audience that my framework offered a new and valuable approach to CDA. Leaving its potential with me, Luke enabled me to develop Thompson’s ideas further, showing how they could be applied as a framework for Critical Discourse Analysis (Janks, 1998, 2010). In building me up, Luke taught me the importance of pedagogy as gift. He modelled a practice of turning an absence into a possibility for a new researcher, of helping others to see where they might take their ideas.

Luke’s gift to the field of literacy education is a critical sociological lens. At the same time as Heath (1983) and Street (1984) were theorizing literacy as a social practice that varies across cultures, Luke was completing his PhD in the Sociology of Literacy. Together they provided the foundation for socio-cultural orientations to literacy that marked a decisive rupture in the field, which had been (and continues to be) dominated by psychological and cognitive orientations to learning to read and write. The anthropologists’ focus on cultural variability led Street (1984) to argue that the autonomous, psychological model of literacy fails to recognize a multiplicity of literacy practices, leading ultimately to the work of New Literacies. Luke provided the field with an understanding of the part played by literacy education in reproducing social stratification and differential access to cultural capital, as well as an understanding of how discourse and social interaction contribute to the construction of embodied subjectivities. Sociology provides theories of power, from which Luke made judicious selections. These he put to work to make critical literacy more robust.

Luke’s (2018) suggestion that we might view ‘pedagogy as gift’ comes from traditional societies where teaching and learning are seen as ‘cultural and intercultural gifts, with reciprocal expectations and responsibilities’ (p. 272). He reminded me of the ways different Rabbis prepared my sons for their bar mitzvahs with ‘direct instruction’ in decoding Hebrew, ‘passage study, and memorization of culturally significant texts, oral recitation and call and response reading’ as well as the musical intoning of these texts (Luke, 2008/2018, p. 284). This is an act of intergenerational exchange that for centuries has prepared Jewish boys for the ritualized rite of passage that marks the reciprocal act of their accepting and being accepted into the community as adults. It serves the purpose of ‘the scripted reproduction of historical and cultural memory’ (p. 287) along with its attendant ideologies and prescribed identity positions. While Luke’s focus is on the reciprocal exchange entailed in traditional pedagogies, he recognizes that, as with Western pedagogies, they need to be subjected to ideological critique.

Luke also sees academic writing as a ‘pedagogic act’ tied to the authority and responsibility of scholarship. As a reader, I have a reciprocal responsibility to read critically and with care to imagine if and how Luke’s ideas might be useful for my own context; how others might benefit from this writer/reader pedagogical exchange. Reading Luke’s (2018) selected works, I was struck by the extent to which his thinking addresses the concerns of South African higher education students, which can be seen as a gift that contributes to our thinking.

According to the Magubane Institute for Strategic Reflection,‘decolonisation thinking and practice has firm roots in South Africa’s historically-black, rural institutions’ (2017:1). Student protests at Universities (Limpopo, KwaZulu Natal, Johannesburg) and Universities of Technology (Cape Peninsula, Durban, Mangosotho, Tshwane, Walter Sisulu) from 2009 to 2014, relating to the cost of fees and the quality of Higher Education (South African History Online, 2015), received far less attention than the #Fallist protests, which they preceeded. Their contribution to the struggle for change has been marginalized compared to that of the urban, historically white Institutions. In 2015 at the University of Cape Town, under the moniker #RhodesMustFall, students demanded the removal of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes from his elevated position overlooking the mountainside campus. Rhodes, an archetypal exploitative colonizer associated with “racism, plunder, white supremacy, colonialism, pillaging, dispossession and the oppression of black people” (News24, 22 March, 2015) became a symbol for the lack of transformation in South African Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The cry to decolonize higher education was taken up across the country also finding expression in the #FeesMustFall campaign (2015-2017) at my University. The protest action was ongoing and strategically aligned to the demands of outsourced workers on South African campuses for decent working conditions and pay. The protests were often violent, destructive, racially polarized and polarizing, causing most Universities to close for varying periods of time across the three years. Where police were called onto campus to control the situation, their brutality further inflamed the situation, particularly as this was often in response to disruptive but constitutionally legitimate protest action (Duncan, 2016; de Vos, 2016 . By the end of 2017, having won on key issues – the Rhodes’ statue was taken down, the government announced free higher education for students in financial need, workers were ‘insourced’, employed directly by the HEIs – the students could turn their attention to re-writing Higher Education curricula, which many black students experience as alienating. Even if Jansen (2017) is right that ‘there is no curriculum this side of apartheid that teaches white knowledge and experience to the exclusion of black knowledge and experience’ (p. 165), and I do not believe he is, the students’ determination to decolonize the curriculum is an expression of their resistance to education centered on Western traditions of knowledge and predicated on the embodied culture of whiteness.

