Decolonial Violence and the ‘Native Intellectual’

Patricia Tuitt

In this chapter I assess the role Frantz Fanon’s 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth (Fanón, 2000) has played in the various strategies employed in an effort to decolonise the university. Focusing on decolonising movements as they pertain to British universities, I argue that although this book is one of a core of theoretical works that supply the movements’ intellectual framework, as Fanón himself predicted, the central thesis of The Wretched of the Earth that decolonisation is necessarily a violent phenomenon has had a limited appeal.

Decolonisation and British Universities

The question of how British universities should confront their colonial legacies is one of the most pressing to confront the academy in recent years. Forming part of an international movement, several major works have been produced which, in varying ways, seek to uncover the colonial legacies of universities (e.g. Arday and Mirza, 2018; Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioglu, 2018). Such legacies are made manifest in three major ways: first, through the determination of universities to retain and preserve various colonial monuments. The most well-recognised of these monuments is the statue of Cecil Rhodes, which, after a sustained campaign, was removed from the University of Cape Town in 2015. The movement to divest universities of their colonial spoils, which began in South Africa, has been taken up by students and academics in a number of universities - not least in Oxford, where the second statue of Cecil Rhodes is located. Thus, the ‘world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge’ (Fanón, 2000: 40) is a world which the British university holds in its very fabric. In 2018, Chantiluke, Kwoba, and Nkopo wrote a comprehensive account of what has come to be known as the Rhodes Must Fall movement.

The second major manifestation of the colonial legacies of universities is to be found in curricula which, across the full disciplinary range, ignores or marginalises the field of postcolonial studies and, more generally, academic work produced by non-white authors. One especially high-profile challenge to the absence of writings from persons of colour in standard curricula was orchestrated by Cambridge University students who posted an open letter to their English Faculty requesting the decolonisation of “reading lists” (cambridgefly, 2017), arguing that the current curriculum ‘taken as a whole, risks perpetuating institutional racism’ (cambridgefly, 2017).

The third and arguably most worrying sign that universities are still deeply invested in colonialism is their tendency to re-enact the colonial logics of appropriation to aid their growth objectives. As many have observed, the economic growth of universities today is significantly dependent on the recruitment of black and minority ethnic students ‘producing highly indebted and unemployable graduates in the context of economic austerity’ (Icaza and Vázquez, 2018: 109-110). Again, in an echo of earlier colonial times, decolonial scholars narrate a regulatory regime, which is disproportionately focused on the surveillance of those spaces of higher education inhabited by black and minority ethnic students and academics. At the same time that it has become evident that BAME students are now outstripping white students in university attendance (e.g. Boliver 2018: 67; Shilliam 2018: 59). Legally sanctioned and colonial style “social cohesion and civic integration policies” (Brayson, 2019: 57) targeted at those students have increasingly defined the university experience. In short, once within the environs of the university, BAME students are paraded or “exhibited” (Icaza and Vázquez, 2018: 118) as inherently resistant to higher learning, making the university a place ‘in which some people feel at home and others are alienated’ (Icaza and Vázquez, 2018: 111).

The concern of this chapter is that the emerging literature on decolonising the university fails to pay due regard to Fanon’s argument that the violence of colonialism cannot be erased if forms of decolonial counter-violence are excluded from the various means through which the colonial is confronted. Absent a strategy which includes counter-violence (the forms of which are addressed later in the chapter), my tentative conclusion is that current decolonial works are in danger of strengthening, not dismantling, the colonial structures of universities. They will strengthen it by forming part of a new colonial archive of knowledge about academics and students of colour. Whatever its ostensible design, such an archive serves to perpetuate colonial structures - not least by increasing the levels of surveillance over those spaces of higher education mainly inhabited by academics and students of colour.

Fanón, Violence, and the Colonial University

Based on a close reading of The Wretched of the Earth, I advance two propositions. The first is that Fanon’s category of “native intellectual” is one which perfectly adequately captures the condition of scholars of colour (black and minority ethnic (BAME)) in UK universities. The second is that Fanón provides a cogent explanation for why it is that the native intellectual” will always be beguiled by what he describes as a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence” (Fanón, 2000: 48). The chapter draws on samples from some of the more recent decolonising the university literature to illustrate how academics of colour avoid or defer violence, or, to be more precise, engage a strategy of non-violence. I begin with a brief ovendew of the main arguments in The Wretched of the Earth, intimating how Fanon’s arguments are deployed in this chapter.

