Decolonising African Higher Education

Practitioner Perspectives from Across the Continent

Christopher B. Knaus, Takako Mino, Johannes Seroto, Christopher B. Knaus, Takako Mino, Johannes Seroto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000577754
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Across the African continent, college student activists have long fought to decolonise African institutions. Reflecting ongoing Western colonisation, however, Indigenous African languages, thought, and structures remain excluded from African universities. Such universities remain steeped in Eurocentric modes of knowing, teaching, researching, and communicating. Students are rarely afforded the opportunity to learn about the wealth of knowledge and sustainable wisdom that was and is generated by their own home communities. Such localised Indigenous African perspectives are critical in a world committed to anti-Black racism, capitalist materialism, and global destruction.

This book thus clarifies decolonial efforts to transform higher education from its anti-Black foundation, offering hope from universities across the continent. Writers are university administrators and faculty who directly challenge contemporary colonial education, exploring tangible ways to decolonise structures, curricula, pedagogy, research, and community relationships. Ultimately, this book moves beyond structural transformation to call for a global commitment to develop Indigenous African-led systems of higher education that foster multilingual communities, local knowledges, and localised approaches to global problems. In shifting from a Western-centric lens to multifaceted African-centrism, the authors reclaim decoloniality from co-optation, repositioning African intellectualism at the core of global higher education to sustain an Ubuntu-based humanity.

1 Decolonising Higher Education Definitions, Conceptualisations, Epistemologies

Christopher B. Knaus, Takako Mino, and Johannes Seroto

DOI: 10.4324/9781003158271-1

2020 got off to a rough start, with news of a deadly virus spreading fears about a possible global contagion. By March, much of the world began closing borders, shutting down basic aspects of society, and limiting non-essential human movement. Many African countries were quick to respond, shutting down all but essential services when the first trickle of cases came in. Others downplayed the virus, with some leaders denying the virus existed, paralleling historic and ongoing treatment of those with HIV and AIDS. Some of this fear and denialism reflected historic (and ongoing) Western medical research that withheld healthcare, forced sterilisations, and tested vaccines on unwitting populations (who later would be kept from accessing those very vaccines, as has been the case with COVID-19 in South Africa) (Washington, 2008). Regardless of response, however, testing capacity was limited, and enforcement of social distancing was nearly impossible in areas where people live in tight quarters, sharing washrooms and limited water access. Universities across the continent struggled to adapt to the unexpected lockdown; some shifted to remote learning within weeks, while others shut down completely, awaiting government directions on re-opening. In July of 2020, despite COVID’s continued spread and increasing deaths, many economies across Africa began to re-open to reduce the impact of the first continent-wide recession Africa has experienced in 25 years (Giles & Mwai, 2020). As people returned to work and travel restrictions were eased, a daily balancing act between risking COVID contraction and personal survival became the new normal. COVID heightened pre-existing inequities and threatened to push millions more into poverty (Lakner, Mahler, Negre, & Prydz, 2020). These disparities only increased in 2021, as vaccines that were shared amongst Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., were largely withheld from Africa.

Global racial tensions rose as the pandemic dealt a disproportionate blow to Black Americans in the U.S. (Laurencin & McClinton, 2020; Shah, Sachdeva, & Dodiuk-Gad, 2020). On top of these strains, the killing of George Floyd by U.S. police officers sparked a national wave of anti-Black police brutality protests, renewing the global momentum of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. A multiracial coalition across the globe protested at police stations and civic offices, and for a short while, the world saw statues of racist historical figures toppled (McEvoy, 2020; Taylor, 2020). The 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests continued a long-standing tradition of global struggle against the structural whiteness that enables violence against Black lives on every continent (Marx, 1998). For many Africans, the #BlackLivesMatter movement re-opened painful memories of colonisation, imperialism, and the imposition of a white supremacist doctrine that justified slavery and the killing of untold hundreds of millions of Black people on the continent, and that still persists in shaping modern African societies.

As these dual pandemics collided across the globe and extenuated disparities, displaced Black communities in South Africa erupted into protests, conducting coordinated mass movements to occupy land. These protests continued the #RhodesMustFall movements that emerged into prominence in 2015 with an aligned effort to challenge structural racism (Brown, 2020). These movements specifically called for higher education curricula to centre on African discourses. Contributing to decolonising higher education efforts, these anti-racism protests called for a full stop to the entire educational system’s fostering of racism and coloniality (Chantiluke, Kwoba, & Nkopo, 2018). The historic and contemporary linkages between South African anti-Blackness and American anti-Blackness are both historically and currently rooted in a white settler coloniality, wherein the structures of whiteness have remained intact, ensuring coloniality as the way of organising all aspects of society (Knaus & Brown, 2016; Rosenberg, 2020). Thus, Black South Africans agitated, not just for access to land and higher education, but for decolonial orientations to both.

Across much of the rest of the African continent, however, discussions on the inherent anti-Blackness in colonially imposed structures can be more muted, in part because many African institutions of higher education are predominantly Black. In South Africa, however, apartheid-era segregation remains normalised in racially disparate higher education institutions, with larger numbers of Black staff, faculty, leaders, and students serving in resource-depleted institutions. In South Africa, the connection between historic anti-Blackness and contemporary conditions is impossible to ignore (Carter, 2012; Marx, 1998). As Makhubela (2018) argues, ‘The South African academy is a colonial-apartheid invention and continually seeks to reproduce this status quo’ (p. 2). This commitment to the status quo of coloniality is precisely what South African students have protested in the ongoing #RhodesMustFall movements.

