Curriculating from the Black Archive – Marginality as Novelty

The Black Archive is constitutive of works of literato such as JT Jabavu, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, the artist Gerard Bhengu, and musicians like Busi Mhlongo. This collective resource, which should play a crucial role in curriculating, compels us to consider two questions when rethinking Philosophy curricula: First, pedagogically, how does the epistemic access that the Black Archive affords our context facilitate justice? Second, and importantly, how does it help us in achieving justice? I, here, answer these questions in three moves. First, I consider certain key propositions; namely that decolonisation facilitates epistemic access, and that epistemic access in turn facilitates justice (historical, epistemic, and social). Second, I demonstrate how these propositions require the Black Archive (in South Africa) in order to be held as valid. I demonstrate this claim in Philosophy using Dumile Feni’s African Guernica, and in Curriculum Studies, through analysing W. W. Gqoba’s Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo. I conclude by prescriptively outlining uses for/of the Black Archive, guarding against misappropriations that derail justice as I treat it, safeguarding this corpus from epistemic arrogance that maintains that knowledge is valid only insofar as it is developed by white scholars.


Introduction
I come to the writing of this text having worked in curriculum transformation and decolonisation in the education landscape of South Africa. This paper, therefore, is inspired by the calls to see justice realised; a call rooted in one of the works I will analyse in my argument. A conception of justice derived from the Black Archive seeks to abrogate the continued exclusion of knowledge developed by Black/Indigenous people. 1 Exclusion, here, refers to the silencing, marginalisation, ‫٭‬ I am thankful to North-West University for their gracious invitation to address their Humanities Lekgotla in November of 2019, where I presented the first draft of this paper. 1 praxis to be reappropriated as Ubuntu, a certain circumcision [my emphasis] is called for, one through which the ontic [sic] orientation of ubuntu, the fact that 'having ubuntu' is a function of ritualised becoming-through-other people, will need to be deontologised or reinvented in order to retain its relevance in a postfunctionalist context, where our humanity or personhood as rights-bearing individuals is accepted as an existential and ontological bottom line, not subject to the vagaries of communitarian consensus or ritualised processes of belonging.' This formulation, in its dismissal of Black/Indigenous ontology, is premised on the racist economies of knowledge production that continue to proliferate in and define the University and Philosophy as discipline in the country. By racist logic I draw the readers' attention to the notion of the 'reapropriation and circumcision [that is] called for'. Framing Black/Indigenous thought as in need of 'circumcision' reveals Praeg's (2014) phallic thinking, that is not only possessive but has wrought violence and has been the premise of Eurocentric imposition in our context. More importantly, these white scholars (Praeg and company) are regarded and regard themselves as experts on Black/Indigenous knowledge, all the while masquerading as progressives and denying their racist attitudes. 4 To demonstrate this point with more veracity, I point the reader to the Zulu aphorism 'izinyane lemvubu kalidliwanaga ingwenya kwacweba iziziba', (Nyembezi and Nxumalo, 1966: 62) which captures a form of curative violence in the ethics of ubuntu. The treatment of African thought by white scholars has been such that we have bought into notions of ubuntu that deride this underlying ethic that portends a n ubuntu rooted in African conceptions of justice. This is to say that ubuntu as developed by white scholars has divorced the intrinsic humanness that the progenitor groups ascribe to its value and social uses -ubuntu is now fashionable only insofar as it is a theoretical concept that is at best vacuous and at worst misrepresents the realities that gave birth to it. reasoning and its epistemic arrogance that divorces thought from the realities of those at the centre of said thought; Black subjectivity. 6 Post 1994, the South African people were led to believe that higher education would be constructed as a social institution that would work towards the amelioration of historical injustices instituted by centuries of domination and subjugation. This framework is derived from an analysis of the White Paper 3 of 1997. I anticipate objections to my framing, objections that are rooted in the thinking that Philosophy as discipline is a second order discipline and should not be forced to deal with socio-political reality. 7 This objection is premised on academic freedom and institutional autonomy; objections which are dealt with in a previous publication (Kumalo, 2020). As I have dealt with this debate elsewhere, I invite the reader to consider the abovementioned treatise, as I do not pay attention to these objections here.
