After the Woke University, Then What?: Lessons from the Azanian Project in Southern Africa

 

This essay is, for the most part, descriptive of what is called Azanian philosophy.  This philosophy offers, in my view, an excellent example of the tribalist thought that necessarily follows postmodern relativism and its social values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Azania is a name given to southeastern Africa from earlier times, and the new project of an Azanian social and political philosophy is a critical theory that intends to deconstruct ‘South African’ (the country’s name is problematic itself) identity from the time of its colonial inception.  It criticises the post-Apartheid developments in the country because the problem in Africa is far deeper than cultural conflict or economic disparity.  The paper follows the lengthy, detailed, and erudite article by Joel Modiri titled, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges’.[1] Modiri is an associate professor and the head of the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria, and his paper attempts to offer a philosophical foundation for the sort of radicalism that we find in political activists in South Africa such as Julius Malema and his Economic Freedom Fighters (not mentioned in the paper).  As such, it articulates a post-postmodernist alternative philosophy to post-colonial movements in Africa.  It also offers a look at a challenge facing the university, not only in ‘Azania’ but or in Africa but also beyond the continent’s borders.  Amidst my abbreviated description of Modiri’s points, I will interject some of my own criticisms, which could be multiplied further.  My primary purpose, however, is to explore where the university might go next after wokism, if allowed to pursue a post-Christian, post-Enlightenment trajectory.

As Modiri explains, Azanianism[2] rejects

the ubiquitous valorisation of Western values, institutions, and knowledges (sic); taken-for-granted assumptions about the solidity, naturalness, and permanence of the South African state; a hegemonic ANC-centred narrative of history and politics; and uncritical acceptance of liberal multiracialism and moderate politics as entrenched in the post-1994 constitutional order.[3]

‘Azania’ is suggested as an alternative place name to South Africa.  The Azanian ‘five-fold itinerary’ involves:

1.     an advancing of the struggle for liberation in law, politics, and society

2.     critique and negate Western civilisation (colonialism, white supremacy, racial capitalism)

3.     an analytical focus and consciousness of race and racialisation

4.     an historical perception of South Africa’s negative history since colonialism

5.     a ‘restoration and reaffirmation of the political and cultural integrity of African, indigenous, and Black experiences and consciousness’.[4]

Whereas critical theory is ideological, this Azanian critical theory is deconstructive of Western civilisation and formulates an ideology around African identity.  Peculiarly, critical theory is Western, and the Azanian ideology is an imagined construct of African identity.  This is not contextualisation, not an attempt to recover some stage of some African culture or another, not an attempt to affirm a present African identity—as it claims.  It is a new construction of African identity by some vanguard of ‘Azanian philosophy’. 

This involves something along the lines of Western critical theory, but it is a different agenda from what we find with, say, Antonio Gramsci.  Gramsci took Marxist critical theory (the aim of which was to create a universal revolution whereby the proletariat class would overthrow the bourgeoisie) and broaden it to (1) deconstruct all social institutions (not just government and the economy), (2) create a crisis that would galvinise people and force them into action, and (3) leave open the end that this critique will produce.[5]  The Azanian version of critical theory is not open-ended, but it is someone’s or some group’s vision of what an African social construct might be.  In other words, it is putty in the hands of someone wanting to destroy how it has been previously shaped and made into whatever one wishes.

A significant element of Azanian philosophy is to deconstruct not only the power of white people in South Africa but also white methods and white logic as they appear in the academy.  The flip side of this deconstruction of whiteness is not by any means a more pristine pursuit of universalism or colourblindness but a promotion of blackness.  Referencing the claims of M. B. Ramose, Joel Modiri says, ‘The massive academic and scientific power that whites wield over higher education and knowledge production is characterised by a Eurocentric order of knowledge and a Northbound gaze.’[6]  This claim imagines a hegemonic intellectualism and politic in higher education.  That higher education can become so has been demonstrated repeatedly, such as in the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) values in Western universities in the 21^st century.  The question to ask, however, is whether the university is capable of self-correcting by virtue of being committed to a notion of truth that allows disagreement and requires proof, not political posturing.  The Azanian philosophy offers the opposite.  Like DEI, it is a political ideology that does not support the values of true research.  Like DEI, it is racist.  Unlike DEI, its values are African (not diversity), privilege (not equity), and exclusion (not inclusion).

