Over the past five years, no less than ten open letters have been published that critically address the reproduction of racism and coloniality in Belgian higher education.[1] The arguments, dialogically building on each other, establish a common-sense discourse signifying contemporary racism as remnant of Belgian colonial history.[2] Decolonisation, as an anti-racist project, aims to redesign the narration of Belgian colonial history in the curriculum. Unlearning the dominant colonial narrative is believed to enable the fostering of critical awareness about the root of institutional racism in Belgian Universities. I firmly subscribe[3] to the need for Belgian higher education to revise the place of colonial history in its curricula, however, I am not entirely convinced about the way (de)colonial histories of the Global South are rewritten; often commodified into solely anti-racist capital for and by the students at European universities.[4] Decoloniality and anti-racism are two different paradigms and by conflating them, Belgian decolonial discourse suffers from a fundamental paradox. It reconstructs the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while simultaneously silencing realities and actions currently coming from the DRC. That the decolonial discourse limits its dialogic process to within the national borders of Belgium sits at odds with the colonial history itself, which was transnational in nature.

This critique is based on a dialogic analysis of open letters, written between 2017 and 2022, advocating for decoloniality and anti-racism in Belgian higher education. Throughout the essay I refer to a few of the letters specifically, but the full list is included at the end of this text. The dialogic analysis builds on Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination.[5] Through these essays, Bakhtin argues that discourse is dialogic in the sense that it borrows symbols from previous discourse, encodes these symbols differently, and transforms them into new discourse intending to persuade audiences.[6] As a dialogical meaning-making practice, the Belgian decolonial discourse borrows its concept from anti-colonial liberation struggles in the Global South, and transforms it into a prism facilitating the inclusivity and representation of students in Belgian higher education.[7] Scholars in educational sciences derived—from Bakhtin’s thinking—the concept of “internally persuasive discourse,” a praxis in which learners dialogically test and challenge the boundaries of ideas. This kind of reflexive learning leans on dialogue as the space where discourse and its concepts can be dialogically tested and remain forever testable.[8] By engaging with the paradox of the decolonial discourse in Belgium, I intend to make it a subject of dialogic learning. This means that I revisit arguments and logics that might have become normative, and reclaim them as objects of dialogic reflection.

Why should affordable education in the DRC (not) be a part of the Belgian decolonial discourse?

The 2015 student protests in South Africa have been fundamental to our current understanding of the international movement calling for the decolonisation of higher education. The #FeesMustFall movement started in Johannesburg after the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) declared an unaffordable rise in fees for 2016, followed by Rhodes University announcing a similar increase in The 2015 student protests in South Africa have been fundamental to our current understanding of the international movement calling for the decolonisation of higher education.[9] The #FeesMustFall movement started in Johannesburg after the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) declared an unaffordable rise in fees for 2016, followed by Rhodes University announcing a similar increase in their fees.[10] The #FeesMustFall movement became a rallying cry against financial exclusion and debt traps for economically disadvantaged students. The decolonial discourse of these protests contested the (neo-)colonial structures limiting students’ access to resources and knowledge.

Similar waves of student protests emerged almost at the same time in the DRC.[11] Earlier, in 2012, the non-violent, student-led movement LUCHA (“Lutte pour le changement”, or “struggle for change”) had emerged in eastern DRC,[12] and ever since it has grown into a national movement with branches in every major city. In the DRC, (neo-)colonisation is not only a matter of the curriculum, but a lived reality that renders Congolese lives economically precarious. The 2015 protests were part of a larger social uprising, as the population tried—is trying—to renegotiate the country’s many injuries caused by intersecting dynamics such as Belgian colonial rule, national leadership, and foreign investments draining resources, to name a few. These political and economic injuries coincide with dramatic poverty numbers. In 2018, the World Bank[13] estimated that 72% of Congolese people are living below the international poverty line of $1,9/day.[14] This equates to 60 million Congolese people living in dire economic conditions. To put this into perspective, Belgium has a population of 11,5 million: the Congolese population living in extreme poverty is almost six times larger than the entire Belgian population.

During the mass protests of 2015, contesting then-president Joseph Kabila’s attempt at amending the constitution to prolong his reign, students joined the manifestation at the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN), holding the government accountable. In 2020, students at UNIKIN protested against the soaring school fees.[15] Even recently in 2022, new protests erupted at UNIKIN against a further rise in tuition fees.[16] When Congolese students rally for affordable education, we should be able to read this in the light of the extreme poverty that the country is forced to suffer. Their call is a decolonial one, reckoning with the solidification of colonial history into neo-colonial structures of exploitation.

As part of my PhD research, for the past four years I have been monitoring Belgian decolonial discourse in higher education. None of the open letters I studied mention the Congolese student protests or staggering poverty rate of the DRC as part of their decolonial discourse or demands. I am rather puzzled by the persistent absence of the Congolese student protests, and their economic foundations, in the Belgian decolonial conversation.
Instead, the discourse tends to re-code economic inequality into racial terms. For example, in the international portrayal of the South African student protests, the economically motivated demand for decoloniality seemed to evaporate, overshadowed by gestures of statue removal and the exposure of white supremacy. Although the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests were part of a joint student-led movement towards affordable education, many European-based students are re-tuning the idea of decoloniality into a gesture with which to primarily tackle and eliminate white supremacy.