This occlusion of Black thought is a form of modes of abjecting in the contemporary Historically White University (HWU) (Kumalo, 2018). 8 Abjection, here creates the Native of Nowhere, which denotes a graduate who can neither fully identify with their own cosmology, which is relegated to the margins on the premise that it is fictitious or mythological and lacks 5 Praeg (2014) uses this very concept of 'discovering' Black thought, a term for which I critique him as it is racist and reminiscent of the colonial thinking about and uses of disciplines such as Anthropology in the project of conquering Blackness/Indigeneity. It was the 'discovery', as if Blackness/Indigeneity was an inanimate object to be discovered by arrogant, racist bigots with their gluttonous modes of thinking, of Africa that led to the violence witnessed all across the continent and this violence still manifests itself as the racist logics of knowledge production seen in Praeg's (2014) treatise -wherein a man who cannot even speak the language -can claim to produce a Report on a system of thought, he distorts and violates beyond something recognisable by its progenitor groups. 6 This substantiates the claim that contemporarily, justice in the country is superficial and continues to pander to the interests of whiteness at the expense of Blackness/Indigeneity. 7 This objection is given to anyone who demands that Philosophy departments in the country do work (research or teaching) that is socially responsive and that addresses the realities of South Africans in a meaningful way. 8 My use of abjection follows the thinking of Jones (2016: 322) when she writes '[with] abjection at the helm [of discarding Blackness/Indigeneity] and science backed by the epistemic virtue of defeasibility, we should not be surprised if science seeks repeatedly to sanction ideas about abject black people.' Kumalo 114 scientific empiricism 9 , nor fits neatly into the university that is premised on the culture, mores and values of whiteness. Scientific empiricism, then, becomes the framework by which we judge knowledge that is included in the Ivory Tower, the University. Scientific empiricism can inaugurate a lengthy debate (as it has done, historically) about canon formation and its political and historical imbrications. There are two critiques, however, that I wish to advance against scientific empiricism, even if briefly. The first foregrounds epistemic mis-framing, which addresses the problem/demand that African systems of thought be compliant with western conceptions of knowledge, with a failure to do so being the qualifying premise for our excluding African knowledge from the University. 10 This is indicative of the imperative to address the question of justice. This awkward and problematic demand derived from scientific empiricism is aptly dealt with, albeit in a fleeting fashion, in the authors' note to Noni Jabavu's The Ochre Peoples: Scenes from a South African Life (1963). Jabavu writes: May I have a word surreptitiously with Xhosa-speaking readers -'bite their ear', as we say?
The present Orthography of the language came into general use after I had learnt its predecessor and I have never become reconciled to it. I dislike the appearance of symbols like 'th' for aspirated 't'; marks for tone pitch; double vowels in plural noun-prefixes, verb tenses, demonstratives, ideophones, and so on. This is the reason why, where I have written out a Xhosa sentence, my spelling is erratic. I am among those who, 'eating with the oldfashioned spoon', believe that for languages so 'dominantly vocalic in character' […] nothing short of a new script should be devised. The roman is not suitable, and will always make for troublesome -and ugly -reading or writing (Author's Note in The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life, 1963). These orthographic changes contested by Jabavu (1963) point to an Anglicisation, not only of isiXhosa but broadly of our knowledge(s), in a bid to have the language fit into the lexicographic, orthographic and semantic rules of English. It is useful to reiterate the underlying question of my analysis, i.e. how do we arrive at justice. 11 Extraversion, either through language or thought, runs the risk of losing the textures and nuances that inform Indigenous African subjectivity. 12 I would go so far as to suggest that the demand that African thought fit neatly into established categories, shores-up Eurocentric epistemic arrogance that maintains that our 9 For a more considered debate on this matter, consider Kumalo's (2018) work wherein he writes about Explicating Abjection -Historically White Universities Creating Natives of Nowhere? As this debate has been detailed by Kumalo, it is used here to set-up the framework for my analysis. 10 It is this very logic and mind-set that has Praeg (2014) desirous to discover African thought such that he can conform it to western epistemic paradigms -a process of conformation that is witnessed in his dodgy move that separates praxis from philosophy! 11 This question introduces my analysis of the Black Archive, specifically in relation to Philosophy as discipline and Dumile Feni's African Guernica (1967). Anglicising African thought denotes the epistemic imposition of euro-western epistemology. 12 I detail this above, in the passage that elucidates the decontexualisation, through abstraction, of African thought by white scholars. , which briefly, consists in a respect for others' property rights is considered artificial'. Artificial justice is concerned only with the invented social conventions, but is intrinsically divorced from our moral judgements. Simply put, artificial justice is problematic insofar as it sidesteps moral and ethical questions concerning justice. 14 Distinguishing artificial from natural justice facilitates an interrogation of the efforts of decolonisation. Decolonisation of the curriculum is concerned with justice and is aligned with the contemporary zeitgeist, that institutions change and recognise the ontological legitimacy of Blackness/Indigeneity. This is to say that students want to see their realities reflected in the curriculum. The desire that students expressed -to see their realities reflected in the curriculum -inspired curriculum reviews across universities; reviews that were aimed at authentic justice and that sought to challenge what Lange (2014) understands as the vacuousness of transformation.