Thus, the construction of a black African intellectual tradition would be

a self-consciously cultivated and reproduced tradition of analysis deriving its key questions, assumptions, methods, conceptual conventions, styles, and idioms from the authority of Black historical experiences and from the cosmology and cultural-linguistic resources of the African majority, practiced (institutionally and extra-institutionally) within an autonomous and organised community of interlocutors.[7]

This is not just a replacement of white racism with black racism.  It is that, but it is also a replacement of the very concept of a university that is founded on the Christian and Enlightenment belief in truth.  The university can only function as a uni-versity if the intellectual work of the different fields of study cooperate in working toward the end of truth.  To be a university, a university must reject the notion of different ‘truths’ within different fields of study, let alone for different groups of people or even individuals.  The presumed ‘whiteness’ of the university did not, in fact, call for racist, cultural, or ethnocentric analyses, assumptions, and methods that are promoted by Azanian philosophy.  As M. Mamdani argues, however, the vastly different intellectual views of liberalism, social Marxism, and conservatism are one and the same product of white intellectualism, and therefore to be rejected out of hand.[8]  If universities succumbed to such political lenses bending their vision in academic research and teaching (and it does), as universities their commitment to truth would eventually be corrected.  (This is happening right now to some extent in American universities with the rejection of antisemitism and wokism.)  Azanian philosophy, however, enshrines a particular, ethnic perspective.  It assumes that all research is political, not scientific.  It imagines that one political perspective (African) is preferred.  It further imagines that there is such a thing as an ‘African tradition’ of analysis.  The Azanian construct ignores the diversity of black tribes in South Africa, let alone Africa, itself prior to colonialism and seeks to create something that never was: a supra-cultural culture of African tradition.[9]  Moreover, it ignores the fact that cultures evolve and do not remain static.  Finally, while it rejects certain cultures and enshrines as sacrosanct some constructed and static ‘Azanian’ culture, it lacks a non-political, self-critical analysis and moral critique.

The Azanian philosophy is both pre-colonial in its nostalgia and very much part of Western, Marxist intellectualism.  It is part of the Western intellectual story in that it is a ‘critical theory’.  As such, it interprets everything through the lens of power (versus truth).  It rejects the very notion of objectivism (and therefore scientific research).  In its promotion of a particular type of subjectivism, one that is African, it hopes to return to a pre-colonial past, and in so doing it takes postmodernity to its natural and next stage: tribalism.[10]  Its replacement for Marxist utopianism is this imaginary ‘Azania’, a pan-African ‘something’ that is good simply because it is African and that has little to define it other than the vaguest of vague notions.  The question will need to be asked, ‘Is it also violent?’  As G. Gerhart says of what Modiri calls the Azanian tradition, ‘the only way in which domination will ever be broken is by a black force.’[11] (The rejection of liberalism’s assimiliationist hopes and the terrible consequences of what we are now to call an Azanian programme was imagined in the fictional book by South Africa’s celebrated author, Nadine Gordimer, in July’s People.)

Three intellectual projects that Modiri rejects are liberalism (modernist and postmodernist), privileging ‘deracialisation’ over ‘decolonisation’, and the postcolonial shift to nation building that ignored the ongoing white supremacy and imperialism.  I will present my own descriptions of these but try to get at the points he is making.  Liberalism operates in the modernist world of universal reason and therefore rejects the independence of a racial group.  It seeks to address racism by skirting the issue of race and addressing the issues more conceptually.  Postmodern liberal thinking is anti-foundational, and therefore opposes essentialism, the view that some characteristics are essential and not accidental.  Of course, postmodernity is relativistic and subjective, but constructs are considered ephemeral and therefore neither foundational nor essential.  An Azanian philosophy, though, insists that culture and history are essential, and, in the case of Africa, conceptualisation of the self and of the community must necessarily include a cosmology that includes belief in the active role of tribal ancestors, the spirit world, and the solidarity of the community.  Liberalism, on the other hand, seeks to dismantle race when addressing racism in the institutions, social structures, and intellectual understanding.

The second project that Modiri rejects is the privileging of ‘deracialisation’ over ‘decolonisation’.  In this, he notes the work of Suren Pillay, who directs the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town.[12]  The privileged attack of Apartheid in South Africa came from Marxism (in religious circles, ‘liberation theology’).  Marxist thought in South African departments of humanities and Marxist rewriting of the country’s history focussed issues on class, not race.  Thus, capitalism, not colonialism, was the problematic past and the issue to be addressed.

The third project involves addressing ongoing white supremacy and imperialism and not suppressing these matters in the concern of nation building.  (The article is focussed on Western imperialism and ignores Chinese economic colonialism and imperialism in Africa.)  Modiri writes,

Dismantling the conceptual whiteness of the academy will require a new generation of oppositional Black academics to reset the terms of social, historical, political analysis through a sustained intellectual and political engagement with the global archive of liberatory Black thought.[13]

Midway through his essay, Modiri turns to outline three tenets of Azanian social and political thought.  These are:

1.     South Africa as an Unjust and Unethical Political Formation

2.     A Black Radical Conception of Race/Racism

3.     African Culture, History, Experience, and Imagination as the Basis for Knowledge Production and Liberation

To criticise South Africa’s colonial history and the Nationalist Party’s Apartheid programme is an easy if not brief task, and the Azanian theorist picks up the powerful winds of such criticism to sail away on his or her own course.  That course involves

