ABSTRACT
The modern ‘Westernized’ university played a central role in the invention and universalization of what James Blaut (1993) termed the ‘colonizer’s model of the world’. The university inevitably became intimately imbricated in spread and naturalization of ‘imperial reason’ as well as institutionalization of ‘Eurocentrism’ (Amin 2009). Thus, the genocides, ontolocides, epistemicides, culturecides and linguicides committed by the imperial/colonial footsoldiers on the ground became rationalized within the modern Westernized university intellectually. Ironically, it was also at the university that the subject of the ‘human’ was researched and debated endlessly, going as far back as the School of Salamanca and the time of the Valladolid Debates (1550–1551) (Castro 2007; Suárez-Krabbe 2016). It was perhaps this irony, if not outright hypocrisy, of Eurocentric modernity and the modern institutions it laid out on earth that provoked Frantz Fanon (1968: 251) to urge his comrades to ‘Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their streets, in all the corners of the globe’. Decolonization of the university is part of the broader struggles to escape from the ‘European game’.