Over six chapters, and with illustrative examples from his involvement in the Algerian revolution, in which he was engaged as a physician and psychiatrist working in a hospital in Algeria, Frantz Fanon charts with ceaseless clarity the unsteady and fragile processes of decolonisation. As detailed in chapter 5 (Fanon, 2000: 200-250), Fanon treated both Algerian torture victims and the French soldiers who tortured them. For Fanon, decolonisation is an extended process that cannot be expected to follow a predetermined path. It is “a program of complete disorder” (Fanon, 2000: 27), and it is always threatened with failure because the colonised will find his/herself somersaulted in the van of negotiations and compromises” (Fanon, 2000: 49) in a way which deters her/him from bringing into being entirely new modes of existence in the place of the motionless, petrified world of colonisation” (Fanon, 2000: 61).

In chapter 2 titled “Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness (Fanon, 2000: 85-118), Fanon warns of the danger of decolonial efforts being undermined by the “fetish of organisation” (Fanon, 2000: 85). For Fanon, organisations are inherently violent - no less than an instrument of modern political warfare” (Fanon, 2000: 85). Fanon’s observations are especially pertinent when we reflect on the nature of the more ostensible outcomes of the move to decolonise universities. Thus far, outcomes have followed classic organisational modes, such as investigations, inquiries, and special appointments. For example, the universities of Cambridge and Oxford have launched formal investigations into their links with the slave trade (The Telegraph, 30 April 2019; The Guardian, 21 March 2019). Bristol University, which received an estimated 85% of its original funding from the slave trade, has recently appointed a Professor of Slavery (see the announcement in The Guardian, 5 May 2019). Glasgow University announced its aim to make amends for the way it financially bencfitted from slavery by, among other reparative justice” initiatives, creating a centre for the study of slavery (The Guardian, 17 September 2019).

Chapter 3, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ (Fanon, 2000: 119-165), will be of interest to those observers of decolonising movements who fear that nothing more than minor advancements in the equal treatment of scholars of colour and other “diversity” initiatives will be all that decolonisation brings. The expenditure of ‘energies to ending certain definite abuses: forced labour, corporal punishment, inequality of salaries, limitation of political rights, etc.’ (Fanon, 2000: 119) is, according to Fanon, natural to the processes of decolonisation and, in and of itself, does not signal the failure of the movement.

In chapter 4, “On National Culture” (Fanon, 2000: 166-199), Fanon evaluates the importance of decolonisation of those persons of culture” (Fanon, 2000: 168) who constantly challenge and subvert the coloniser’s treatment of the histories of the colonised people - histories that the coloniser distorts, disfigures and destroys” (Fanon, 2000: 170). Fanon’s own practical struggle against the violence of colonisation is well known and is further documented in the penultimate chapter of the book titled Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” (Fanon, 2000:

200-250). Fanon lived very much on the receiving end of the colonial violence that ‘in its essence was already taking on the aspects of a fertile purveyor for psychiatric hospitals’ (Fanon, 2000: 200).

A concern that permeates throughout the book is the way that the “tabula rasa” (Fanon, 2000: 27), which is the mark of true decolonisation, is rendered precarious by the ‘elites’ of which the native intellectual” is a part. Through his or her actions, the native intellectual” gives credence to the notion that ‘[t]he will to break colonialism is linked with another quite different will: that of coming to a friendly agreement with it’ (Fanon, 2000: 98). Kehinde Andrews recognises this potentially fatal self-interest: ‘[ajcademics as a class of people are ... the last group ...to challenge the status quo’ (Andrews, 2018: 136). He goes on to say, ‘[l]eft to our own devices, the institutional temptations will more than likely override our political sentiments’ (Andrews, 2018: 142). Fanon views the native intellectual with barely veiled suspicion and hostility, and this is especially evident in chapters 1 and 2. The reader is left to question whether this class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free” (Fanon 2000, p. 47) can have an interest in true decolonisation. For Fanon, such would entail the native intellectual, ‘rejecting the “position or status” (Fanon, 2000: 47) of the coloniser in favour of the colonisers “place”’ (Fanon, 2000: 47).