The lack of such overt structural whiteness in opposition to Blackness across much of the rest of the African continent, however, complicates resistance to contemporary coloniality. Indeed, when those who organise and lead higher education infrastructures are ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse, in reflection of a country’s Black populace, considerations of colonial infrastructures are murkier. Such is the case with colonisation; when countries overthrew their colonial rulers, the infrastructures, particularly in education, remained (Belluigi & Thondhlana, 2019; Lulat, 2005; Teferra & Altbach, 2003). While white colonial rulers may have been overthrown, the machinery of linguistic and capitalistic domination was not. The liberation struggle may have removed symbolic European colonialism, but Arabic domination of Black populations, for example, were not so easily dislodged. Within these nuanced oppressive constraints, higher education has largely continued its colonial foundation unabated, even as the need for Indigenous African methods has been expressed through research, publications, and recently created academic departments (Chilisa, 2020).

The opportunity for higher education to offer solutions to pandemics, poverty, racism, and disparities, and to foster local and global leadership that can break economic and social dependency from the West, is ever growing (Moyo, 2009). Yet the higher education institutions imposed upon Africa were not designed, nor have they been transformed, for such. Despite thousands of years of higher education, African nations have largely transitioned to a Western-based approach to post-secondary education, embracing a model colonised into existence (Lulat, 2005). This approach has led to a focus on Western notions of research, limited to dissemination in obscure academic channels often hidden behind paywalls and monolingual instructional approaches geared towards standardised colonial languages (Ramoupi, 2014). Even though multilingual and Indigenous African learners make up the majority of students in Africa, most attend woefully unresourced basic education systems, and the cultural, linguistic, and historical wealth of these communities remains structurally excluded from official knowledge (Lulat, 2005). Thus, despite the vast intellectual wealth that Pan-Africa represents, including the continual infusing of African identities and ideologies into the fabric of colonial systems (Falola, 2003), decolonising all aspects of higher education in Africa—after centuries of colonial rule and continued reliance upon the West—remains as Bob Marley (1976) sang, ‘a fleeting illusion, to be pursued, but never attained.’

The work of decolonisation is not only limited to higher education institutions but is a process requiring transformation on multiple levels—from the global to the individual—across economic systems, housing, food, electricity, basic education, representational politics, transportation, and other societal functions. This book focuses on the future of African universities because of their current role in reinforcing structural oppressions, and because of their potential to disrupt colonial legacies. Indeed, as the ongoing COVID-19 and anti-Black racism pandemics demonstrate, higher education can emerge from its colonial roots to lead the way towards addressing our most pressing global issues. We argue that no other resource is equipped to foster such decoloniality on a continental level. This book will thus accomplish two primary objectives. First, we make the case for why elevation of ongoing processes of higher education decoloniality across Africa is essential to fully release from the chains of colonialism and anti-Blackness. We demonstrate how definitions of decolonising education engage contemporary African higher education contexts and clarify complexities of Indigenous African modes of decolonial thought (Falola, 2003). Second, we engage the complicated and often contradictory transformative efforts that are contained within overused, oft-appropriated, heavily theorised notions of decoloniality (Manthalu & Waghid, 2019; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015a; Shepard, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). This chapter also frames how Africa-based authors grapple with various levels of and orientations to higher education decoloniality, offering insights by practitioner-scholars who lead within institutions of African higher education.

Why Decolonise Higher Education

Centuries of enslavement, racism, land theft, systemic exploitation, environmental degradation, genocide, war, violence, eradication of family structures, implementation of colonial schooling, disruption of such schooling, and the continual exodus of people trying to survive have dramatically shaped the backdrop of African societies. Higher education similarly reflects these historical and contemporary realities, systematically privileging whiteness, European and American subjectivities, and European linguistic domination, while largely ignoring (and/or justifying) the fabric of sustained racialised impoverishment (Lulat, 2005). Yet countless examples of resistance strategies, programmes, and entire academic departments exist in opposition to the colonial mission, consequently fostering Indigenous African knowledge systems. While many examples of higher education challenge such structured devastation by infusing Indigenous African knowledge and providing leadership through localised circumstances, the bulk of African higher education remains committed—in shape, scope, and form—to Western approaches, despite how these approaches continue to disrupt African societies. The core of higher education decoloniality, then, must build from these pockets of resistance, to challenge the pressures and powers that normalise colonial structures that silence and limit Black-affirming efforts to implement institutional and societal decoloniality.

One recent example illustrates how the commitment to Western-framed higher education promotes racism as knowledge, further silencing conversations that challenge whiteness. In May 2020, the South African Journal of Science published an article entitled, ‘Why are black South African students less likely to consider studying biological sciences?’ The article reported on Nattrass’s (2020) survey, which 211 University of Cape Town (UCT) students completed during their lunch breaks. Questions asked if respondents had ‘considered studying the biological sciences,’ and a seemingly random selection of opinions, such as if they agree that ‘Addressing social inequality is more important than wildlife conservation’ or that ‘Humans evolved from apes’ (Nattrass, 2020). Additional questions assessed if respondents agree ‘that disciplines like c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• About the Contributors
• 1 Decolonising Higher Education: Definitions, Conceptualisations, Epistemologies
• 2 Centring African Knowledges to Decolonise Higher Education
• 3 Curriculum Transformation to Decolonise African Higher Education
• 4 Removing and Recentring: Student Activist Perceptions of Curricular Decolonisation
• 5 Localising Knowledge Systems
• 6 Reclaiming Indigenous Epistemes: Entenga Drums Revival at Kyambogo University
• 7 On Language, Coloniality, and Resistance: A Conversation between Abdirachid Ismail and Christopher B. Knaus
• 8 (De)Colonising Physical Education in Ghana
• 9 The Re-Assimilation of Indigeneity in Education: A Long-Term Journey
• Index