According to Luke,

Curriculum hides its class, patriarchal and cultural bases by representing its selections and claims as natural, truthful and scientific, as quite simply, the way things are and should be. In this way, that which is inaccessible to marginalized students – for example the selective tradition of texts, practices, procedures and bodily dispositions – is lent authority as ‘Culture’ and ‘Knowledge’ and thereby is placed above criticism and dispute (2018, 151).

South Africa is unusual in that the marginalized students of higher education come from the country’s overwhelming black majority. I agree with Everatt (2016) that

many black students are recognizing and challenging the powers and privileges that vest in whiteness; the effects of social class on their access and success; and the consequences for their own identities of a curriculum and institutional practices that devalue or negate their cultural and linguistic capital. Many students experience the academy as an alienating space, with unfamiliar discourse norms and practices. The texts they are expected to read are mostly Eurocentric and written in dense academic English (Everatt, 2016).

These students experience the cultural imposition of higher education as symbolic violence and are angry that little has happened to displace white privilege since 1994, the year of the first democratic elections. So, while challenging the ‘cultural arbitraries’ of curriculum (1997/2018, p. 147) is difficult, this is precisely what our students are doing. That they are often unsure of what should be selected instead is not surprising, given that they have had little access to texts and knowledge valued outside of the dominant Western and European traditions of scholarship. This does not mean that we should not trust their discomfort with curricula that fail to address their interests and concerns. The Universities need to work with students and community leaders to create institutions, underpinned by an African ethos. We need to pay attention to the ‘voices, histories and cultures’ of marginalized communities ‘to rethink, revoice and alter what counts as legitimate knowledge’, taking seriously the politics of recognition (Luke 1992/2018, p. 11).

In thinking about students’ sense of discomfort, I find Luke’s (2018) use of Bourdieu’s conception of habitus enlightening. Although Luke uses habitus to think about literacy education more broadly, it is not much of a stretch to apply his thinking to the literate subject of higher education.. Luke’s work on the production of literate bodies (p. 100-123) relates to early childhood education. We need to understand how the ‘ideal body literate’ of higher education is constituted and inscribed on undergraduates and graduates, by whom, and in whose interests. Students in higher education are adults who are both less malleable and more resistant to bodily inscription than young children, particularly where such inscription is experienced as symbolic violence and a threat to identity.

Linking literacy to habitus is one of Luke’s inspired theoretical gifts. For Bourdieu, habitus is a set of durable dispositions, which are instilled in childhood, structured by our circumstances and our histories, and inscribed on our bodies. Our habitus is inculcated through the practices of everyday life (for example, our upbringing and our community and educational experiences) that are full of injunctions that insidiously suggest how we have to behave and who we have to be (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 52). Operating below the level of consciousness, this early training shapes our ways of acting, feeling, thinking, and valuing that are inflected by our class, gender and generational positions. While habitus is not immutable, evolving in relation to new contextual fields that we encounter, some dispositions become ingrained, permanent and durable, what Bourdieu calls bodily hexis. Bourdieu provides a wonderful description of how our linguistic habitus is written onto the mouth as we learn to produce the sounds and speech style of the discourse community we inhabit. Where this becomes part of our bodily hexis, it informs and expresses our ‘whole relation to the social world’ (p. 86).

