The Uncritical Murder of Progress

The following is a critical experiential reflection of the Higher Education Sector (HES) in South Africa and serves as a warning against the adoption of uncritical ideas of progress, particularly with regard to ‘transformation’ and ‘decolonisation’. This piece serves as a call to ensure the decolonial project is done in a manner that maximises the possibility of emancipation, not to minimise its possibility.

‘Epistemic closure’ is a concept developed by Black existentialist Lewis Gordon. He identifies it with the narrowing of the horizons of knowledge, leading to one’s worldview being reduced to a single story or narrative (Gordon 2015, 49). South African philosophers Helen-Mary Cawood and Mark Jacob Amiradakis (2023) appeal to epistemic closure in arguing for a ‘Critical Decolonial Theory’ (CDT). CDT calls for the inclusion of multiple narratives or stories to maximise the possibilities of emancipation within society. They warn that an exclusive focus on a ‘decolonial’ narrative means that a ‘grand master narrative’ is created (Cawood & Amiradakis 2023, 4), which perpetuates the status quo of power relations within society amassed by the ‘elites’. Progress is seen entirely from the perspective of this master narrative while ignoring all other narratives, limiting the possibilities for emancipation.

Understanding the concept of epistemic closure and its relevance to the emancipation of society through CDT, let us consider a case study of Indian Philosophy in South Africa. 

The year is 2004. The dark clouds of the Apartheid regime still linger over South African society. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal, change is brewing. 2004 saw the amalgamation of the historical University of Natal (UN) and the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) into the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). In the busy fluorescent-lit corridors of UDW, a whole school of thought is on its deathbed, murdered in the name of ‘progress’, ‘transformation’, and ‘decolonisation’: a sacrifice to the post-apartheid democratic epoch. 

This merger saw the complete closure of some UDW departments. UDW, founded in 1971, can draw its lineage back to 1961 and the creation of the University College for Indians (UCI) on Salisbury Island in Durban. UCI (and later, UDW) would be the sole institution of higher learning for Indian people in South Africa until the Universities Amendment Act of 1983. Due to its contextual nature (knowledge and experience of a specific situation or location) of being a historically Indian institution, three departments played a significant role in the development of Indian thought situated in South Africa. These were the departments of Hindu Studies, Islamic Studies, and Indian Languages. The closure of these departments was the result of a wide-ranging restructuring of the Higher Education Sector (HES) that, enacted by the ANC government, began in the 1990s and was done with the end of shifting the goalposts in the HES to allow for ‘transformation’ to occur. 

In 1997, then Minister of Education Prof S.M.E Bengu published Education White Paper 3, stating the need to transform, “to reflect the changes that are taking place in our society and to strengthen the values and practices of our new democracy … to serve a new social order” (1997, 1). This directive served the ideological aims of the ANC to ‘transform’ and ‘decolonise’ the HES to further social emancipation. I would argue that this resulted in the creation and promotion of an uncritical ‘grand master narrative’. In creating this grand master narrative of transformation, the ANC government committed epistemic closure, purposefully narrowing the horizons of knowledge. This epistemic closure further amassed power within this narrative, ensuring dominant players in the HES maintain control of the narrative, stifling the possibility for emancipation. This uncritical adoption of an idea of ‘progress’, I argue, has individual and social implications.  

As a South African of Indian heritage, I often struggle to find a balance between the meaning of existing in this geographically situated, historically contextualised space of my birth, and being fully aware of the sense of meaning that comes with my Indian heritage. It must be accepted that, relative to native-born Black people especially, Indian people did enjoy certain privileges prior to 1996. But the fundamental fact remains that the Apartheid state did not distinguish between Black, Indian, or Coloured in one important dimension: we were all robbed of our meaning, of who we are, and branded simply as Nie-Blankes or ‘Non-White’. But I am not simply just ‘Non-White’ or ‘Indian’ or ‘South African’; who I am individually is a multiplicity of contexts housed in my homogenised being.

Socially, we exist in a world increasingly robbed of meaning. In a 2016 article, Chi Luu argues that we exist in a post-truth world where facts and meaning of words do not matter. Consider George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In this fictional post-truth society, there is a fundamental collapse of meaning. In our contemporary world – a society robbed of meaning – Indian Philosophy can become an additional narrative that can help society regain meaning by dismantling the mastery of the grand narrative. This has the effect of diluting power dynamics and opening greater possibilities for emancipation, not just for people of Indian descent but all members of society. The meaning found in Eastern thought is not just the trope of ‘liberal, hippy-like’ Westerners doing an ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, but a serious endeavour taken up by thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Erich Fromm, Carl Jung, and all the way back to Plato, through thinkers who ascribe to ‘Oriental Platonism’ (Krause 2019).

What the individual and social implications highlight is that by increasing the amount of narratives that exist outside the horizons of knowledge in a critical way, power cannot be accumulated by the ‘elites’ of society. This piece does not serve as a direct call to revive Indian Philosophy, although I hope it does stir up interest; rather, I hope that this piece and the epistemic closure of Indian Philosophy in South Africa are taken as a warning sign. If we are to be truly decolonised and emancipated, we should be critical not just of ‘Western’ concepts, but of concepts themselves, and this can be greatly aided by increasing, and not decreasing, the number of narratives that exist. 

Works Cited

Allen, A. 2016. The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. New York. Columbia University Press.

Cawood, H. & Amiradakis, M. 2023. Intellectual Decolonisation and the Danger of Epistemic Closure: The Need for a Critical Decolonial Theory. Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies. 49 (3), pp. 528-533

Gordon, L. R. 2015. What Fanon Said. New York: Fordham University Press.

Krause, P. 2019. Introduction to Plato: Oriental Platonism. Discourses on Minerva. (online). Available: https://minervawisdom.com/2019/05/06/introduction-to-plato-oriental-platonism/. [Accessed 3 September 2025].

Luu, C. 2016. The Collapse of Meaning in a Post-Truth World.  JSTOR Daily.  (online). Available: https://daily.jstor.org/collapse-of-meaning-in-a-post-truth-world/. [Accessed 3 September 2025].

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. 1998. pixie.udw.ac.za. Internet Archive Wayback Machine. (online). Available: https://web.archive.org/web/19981207061427/http://pixie.udw.ac.za/. [Accessed: 3 September 2025].

Ndhlovu, E. P. 2023. History and Implications of Indian Education in South Africa in the Era Before 1994 and After: An Educational Psychology Approach. International Journal of Studies in Psychology. 3(2), pp. 1-4.

Orwell, G. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg.South African History Online. 2011. Indian South Africans. South African History Online. (online). Available: https://sahistory.org.za/article/indian-south-africans. [Accessed 3 September 2025].