 His keynote talk today is on decolonizing knowledge, the flow of knowledge in regards to the positioning of the global South. Professor Adam Habib, a warm welcome and thank you for joining us. So thank you very much, Amir. It's a real pleasure to be here. And thank you for that very, very generous introduction. I also want to kick off by thanking a boss for that wonderful presentation. It was incredible and he's going to be a truly hard act to follow. But what an introduction to SOAS and inaugural SOAS Festival of Ideas. This is Amina and others for providing me with the opportunity to share my thoughts on the theme of decolonization. I look forward to engaging each one of you in face-to-face deliberations in the coming months, in the coming year around the issue of decolonization, but also on much of the other issues that will impact on the collective deliberations at SOAS. I want to start by with an apology. And I really want to start with this apology because in a sense, I'm going to speak frankly in the coming half an hour, 30 to 40 minutes. And I think it's, I'm going to give up, I'm not going to focus on diplomatic speak. I think that part of the problem with diplomatic speak is it creates intellectual ambiguity. And I'm not so sure that we need that kind of ambiguity in the kind of historical socially and politically polarized historical moment with him. So for the purposes of clarity of thought, clarity of ideas, I'm going to fake frankly and boldly. The risk, however, is that I might offend the political and intellectual sensibilities of some colleagues. If I do so, I want to apologize in advance. My only excuse is that I do so in order to enable an honest deliberation of the ideas that we hope to talk about. Let me also openly declare that I'm an ardent supporter of decolonization. For much of my life, I've written about it and I've also been an activist advancing this agenda. Of course I did it under alternative labels, anti-racism, non-racialism, anti-capitalism, and even transformation. This agenda of radical reform has not simply been directed at the political level but at the national level. I have also focused it on the university arena. My involvement in thinking through this agenda goes back that years. In an earlier part of my life, the rethinking of the university was imagined under the label transformation. I know today many student leaders, many academic activists reject the term. They do not like the term because, and they prefer to use the term decolonization. They do so on the assumption that decolonization is distinct, more radical, more anti-status code than transformation was. But you know, I recall that the term transformation, when it was introduced by academic unions in the university discourse in South Africa with 30 years ago, it was about reimagining the institution in the African context and using the university as an instrument of social justice. In many ways, transformation as a discourse contained all of the elements that activists today see as comprising decolonization. In a lot of ways, this is why I cheekily entitled the chapter on decolonization in my book, Fees Must Fall, in my book, Entitled Rebels and Rage on Fees Must Fall as what's in an A, transformation or decolonization. I also want to reflect a little on the term decolonization. And I want to do so through the writings of Memud Mamdani, a Ugandan scholar who teaches in Columbia and Macarena University. Mamdani's reflections are about trying to understand why our countries have not been able to build the inclusive economically successful democracies that we had hoped to build at the dawn of decolonization. And Mamdani argues that the essential crime of colonialism was that it allocated different sets of rights to distinct groups on the basis of what he termed citizens and subjects. He suggests that the mistakes of the nationalist leadership in the post-colonial moment was to leave the colonial spatial, political, and socioeconomic system intact and subvert the allocations of rights within it. So those who were previously allocated rights are our settlers. We're no longer given a monopoly of this. And in some cases, we even deny those rights. As a result, what Mamdani suggests, we enable the continuous struggle of indigeneity around who is the authentic citizen and many countries are in the developing world. And this has become the basis for continued conflict in the African context. Mamdani further argues that the answer to this conundrum is not simply to be focused on a divided past, but rather to be directed towards a more inclusive future, incorporating all of those who wish to be part of a new nation. What Mamdani was saying is we too focused, if you like, on the divides of our past, on who is the authentic citizen, who belongs to a particular piece of land in a particular part of the planet. And what that goes against is the kind of integrative impulse of the human condition, the fact that human beings have been mobile and moving across the world since the dawn of civilization. And what he says is instead of focusing on a divided past, we need to focus on a more inclusive future, who wants to be part of the spatial formation and try and think through a more inclusive future, a future that is more socially just for all of the citizens in that social formation. It is a lesson, I believe, that we need to heed in the deliberation around decolonization. Whatever the label