Can We Make Spaces for Knowledge Systems to Coexist, Without Duress? - A Conversation Prof. Catherine Odora Hoppers

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

How can we create pluralistic societies without violence? Genuinely, that means that we have to create a deeper methodology, not just of relying on academic outputs and so on, but we have to engage Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast.

My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As you will have heard on many previous episodes of the podcast with Marie Baptiste, Karl Meeker, Wakani Hoffman, and Vanessa Andriotti, among others, understanding the ways in which our colonial schooling systems have propagated one particular way of knowing our world and excluded and often violently suppressed many others is something that I care deeply about. For me, it has to be a key part of any transformative work that we do with humility and curiosity to reorient our education systems. But in order to do this, we need people who are able to gather and convene the critical conversations that put these ways of knowing in dialogue with each other. It is therefore the greatest honor to have Professor Katherine Odora Hoppers joining me on the podcast this week. For her entire career, Dr. Hoppers has been at the forefront of facilitating these vital conversations. In post-apartheid South Africa, she designed and enabled the process that led to the first national policy on the recognition, development, and protection of Indigenous knowledge systems. She has received many incredible accolades for her work, including in 2015 the Nelson Mandela Distinguished Africanist Award from Thabo Mbeki for her pursuit of the total liberation of the African continent. Today, Professor Hoppers is the Canada Research Chair in Transdisciplinarity, Cognitive Justice, and Education as part of the Pluralism Strategy Initiative at the University of Calgary. She is the author of many important works, including the book Rethinking Thinking: Modernity's Other and the Transformation of the University that she wrote with the late Professor Howard Richards. I started by asking Professor Hoppers about her experiences in South Africa.

For me, when I went to South Africa in the '90s, South Africa had just got its democratic dispensation in 1994. I went there 3 years later. And when South Africa called me, they gave me a position at the Centre for Education Policy Development, an institute that Mandela had created knowing that there would be so much policy work that South Africa would need to undertake in preparation for taking apartheid episode, you know. There would be so much demanded of policy. How can South Africa manage with the policies which apartheid had installed and so on. So I was put there as deputy director of that institute, that center, and because of that we used to attend ANC policy meetings together at that time. But I witnessed what the formation of post-apartheid policy work entailed. You know?

Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, I do. No, it's fascinating. And the thing that it makes me curious about is how do you not, when you are thinking about such a radical shift in policy to support a new era, right? How do you not write in the policies the same kinds of habits or same kinds of patterns that were there already, right? How do you do it differently? That's such an interesting question.

Exactly, because peace with a nation going through such a process, you know, it is immense actually. It is almost impossible to narrate it really, but I will try. Luckily, the words like transformation was embedded in the policies. It was embedded in the thinking. Yeah, so Transformation was already articulated, so it was finding out what that would entail, that transformation. It covered the human resources, covered the tenets of the policy itself, it covered the thought processes.

Exactly, yeah.

And it covered the financial system itself. It covered the scientific community themselves. You get me? Yeah. I think I worked there for 1 or 2 years, and then I was appointed from that post to go and advise the parliament. And I was stationed in the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on arts, culture, languages, science, and technology. There was one big portfolio committee which handled that, and they, they were struggling how the knowledge systems of South Africans can be brought to bear. Yeah, at that time, that no transformation can occur without the knowledge systems, Africans, coming into the fore. And how to get the African indigenous knowledge system to come out in public was my task.

Wow.

It makes me think of your friend, Dr. Marie Baptiste, amazing lady, who talks about the cognitive imperialism, you know? So like in a colonial education system, for example, Eurocentric, education system, when you've been marinating in that Eurocentrism, as she says, it's really difficult to even think of a different way, right? The conditioning is so strong. And so some of it sounds like a fascinating example of like, how do you try and uncondition, or maybe in your language, how do you rethink thinking, right? So how do you allow a new set of ways of knowing to come in? To a space that has been colonized by such a specific, like in this case apartheid, but in a more general educational place, a kind of a Eurocentric colonial knowledge. So it's, yeah, it's a fascinating example of that.

So Mary diagnosed that, isn't it?

Exactly, yeah.

But she did not diagnose the post-cognitive imperialism. You get me?

Right.

She did not extend her diagnosis of the post.

Yes.

I am the emblem of the post.

