Decolonising Affirmative Action in 21st Century Africa

Reparatory alternatives for affirming South Africa

Abstract

Decolonisation of knowledge enhances Africa’s contribution to the global knowledge commons, augmenting both theory from the global South and its universal value. In this paper, I apply this insight to affirmative action policies. Affirmative action claims to facilitate socio-economic mobility and that this avoids the most extremely perverse inequalities.  owever, the gross brutalities of conquest, dispossession, racial genocide, slavery, slave trading, colonialism and apartheid demand a decolonial critique of affirmative action. This applies not merely to affirmative action as policy, but perhaps much more significantly, as practice. Indeed, I reject affirmative action for South Africa, if not for the entire globe (the latter position would raise an argument that is beyond immediate focus). This personal ‘decolonial turn’ from affirmative action foreshadows my advocacy of such concepts as ‘wholeness’ and ‘reparation’, which I conceptualise as a return of something to its original condition plus satisfaction for the interim rupture. Wholeness and reparation in this particular setting require replacement, atonement, restoration and restitution to remedy the sense and reality of injury flowing from the gross brutalities listed earlier. I argue that such concepts are the ideal remedy for the South African condition and need that my analysis details. This move from affirmative action to reparation affirms the inside-out posture of decoloniality, insistent as it is on African agency, on ‘centring’ Africa and on ‘provincialising’ the exogenous.