we use, the colonial university must never be the frame of reference to reimagine the institution of today. If we are to use the term decolonization, we must ensure that it does not prevent a comprehensive re-imagination of the university so that it speaks not only to our local, but also to our global, not only to our past but also to our future, as Amina so eloquently put it in her introductory remarks. On the basis of this conceptual clarification, I want to identify four elements that I see as the core to the decolonization agenda. I'm going to reflect on this, not simply in conceptual terms, as somebody who has written about this, but also in experiential terms, as somebody who has grappled with its application in real-life institutional experiences. I've also grappled with this experiential learning from a variety of positions within the university as a secretary general of an academic union 30 years ago, as an academic and head of the school applying this within the department perhaps 20 years ago as a student activist intent on changing the world 40 years ago, and if you like, as a university executive grappling with transforming and managing the university over the last 10 years. I therefore will not only identify what I see as the elements of the decolonization agenda, but I also want to problematize it in the context of our experiential application and learning in universities in South Africa for the last 25 years, the era of South Africa's decolonization. The first of these elements that I want to speak about is the representivity, which involves enabling the presence in the university and within the academy of students and scholars of all those who have been denied access to the system in the past. Representivity is important, not only because it creates a sense of belonging for all of us, but also because it enables the surfacing of multiple knowledges, thought processes and frames of understanding within the university's teaching and research. Representivity is not manifested simply in the presence of black scholars and those who have been marginalized, but also in the symbolic representations of the institution through its naming traditions and memorials that are often reflected in the university space. But I do want to say that representivity cannot be advanced without qualification. It has to be taken in a manner consistent with the meritocratic tradition. Now, as soon as I say this, I want to immediately say that I'm aware that there are scholars and activists who correctly argue that much of the meritocratic discourses are racially and culturally encoded. Yet, the answer to this racialized or culturally loaded meritocratic narrative is not to deny meritocracy. What is required is the deracialization of the meritocratic debate and ensuring that we are its representivity and meritocracy in our appointments and our admissions processes. Representivity and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive goals. They can be brought into alignment and it is something that we all need to be expressly committed to. The second element of this decolonization agenda has to be about surfacing all streams of humanity's knowledge in our curriculum. Our curriculum has to tell all of our stories. It has to identify all of our challenges and it has to surface all of the innovations to address those challenges. See, there is knowledge in all of our communities and all of this knowledge needs to be surfaced in our curriculum. I also want to say the global corpus of scientific knowledge is not simply the product of Western intellectuals, Western universities, the Western academy. It is the product of the collective knowledge of all of our academies, both formal and informal, across continental and across national boundaries. And we do a disservice to the great intellectuals of the developing world when some of us actually claim that there is such a thing as Western knowledge and that the existence corpus of scientific knowledge is simply a product of Western institutions, Western intellectuals and Western academics. There is a knowledge in all of our communities and that knowledge has always contributed and surfaced in a variety of ways into what is now known as the corpus of scientific knowledge. It's not been reflected fairly in the existing curriculums. It's not been fairly acknowledged in the curriculum discourses, but it has influenced that curriculum in multiple ways. So there is an importance to surface multiple knowledges and to acknowledge the contribution of all parts of the world in informing our curriculum. But again, it is important to qualify this. All of this knowledge needs to be subjected to critical reflection and scrutiny. Too often, activists of decolonization imagine the surfacing of knowledge with an uncritical gaze. Now I'm sure there are some who will take offense that I say this, but it's important bearing in mind how often people articulate or scholars and activists articulate a decolonization agenda with an uncritical gaze. You cannot imagine how many times I have had student leaders walk into my office and say, I would not because I am a Marxist, I do not want to learn neoclassical economics. What I always and only want to learn is Marxist economics as if one can teach Marxist economics without an understanding of neoclassical economics. I want to say openly that we are not in the business of simply engaging with ideas that we are