Yeah. Wow. I do. So, so what did you— yeah, I mean, I know this is like an impossible question, but what did you learn from that process? Or what— how did it flow so that you, you can begin that work?

That is why when you contacted me, I said let this be a continuous conversation. I can't finish it now because it is life and death. It is not just an academic doing a— no, it is life and death. What I'm telling you, it is real. It is not a result of some analysis. I had to go beyond analysis to the real thing, to the real African population the white population that is in fact there. I cannot go and analyze them. No, because I was put there to take action as a result of where South Africa found itself. So these academic things, who said what, what, you know, I had to put it way out of my reach. Because I was challenged. In South Africa at that time, if you were not courageous, you couldn't say anything really. So South Africa challenged me to be myself and to act. So the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee invited me to advise them on how African indigenous knowledge can be brought to bear. Now you can imagine a person asking a neighbor, "How can African indigenous knowledge systems be brought out to bear?" But my task was more than all of this. It was a national question which needed a response. Immediately yesterday, you know. Yeah, yeah. So at that time, the parliament decided that our meetings should be held in Robben Island. Wow. Where Mandela suffered. So we moved our meetings there so that it would ground people in their sincerity. Because the portfolio committee had all the members of the different parties in it. I have pictures, I tell you, you know, it is to remember it in a podcast like this, it is unbelievable actually. So in Robben Islands, we decided that the real challenge, because we did almost like a SWOT analysis of the problem. And all of us felt that actually the scientific community, it is not just that they had a responsibility, but they were the culprits because policy follows what science say.

Yeah.

Ah, what shall we do now? So the chairman say, no, We are responsible for funding the science communities in South Africa. Let us start with that and let us focus on what our mandate is. But now, how can the parliament start this experiment with truth? Like Gandhi, you get me? Gandhi wrote his book, My experiments with truth. Yeah. They retasked me to go and workshop these presidents and vice presidents and the leadership of all the science councils in South Africa. There were 9 science councils. Wow.

Walking into the lion's den, eh? Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. Ranging from Atomic Energy Commission to the South African Weather Bureau. In the middle, there were medical research councils, human sciences research council, agricultural research. They said, "Go and produce the results." I said, "Ah!" Without any textbook.

Of course, there is no textbook for this, right? Amazing. In one of your talks, I heard you talking about science museumizing other knowledges. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about, right? Is that the power of the science creates a museum out of these other knowledge systems.

Exactly. And people are so comfortable with that because you belong to a museum, your knowledges are not worthwhile like ours. That was the platform upon which science had perched itself throughout the world. I was to go and untie that.

What a job. Wow.

Well, you know, if there's no theories, you have to rely on honesty. You have to rely on basic ethical values. And so-and-so said this. No, I had to go to the scientific community with my own truth. I worked them for 2 years until they realized that, yes, we heard this something sincere you are saying to us. I said, put it in writing. Put it in writing. They came back to me, okay, let us work on this together, okay? I think, okay, let me draft what you told me and then you go and edit it and it comes like the official. After 2 years.

And can I ask you where you saw those little cracks and those admissions from them? Were some of them coming from a place where they recognized the deficiencies of their scientific knowledge, or, or maybe, and was it something about the people's kind of lifeworlds and knowledge systems that they were kind of look— trying to acknowledge, I guess?

Because the way I approached them was based on truth. I was appealing to them to let go of their professional scientific credentials and come back to being human. So we drafted almost like a declaration or something like that. They gave it to me. I said, "Don't give it to me." And there was a committee chairman of the presidents of the science councils. I said, "I will go with him to the parliament and present this." Imagine.

Yeah, wow.

So the parliament got this. I tell you, they discussed it for several weeks. You couldn't hold on to that document and put it in your drawer, no. It was so potent. That document was like a living thing, you know. Nobody could just read it and put it like that. It was history in the making. So the chairman of the portfolio committee, when he went to the cabinet, I could see South Africa almost trembling. Not like in an earthquake, no. But the tremors was being felt, so it was decided that this matter should be put nationally now, because from the portfolio committee to the minister now. But the minister at that time, he was Black, okay? But he was the typical case of a married lady He hated this thing with indigenous or African or what. He was a doctor, yes. He was Black, yes. But he hated everything. Really, with his whole might, he hated this.