If, following Fanon, we accept that, historically, the native intellectual has proved to be the weak link in the decolonising chain, the attempt by academics of colour, in universities across the globe, to provide the intellectual frameworks on the basis of which the colonial university can be challenged and changed can be read in at least two ways. First, this decolonising activity could very well be read as a sign that academics of colour (who are the modern-day “native intellectuals) have recognised their past collusion” with colonialism and are now determined to engage proactively and wholeheartedly in the urgent project. There is, however, a second, less optimistic reading of the situation. The cultural capital which this group of elites carry could mean that they settle, permanently, the question of how decolonisation is to be performed: who can say which is a true decolonisation, and which a false” (Fanon 2000, p. 46)? In what follows I show that a strategy of non-violence underpins the way in which academics of colour perform decolonisation. Ultimately, such performances will work to the detriment of academics and students of colour in British universities.

Decolonial Violence and Colonial Non-Violence

Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioglu’s edited collection, Decolonising the University (2018) is one recent publication that indirectly touches on the question of decolonial violence. For some contributors, the demise of‘colonial forms of recognition and redistribution’ (Maldonando-Torres, Vizcaino, Wallace, and We, 2018: 80) in the university setting might come about through a bloodless intellectual revolution. Others seem to contemplate a more direct and “violent” confrontation with the ‘nstitutionally and intractably racist” (Andrews, 2018: 138) university (for further discussion see Tuitt, 2019).

For Fanon, a true decolonist is one who would ‘use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence’ (Fanon, 2000: 28). However, it is important to emphasise that Fanon speaks of a violence that is not just evidenced in guns and tanks. In an earlier publication in which I sought to align The Wretched of the Earth with other theories of law and violence, such as that propounded by Walter Benjamin in his 1921 “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin, 1995), I drew attention to the

frequent appearance of ... the ‘spectral’ or ‘transcendental’ quality of violence that haunts Wretched. For Fanon, revolutionary terror is overlaid by the terrifying force of the ‘petrified’ native, the near dead, the Zombies whose principal mode of being is exhibited in the ‘death reflex’ (Tuitt, 2013)

This chapter provides me with an opportunity to explore other aspects of Fanon’s complex account of the phenomenon of violence. For example, Fanon clearly acknowledges the discursive dimensions of violence when he states that she or he ‘who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent’ (Fanon, 2000: 170). What makes Fanon’s idea of violence resonate so well with others, like Benjamin, is his emphasis on the violent nature of the colonised’s decision to withdraw from the dominant legal order. For Fanon, colonised persons

should not lift their little finger or in the slightest degree help the oppressor to sink his claws deeper into his prey. The duty of the native ... is literally to make it so that the slightest gesture has to be torn out of him. This is a very concrete manifestation of non-cooperation, or at least a form of minimum cooperation. (Fanon, 2000: 238)

In this, Fanon echoes Walter Benjamin’s approach to the phenomenon of violence. For Benjamin “violence” as a phenomenon cannot be restricted to conventional understandings, which would equate violence with the enactment of traumatic physical injur}'. Indeed, Benjamin’s analysis of the deployment by organised labour” of the legal right to strike as always carrying the potential of violence cannot be understood unless it is accepted that the notion of violence” can extend to non-physical force, such as extortion”. Speaking of the occasional concessions”, which the colonial state allows when the intensity of decolonial resistance reaches its height, Fanon tells us that ‘the native ought to realise that it is not colonialism that grants such concessions, but he himself that extorts them’ (Fanon, 2000: 114).

On the subject of political “withdrawal” Benjamin opines:

there is certainly the objection that an omission of actions, a nonaction ... cannot be described as violence ... [b]ut its truth is not unconditional, and therefore not unrestricted. It is true that the omission of an action, or service, where it amounts simply to a ‘severing of relations’, can be an entirely nonviolent, pure means ... not a right to exercise violence but, rather, to escape from a violence. (Benjamin, 1995: 281)

In the idea of a form of “nonaction” that will yield to nothing short of the coloniser’s brute force (the slightest gesture has to be torn from him”), Fanon makes clear that he is alluding to a form of force that cannot be equated with a passive withdrawal from the political community.