comfortable with. The core purpose of a university is to introduce our students, our academics, our scholars to multiple ways of understanding contemporary challenges. The university is meant to enable intellectual discomfort and force one to think and rethink before responding. It is not a political school. It is not a religious school and nothing in our curriculum should not be subject to critical scrutiny. The third element of the decolonization agenda has to involve the re-imagination of the curriculum in relation to the challenges of our time. Too much of the university curriculum is organized on the intellectual and conceptual foundations established more than a century ago. But is this a legitimate frame of reference for the university curriculum in the 21st century? Are not all of our challenges far more complex to be understood simply from the frame of a single disciplinary perspective? Let me reflect on a recent example. In 2015, the world was confronted with an Ebola pandemic in West Africa. The management of this outbreak was compromised by the lack of local understanding and by applying a unique disciplinary approach to addressing it. The pandemic was simply seen from the perspective of a public health crisis. But the challenge of addressing Ebola in West Africa was a cultural one. The outbreak was exacerbated by burial practices of predominantly Muslim communities in West Africa. It was only when this was addressed ironically through engagement with religious leaders and through the propagation of new religious injunctions that the pandemic was brought under control. The solution to the pandemic required a multidisciplinary approach. This applies to challenge after challenge of our time. And it poses the question of should our curriculum be based? Less on a disciplinary foundation and more on the conceptual framing of our contemporary challenges. Let me use another example. The pandemic that we currently live with. And look at the challenge of this pandemic and its management in the UK at this very moment. Is the management of the pandemic an issue of not knowing what are the public health measures to be put in place in arresting this pandemic? Or is it a social question? What, how do young people congregate? Why do they congregate? How do we manage their congregation? That has much issues, that has as much to do with issues of anthropology, of sociality, and of the social sciences and humanities has much to do with the public health challenge. Again, I say it poses the question, should our curriculum be based? Less on a disciplinary foundation and more on the conceptual framing of our contemporary challenges. Should our curriculum and academic programs be organized on, for instance, the sustainable development goals rather than the disciplines formulated more than a century ago? Yet again, there's a qualification. Multidisciplinary cannot be pursued without some disciplinary capacity and expertise. Too much of the frames of reference emerge by bringing a disciplinary lens to the conundrum that is under focus. How to achieve the appropriate balance between multidisciplinary and unidisciplinary should be at the heart of re-prinking the curriculum in the decolonization agenda. As of now, too much of multidisciplinary plays itself out at the postgraduate level, at the graduate level, and that much of the undergraduate curriculum is constructed at the disciplinary foundation. Should we reimagine that? And how do we create an appropriate balance between disciplinarity and multidisciplinary? So that we do create the professionals, the thinkers, the problem solvers of the contemporary challenges of our time. The fourth and final element that should be considered in the decolonization agenda is the mode and basis of learning in the contemporary world. As I have said before, all of our challenges in the contemporary historical moment are transnational in character. Whether we speak of climate change, public health, inequality, social or political polarization, clean water provision, sanitation, all of these challenges exist on a transnational plane and require an element of global solutions. But as much as they require global solutions and world-class technologies and knowledge, they also require local understanding. That's the lesson from the Ebola pandemic in 2015. That's the lesson from the COVID, from the manifestation of COVID infections around the world. It is the complex mix of global and local that will allow us to address the transnational challenges of our time. Yet our higher education system does not enable us to do this. Our global, our modern mode of global partnerships also undermines this. Currently, our global partnerships involve identifying talented students in the developing world into London, New York, and training them in the full hope that they will return home to utilize their knowledge in their local context. Yet many of us know that this is not the case. The vast majority of those who come to study in these cities and these countries never return. Life happens. People fall in love, get married, have children, and settle down. This is what the research on global student mobility demonstrates. However, in the cases of Singapore and China post 2006, the vast majority of those who go study elsewhere never return. The consequence of this is it weakens institutions and human capabilities in the developing world, thus undermining the ability to address