1.     ‘the remaking of African identities against tribalist and ethnic divisions as well as spiritual and cultural repair and transformation of those identities;’[14] 

2.     ‘the total dismantling of white supremacy (and not its accommodation)’;[15]

3.     ‘a fundamental change in the basic structure and governing values of South African society through a re-ordering of its political, economic, and cultural-intellectual systems and practices.’[16]

The Azanian project, then, is one of deconstruction (the second point) and of construction (points 1 and 3). Just who gets to take the helm in ‘remaking’, ‘repairing’, ‘changing’, and ‘re-ordering’, and where all this will lead, is where the messiness of calls for change of any sort steps in.  Moreover, I would argue, to criticise the structure of the state using critical theory (really, Critical Race Theory) as itself ‘white’ and, as the theory goes, therefore bad, is to cover over the history of Africa itself.  This would be like criticising the slave trade from Africa as only a problem of colonialism and not also a problem of African tribal warfare and greedy African chiefs or kings.  The story of power abuse is not the privileged domain of the Europeans or the colonists.  Nor is it the only story by any means.  This is reductivism at its worst.  By interpreting South Africa’s history through the lens of colonialism alone is to miss the human story played out throughout time and cultures: the problem of sin.  Missing from Azanian thought is any serious religious commitment or interpretation.  One can only conclude that the great story of Africa’s turn to Christianity in the 20^th century would be dismissed as just another example of white thought because most of the story of Christian missions in Africa comes from Europe and America.

Modiri follows the argument of the radical Congress Youth League from the 1940s.  This argument is that Africa belongs to Africa, not the whites, who have no rights over the land, the people, or the politics.[17]  The policy of the African Nationalist Congress Youth League (its radical wing) calls for a rejection of the moderate approach of change in South Africa of assimilation of blacks into the white culture and structures of power.  It rejects the desire for

civil and political rights, for belonging, inclusion, and recognition within the settler-created and settler-dominated social order, for access to the civilisational accoutrements and universalist promises of Western modernity, and for the (racial) democratisation of the colonial system.[18]

It also calls for a rejection of the borders established by colonial powers not only for South Africa but for all of Africa (presumably, black Africa).

The constructivist programme of Azanianism may sound concrete, but it is in fact very general and lacks analytical and critical merit. Modiri says,

For the Africanists and black radicals of Azania, the main philosophical and cultural source of the liberation struggle and the primary knowledge system from which paradigms of law, social organisation, political ordering, religious, cultural and educational practices and institutions, ecology, aesthetics, and moral norms for a liberated society would be the unfolding and evolving African historical experience.[19]

Just what is, for example, the religious unfolding and evolving African historical experience?  Is this a return to African Traditional Religion (and, if so, which practices on the continent are African?)?  Does ‘unfolding and evolving’ mean some imaginary new religion made up of religions on the continent, including Christianity and Islam?   Stated in the way it is, the proposal is not only vague but also nonsense.  It imagines itself to be a critical theory, but it is in fact not critical enough.  Whatever roams on the African continent—provided it is not an import unsuited to Africa—is gathered uncritically as treasure.  The process of ‘unfolding and evolving’ is mere ethnographic appreciation, not discernment.  The Azanian project begs the questions, ‘Who gets to say what is good and why?’

In this essay, I have noted my own aversion to Azanian philosophy.  One of my criticisms is that, like so much of the social Marxism in which Azanianism is rooted but also from which it departs, the details of where this is all headed are vague, and the project could take various turns.  My own suggestion is rootedness not in some human identity, such as African, but in the Christian tradition that is both particular or exclusive and universal.  The Azanian project, I suggest, is an anti-university project in its rejection of the pursuit of truth and the unity fields of study have because there is such a thing as truth.  It is representative of the sort of postmodern subjectivism in great favour in the universities under Western dominance while also of the African tribalism that affirms a particular subjectivism: a reinvented and reformed African tradition.  South Africa has been floating listlessly since Apartheid—the winds of liberation having dropped.  It is a ship going nowhere in the doldrums of a wide ocean.  Azanianism proposes to dismantle the ship, a white man’s vessel, while still at sea.  If this project takes hold in South African university departments, the university will be replaced with the ‘ulwaluko’ or circumcision and instruction in manhood institution of traditional Africa.  The erudite academics, with their critical theory and imaginative constructions of African identity of the present university, will be redundant.

Related Articles by Rollin Grams: 

Mission as Theological Education in Africa 6: Academic Challenges in African Universities

This is an article summarising a book addressing problems in African universities, particularly in South Africa: R. W. Johnson, African University: The Critical Case of South Africa and the Tragedy of the UKZN (Tafelberg Short, 2012).