By separating people according to race, ethnicity and language, apartheid socially engineered ongoing divides that produce differences in habitus. All students who enter institutions of higher education have to accommodate to a new field and learn new ways of being, doing, speaking, writing and interacting. They have to adjust to academic language as well as to different institutional, social, pedagogical, and literacy practices. This adjustment is much more demanding for black students in South Africa whose languages are not used in the academy, whose dispositions and tastes are often far removed from the naturalized urban, middle class, white cultural norms that are in place, and who are often the first in their families to register for degrees. Systemic problems in education at the level of both national and provincial government, combined with policies (particularly language policies), make it difficult for students to succeed at University. In addition, because the continuing dysfunctionality of schools serving black, working class and rural communities fails to prepare students adequately for university, it is not difficult to understand these students’ feelings of discomfort, dislocation, disempowerment and alienation. Imagine what it must feel like not to know the rules for greeting lecturers, for disagreeing with what the lecturer says, for knocking on someone’s door, for getting access to books that you cannot afford, for participating in tutorials, for asking a question in a lecture, for citing words written in books, or knowing who to ask, and for not knowing how to be in one’s embodied performances. The list is endless. Twenty four years since the end of apartheid, one can understand why black students are enraged. There can be no doubt that higher education is a legitimate site of ‘struggle over difference, identity and politics’ (Luke, 1997/2018, p. 151).

Bourdieu’s (1991) discussion of a ‘linguistic market’ provides a good analogy for privileged and marginalized forms of habitus. As with dispositions and practices, language differences are socially stratified. Different languages and different varieties of the same language are not equally valued in different fields, producing different capital in relation to different identities. South Africa has eleven official languages but they cannot be said to be equal. For example, although IsiZulu is spoken as a home language by 22.7% of the population and is the dominant African language, it does not have the same symbolic value as English, the home language of only 9.6% of the population. Similarly the ability to speak many African languages is less prestigious than knowledge of and fluency in English. Seen as the marker of education and the means to economic success, English is the carrier of cultural capital in South Africa’s linguistic market. At the universities where the Fallist movement is most active, English is a necessity, yet its status as the only medium of instruction has not been challenged as part of the decolonization project. The #AfrikaansMustFall movement has challenged the exclusive use of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction at Pretoria and Stellenbosch Universities, historically-white institutions (Mkhizi, 2018). The history of language policy in South Africa, which enforced mother tongue education in primary school and imposed Afrikaans as a medium with English in secondary schools, seems to have entrenched a desire for English. This is what McKinney (2017) calls ‘anglo-normativity’. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, when he visited universities in 2017 to engage with decolonisation, urged African intellectuals and students to treat the institutionalising of African languages as urgent. He has long argued that the use of African home languages is key to ‘decolonising the mind’ (Ngũgĩ, 1981). Luke would agree. This view is supported by the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures (2000). The advanced language politics in South African higher education following the #Fallist protests is discussed further in Volume 36, Issue 1 of Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (2018).

When one of my Sepedi-speaking colleagues, Sebolai Mohope, wanted to do research with Sepedi speaking students, she had difficulty finding participants. It turned out that students were reluctant to admit to being Sepedi, which they believed stigmatized them as rural. Using the Marxist notion of alienated labor, Luke describes this as ‘alienated language’ (2018, p. 8), so alienated in this case that these students felt it necessary to deny their identities and their linguistic resources. Mohope’s research studied the effects of students’ participating in a study group once a week where they used Sepedi to discuss what they had been taught through the medium of English and/or what they had read in English. She found that licensing students to use their language to talk about their academic work had a number of beneficial effects, not least of which was the way in which it helped them to reclaim a sense of self and enabled them to use Sepedi as a resource for learning (Mohope, 2012.) Bourdieu also draws attention to the fact that the ability to speak the dominant language so as to be understood, does not guarantee that one is ‘likely to be listened to’. Because there is a ‘relationship between the system of linguistic differences and the system of economic and social differences’, differences in variety, accent, intonation, and syntax, make it more difficult for second language speakers of English to impose reception. This is what Blommaert (2005) calls ‘voice’ – ‘the capacity to generate uptake of one’s words’ (p. 68). Mohope’s study group gave Sepedi students voice, and developed their confidence to use their voices beyond the safe confines of the group.

