Very rural background: South Africa and Zimbabwe’s land-composition challenging the so-called higher education

Abstract

Drawing from various sources (fragments of biography, diaries of my own academic life, literary novels) the article aims to deepen the hypothesis that ethnography is a necessary condition for life against plantation as a destructive matter in countries like South Africa and Zimbabwe. Devoted to tackling with the process of capitalist zombification or bewitching, our interlocutors understand the university and its promises of higher education as challenges to their land-composition. The main proposal of the article is, therefore, an analytical transformation of the concepts of otherness, equality and difference in order to challenge university itself as a plantation driven by the exploitation of human resources.