In an effort to shift the geography of reason from a legalistic/formalistic conception of justice and align it with a fundamental one, I discern here -how we come to formulations of justice. I do so by posing a second-order question: do we concern ourselves with justice in its

What is in an Integrative Approach?
Transformation, as empty signifier, is addressed by Lange (2014) in her analysis of the languages of and for transformation. This analysis is indicative of the problem with an integrative approach in curriculum planning and design. Lange (2014) notes that transformation, as used in higher education, lost its political and moral impetus -as it advanced strategies that failed to substantively engage the historical realities of the country. This is seen in the claim (Lange, 2014: 8), 'I contend that in order to get out of the four unfortunate consequences of the adoption of a performative view of transformation, ... we need to undertake a historical-sociological analysis of these three types of knowledge that will provide contextual depth and historical perspective to develop a richer notion of transformation. ' Lange (2014: 9) highlights the lack of political will to correct the moral problematics birthed by history and the contemporary socio-political order.
With transformation as an empty signifier that is concerned with 'performative transformation' (Lange, 2014: 8), it deviates from the intended functions of higher education as proposed by the White Paper 3 of 1997.
The integrative approach suffers from the vacuousness that characterises transformation in the country as noted by Lange (2014). Thompson, et al., (2012), and Antony (2012)  Along with the expansion of Christian kingdoms into nation-states and their colonies, which resulted over the course of a few hundred years into European civilisation on a global scale, was also a series of epistemological developments that have literally produced new forms of life: new kinds of people came into being, while others disappeared, and whole groups of them occupy the age in an ambivalent and melancholic relationship by which they are indigenous to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong to.
Gordon's (2014) assertions substantiate the Native of Nowhere, who is made to doubt, through our teaching praxes and the knowledge that is prized as legitimate in the University, their belonging to this institution that estranges them from their native subjectivity. Essentially the HWU as suggested by Kumalo (2018), in his claim of a Native of Nowhere, perpetuates the phenomenon of an ambivalent colonial melancholy that produces people who are 'indigenous to a world that, paradoxically, they do not belong to.' This formulation is reminiscent of Mamdani's (2005) notion of African categories of thought that are still ensnared in Eurocentric frameworks that arrest our capacity to imagine ourselves out of European modernity. Put differently, the Native of Nowhere, created through our teaching praxes, is a contemporary 15 In Explicating Abjection Kumalo (2018: 3-4) uses 'contestation of visibilities'. Refracting the concept to read as 'contestation of ontologies' better explains his argument.
Curriculating from the Black Archive -Marginalinty as Novelty 117 student who can neither identify with the institutional culture of the HWU nor their own epistemic and ontological underpinnings as a result of 'knowledge that is imported from London, Hull, and Manchester' (Lebakeng, et al., 2006). Furthermore, and equally concerning is the mis-framing of African thought, when it is developed and taught, a concern that is substantiated by the analysis presented in the introduction, wherein I treat the angst I have regarding the 'leading thinkers' of ubuntu being white scholars who cannot read, speak or write any of the progenitor languages of ubuntu.