If the linguistic market produces a ‘profit of distinction’ for speakers with ‘legitimate English competence’ (Bourdieu, 1991, 55), the same can be said for students whose habitus is seen to be legitimate because it fits the norms of the institutions, with dispositions that incline them to discipline, punctuality, participation, self-motivation, diligence, and whose bodies are ‘appropriately’ regulated in terms of eye-contact, proxemics, volume, dress and so forth. For black students who have to rely on unreliable transport to be punctual, who come from a schooling system which did not teach them to question what they read, to substantiate a point of view, to do independent research, to keep a diary, or to generate a plan to meet hand-in dates, the codes of Higher Education Institutions, predicated on unfamiliar/mysterious practices, are unnerving. The funds of knowledge (Moll et al, 1992) that they bring from their communities and their experiences appear not to have a place in curricula where Eurocentric knowledge, dispositions and practices are privileged. Making sense of local epistemologies and pedagogical practices, Luke (2008, p. 272-298) offers insights for de-centering western traditions. We have to make space for African, Asian, and Indigenous epistemologies and we have to embrace research from the political South, where the shared history of colonization has created similar conditions to those we face. Foucault (1970) is right when he argues that, ‘Discourse is the power which is to be seized’ (p. 110)

Western knowledge, broadened to include Western modernity, is not innocent. Luke reminds us that Western science has been

enlisted in the colonization of Indigenous peoples, the destruction of the environment, the marginalization, and, in instances, genocide of cultural minorities, and the pathologisation of LGBTQ peoples (2018, p. 12).

Chemistry and physics have been used to create weapons, literature to construct and maintain orientalism (Said, 1978), economics to justify capitalism, critical discourse analysis to produce spin, anthropology to promote the theory of the ‘great divide’ between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ peoples, biology (in conjunction with anthropometry and craniometry) to produce scientific racism and eugenics, history to tell the story from above, not below. And this is not a complete list. Moreover, the verdict is still out on genetic engineering (seed modification, human cloning), artificial intelligence, the internet and new technologies, along with other recent instances of Western ‘progress’.

Nevertheless lack of access to Western knowledge would reduce students’ life chances, exclude them from the professions and prevent them from wielding the ‘master’s tools’. Although Audrey Lorde, an African American writer, feminist and civil rights activist said that ‘the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house’, Luke (2018) gives a powerful example of how he was able to appropriate and reinvent such tools (pages 13-14). Forced to study educational psychology, he was introduced to schema theory and text grammars. In realizing that ‘disciplinary paradigms and socio-political ideologies were ‘cognitive schemata’, Luke developed

(1) an understanding of the cultural and ideological origins of structured background knowledge, and, reciprocally (2) an understanding that text macrostructures were codings of cultural scripts and social class ideologies (Luke, 2018, 14).

Using his reinvented tools to examine curriculum materials he was able to show how the story grammars of early readers in the 1980s contributed to the teaching and learning of dominant ideologies of race, class, gender and sexuality. It would be interesting to investigate the extent to which early readers since the 1980s have changed over time.

We do have ongoing evidence that ideology continues to inform what counts as worthy of inclusion in selective traditions. The current ‘race row in the poetry world’, reported in by Lichtenstein (2018) in The Atlantic, is a case in point. ‘Celebrated’ white critics disparaged the selections for the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry that Rita Dove, an admired African American poet, made. Dove responded in kind, asking if they were making

a last stand against the hordes of up-and-coming poets of different skin complexions and different eye slants? Were we—African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans—only acceptable as long as these critics could stand guard by the door to examine our credentials and let us in one by one?

The evidence suggests that the gatekeepers of what counts as poetry in the U.S., limited by their whiteness, are out of touch, out of date, and out of line. As Lichtenstein (2018) in The Atlantic points out, the poets who are winning the prestigious poetry awards and fellowships and are being acclaimed at literary festivals, published, and invited to lecture, are

immigrants and refugees from China, El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, Vietnam. They are black men and an Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as well as straight and choose their personal pronouns with care.

New energy is coming from marginalized others who are successfully challenging the cultural arbitraries of the Western poetry canon and in doing so are giving marginalized perspectives a powerful voice. Curriculum needs to be inclusive of a wide range of perspectives and in fighting for a decolonized curriculum, the students imagine one that is not bound by the perspectives and knowledge traditions of the colonizers. In this way they can select from knowledge produced in and beyond the colony, transform it to suit their own African context and thus contribute to the ongoing development of knowledge for and of Africa.

In helping us to think about how curriculum might be reconceived Luke, drawing on Fraser (2005) suggests that it should serve the interests of recognitive, redistributive and representative social justice (p.24). Recognitive social justice, which includes the experiences, understandings and practices of marginalized communities to reimagine what counts as knowledge, has already been discussed. In thinking about where to begin, Luke’s (2018) thoughts on the role of elders, the use of culturally significant texts, the weaving together of elements of pedagogy from different traditions, an engagement with different modes of representation and the use of culturally appropriate forms of intergenerational exchange (pp 290-291) provide a way of imagining what might be needed in an African context.