national challenges. This remains under threat in Burundi or the DRC or the Philippines or in Egypt. So long, all of us will remain vulnerable. If we are really keen on addressing these challenges across all of our spatial contexts, then it is imperative to reimagine high education partnerships. It is absolutely necessary that we focus our global partnerships in an institutional rather than an individual sense. We need to think of the curriculum and we need to think across teaching, across institutional and national boundaries. The curriculum should be reconfigured across spatial contexts and scholarships need to be organized in a split side format. In a sense, what we require is a complete reimagination of high education and partnerships for the contemporary world. Yet too often, this is not even part of the discourse of decolonization itself. Ironically, this historical moment enables it far better than any other moment in our history. The disruption of technology, the emergence of disruptive technologies has created the possibility of learning beyond institutional, beyond national and beyond continental boundaries in a manner that has never existed before. And what this pandemic has forced us to reimagine the pedagogy of learning in a blended format, in a format that requires face-to-face learning. Obviously it requires that. Those who pronounce that the face-to-face learning is now at an end are deluded because learning in a university is so much more than learning in the classroom. It's about the interactions that happen between students. It's about learning to navigate local context, the real power of a Harvard or an Oxford or a Cambridge. It's not simply what they teach in the classroom. It's the networks that get built outside the classroom, the relationships that gets built in the cafeteria, in the sports grounds, in the museums and in the interactions that occur. And so face-to-face learning will exist. But what the disruptive technologies have enabled is a form of blended learning. The movement between online learning and face-to-face interactions. The ability to learn across national and continental boundaries and yet the ability to learn from each other in face-to-face interactions. But none of this global learning, none of this multidisciplinary development of a curriculum, none of the learning that's enabling co-curriculum and representivity is going to happen without the re-imagination of the financing of higher education. Currently, our higher education systems in the UK, in the US and Australia are organized to attract international students, many from the developing world. I wanna be honest, so as we in SOAS, we at VITS in some senses are as much complicit in this as everybody else's. Basically, we attract international students from the developing world. Yet our fees for those students from the developing world is often three to four times those of our domestic students. Think about this. In essence, we are cross-subsidizing the education of domestic students in the developed world with the fees of students from the developing world. And we do this in the name of social justice. We do this in the name of human solidarity. We do this in the name of global partnerships to assist to lend a helping hand to the developing world. How can we not be cynical about this? And should our decolonization agenda not explicitly put this at the core, at the center of our deliberations? Should we not consider fundamentally the refinancing of higher education within and across national and continental boundaries? So I am coming to the end, so let me conclude by suggesting that decolonization is, of course, important. And yes, it must be urgently addressed. Yet I want to stipulate two qualifications in this decolonization agenda. First, decolonization needs to be advanced less by politicians and more by scholars, less by political activists and more by scholar activists. Second, decolonization cannot be advanced in a nativist manner, in an ethno-nationalist manner. It has to be framed, as Amina suggested, within the cosmopolitan tradition that incorporates social justice at its core. I mean, too much of us, too many of us imagine cosmopolitanism as drinking cafe lattes and cappuccinos in international airports around the world. But if you read a wonderful book by Anthony Appiah on the cosmopolitan tradition in the developing world, he writes about the cosmopolitan ethos of the Ghanaian courts, you will realize that we need to take cosmopolitan seriously in our world. Not an abstract cosmopolitanism, but a cosmopolitanism that has at its heart at its very core the principle of social justice. Because if we do not build the bridges of human solidarity, we truly will not survive as a human species in the coming two centuries. And so I want to say again, decolonization cannot be advanced in a nativist manner, but must be framed within the cosmopolitan tradition that incorporates social justice at its core. This is the real line of inquiry that I believe the decolonization agenda must follow in the coming years. It needs to recognize that we are both local and global. We are both British, African, Asian and human. Only then can decolonization not only be about our past, but also our future. Only then can it be part of building a new human community, one that is socially just and inclusive, but perfectly in line with the needs of the 21st century. Thank you very, very much.