MOHAMMAD SHABANGU

Dear Aryan, 

I thought to write to say thank you for putting me onto herri!  This such a vital source. The care and thoughtfulness that went into it translates into a delightful reader experience. And what a pleasure spending time with an immersive and engaging web design. A welcome move away from the feed format. The editing is masterfully done! As if that’s not enough, I absolutely adore the decision to have face-to-face translations like you do in Neo Muyanga’s piece. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a reader-oriented experience of anything online… And Wamuwi deals an astonishing blow in that review essay, as I always come to expect, with marvellous prose and insightful precision. Such clarity: “We were part of the organised social lie, perhaps the last willing participants in the wishful escapist phantasy offered up by the interlock between state, education and capital.” 

Reading his essay, I couldn’t help but detect strong allegiances with a paper I wrote titled “Education as the practice of Freedom: Towards a decolonisation of desire.” It’s never made sense to me how slow the academic publishing wheel is to turn — I wrote a first draft in 2018 and it is being published next month in the journal Social Dynamics. I’m attaching the paper here for your interest (though, forgive me, its not as erudite and elegantly put together as the content on herri). If I were writing it today, I would have to take into account some rather compelling arguments by other South African writers and thinkers such as Wamuwi. There have since also been other theoretical positions that would complicate my views in the paper; like the brilliant reading of Du Bois’ thought in Africa by Tshepo Madlingozi for instance, or his de-colonial critique of constitutional law and its assimilation of the newly liberated into an already bifurcated social structure. Best wishes, 
Mo