And did you get a sense why? Like, did he give explanations as to what he hated about it?

He probably didn't say he hated it, but Look, all the educated Africans were challenged by this realization. All the educated Africans, we are all marinated, you get me? Just take that word from Marikini. I took on the nation as a whole, yeah, not the apartheid, not the whites.

The whole country. Amazing.

So they handed him the document. First of all, I think he just said, maybe this is the usual law briefs or something. He didn't even think about it. But fortunately, he was a minister who read things. One day, at around 6 6:00 AM, I got a call from the minister. Hello, Dr. Happers, where are you? I said, I'm still at home. Come to my office immediately. I said, what is this now? I took my car and off to the minister's office. Dr. Happers, sit down, sit down. It was around half past 6. He was pacing up and down. I was sitting like this. He was pacing up and down. He was holding that document in his hand. He said, "Has so-and-so read this?" I said, "Yes." "Aha, how about this person?" He went through almost 10 names in the government or scientific or whatever. I said, yes. Eh, he sat down. He was so distracted. He wasn't actually speaking to me. He was speaking to himself.

Right, yeah.

I just sat there quietly. Okay, you can go now. But he could not sit still because he realized that that document was a game changer. If he just shoved it into his throat, that document will escape through the holes. So in 2 weeks' time, he called me again. He had set up a binational commission, a South Africa-India, a South Africa-China. Bi-national commissions to look into the way these two countries had dealt with their indigenous knowledge systems. When I went to his office the second time, he said, "I've set up two bi-national commissions and I want you to guide them into India and China." bring for me the report of how these two countries dealt with their Indigenous knowledge systems. We started with India. We traveled through India state by state under the guardianship of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, in India, how indigenous knowledge systems was incorporated into the national system of innovation. So we took there almost 3 weeks. We came and brought a report to the minister. The minister read it and then said, no, you go to China first, I'm coming with you. And then he mobilized the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee to accompany us to China. It was such a huge delegation going there to find out how this Chinese traditional knowledge was brought out to invade China's development.

That's fascinating.

Yes, we visited the Chinese traditional hospitals. It is a hospital that almost covered 1 mile. It was the biggest hospital in Beijing. I said, what happens when a person from the West comes here? They said, oh, they sit in that building. The, the hospital is almost a mile long, but the put a building where Western researchers can sit and do research. Yeah, but epistemologically they didn't matter.

Mhm.

So we came back, we assembled a report to the minister, and then following that, after the minister had taken the experiences or the report and consulted with the other cabinet Yes, and so on. It took time, but after 2 months I got a letter from the minister appointing me to head a task team to draft the first national policy on the recognition, development, protection of Indigenous Knowledge Systems in South Africa, and it is one of the first policies worldwide.

Amazing.

He said, "Do it yourself. If you can't find anybody, do it yourself." I said, "No, no, no." I assembled the people I trusted in South Africa. You don't just go and pick people because of their qualifications because the qualifications themselves were already dipped in poison.

Exactly, the educated people had been marinated. Exactly, exactly.

I had to go deeper and find people who are honest, who are ethical as human being. I brought them. I tell you, as I say, and I will say it over and over and over, my life in South Africa cannot be repeated because it was history in the making. So we finished that policy. We, we went to India and China in 2001, and I embarked on the policy We finished it in 2002 and they did for the bureaucrats to work on it now because it is a long process. So I said goodbye, South Africa. I took my flight to Sweden to be with my children, knowing that by that time I'd done what I could for South Africa. As a human being, I felt that I've done what I could do. 3 years later, I got a call from South Africa. The parliament has decided that they are going to start an initiative focusing on research, but that research should go beyond ordinary research. But it should focus on transforming the higher education landscape. So we'd like you to be one of the 50, spanning all sorts of fields, but we'd like you to come and accept one of these chairs. I said it is going now to the academy, eh, because I dealt with these science councils, I knew that they wanted me to head that process of pricking the academy, just pricking them. I was outside South Africa already, and these chairs had to be embedded in an institution in South Africa. How can it be? So the appointed person, he was a professor in the biggest university in South Africa and the biggest in Africa and the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere called the University of South Africa. It has got 450,000 students. So they said, "The University of South Africa can host you." When I sat down and thought about what I was going to do in South Africa for the second time, what has ached me, you know, I had to call myself to figure out what had ached me so that I would represent the proposal in a genuine way, you know. And I found that the question that I couldn't answer all this time was development. I said, could it ever be educated, development itself? The industry of development, the infrastructures, Yeah, the understandings of development. And so I said, this is the problem. So I started a chair called Development Education. People didn't understand, but I did it for 10 years and it changed everything. I selected thinkers, thinkers from all over the world, professors from quantum physics, professors of law, of economics, of philosophy, of the history of science, and from anthropology of science, from all over the world. 40 of them came to back me up. I assembled the vice chancellors of all the universities in South Africa to come and meet these thinkers. I had 25 postgraduate students, and then this is the catch, I assembled 19 elders, illiterate people from all the 9 provinces of South Africa. All people who understood what Indigenous Knowledge Systems are, they did not have to know English. No, I just say, "Come." 19 of them. I would hold my retreats once a year. It would last 1 month with all my students, the IPKS advisory faculty, The vice chancellors and the thinkers in one room, it changed everything.