Simply, in an integrative framework, where one knowledge system is brought in to co-exist with another that has enjoyed hegemonic preponderance, how are knowledge practitioners to negotiate the power dynamics at play? This question highlights the requisite demand to deal with these power dynamics and how they define the knowledge project; this is to say that the knowledge project is inherently characterised by coloniality. Highlighting the power dynamics that define knowledge, surfaces the shortfalls of an integrative approach in dealing with the politics of knowledge production; and importantly -centres the question of justice. When thinking about knowledge and its political status, the question, 'how can we curate a system wherein knowledge(s) co-exists coevally', resurfaces with more verve. This comes as knowledge production has been and continues to be defined by the political as power.
Curating a coeval existence in the knowledge project, is taken-up by Kumalo  However, what of the pitfalls of this approach?
The integrative approach is challenging in light of the power dynamics surfaced above. 16 This observation is rooted in a preceding claim that asserts that knowledge exists in a political context, defined by political actors. The political (as episodic event) and politics serve the strongest political actor; revealing what is meant by the concept of the political as power. Put differently, one needs to consider whether South Africa expected a group of people, whose political preponderance seemed threatened by the democratic dispensation, to serve societal 16 These power dynamics are what define the raging debates around African Philosophy (and the scholars who are regarded as authorities of African Philosophy) in departments of Philosophy in the country. These debates and contestation are defined by the raciality that constitutes the South African academe -which would have us relegate Black/Indigenous knowers to the periphery, while centring scholars such as Praeg

Critiquing the Additive Approach
The integrative approach requires a mediation of the power dynamics derived from coloniality. 17 In turn the simplest objection to the additive approach is its superficiality. Zoe Todd (2016) substantiates this position in An Indigenous Feminist's Take  'Thinking About Genocide', his analysis reveals that the power dynamics of knowledge that I address here, have far reaching implications in the project of (post)-colonial state formation and identity in Africa. Mamdani (2001: 14) asserts that '[before] undertaking this analysis, however, I propose to discuss both how native and settler originated as political identities in the context of modern colonialism, and how the failure to transcend these identities is at the heart of the crisis of citizenship in postcolonial Africa.' This crisis is taken up, time and again by the contributors of the Black Archive as they think through the place and role of Black/Indigenous subjectivity in light of the impositions of coloniality. 18 These forms of decolonisation are presented, in the South African context, as transformed curricula that continues to displace and abject -in the sense of killing off -Blackness/Indigeneity through denying, erasing and ignoring the contribution of Black/Indigenous intellectuals. In sum, an additive approach can be critiqued for its lack of substantive engagement with the epistemic predispositions of Black/Indigenous knowledge as highlighted by Kumalo and Praeg (2019: 1) when they maintain, '[these] performances of "decoloniality", which often take the form of elaborately ritualised and expensive decolonial lectures delivered by international scholars, amount to a form of "box-ticking" that lacks substantive engagement with locally situated struggles, debates and dialogues'. An additive approach therefore, perpetuates and entrenches artificial conceptions of justice. In response to these approaches, I propose the Black Archive, which substantively engages the lived realities of Blackness/Indigeneity outside of whiteness for as Fanon states it: 19 In this short tale, I explore the customs and systematicity of the Xhosa people as they think through legal arbitration and how it relates to social life. This comes as they attempt to locate legal arbitration in their historical traditions and customs. I also showcase that the King is not the sole adjudicator when it comes to jurisprudential matters, as the nation exists in relational ties to one another. My aim in showcasing these facets of Xhosa jurisprudence is in highlighting how our epistemic practices are being erased owing to the impositions of the colonialists. (Authors translation) 20 More importantly, Fricker's project deals with contexts where minorities are oppressed by the majority, with her analysis making use of examples in the United States. While this might be useful in drawing parallels, ours is different in the sense that we here had/have a majority oppressed by a minority that elides and occludes the experiential knowledge of those who have been and continue to be oppressed.

Fundamental justice in Feni's African Guernica
Feni (1967) concerns himself with the effects of euro-western thought on Blackness/Indigeneity, while highlighting colonial imposition as it concerns white fears and was meant to belay them.
