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- Convenors:
-
Marieke van Winden (conference organiser)
(African Studies Centre Leiden)
Dzodzi Tsikata (SOAS University of London)
Abena Oduro (MIASA University of Ghana)
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- Stream:
- B: Decolonising knowledge
Long Abstract
This panel will examine processes and debates about decolonizing epistemologies, disciplines and pedagogy in higher education in Africa since the 1960s. The panel will discuss the contributions and stances of different actors, how they have defined decolonization in discourse and practice, and the implications for higher education in Africa.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper long abstract
South African universities continue to face existential questions regarding what it means to decolonize and transform into epicenters of social justice, democratic thought and belonging. Prevalent in the existential crisis, is the presupposed idea that the purposes of the university needs to be redefined and a new social contract is required. What appears to be at be center of the crisis, is the long held view that the university continues to be space of marginality, epistemic Otehring and the "thingification" for those who occupy and possess different ontological identities. In this paper, I provide a critical reflection on the potential (decolonial) purposes of higher education, and call for what I term a "decolonial social contract" in responding to the pressing, structural demands made by the #RhodesMustFall, civil society, progressive academics and others in calling for the contemporary university to transform and decolonize. Through the introduction of the decolonial social contract, I argue that the South African university is still a relevant institution in not only responding to the needs of the market place, but for the social construction of the critical citizenship that is required during these contested times in the global South. I end this paper with some philosophical and empirical recommendations regarding the potential possibilities for the decolonial social contract in the South African academy (and beyond) for the state and its relationship to society, curricula, pedagogy and assessment practices.
An investigation of the ongoing colonial legacies in Secondary High Schools in Ghana through the lens of Pan-Africanism
Stephanie Huber
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how Pan-African ideas are represented in Ghanaian secondary high schools, and how these ideas can be understood as part of the paradoxical attempt to move beyond colonial legacies within a school system that is highly marked by colonial legacies. Moreover, this paper discusses how schools navigate in a postcolonial nation-state and addresses the identity politics in two secondary high schools in Cape Coast as these are expressed in curricula and teaching practices. Pan-Africanism understood as an anti-colonial movement provides a lens for my research through which educational institutions are examined.
Keywords: Pan-Africanism, Ghana, education, decolonization, coloniality
A Quest for Decolonizing African universities
Biruk Shewadeg Dessalegn
(Addis Ababa Science and Technology University)
Paper long abstract
African universities have largely been dominated and shaped by the colonial enterprise and organized in accordance with the Western model. With remaining epistemologically subservient to the Western hegemony, and unduly unmaking of the local, they played a great deal in the practice of epistimicide in the continent. Their history of establishment, as an institute facilitating the smooth functioning of the colonial enterprise, have still kept defining their essence in another form, i.e., alienation. Characterized by its dismantlement of everything that is local, it pronounced the modernization discourse that made Africa lose specificity rather an entity that need to be studied by analogy. Moreover, for its intrinsically alienated underpinning, the type of university that many African countries inherited and developed anew have only used them for being a periphery at the global stage of knowledge generation. Overcoming such a challenge, this piece, with the help of analyzing intensive literature and deployment of a discursive reasoning approach, embarked on the idea of decolonization. Fundamental to the notion of decolonization here is the epistemological decolonization of the continent via its institutions of higher learning and finding a discursive space where the universities may harness the local context and respond the demands thereof. To this effect, Philosophy, and perhaps African philosophy specifically, despite an endless debate of proving its existence, have assumed an indispensable role in empowering Africans through articulating a philosophical locus that take the context and cultural specificities of African places into account. It is further tasked in broadening the horizons of decolonization and independence of the continent which still remained at the flag level.
Key Words: African Universities, Alienation, Decolonization, Philosophy.
