Abstract:
In order to know how to change one must be able to acknowledge what one
does not know. Central to knowledge production of relevance is humility and
an understanding of the realities of one’s own environment. From a decolonial
perspective, knowledge production is affected by the development and creation
of the actual physical spaces of the university and its pedagogy. The Covid_19
pandemic has tested the functionality of the physical space of the university as
well as the organization of the city space. This paper considers these issues, their
impact and effect on the mental well-being of both academics and students by
exploring the idea of the university as a virtuous city. We draw on Al-Farabi’s
treatise of the Virtuous City because physical and conceptual architectures reflect
a way in which the world is structured. In South Africa, the violent design of
the fragmented spaces has been planned according to the colonial, cartographic
imagination which destroys and distorts memory and ruptures tradition. The
architecture of the cities and universities, it can be argued, effect a similar process,
and serve as an affirmation of the pre-dominance of the white-supremacist power
structure in South Africa. Cities are created by people and each city is a creation
of the interaction of social, economic, cultural, and political imperatives. The
university is a micro-manifestation of the cosmopolitan city that adopts different
approaches to knowledge, decolonisation and transformation. In re-imaging and
reconstituting the westernised South African university an appropriate approach
to reaching the ideals of well-being and harmony would require the shedding of the ego and the Cartesian “I”. The process of decolonising the university should
occur by deconstructing and recognising colonial methods, theories and practise
in our pedagogy and spaces in order to begin the process of reconstruction.