Amazing.

So, um, I finished with the chair 6 years ago in South Africa. I retired and so on, so forth. Came home to Uganda and I built my house. I minded other things. Yeah, the University of Calgary had been following at least a bit what I was doing, and they said, Catherine, even if you extract from all these things you were doing, even if it is 15% or 20% of what you did, come and do it here.

And is that in a Canadian Indigenous context? No.

No, the University of Calgary. First of all, they wanted me to— they, they wrote a proposal for the Canadian Research Chair.

Okay.

And I got it in November last year, so I'm here.

Amazing. And I mean, I know this is an impossible question, but can I at least ask it? I mean, such an amazing amount of learning, I'm sure, has happened in those spaces with all of those different bringing different epistemologies in, even different ontologies about, you know, how people know that they're different worlds, their lifeworlds, and they're coming into this same space. What are some of the things that you have kind of seen that, that might allow more of a sustained shift in the way that education happens? Because I guess that's my real interest. That's the core of my interest is how does this thing called education happen, and, and it's happened for so long in such a particular and, and violent and superficial way, excluding all of these other different ways of knowing. And you've been right at the heart of that work for, for many, many years. So, I mean, how are you feeling about that work now and in terms of its relevance in our current education?

Okay, I will answer you by bringing what I'm doing now, because the CRC chair I'm running now, it is called Transdisciplinarity, Cognitive Justice, and Education. I will explain. Transdisciplinarity tackles the system itself, the linearity of the system itself. Vis-à-vis a holistic frame of reference. So how could I come in to fathom out a healing methodology to the system? Cognitive justice is the right of all forms and traditions of knowledge to coexist in public without duress. If the knowledge of the Native Americans is being recognized, yes, yes, but are they allowed to coexist in public without any form of duress? This is my task here.

Yeah, without duress is a big— those are big words, right?

Exactly. That is why I'm here. Okay, and then what is the total sum of these insights? Education in the long run, it is challenging me now like South Africa, because if I take this to its core, to its ethical core, it is like being in South Africa. Yes.

It's incredible. It's such important work now, right? We need it so badly, I feel. We need it so badly. There's so many blind alleys we've gone down as a civilization, as a species that, you know.

And the academy keeps on repeating itself. Citing themselves without examining how each person comes to that violent system. Paints themselves in a lifelong way in the violence systems themselves. What is it that converts people? This is my task.

Yeah. And it feels like one of the things that people are asked to do is remove themselves in a way, right? Their humane, their deep humanity, because it's a professional space or it's a scientific space.

Exactly.

And what I've heard you talking about so often throughout these stories so far is bringing that human, like the ethical essence of what it means to be human, back into the center of these.

Exactly. Exactly. In the University of Calgary, my chair is embedded in a national initiative in the university of creating pluralistic societies.

Yeah.

How can we create pluralistic societies without violence? How can we genuinely? That means that we have to create a deeper methodology, not just of relying on academic outputs and so on, but we have to engage. I wrote a book with one of my fellows called Rethinking Thinking: Modernities Are There and the Transformation of the University.

What a title. Yes.

It is only 90 pages.

Brilliant. And I know how I've read some of Howard's work as well, your partner, now sadly passed on, right?

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

Thank you. This is just beautiful. It's so interesting.

Thank you, Katherine. Okay.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.