The International Call for Decolonization.

Colonialism was an international (criminal) project, and ending its remnants requires an international movement for decolonization. The University of Colour is an initiative that did not start within a vacuum. With this post, we want to pay tribute to all the movements and organizers that preceded us. We hereby give our gratitude to the:

 

Voices from South Africa: The University of Cape Town has made yet another petition to sign. This one comes from the South African student, staff and workers movement called Rhodes Must Fall. Their goal is to move “towards the decolonization of the university as a whole" and to combat institutional racism. The SA students congress from the University of KwaZulu-Natal have followed their example.

Voices from the United Kingdom: The London School of Economics, University College London, the University of Warwick and the University of York, among others, have started campaigns under the name Why is my curriculum white?, challenging the Eurocentricity of university curricula. In addition, students from Oxford University have started the “Alternative Reading List Project’’ to bring attention to marginalized voices within academia. Oxford now also started has a Rhodes Must Fall Movement called Rhodes Must Fall Oxford. Also students in Cambridge have started a decolonial movement. Also in SOAS you can see debates around decolonising the University emerging.

 

Voices from the United States: In 2010, a gathering of activists, artists and scholars took place at the University of California, Berkeley, to stand behind the idea of a Third World College and the decolonization of the university. In addition, the Why is my curriculum white? campaign has also reached Yale University.

Voices from Europe: Even Europe itself seems to acknowledge the Eurocentricity of European universities.The project ALICE secured a five year funding from the highly competitive European Research Council (ERC). This project is led by professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos who summarized his work on European Universities in four words: ‘’democratize, decolonize, decommodify, depatriarchize.’’
Furthermore, you have different decolonial summer schools being opened in Europe as can bee seen for instance in Barcelona, Granada, Amsterdam, and Middleburg.

Voices from The Netherlands: Amsterdam United strives towards ‘an inclusive university,’ stating in their petition that "the dominant narrative is that everyone has equal rights and chances, but in practice students and staff experience that this is not the case,” thus calling for more diversity and equal chances at the University of Amsterdam. They also called for the “decolonization of the curricula and to give room for reflection on dominant discourses.” In an article titled Why is my university so white? Time for more diversity written by New Urban Collective, the following question was asked: “This institutional whiteness is often taken as normal, but is it really normal that an education center, placed in a city [Amsterdam] where more than 50 percent of the youth is from migrant backgrounds, is so dominantly white? And what does this whiteness and lack of diversity then say about the university, science and society?” In addition, two campaigns were launched in the Netherlands that were inspired by similar campaigns launched in Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and UCLA, among others, called#ItooamVU and #ItooamUva, aiming to make people aware of microaggressions within universities.

Finally, we also want to thank some of the movements within universities who have supported our demands, such as Occupy LSE, the Free University of Sheffield and Democratize SOAS.

These are just some of the many movements and voices from which the University of Colour draws knowledge and strength. Can you feel it too? It is time for decolonization!

Do you know of any more movements and/or initiatives that inspired you which were not mentioned here? Please share them in the comment section here so we can all see them and get inspired. These can be actions from the past as well as from the present.