Straddling Gratitude and Resentment
Being a postgrad student at a predominantly white institution was exhausting.
I am a black Tanzanian woman. The way Swahili knowledge is produced and consumed in my country ranges from written works, to oral storytelling, to misemo printed along the hems of khangas, to the way our bodies move to traditional dance and physical activity. When your education consistently alienates all of this incredible history, you run the risk of starting to feel like its alternative.
A little bit of history: SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), where I attended postgrad, was established in 1916 as an institution to “train the colonial administrators who ran the British Empire in the languages of Asia and Africa.” In his 2016 book, historian Ian Brown writes about how it has become “a world center of scholarship and learning, challenging [its] imperial origin.”
In line with Brown’s words, the institution has spent the last few decades going through a kind of rebrand. It has leaned in to the fact that its name implies de-centering whiteness; it has more Black and Teachers of Color than majority of the academic institutions in the country; it has a common area that plays Noname almost every other day and has gorgeous murals of Kendrick Lamar, Maya Angelou and Che Guevara that fill up the walls; and it’s extremely fond of the phrase “Decolonise your mind.” SOAS’ brand is so strong that everyone would immediately assume I was incredibly political as soon as I’d mention that I went there.
“Simply being critical of Euro-patriarchal thinking will never be enough. Its dominance runs too deep. If this is what academic institutions consider to be decolonization, then we ought to question whether the project is worth our energy at all.”
I quickly realized that SOAS, like many British academic institutions, does a great job of selling you the idea of a better learning environment while ensuring that none of its foundations resemble what that environment would look like. I knew the usual white male thinkers would feature in my syllabi, but I was not prepared for Black and POC thinkers to be that sparse in essential reading lists. I remember writing about black women and black African women every chance I got, and having to seek out black writers’ work to cite because they were rarely introduced to us by lecturers. Sure, it was out of interest, but when a huge portion of your compulsory modules is based on your understanding of white thinkers and frameworks, it starts to feel like an act of defiance. While I’m grateful that that tension led me to some of my favorite Black and POC thinkers to date, I wonder what it would have felt like for nurture to be the feeling that ushered me towards them.
According to SOAS, to “Decolonise your mind” means that white male thinkers need to be looked at critically; that their work needs to be read carefully and not taught unquestionably - a standard that, quite frankly, should not need to be articulated when you consider how many of these thinkers have expressed violent and racist rhetoric in their work, either overtly or by rewriting and omitting experiences of people from other cultures.
“I now have the language to refer to it as ‘epistemological racism,’ but at the time I remember constantly feeling intellectually tired and lonely - for reasons beyond the rigor involved with postgrad - and not quite being able to put my finger on it. ”
I sat through so many lectures that studied the works of these thinkers as if they were the ultimate fountain of knowledge and wisdom. If you complacently sit through enough of them you don’t just develop a sense of respect for their contribution to knowledge, you start to truly think of black and people of color thinkers as alternative. Instead of it being a time when you learn to appreciate the vast forms of knowledge cultures have to offer, getting through your degree becomes a process of trying to assimilate into white knowledge spaces.
Simply being critical of Euro-patriarchal thinking will never be enough. Its dominance runs too deep. If this is what academic institutions consider to be decolonization, then we ought to question whether the project is worth our energy at all. Quite frankly, unless there is an entire upheaval of how and which knowledge is produced and consumed at these institutions, sprinkling a few readings by non-white writers and case studies from non-white spaces is just not enough.
SOAS is my point of reference, but I suspect this is the case for many (if not all) British academic institutions. I now have the language to refer to it as ‘epistemological racism,’ but at the time I remember constantly feeling intellectually tired and lonely - for reasons beyond the rigor involved with postgrad - and not quite being able to put my finger on it.
I certainly experienced individual and institutional racism during my time in England, but this is the form of racism that perhaps caught me off guard the most. The institutional racism that keeps Black and POC educators from accessing these academic institutions probably magnifies this form of violence. I wrote my dissertation on a black woman, Caster Semenya, and my non-black supervisor would thoroughly critique all of my work until he got to the bits that invoked Black knowledge and Black womanhood. He would then either insist that I was being ambitious or just not comment at all. Not only did it leave me in the dark in terms of how good my work was, but also it made me extremely anxious when I thought that the kind of person who would eventually mark my work would likely look like them, and thus react like them.
It’s strange. I feel like I’m straddling gratitude to have attended a good institution but also resentment for having been forced to experience racism relentlessly. There is not much that SOAS and the like could do now to change that, except commit itself to radically altering what they consider to be ‘knowledge.’ But if I am entirely honest, I don’t have much faith.
About Karen: Karen is a writer/researcher from Tanzania, with a deep love for women's sport, tv show rom-coms and great literature. She is also a senior editor for The Floor Magazine, co-host of The Playback Podcast, and a new plant mum. You can follow Karen on Twitter @kayandstuff.
This story is part of an ongoing series, Surviving PWIs for POC, about the experiences of students of color in higher education. The series is edited by Shanice Arlow. If you are interested in submitting a piece for this series, please contact Weave Newshere.