A case in point is in Britain, where since 2015 the National Union of Students has been running “Why is My Curriculum White?” and #LiberateMyDegree as two of their flagship campaigns.[17] Noteworthy is the ascendance of neoliberal values in British students’ translation of the global call for the decolonisation of higher education institutions. Where the South African and Congolese campaigns highlight the barriers to knowledge, the British campaigns seek to make knowledge the subject of productive desire, identification, and representation. In a similar vein, while Belgian anti-racist movements have adopted decoloniality as a term, the material class struggle has been rewritten into a predominantly racial discourse of identification and representation.

Translating the decolonial discourse from the South African settler colony to the European metropolis came with a vast reduction of its scope. In Belgium, a similar reduction meant a silencing of the Congolese students rallying for affordable education in postcolonial DRC. The economic inequality, fundamental to such protests, is absent as part of any decolonial demand in Belgium. Instead, the open letters focus on the racism in Belgian higher education as a consequence of colonial history in the DRC. Not a single open letter includes the need to learn with the people of the DRC as an important step in contemporary decolonial discourse in Belgium.

One of the open letters that garnered the largest support base was the Decolonize UGent statement,[18] signed by an alliance of 700 students, researchers, and lecturers affiliated to Ghent University. The letter argues that decolonisation is needed in order to combat the racial bias fuelling structural discriminations such as ethnic profiling and police violence. The letter refers to the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in the United States of America. The discourse on decoloniality in higher education did, quite surprisingly, ignore the police violence inflicted on students protesting for affordable education in South Africa, the DRC, and elsewhere in the Global South. Like the rest of the world, Congolese students have been marching against police violence.[19] What informs this persistent blindness to the realities in the DRC?

Unlearning national illiteracy via transnational literacy

The focus of this decolonisation movement, formulated by Decolonize UGent, is “confronting Belgium’s colonial past, for a better understanding of the current influences on our educational practices and frameworks.”[20] Within the national imagination of Belgium, colonisation is imagined as a reality of the past. In contrast, the dazzling number of Congolese people currently living below the international poverty line is not something of the past at all. It is an urgency waiting for reparations. How can we understand the absence of these DRC realities in the decolonial discourse that intends to rewrite its history in Belgian curricula?

I believe that the absence stems from a collective illiteracy, which Belgian people have inherited from the political decisions of the 1960s. The illiteracy, in my opinion, is a signifier of a transnational learning between Belgium and the DRC that has been historically eliminated. Bambi Ceuppens explains how two colonial institutions for transnational relations between Belgium and the DRC were abruptly shut down. The first was the Koloniale Hogeschool, or the Colonial University of Belgium, founded in 1920 in Antwerp, which prepared students for a life in the Belgian colonies. The second was the Afrikaans Studiecentrum, or the bi-lingual African research centre, in Leuven. Following the independence of the DRC in 1960, both institutions were discontinued in 1961.[21] The Colonial University of Belgium sold its collections, which means that our transnational colonial memory has been dispersed into privately owned, often inaccessible collections. Ceuppens explains that by 1963, Belgium no longer had any academic infrastructure producing scholarship in relation to the African continent.[22] One of the last remains of such contested infrastructure is the Afrika Museum, or Royal Museum for Central Africa, in Tervuren. This museum collection consists of objects and culture looted from Central Africa.

The contemporary consequences of these historical political decisions ought not to be underestimated. For almost sixty years, the Belgian population has been actively unlearning the colonial history of their nation, so much so that the average citizen is virtually illiterate in Belgian colonial history. As part of the decolonial discussion, a bill was submitted to make critical education about Belgian colonial history mandatory in secondary schools, however this bill did not pass.[23] Thus Dutch-speaking schools have, so far, no obligation to teach Belgium’s colonial past, critical or otherwise. The French-speaking schools have, at the moment, no obligation either, though from 2027 onwards it will be a mandatory subject in secondary education.[24]

It should not come as a surprise that the decolonial discourse enacted and engaged in by younger generations is reproducing this illiteracy towards Belgian colonial history. Although the discourse of decoloniality shows awareness of this illiteracy, it reproduces fundamental elements by remaining indifferent towards both the extreme poverty and the student protests in the DRC. Rather than “solving” this illiteracy by learning alternative “decolonial” knowledge, we should instead, or first, inquire as to what this illiteracy actually implies. According to critical pedagogue Henri Giroux, civic illiteracy signifies the inability or ignorance to read ourselves in a historically related way to others.[25] The discontinuation of the Belgian colonial institutions in Antwerp and Leuven has been a fundamental cause of such festering ignorance. Remarkably, the elimination of symbols and institutions is a much-debated topic nowadays. Such discourse is persuasive, for it proposes a clear binary of the “good” or the “bad” decision. But if Belgian history has taught us anything, it is that such a reductive culture of cancellation or erasure also eliminates opportunities for the civic community to revisit, reconcile, update, and rewrite its transnational relations with the postcolonial communities it shares histories with.