The Postmodern University and Its New Methodologies

This article gives a brief summary of new methodologies.

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[1] Joel Modiri, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges,’ Theoria, Issue 168, Vol. 68, No. 3 (September 2021), pp. 42-85; online: Modiri_Azanian_2021.pdf (accessed 30 March, 2025). 

[2] Modiri himself avoids the term ‘Azanianism’, but he uses different nouns to follow ‘Azanian’.

[3] Modiri, p. 44.  I have attempted to abbreviate the points in the interest of greater simplicity.

[4] Modiri, p. 45.

[5] For Antonio Gramsci, see the collection of his writings in The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: New York University, 2000).  For my discussion of Gramsci, see my What is Progressive Theology? (self-published, pdf, 2022), pp. 100-104; available at my bookshop, Bible and Mission: Book Shop.

[6] Modiri, p. 47; M. B. Ramose, ‘“African Renaissance”: A Northbound Gaze’, Politeia 19.3 (2000), pp. 47–61.

[7] Modiri, p. 48.

[8] As noted by Modiri, p. 49.  Cf. M. Mamdani, ‘When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections on the Colonial Roots of Equatorial and South Africa,’ Inaugural lecture as AC Jordan professor of African Studies (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1998).

[9] There are similar projects that could be reviewed: a racially and ethnically determined, pan-Slavic movement in the 19^th and early 20^th century, a Germanic racial movement in fascist Germany and surrounding countries in the mid-20^th century; a pan-Islamic, religio-political ideology (cf. Abul A’la Maududi); etc.

[10] I addressed this development in 2017.  Cf. Rollin G. Grams, The Church and Western Tribalism: Studies in Theology and Culture (self-published, pdf., 2017); available from my bookshop online: Bible and Mission: Book Shop.

[11] G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 163.

[12] Articles written by Suren Pillay and cited by Modiri are: ‘Translating ‘South Africa’: Race, Colonialism and Challenges of Critical Thought after Apartheid,’ in H. Jacklin and P. Vale, eds, Re-imaging the Social in South Africa: Critique, Th`eory and Post-apartheid Society (Durban: KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009), pp. 235–267, and ‘Why I am No Longer a Non-racialist: Identity and Difference,’ in X. Mangcu, ed, The Colour of our Future: Does Race Matter in Post apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015), pp. 133 – 152.

[13] Modiri, p. 55.  In this third point, Modiri references the work of Jemima Pierre, an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, LA.  See her The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013).

[14] Modiri, p. 61, referencing Gerhart, p. 61.

[15] Modiri, p. 61, referencing R. M. Sobukwe, ‘The Opening Address at the Africanist Inaugural Convention,’ (4 April 1959); https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/document-58-robert-mangaliso-sobukwe-opening-address-africanist-inaugural-convention-4 (accessed 31 March, 2025).  However, Sobukwe cannot so easily be signed up to Azanianism as Modiri wishes.  He did reject European intellectual and political exports to Africa, but he did not call for a racial division.  Instead, he said, ‘We guarantee no minority rights, because we think in terms of the individual, not groups.’  (Azanianism rejects the ‘European’ group in favour of the ‘African’ group.)  Sobukwe, therefore, rejected multiculturalism, what he termed ‘multi-racialism’: ‘To us the term "multi-racialism" implies that there are such basic insuper­able differences between the various national groups here that the best course is to keep them permanently distinctive in a kind of democratic apartheid. That to us is racialism multiplied, which probably is what the term truly connotes.’  Perhaps Sobukwe would say that Modiri’s Azanian project is racialism multiplied by virtue of a tyrannical apartheid.  Like Apartheid, Azanianism sees the world in terms of racial groups, not individuals.  Like Apartheid, it privileges one group and its culture over another.  There is a real problem in trying to tie a postmodern, tribalist (or racist) critical theory in the 21^st century to a modernist, anti-Apartheid critique in the mid-20^th century.  Indeed, Modiri wants to assert that racism is itself a European concept that needs to be deconstructed.  He says, ‘Race, for the Africanists, has no real meaning outside of the historical and political context of its ideational fabrication and material (re)production’ (p. 66).  Yet, his criticism of the white Europeans who introduced race as the primary category for determining human value, political power, and economic advantage is not limited to what they did but to who they were as white Europeans.  The end of the matter is that Azanianism makes race the key factor in everything.  It is inherently racist.  Indeed, Modiri later says, quoting Gerhart (p. 158) once again, the problem with the critique of Apartheid or colonialism in Africa by liberals and Marxists, was their  ‘failure to foreground the materiality of race, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism’ (p. 71).

[16] Modiri, p. 61, referencing G. Gerhart, p. 68.

[17] Modiri, p. 60, referencing G. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 67.

[18] Modiri, p. 61, referencing J. Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 2018).

[19] Modiri, pp. 69-70.