Redistributive social justice ensures ‘fair and equitable access to dominant knowledge structures and … practices that are requisite for … sustainable economic and social participation’ (p.11). Luke cautions that we have to find a way to do so

‘without paying an ideological price, losing soul and family, kin and land, without forgetting our communities’ narratives and histories in the process’ (p.12).

This is similar to what I meant by the ‘access paradox’ (Janks, 2004; 2010). We have to imagine ways of supporting students to gain access to those aspects of dominant knowledge that they desire but with sufficient skepticism not to be colonized by them.

This skepticism needs to be grounded by training in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989, 2003; Janks, 2010), that provides students with the tools they need to understand how texts are positioned and positioning, and how the semiotic choices in texts work to construct meaning (Luke, 2001/2018). Students need a great deal of practice in interrogating texts to see who is included/excluded, what is foregrounded/ backgrounded, what is assumed/naturalized, and what knowledge and experience is privileged/marginalized/silenced. In short they need to be able to read critically. That is, they have to be able to operate with Luke’s ‘two takes on the critical’ (Luke, 2004/2018, p. 216). First they have to be able to use reason to analyse evidence, facts and arguments, and secondly, they need a theoretical understanding of the relationship between discourse power and knowledge for analysing the social and political effects of texts. Across disciplines in higher education, they need to be able to read with texts in order to learn from them, and against texts in order to question and challenge them. I would argue that critical discourse analysis is a decolonizing pedagogy.

Luke also reminds us that opaque academic discourse often stands in the way of access, particularly for students working in a language that is not their own. When he began to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island student teachers at James Cook University in Australia, Luke says that he

had to begin to learn to narrate again, unlearning a style of speech and teaching that had been taken over by APA references. This amounted to the deliberate reversal of … an ontological continuum of Western literacy, one that had taken me from first person to third person and trained me to talk like a book. It was a challenge … Much remained to be learned and unlearned (Luke, 2018, p. 15).

In addition, we need to ensure that access to dominant knowledges does not further entrench their dominance by guaranteeing access to competing knowledges that are powerful outside our normative traditions. I agree with Luke (2018) that alternative discursive positions provide different places in which to stand that enable us to question dominant theories and perspectives (p. 7). By denaturalizing one another different discourses are able to unsettle one another’s taken-for-granted truths. This is disruptive both at the level of ideas and in relation to one’s own identity. Because marginalized people are able to see the world through the lens of their own communities, but also have to learn to see through the eyes of the dominant culture, they have to suffer the oppressive condition of ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois, 1903/1994). They experience the disempowering weight of having to look at themselves through the negative gaze of the dominant Other that constantly undermines their sense of self and reinforces their marginal status. As a Chinese-American, Luke has lived with these oppressive relations and says that the ‘experience of liminality, of embodied Otherness, of being an outsider remains’ (p. 5).

Nevertheless, as a poststructuralist, Luke does not subscribe to theories of identity as singular or unified (p.6) and is able to reconceptualise his own double consciousness as ‘neither binary nor deficit’. Instead he sees it as

an enabling epistemic stance … that comes from the juxtaposition of multiple world views … Double consciousness is in fact a source of epistemic power and privilege. Our alterity, our Otherness has enabled many of us to see, observe and construct unconventional frameworks, models and explanation (Luke, 2018, p. 7).

Having moved from ‘margin to centre, from culture to culture, from institution to institution, from continent to continent and back again’ he has come to understand that

There is insight in displacement and liminality, often painful and difficult. It is the insight borne from juxtaposition and transliteration of experiences and theories, cultures and selves (Luke, 2018, p.7).

He argues that deficit belongs instead to

Those who have lived in privilege, [who] working from an unmarked dominant speaking/epistemic position [are] at risk of a monocular and myopic stance (Luke, 2018, p.7).