I read this paradox as the outcome of a dialogic process between student-led movements and institutional responses, constrained to the borders of the national imagination. In this confined dialogic space, our national illiteracy is repeatedly reproduced. We need to engage in transnational literacy, that is learning with the DRC, to truly embark on a route towards unlearning our inherited illiteracy. Student-led movements in Belgium have made tracks towards dialogic learning, however institutional responses have perceived these demands merely in terms of inclusivity. The open letter Decolonize UGent formulated the demand for “non-western knowledge.” Ghent University paraphrased the four main concerns[26] of Decolonize UGent as follows: “institutional racism,” “inclusivity,” “revising the colonial past,” and “representation.” I think it was a missed opportunity that the University refrained from supporting the demand for non-western knowledge. I am not proposing that we should define, and then include in our demands, something labelled as “non-western knowledge.” This could easily result in a distancing from cultural production from the Global South, regarding it as “radically other.”[27] But I think that this demand could have been useful in taking us in transnational directions, moving us into a dynamic of dialogic learning with Congolese communities.
From a dialogic point of view, revisiting the Belgian colonial history in our curricula, canons, and history should foster a re-connectivity, redistribution, and reconciliation with the people of the DRC.

Dialogic pedagogy should therefore be less concerned with the question “what knowledge is decolonial?”, and rather ask “how could decoloniality inform a dialogic knowing?”. Sruti Bala argues for such a dialogic and dialectic knowing in the context of decoloniality in her teaching at the University of Amsterdam. Revising curricular knowledge should not necessarily revolve around adding so-called decolonial or “minority” perspectives through the act of inclusivity. Instead, a decolonial revision of curricula knowledge could be built around revisiting core knowledge from perspectives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.[28] It would engage with questions such as “how have regions elsewhere been contributing to the scholarship of canonical knowledge in Europe?”, or “how have scholars in the South updated concepts that are historically associated with European thought such as citizenship, democracy, literacy, or social justice?”.[29] This approach could guide us in connecting decolonial knowledge, as a noun, to decolonial knowing, as a verb. Hence, Belgian decolonial knowledge would be the knowledge produced by dialogic learning with the people of the DRC, or rather the people of the Global South.

I want to conclude this essay on a hopeful note, which could inspire critical educators to redirect their decolonial discourse in dialogic directions. The anti-racist work of the past decade, of which decolonial discourse is a fundamental part, has managed to place the topic of colonial history firmly on national agendas. As such, the Belgian federal government commissioned a research report about the impact of colonial history on our national memory and educational curricula.[30] In addition to this report, a collaboration between the Dutch-speaking and French-speaking inter-university associations produced a reflection on colonial history and its relation to Belgian higher education.[31] The authors of these documents state the necessity to learn with scholars affiliated to universities in the DRC as an important strategy in avoiding the reproduction of (neo-)colonial relations. In my opinion, this is a positive evolution, which should be fostered further into solid transnational dialogues. This shouldn’t remain limited to the French-speaking universities, but preferably extended to the more than 200 socio-linguistic communities residing in the DRC.

As Ariella Azoulay forcefully argues, there can be no decolonisation of the Afrika Museum—and, by extension, of Belgian institutions on the whole—without decolonising the world order.[31] We cannot decolonise Belgian colonial infrastructure without the people in the DRC becoming necessary and sustained dialogic partners.

I want to thank my supervisors Kris Rutten and Sruti Bala for supporting and challenging my thinking, Joachim Ben Yakoub for his feedback on the first draft of this essay, and Harriet Foyster for the engaged proofreading. My appreciation also goes to former colleagues at Citylab Pianofabriek Angela Tilieu Olodo, Samira Hmouda, and Pitcho Womba Konga who programmed debates and documentaries for the annual festival Congolisation.[33] In times of generational Belgian illiteracy towards the DRC, this festival has been hosting essential dialogic spaces to learn with the people of the DRC.

Open letters

The selection of letters are available upon request. Interested readers can reach out to the respective authors.

1. A letter to the Walloon Minister of Education addressing colonial propaganda (2017)
2. A letter to the Flemish minister of Education addressing migration and racism (2018)
3. A letter to the curriculum commission of KASK (School of Arts) addressing a male and western dominated curriculum (2018)
4. A letter to the dean of KASK (School of Arts) addressing racial and gender equality (2018)
5. Open letter to the rector of Ghent University about the need to decolonise the University (2019)
6. Open letter to the rector of KU Leuven to address institutional racism after the fatal hazing baptism killing Sanda Dia (2020)
7. Open letter to the Walloon Minister of Education addressing the need for anti-racism and the decolonisation of education (2020)
8. Manifesto at KU Leuven to decolonise the university (2021)
9. Open letter to the Walloon Minister of education to tackle institutional racism (2021)
10. Open letter written by the five rectors of Flemish universities in defence of the race-critical work of the Hannah Arendt Institute (2021).

Footnotes