Paper long abstract:

Recent developments in African higher education have called for decolonization of knowledge, curriculum (syllabi) (Baijnath, 2017; Sidoji & Rasedile, 2017) and other real or perceived forms of colonial legacy in African universities (Mbembe, 2016; Shay, 2016; Essop, 2016; Kamanzi, 2016; Le Grande, 2016). These discussions - for example, echoed in protests in South Africa since 2015 calling for the removal of colonial symbols from university campuses - have questioned the ethos and values of the university in Africa, including the need for "Africanization" (Nkoane, 2006)- a notion which also requires scrutiny as to what it means in practical terms (Mbembe, 2016). Despite the rising concerns with decolonizing African higher education, there is paucity of research which focus on the internationalization aspect of the decolonization discourse. In the global landscape of international education, Africa maintains structural features inherited from its colonial past, including a mismatch between inbound and outbound student mobility, with former colonies and more recently China becoming the major destination of African students. The tradition, in most African countries, is that universities would send their students to pursue further, if not entire, studies in the former metropole. This trend continues, even years after independence. Elites from former British, French and Portuguese colonies, even after developing their national higher education systems for over half a century, continue to send their kids to study in their former metropole using mainly the language, curriculum and knowledge tradition of these higher education. This trend implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - raise the question of what it meanings to internationalize, Africanize and decolonise for African higher education in "post-colonial" times. The focus of this paper revolves around the question of whether internationalization of African higher education needs decolonizing.