Abstract
The concept of an African university was brought into the spotlight during the 2015-2016 FeesMustFall students protests. However, decolonial history illustrates that the notion of an African university predates FeesMustFall. African scholars and politicians have mooted this idea as far back as during the colonial and post-colonial period. This dissertation investigated how the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Sociology undergraduate departments have fared to decolonise their curriculums post the FeesMustFall students protests. The need to study Sociology departments at UJ and Wits was informed by these universities’ past ideological and pedagogical leaning. UJ, having previously been Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), an Afrikaans speaking conservative university that gave prominence to structural functionalist scholars, such as Talcott Parsons and Emile Durkheim, and Wits a liberal English university that gave weight to neo-Marxist scholars, such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. My intention with this study was to explore if these past-ideological leanings have shifted or they are still unsullied even after students demands for decolonisation. This dissertation explored these responses taking a decolonial and Foucauldian lens. It challenged the hierarchisation of knowledge and coloniality which have appropriated sociological knowledge to the West...
M.A. (Sociology)