If the nature of violence is not capable of being determined, how can we know when decolonial violence is deployed - other than in the self-evident cases of revolutionär}' war or other forms of physical force? The answer to be deduced from The Wretched of the Earth is a negative one: we note the absence of decolonial violence whenever we can note the presence of colonial non-violence. Ultimately, what Fanon asks of the colonised in response to the colonial violence that is a ‘violence in its natural sense, and ... will only yield when confronted with greater violence’ (Fanon, 2000: 48) is that she or he does not ‘at the decisive moment introduce that new idea which is in proper parlance a creation of the colonial situation: non-violence’ (Fanon, 2000: 48).

In the idea of “nonviolence” is encapsulated by Fanon all the failings that the native intellectual exemplifies. This is the native intellectual, who, refusing the challenge to alter the order of the world” (Fanon, 2000: 27), ‘will fight in order that the settler and the native may live together in peace in a new world’ (Fanon, 2000: 34-35). This is the native intellectual who, wedded to organisational structures, will allow the claims of the organisation to ‘take precedence over a reasoned study of colonial society’ (Fanon, 2000: 85) and who seizes upon every ‘attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table’ (Fanon, 2000: 48).

Decolonising literature tends to focus on the colonial legacies of universities. For the most part, they are rooted in past acts which resonate in the presence. The location of decolonising literature betrays its attachment to a strategy of non-violence. For a strategy of non-violence is premised upon a strategy of ignoring or downplaying the full effect of the coloniser’s violence. It is to downplay ‘[t]he violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed’ (Fanon, 2000: 38) as a direct response to a decolonising movement. It is to ignore the fact that ‘[t]he settlers work is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the native’ (Fanon, 2000: 73). It is to downplay the reality that ‘colonialism does not doubt the strength of its system. It does not feel that it is endangered fundamentally’ (Fanon, 2000: 102). Or, put differently: ‘[cjolonialism has greater and wealthier resources than the native’ (Fanon, 2000: 113). Most significantly, it is to address colonialism without adequate tools with which to confront a colonial strategy that combines ‘brutal repression with spectacular gestures of friendship’ (Fanon, 2000: 108).

In reviewing the decolonising of the university literature, I have been struck by the absence of references to contemporary developments in universities, which suggest that even now they are engaging in surprisingly unreconstructed techniques of colonial imposition and governance. Two prominent examples will suffice. First is the example of the University of London External Programme

(now the University of London Worldwide), which was established in 1858. It was (and continues to be) structured on a distinction between the University of London students who receive their university education within the constituent colleges of the university and those who are educated in places located outside of the colleges - most commonly outside of the UK altogether. The University of London External Programme model - which has been widely adopted by other universities - has normalised distance learning and/or cut-price degree programmes delivered by for-profit providers as the primary means through which Britain’s colonised subjects would access university-level education. Second is the example of the University College London’s extension of its campuses from their traditional locations in Bloomsbury in the West End of London to Stratford in the East. The University College London describes its acquisition of grounds on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford - collectively named UCL East - as ‘the largest ever single expansion ... since the university was founded nearly 200 years ago’.

These new and continuing developments show that the intellectual practice which decolonial scholars are in the processes of establishing cannot be confined to the colonial appropriative methods that have already been identified and named but must also be able to anticipate those which even now may be silently consolidating around us. More generally, they indicate that the main form of colonial violence is still being enacted, for colonialism, at its base, is a mode of invention/regeneration - in aid of which territorial acquisitions are an indispensable requirement. The newly acquired territories - and the communities already resident there or enticed there by the prospects of advancement which regeneration promises - are then deemed to be ripe for experimentation and change. To address this point to the University College London example, presented as part of the overall regeneration of Stratford, the narratives surrounding the expansion of the UCL in an eastward direction carries an uncomfortable flavour of the aforementioned colonial techniques and tropes. It is in the new campuses of East London and not in the old location of Bloomsbury that UCL can be ‘non-conformist, quirky, effortlessly radical, progressive, creative, egalitarian, meritocratic, transformational’ (for further discussion, see Tuitt, 2019). With such prominent examples ( and more) at hand, it is hard to account for the focus on the literature on past colonial activities of universities and their legacies - except as a strategy of non-violence, which, to remind ourselves, Fanon alluded to as a ‘creation of the colonial situation’ (Fanon, 2000: 48). By this, Fanon meant that a strategy of non-violence can only work in aid of colonialism.

