My name is Mahalia and I graduated university in September 2017.
At university, I studied Anthropology. Anthropology is the study of humankind in all its aspects, from analysing skulls and the acquisition of language, to contemporary politics.
Anthropology is a subject built from European colonialism, its roots lay within white men “discovering” fully formed countries and labelling its black and brown inhabitants as savages to be civilised. This however, is not a history lesson that I received once in my three-year degree but one I took upon to teach myself.
As I write this, thousands of new students are starting university. They have sat through their first lectures and gotten an insight into the content they’ll examining over the next few years.
If they are like me, they are probably sitting there asking questions like; “Are we really talking about the origins of humans without looking at cultural changes in Africa?” And “How many region-specific modules will I have to sit through where I’m not taught by someone with any connection to that region?”
In my frustration, this time last year I started a project to decolonise the content of my university department. Decolonisation itself is the undoing of colonialism. But in an academic context, it means breaking down and challenging knowledge founded in colonialism and putting it in its rightful context.