These white fears are aptly addressed and detailed by J. M. Coetzee in his Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), a text that is poignant when thinking through the historicity of white fear(s) in our context, even as Coetzee does not disclose the location of his fictional tale. What Feni (1967) captures in a chilling artwork (Figure 1), whose magnificence is not only remarkable but also poignant, even in the contemporary day is addressed by literato such as Alan Paton ([1948] 1957) in Cry, the Beloved Country. Paton (1957: 72) deals with these concerns in the following manner: [bathi] lapho izisebenzi zingakhokhelwa khona imali enhle, nesizwe siba mpofu. My argument is in line with Young's (1990: 5) contention that: [normative] reflections [as is the case here] must begin from historically specific circumstances because there is nothing but what is, the given, the situated interest in justice, from which to start. Reflecting from within a particular social context, good normative theorising cannot avoid social and political description and explanation. Young's (1990) contention that 'good normative theorising cannot avoid social and political description and explanation' highlights how Feni conceptualises and subsequently theorises social life under apartheid; a conception and theorisation that is reflected in the eviscerating African Guernica. More so, Young (1990) highlights the centrality of Feni's work in curriculation strategies concerned with fundamental justice. Feni's (1967) work reminds the philosopher of the 23 For the English translation see Paton (1948: 69-70 Villa (1998), concerning the role of the philosopher in the polity. 24 While Plato, in the Republic, critiques poetry for its inadequacies in addressing philosophical questions 25 -a critique that might be extended to the artistic medium -Feni's artwork might be read as a precursor to Jane Alexanders ' Butcher Boys (1986), and Willie Bester's Election 94 (1994). These artworks capture the sentiment of a young nation grappling with the extrications between constitutional/democratic freedoms and the lived realities of the nation, thus poignantly addressing the reality of justice. 26 This is to say that Fenis' African Guernica (1967) is of immense import in aiding our understanding of Young's (1990: 5) contention that ' [social] description and explanation must be critical, that is, aim to evaluate the given in normative terms.
Without such a critical stance, many questions about what occurs in society and why, who benefits and who is harmed, will not be asked, and social theory is liable to reaffirm and reify the 24 As Feni (1967) is addressing the question of Black/Indigenous personhood and subjectivity as it relates to a political system that defined Black people as less than and non-human, the philosophical emerges in how this dehumanisation -which signifies an inherent injustice -is to be dealt with by the philosopher.
Plato in Book I of the Republic addresses this point through Thrasymachus' relenting the task of defining justice and rather stating, (Lindsay, 1935: xxxii) '[the] ruler rules because he is unjust, and injustice is virtue and wisdom, strength and happiness.' This observation, which is challenged by Socrates as the lack of fundamental justice, can be understood as defining the South Africa that Paton portrays in his novel, while the implications of this portrayal and conception of the Indigene are visually represented by Feni's African Guernica. In Book IV, as Socrates has defined justice through the ideal state, it is noted (Lindsay, 1935: xxxvi) '[now] that justice is discovered, it can easily be seen that it is the health of the soul, and injustice the disease, and it might readily be inferred that justice is better than injustice; but Socrates proposes that they should first of all examine injustice in four types of unjust cities.' Lindsay notes of Plato's ruminations on the ideal state and the role of the philosopher in the polity (1935: xiii) '[these] later books [Xenophon's Memorabilia] still maintain the possibility of the ideal state, but they discourage the philosopher from taking part in practical politics. He is sadly advised to "hold his peace and do his work, like a man in a storm sheltering behind a wall from the driving storm of dust and hail."' This claim marks the distinction between Arendt and Strauss in that the philosopher citizen is discouraged, rather the philosopher is directed to assume the role of one who is concerned only with abstract thought. The rejection of this position is detailed by Arendt (1994: 428) thusly, '[the] event which started our tradition of political thought was the trial and death of Socrates, the condemnation of the philosopher by the polis.' The philosophical then, presents itself as the ethics of statehood, as statehood (in the case of South Africa) relates to the deliberate and intentional negation of Blackness; concepts which are aptly captured and expressed in and by Feni's African Guernica (1967). More importantly, as noted by Socrates in Book IV of the Republic, injustice is seen as the disease of the soul. This disease is dealt with as the animalistic traits given to the figures depicted by Feni's paintings. 25 This critique is presented as follows (Lindsay, 1935: 296), 'between ourselves -and don't denounce me to the tragic poets and all the other imitators -all such things seem to pollute the understanding of those who hear them, unless they possess a knowledge of their real nature; that is an antidote.' 26 These experiences of the Indigene are articulated in and through language. By holding to the proposition of divorcing praxis from philosophy as proposed by Praeg (2014), we see here the continued denial of the Indigene as a subject that is able to think and express these thoughts -without the guidance of whiteness. In divorcing language from the philosophy, Praeg (2014) plays into racist logics that treat the Indigene as an invalid, in constant need of the aid of whiteness; a logic inherited from the racism of whiteness and one that is lauded as scholarship, which itself demonstrates the racism inherent in higher education -as institution -in the country.