Although there is no direct reference to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the idea of nonviolence in his well-known critique, it is clear enough that Fanon, like Walter Benjamin, sees that the colonial state is entirely absent of those preconditions which make non-violence conceivable.

In Benjamin, non-violence appears as a utopian ideal. The ideal of “nonviolence” is the idea that society could/should evolve to a stage where individuals can reconcile their interests peacefully - without violence - which, for Benjamin, who equates law with violence, meant without involving the legal system (Benjamin, 1995: 288). Benjamin’s discussion of non-violence”, which can be located between pages 289 and 291 of the Critique, warns of the dangers of promoting alternatives to legal violence in the absence of certain preconditions” which he sets out, albeit in rather opaque terms. Regrettably, the tendency has been to highlight the opportunities which the notion of non-violence” offers without paying sufficient attention to Benjamin’s cautionary words.

Benjamin begins his contemplations on non-violence in the following terms:

Is any nonviolent resolution of conflict possible? Without doubt. The relationships of private persons are full of examples of this. Nonviolent agreement is possible wherever a civilized outlook allows the use of unalloyed means of agreement. Legal and illegal means of ever}' kind that are all the same violent may be confronted with nonviolent ones as unalloyed means. Courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust, and whatever else might here be mentioned, are their subjective preconditions. Their objective manifestation, however, is determined by the law (the enormous scope of which cannot be discussed here) that unalloyed means are never those of direct, but always those of indirect solutions. They therefore never apply directly to the resolution of conflict between man and man, but only to matters concerning objects. (Benjamin, 1995: 289)

Thus, even a fairly cursor}' reading of the ‘Critique of Violence’ makes clear that Benjamin would not have seen contemporary social and political arrangements as being ones that could accommodate nonviolent means. Benjamin’s was never an unproblematic invocation of non-violence. On the contrary, he was acutely conscious of the consequences of recourse to nonviolent means in the context of a legal system that has yet to be cleansed of its “mentality of violence” (Benjamin, 1995: 288). Certain conditions need to exist before Benjamin could contemplate substituting nonviolent means for legal power. What Benjamin refers to as indirect” solutions to conflict requires courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, trust” (Benjamin, 1995: 289).

A number of theorists have sought to elucidate these preconditions (e.g. Wolcher, 2008 and see for further discussion, Tuitt, 2019), most recently Judith Butler in The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind (Butler, 2020). Butler’s work is especially relevant to this reading of Fanon because, on my reading, her conception of non-violence is perfectly aligned with Fanon’s notion of decolonial violence. To put it another way, Butler discusses forms of resistant practices to racial and other forms of violence, which Fanon would both approve and recognise. However, whereas Butler categorises these forms as “non-violence”, Fanon, as illustrated in the preceding paragraphs, resolutely refuses to do so. For Butler nonviolence simply signals the various ways and means through which violence is confronted and opposed. She explicitly refuses to conceive of non-violence in terms of‘the absence of violence, or as the act of refraining from committing violence’ (Butler, 2020: 27), preferring instead to think of non-violence as ‘a ... way of rerouting aggression for the purposes of affirming ideals of equality and freedom’ (Butler, 2020: 27). According to Butler’s conception of non-violence, those who enact physical force are not necessarily behaving in ways which are inimical to a practice or philosophy of non-violence, for nonviolence is, in essence, the name of an ongoing struggle” (Butler, 2020: 23), which seeks not to bring about more violence, but to ‘dispute the inevitability of its circulation (Butler, 2020: 8). Butler pays homage to Fanon in her book. Specifically, she draws on Fanon to emphasise the central role played by ‘[r]acial schemas ... in ... debates about violence and non-violence’ (Butler, 2020: 115). However, she does not directly address the idea that a philosophy of non-violence (even in the expanded sense that she conceives it) might form part of the colonial arsenal of weapons.