A decolonizing pedagogy would develop students’ ability to use their double or multiple consciousness to question what is presented as natural or normal and to use their ability to see and think differently and productively. Standing outside the codes of a discourse automatically puts one in a powerful deconstructive position. Once again Luke offers a way of accessing dominant knowledges, texts and practices without having to buy into them. This is what he means by redistributive social justice. Denying people access to powerful dominant knowledges is not an option. It would be equivalent to denying slaves in the U.S. access to literacy, or re-introducing Bantu education in South Africa, both policies designed keep black people in their subservient place. However, powerful knowledge should always be subject to questions such as, ‘Powerful for whom?’ and ‘Who decides?’

Finally Luke argues for the importance of representative social justice – that

education should prepare students to be activists: to engage in politics at all levels and ‘to take to the streets when necessary’ (2018, 25). The teaching and learning of civics, mandated in Florida by the Sandra Day O’Connor Civic Education Act, provides an excellent example of education that enables representative social justice. Following a school shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students who survived the gun violence organised to protest gun legislation nationally. These high school students found the courage to speak out, demonstrated the eloquence needed to challenge the powerful gun lobby in the U.S., and put their know-how, passion, and commitment to work to effect wide-spread political mobilisation under the banner #NeverAgain.

The Fallists in my country have also shown an ability to mobilise students and to fight for recognitive social justice by insisting on the decolonisation of university education. This is a deeply unsettling process because it forces everyone to rethink everything.

Decolonisation, which sets out to change the order of the world is obviously a programme of complete disorder (Fanon, 1963, p. 36)

Rethinking is not helped by protest action which includes intimidation, violence and arson. Fear induced by intentionally offensive graffiti, such as ‘Fuck white women’, written in public spaces on campus is counter-productive. It reveals the anti-white and patriarchal ideologies that have been used by some to fuel the decolonisation project. The smearing of human faeces on campus and the use of dirty sanitary towels are confrontational acts of cultural violence and attacks on the social order. The destruction of buildings, including libraries, has longterm material effects. The slogan Burn to be heard points to the students’ sense that their demands have not been met through peaceful protest (Duncan, 2016). Rethinking is also not helped by the excessive brutality of poorly trained security personnel, and police using water canons, rubber bullets, batons, and tear gas. Violence escalates. The conflict is ugly. Attitudes harden. Institutional transformation is delayed. Disorder interrupts the rethinking needed to re-order higher education. (Images of the clash between students and police can be seen at https://www.theguardian.com/ world/gallery/ 2016/ sep/ 22/ south-african-students-clash-police-johannesburg-wits-university).

White academics, and I still count myself as one as a retired emerita professor, have to figure out how to function with tainted capital and embodied whiteness in institutions where our academic authority, disciplinary knowledge, and experience no longer authorize us to speak or teach (Heleta, 2016). We have to find a way to use this discomfort to experience and comprehend what it means to live with a habitus that lacks legitimacy. Luke (2018) talks about what he learnt in moving from the margins of White societies as ‘a marked cultural Other’, to the centre in Singapore where as a ‘Han-Chinese male in a position of administrative power’ (2018, p. 20) he was a member of the dominant group. Whites in South Africa have to see what they can learn, as they accommodate to moving in the other direction, from the centre to the margins.

The move to decolonize higher education has not occurred in a political vacuum. It is part of a much larger project to address the lack of radical change following the negotiated transfer of power in 1994, which has left white privilege largely intact. Tuck and Yang (2012) are educationalists who see decolonization of education as a metaphor that should not displace the true decolonial project – ‘the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ (p. 1). In South Africa, the expropriation of land without compensation is firmly on the agenda and ‘white settler futurity’ (p. 3) is by no means secure. Confronting the reality of living with one’s tainted capital and embodied privilege while dealing simultaneously with the threat of dispossession and displacement, is not just unsettling (Tuck and Yang, 2012), it requires a profound shift in consciousness.

In recognizing the structural advantages of my whiteness, I accept that what I have tried to contributed to the struggle for greater equity and social justice as a critical literacy and activist educator does not exonerate me. I nevertheless take comfort from Luke’s ‘de-reification and deconstruction of the homogeneity of race’ (2018, p. 20) and trust that black students and colleagues have the capacity to see difference in whiteness. However they may judge me, I hope that my whiteness will not stand in the way of their accepting Luke’s work as a gift worthy of their consideration.

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Ana Ferreira, Carolyn McKinney and my reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper, and to John Janks for his proof reading and support.

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