given social reality.' This reality is precisely what we see in Praeg's (2014) analysis; an argument that is uncritical of reality, maintaining rather the status quo that continues to abject the Indigene.
How then, does Feni (1967) address Young's (1990) stated task of social theory. Concerning himself with the amorality of a totalitarian regime (apartheid), Feni (1967) depicts Blackness/Indigeneity under a political system that tears asunder the fibre of Black life. Depicted as an animality that defines the diseased soul characteristic of an injustice against Blackness/Indigeneity -that has furthermore been internalised-owing to centuries of dehumanisation, the artist addresses three things; first a political system that is amoral resulting in structural oppression. Second, the ontological denial of Blackness/Indigeneity that frames Blackness as sub-human, finally and thirdly the implications of this reality. Derived from an analysis of structural oppression -seemingly, a pre-emptive move to the third component The principle of equal treatment originally arose as a formal guarantee of fair and inclusive treatment. This mechanical interpretation of fairness, however, also suppresses difference.
The politics of difference sometimes implies overriding a principle of equal treatment with the principle that group differences should be acknowledged in public policy and in policies and procedures of economic institutions, in order to reduce actual or potential oppression.
Young's claims in the abovementioned excerpt point to the complexity that Feni's work invites when thinking about justice in the country. Simply put, Feni invites us to systematically consider how to heal the diseased soul -as it were -in a post-conflictual context such as ours.
Addressing justice through a close reading of African Guernica (1967) requires then, that we interrogate public policy arrangements as they attempt to confer ontological legitimacy on Blackness/Indigeneity in a country where this was denied owing to an amoral political order.
Analysing public policy and institutional arrangements acts as a rejoinder to our conceptions of justice and how we arrive at them contemporarily. This is to say that through a philosophical reading, Feni (1967) compels us to the task of discerning conceptions of justice owing to the  Young (1990: 15), I suggest that justice means the elimination of institutionalised domination and oppression.
Any aspect of social organisation and practice relevant to domination and oppression is in principle subject to evaluation by ideals of justice. Contemporary philosophical theories of justice, however, do not conceive justice so broadly. Instead, philosophical theories of justice restrict the meaning of social justice to the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society's members.

Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo -In pursuance of discernment
The conqueror writes history, They came, they conquered and they wrote.

Now you don't expect people who came to invade us,
To write the truth about us.