The “Native Intellectual” in British Universities

The trajectory of decolonising scholarship, which I have described in the preceding paragraphs, could be said to have been anticipated by Fanon. To accept this proposition, however, is to accept that the category of “native intellectual” to which Fanon addresses his various strictures on colonial non-violence adequately captures the condition of academics of colour working in British universities. I suggest that it is no less valid than the category currently in use - black and minority ethnic. As Foluke Adebisi (2019) insightfully remarks, BAME

like the porous idea of liberal ‘diversity’ pretends all marginalized people are interchangeable. It assumes that the experiences of an Indigenous Australian woman are the same as that of a Brown Muslim man are the same as that of a Black African woman, are the same as a First Nations non-binary person. It puts all non-white people a single box, it allows you to check that one box and be done, while lots of experiences are left out of the box. One BAME person stands for all BAME people. (Adebisi, 2019)

The Wretched of the Earth manages to exceed the time and place of its origin in ways which this short chapter cannot hope to convey. That said, the book appears to speak of a time when colonialism was synonymous with settler colonialism. For Fanon, ‘[t]he settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners’ (Fanon, 2000: 30), but it has long been accepted that colonial impositions stray beyond the territories governed and administered by the colonial centre, and, therefore, that the settlement of foreigners is not an indispensable mark of colonialism. Thus, whilst postcolonial studies focus disproportionately on the settler colonies produced during the time of the British empire - in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand especially - few would now dispute that settler colonialism is just one of many forms which colonialism takes. Undoubtedly, then, terms which proliferate in The Wretched of the Earth, such as ‘native’ and ‘settler’ must not be transported into different contexts without sufficient care. However, this does not mean that they are redundant terms/categories. The category of the native intellectual, for example, may have greater political purchase than does the category of BAME

Decolonial Violence and the ‘Native Intellectual’ 27 academic of student - since the former better calls attention to the enduring reality of the colonial situation.

For the purpose of this exposition, the category of ‘native intellectual’ is carried into the British university to designate those academics of colour - usually referred to as BAME - who are actively engaged in one or other of the movements to decolonise the university or who, irrespective of any action on their part, are, by the very nature of being academics of colour, liable to be referred to in writings on the colonial university. Inevitably, then, I carry also Fanon’s somewhat negative assessment of the role of the native intellectual in decolonial struggles. Fanon characterises the native intellectual as one who shares with the colonist foundational principles that have been shaped by European philosophy. To be precise, she/he is identifiable by her/his ‘closeness to the colonist with regard to the universal abstract’ (Fanon, 2000: 34-35). As previously stated, she/he is also intractably wedded to organisational structures. One of the more prominent of the recent decolonising literature is the edited collection Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia (Gabriel and Tate, 2017). The importance of this collection of essays written by ten academics, all women of colour, which document their experiences of race and gender discrimination within the setting of the UK public university cannot be overstated. However, the majority are deeply invested in the organisational form. All of the authors have spent several years within the university, and many occupy high-profile positions within academia, including that of Professor, Associate Dean, research project leader, and, in the case of two of the authors, founding Director of highly successful cross-disciplinary networks of Black and minority ethnic academics. The author of this chapter is no exception - having spent eight years as Executive Dean in a University of London School of Law. One cannot overstate the fact that Fanon saw the native intellectual as a creature wedded to the ‘modern political warfare’ (Fanon, 2000: 85), that is the organisation. She/he is ‘permeated by colonialism and all its ways of thinking’ (Fanon, 2000: 34-35) and attempts to hide away the desire to ‘assimilate ... to the colonial world’ (Fanon, 2000: 47). He/she is ‘occupied in action on a particular front’ (Fanon, 2000: 39) and, as a result, ‘overstates details’ (Fanon, 2000: 38).

Conclusion

The native must realise that colonialism never gives away anything for nothing. Whatever the native may gain ... is not the result of the kindliness or good will of the settler: it simply shows that [he] cannot put off granting concessions any longer. (Fanon, 2000: 114)

The developments at the universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Glasgow, and Oxford, which I outlined in the second section of this chapter, are examples of concessions which have been wrung from the colonial university. Moreover, published works on the decolonial university have carved out a distinctive role in the university for many academics of colour as well as adding to their university’sstock of highly rated research. Fanon warns us that these concessions will come at a considerable cost. What I fear is that much of this scholarship will sit alongside reports of the kind recently produced by Universities UK and the National Union of Students (May 2019) and will form part of an archive of government-initiated investigations and reports into the university in which a contemporary form of narrating knowledge about the colonised other is embedded in a way which leads to his/her further marginalisation.

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