Exploring the options for a decolonised knowledge paradigm for African education through a critical contrast of Afrikology, Negrology and Conceptual Africanisation
Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi
(University of Abuja)
Paper short abstract
This paper is a search for a decolonised knowledge paradigm through a critique of three options suggested- Afrikology (Dani Nabudere,2011), Negrology (Chinweizu,2018)and Conceptual decolonisation(Kwasi Wiredu,1995).It provides their critical contrasts, in search of other alternatives.
Paper long abstract
There are plausible reasons to suggest that education in the African contest demands fresh orientation to be more reliable and productive. The position implied by this claim is that knowledge needs to generate new forms of attitude for it to be functional and relevant to African life. This call is what is represented by the calls for decolonisation of the curriculum of studies. By Africa is implied Sub-Saharan Africa and by education is meant the formal certified ways of imparting knowledge. But decolonisation is a concept with wide implications which needs to be deconstructed for it to achieve its desired objectives. Decolonisation could be interpreted in such wide terms as -decolonisation of school structure, decolonisation of learning structure, decolonisation of curriculum, decolonisation of concepts and ideas. This paper represents a search for a decolonised knowledge and curriculum paradigm. It maps out three options proffered in the effort to provide alternatives for a fresh knowledge paradigm- Afrikology as suggested by Dani Nabudere (2011), Negrology as suggested Chinweizu(2018)and Conceptual decolonisation as suggested by Kwasi Wiredu (1995).The paper will provide a critical contrast between the three options with the view to locating the possible alternatives to explore in achieving a decolonised knowledge design in the continent. The method applied is textual analysis and comparative criticism.
Paper long abstract
In South Africa, one of the claims made most frequently by students in the protests of 2015 and 2016 related to their experiences of alienation on the campuses of the universities in which they were enrolled. For many, this alienation stems from the need to develop ways of knowing and being associated with academic life that are at odds with all they have previously experienced.
This paper is located within a larger research project which explores the impact of 'going home' both literally and figuratively on students as they engage with the need to develop the ways of being currently valued by the universities. The focus of the paper is on the 'clashes' where indigenous knowledge is in conflict with the disciplinary knowledge students need to master if they are to succeed and attain a degree and, thus, on the impact on them as individuals.
Data is drawn from interviews with academics from a range of academic disciplines who were asked to identify instances of such conflict in their own disciplines and to explain how they had dealt with them in their own teaching and engagement with students.
The paper draws on understandings developed by sociologists of knowledge, Basil Bernstein (2000) and Karl Maton (2012) and uses the work of Gee (2010) to acknowledge the profoundly disorienting effect of needing to develop what is effectively a new identity in the course of the undergraduate years.
Paper long abstract
In postcolonial Sudan, successive national governments implicitly posited Islam as the state religion while apparently regarding Islamic education as if it were at once a national plant that had struck deep roots into the Sudanese terrain, and an instrument to offset the confusion that colonialism had wrought there (Nur, 2017). This perception gained political ground during the Islamists' reign from 1989 - 2019. The Islamists took significant steps to reconfigure educational policy in accordance with their fight against "western values" and in order to (re)appropriate science and technology and inject it with their new Islamic ideology and epistemic orientation. The Islamists established new ideologically-oriented learning institutions that promote Islamo-politically oriented education and offer ideological training to those working in governmental institutions. The most prominent among the ideologically Islamic learning institutions are the University of the Holy Qur'an and Islamic Sciences (UHQIS), Omdurman Islamic University (OIU), and the International University of Africa (IUA). This massive expansion of religiously oriented higher education is accompanied by changes in educational policy in line with new laws that organize the curricula, pedagogy and enrollment of students in the Islam-oriented universities. This paper critically examines the inner workings of the Islamist education policy and epistemic orientation in Sudan, as well as their socio-religious and political impacts therefore contextualizing the three ideologically Islam-oriented universities. It investigates how these Islam-oriented universities function and uncovers the learning practices followed there. The paper undertakes a thorough examination of their internal bureaucratic functionalities, the pedagogical practices and the regulations that govern the curriculum and the enrollment of students to understand how educational policy is negotiated in practice.