They will always write negative things about us, And they have to do that because, They have to justify their invasion (Miriam Makeba, 1969) Education, in South Africa, is defined -historically-by debates that contest its role, function and place; a debate that that has attempted to discern the aims of education. As indicated in the introduction, my concern is with justice. My conception of justice, as it relates to higher education, is informed by the White Paper 3 of 1997, which defined education as a social institution that would ameliorate injustices instituted by centuries of domination and subjugation. To this end, This is demonstrated by another participant, whose words substantiate the claim made in the introduction about the silencing, marginalisation and negation of Black thought. His contribution aims to highlight the duplicity of white colonial settlers, whose fraudulence in the 27 The title of this poem translates to 'The Great Debate about Education'. In the paper, however, I protest translating this poem as a translation undermines the veracity of what is intended. In this sense, I join Noni Jabavu in the claim that the roman script for a language so vocalic as isiXhosa makes for ugly and troublesome reading and writing. It is intended that my analysis will aid readers who are not native speakers of isiXhosa in understanding the excerpts from the poem. Furthermore, I must stress Coetzee's (1988) position, while radicalising it: the vast majority of white scholars claim native identity and yet know not a single African language. My protest against translation seeks to drive the point home, that as natives in the land of our forebears we will no longer acquiesce to being treated as second class citizens when our languages are constitutionally recognised. 28 Native speakers of isiXhosa will understand that the name, in and of itself, is indicative of the contribution that this character will make to the debate in line with historical conceptions of naming and indigeneity's treatment of naming. The same can be said of all the participants in this debate -a matter that corroborates the notion of an 'Adamic language' as suggested by Coetzee (1988: 8-9) when he writes, '[but] dissatisfaction with English would in turn hold for any other language, since the language being sought after is a natural or Adamic language, one in which Africa will naturally express itself, that is to say, a language in which there is no split between signifier and signified, and things are their names.' It is necessary to indicate that in the case of isiXhosa as it is used in this paper, things are indeed their names. Prior to summating my argument by showcasing the link between this great debate and curriculum studies, I wish to pay brief mind to Yiwenani's contentions. In lamenting colonial settler arrival and its effects of dispossessing Black/Indigenous people, the abjection that Kumalo (2018) speaks of can be traced back to the claims propounded by Gqoba as early as the 19 th century through Yiwenani. The reader is, here, confronted with colonial settler dispossession, duplicity and an amorality that Feni (1967) showcases as the corruption of Black/Indigenous subjectivity.
It must also be remembered by the reader that this injustice in the Socratic sense is viewed as a disease of the soul, a disease that manifests as the death of the nation, expressed by Paton as the lamentation 'Lafa Elihle Kakhulu' ([1948]/1957). In this composition, I cannot stress sufficiently the challenge that was the imposition of colonial education, with Bhedidlaba, another of the debates' participants, observing the following of colonial imposition and infiltration, (Gqoba, [1888(Gqoba, [ ] 1906: Asikuko nokuba ndiyayibulela le ndawo nindibeke kuyo kwesi sihlalo, kukhona namhla ndiya kukhe ndizive izimvo zenu, ngohlobo abasifundisa ngalo aba bantu.
On wanting to discern the views of the younger participants of the debate and how they negotiate the impact of colonial education, Bhedidlaba invites us to consider the link between this historic intellectual contribution and curriculum studies. Concerning itself, principally with three questions, curriculum studies asks, 'what is to be taught, how is it to be taught, and for what purposes is it to be taught'?
These questions evidently showcase the purposes of the Black Archive in the contemporary pursuits of justice and a decolonised curriculum in the South African University. As Kumalo (2018) has successfully argued that the continued reliance on a pedagogic slant that is premised on western epistemic paradigms creates the Native of Nowhere, a matter that was raised as early as the times of W. W. Gqoba, it is imperative for us to consider what is taught, by whom is this subject matter taught and why it is taught in our contemporary lecture theatres. These questions help us to discern the violence that is disguised as scholarship; scholarship that invariably miseducates and maintains epistemic violence (see Praeg, 2014).

Conclusion
A great deal more can and remains to be said on the uses and the usefulness of the Black Archive if indeed higher education is to function with the intended aims of delivering on the promise of justice; as was intended by the White Paper 3 of 1997. However, cautionary remarks are in order on the uses of the Black Archive. These are a result of the continued marginalisation of Blackness/Indigeneity by those who divorce the abstract knowledge that they create using the intellectual corpus of the progenitor groups, while further acting as the institutional gate-keepers that disallow a correcting of the script through continuing to rubbish and silence Black thought.
As the reader might have gleaned from my use of language, it plays a crucial role in understanding the insights, experiences and ontic positions from which the oppressed Black person speaks. Language then, in the Black Archive, is a necessary distinguisher that disqualifies this epistemic resource from being used as a careerist ticket for those who would steal from Blackness/Indigeneity without any recourse for these fundamental injustices (see Praeg, 2014).
Simply put, working with and in the Black Archive means that scholars are not only familiar with the progenitor languages that gave rise to this knowledge, but furthermore are concerned with fundamental justice. This is to say that as Black scholars working with the Black Archive we will not allow for this area of scholarship to once again be high-jacked by intellectually trite thinkers who masquerade as progressives while stealing from Blackness/Indigeneity in suggesting that knowledge is knowledge only insofar as it is produced by white scholars in our context.