Democracy 'is a myth'

Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres.

Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres.

Published Jan 11, 2017

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Pretoria - The struggle for decolonisation in South Africa may have taken the country's citizens by surprise, but it was only a matter of time before the issue came to the fore, exposing the myth of democratisation.

Decoloniality studies expert Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres from Rutgers University raised this point when he was speaking on the opening day of Unisa’s fourth Decoloniality Summer School held by the College of Human Sciences. Academics and scholars from across the world have gathered at Unisa for the two-week summer school, which addresses the topical issue of decoloniality with a focus on power, knowledge and identity.

Maldonado-Torres said the country’s youth were bound to take on the struggle to decolonise various institutions across South Africa because they had found democracy to be a myth.

He said this came as a surprise to many South Africans because since 1994 the dominant rhetoric of a democracy in which the nation lived as equals had been the message delivered to the country's citizens.

However, this structure, which implied a change from segregation and inequality, had not yielded such outcomes over the past 22 years, resulting in the call for decolonisation.

“The demand for decolonisation is massive interruption of democratisation, meaning that people believe democratisation is a myth The youth have played a critical role in revealing this myth. They grew up with the rhetoric of democracy but when they became adults, the realised the reality was different That is why the youth created an earthquake in South Africa.”

Maldonado-Torres also spoke on dominant forms of power and questioned how whites, who are a minority in this country, remained the dominant power.

He said this was achieved by owning land and ownership of means of production. “In this way, your interests will always be served. You may be a few, but you will always be boss,” adding that because there were black leaders within the political system, it did not mean that they were serving black bodies.

He said this white dominant power also affected the working class whites who could become resentful of black people who they believed were benefiting from policies such as BEE and employment equity when they should be resentful against the powerful whites who kept the structure in place.

Scholars and members of society should traffic knowledge across international borders, he said.

The summer school will run until January 20. Lectures and discussions are being delivered and facilitated by leading international and local decolonial thinkers and theorists.

Pretoria News

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