The path to decoloniality: A proposal for educational system transformation (original) (raw)
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Editorial Decoloniality and Decolonial Education: South Africa and the World
Alternation, 2020
The decision to put together this collection began as an initiative to engage with presenters and participants of the UNISA Decolonial Summer School of 2019 beyond the content that was presented. UNISA, referring to the University of South Africa, was established in 1873 and is South Africa's foremost distance learning university. UNISA is situated in Pretoria in the province of Gauteng, which is one of South Africa's three capital cities where the executive branch of government is located, with over 400,000 registered students, including its international student population that come from 130 countries around the world. UNISA's Decolonial Summer School commenced in 2013 for the first time, under the direction of the School of Humanities, and has thus far run every year except for 2021, due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This collection is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, colonisercolonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection. Not only are we confronted with the overwhelming critique of colonial pedagogies, we are also confronted with an ongoing critique of teaching and learning practices within the university system that almost all of the contributors draw attention to. Some authors utilise the terms, Black and White when referring to racialised identity, with capitalisation, and some do notthose who write Afrika in its newly adopted form within the
African Perspectives of Research in Teaching and Learning Journal, 2024
The call for this Special Issue can be thematised into African languages in teaching and learning, multilingualism, and decolonisation. These themes come from the (South) African language realities where teaching and learning are through European languages that are not spoken by the majority of learners and teachers or students and their lecturers. The languages that were brought by colonialism continue to be used for teaching and learning long after the process of colonialism. There has been a continued call to alleviate the plight of many Africans who cannot access knowledge adequately because of language barrier.
Alternations Journal, UKZN, 2021
This collection, edited by Rozena Maart from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is composed of an introduction, seventeen articles by eighteen authors, two opinion pieces, two roundtables by eight authors, two of whom have articles in the collection, three interviews and three book reviews, and as such contain the work of twenty-eight contributors. Critiques of racism, definitions of decolonisation and decoloniality, histories of enslavement, coloniser – colonised relations, the coloniality of language, the colonial teaching practices of empire colonies, Black and racialised bodies as sites of racism and colonisation in the afterlife of apartheid, the recolonised economy, and the European colonial curricula that continue to support such practices, especially in law schools in South Africa, run between and among the work in this collection.
African-Centred Education and African Languages in South Africa
This policy brief is part of the larger research project that I am conducting in the Unit of Knowledge Transfer and Skills Development in the Research Division of the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA), entitled Deconstructing Eurocentric education: Teaching African-Centred curriculum at the Universities of Cape Town and Fort Hare: A comparative study with the University of Ghana, Legon. The two selected South African universities are, firstly, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of Fort Hare (UFH). The rationale for selecting UCT is twofold: firstly, because of the colonial heritage of the institution; and secondly, because as a result of some authorities wanting to preserve that heritage, the Centre for African Studies (CAS) at UCT exploded into the public in 1997 concerning the topics that should constitute the African Studies programmes. This explosion stimulated questions about the lack of African-centred education in the university in the post-apartheid era. The second university is the University of Fort Hare, chosen for its relation to and place in the history of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, and for the educative role it played in the leadership of those struggles And for being the sole custodian of the historic archives of the liberation movements of South Africa. While the focus of this current research in South Africa is the universities of Fort Hare and Cape Town, in general the study will also seek interviews with the leadership of other universities in South Africa, such as Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Professors Malegapuru W. Makgoba, Jonathan Jansen, and others – black and white – who are involved in questioning the continuation of the Eurocentric nature of the education system in the liberation period in South Africa. Furthermore, I draw from my own experience of university education curricula in South Africa and abroad. The massive challenges in our education system were made acutely aware to me during my own experience of education at the various institutions of higher learning and training during my own academic education. Throughout this period I recognised that the education system that had been legally endorsed by the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, with its colonial and apartheid mind-set is for the most part still in place in South Africa today – 17 years after the inauguration of Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela in 1994.
African Languages Policy in the Education of South Africa: 20 Years of Freedom or Subjugation
This paper focuses on the indigenous African languages policy in education debates in post-apartheid South Africa, and provides a policy review of language in education in the past 20 years of liberation in the South Africa. The research problem is that the post-1994 governments of South Africa stated in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) that indigenous official African languages must be in the curricula of the education system. But the findings reflect that this constitutional mandate has not been accomplished in the twenty years of South Africa's liberation. Conclusions drawn are that the former two official languages used in the education policies of the apartheid South Africa, i.e. English and Afrikaans, have continued to be used in pretended implementation of indigenous official African languages in the curricula of education of a free South Africa. Résumé Cet article met l'accent sur la politique des langues africaines indigènes dans les débats sur l'enseignement en Afrique du Sud post apartheid et offre une revue de la politique de la langue dans l'éducation au cours des 20 dernières années passées de libération en Afrique du Sud. Le problème de recherche est que les Gouvernements post 1994 de l'Afrique du Sud déclaraient dans la constitution de la République d'Afrique du Sud (1996)
Editorial: Issues of Decolonisation and Africanisation in Southern Africa
Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020
according to Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo's decolonial understanding (Decolonizing the Mind 1981), and 're-centering' the African position of 'seeing ourselves clearly' should go hand-in-glove with infusing ourselves at the centre of the knowledge generated (Africanization). This special issue gives us adequate room to engage with the two positions without collapsing them and forcing a narrow understanding. This special issue is located within a south-south collaborative initiative between the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of Botswana, and looks at issues that shape and inform both research and curriculum in Southern African contexts, including the epistemic violence and hegemony that encircles research and teaching in Higher Education, as well as reminding us of internal structural coloniality in the guise of so called tradition and traditional values and expectation of women. This special issue sought papers that attempt to 'tease out' the multiple strands in the Africanization, coloniality, and decoloniality discourse, and sought to allow the 'blind spots' to begin to show. In 'troubling' and problematizing the notion of Africanization, we also 'trouble the notion of who and what being African is, and the complex nature of social identities'. The editors invited both theoretical as well as empirical and descriptive papers that sought to engage critically and grapple with the variously positioned poly-vocal meanings of Colonialism/s and Postcolonialism, and Decolonization and Africanization, specifically within the geo-political Southern African space. Papers included, but were not restricted to, * Migrated African Archives: What does this Mean for 'African' Research? * African Feminism/s: Teaching & Researching within African Feminist Paradigms * Issues of Post-colonialism/s, Nationalism/s and Identity * Africanization of the Curriculum and * Complexities in Teaching and Researching. When the editors of this special volume called for contributions, they raised key questions that invited authors to interrogate issues of decolonization and means by which Africanization could be achieved. The salient questions that were raised were: What are the limits placed on the 'decolonization' project by the forces of neoliberalism? How are the latter affecting the future of the university? Is 'decolonization' the same as 'Africanization', as some African scholars have opined (Mbembe 2016)? These probing questions focused reflections and provided the fuel to engage the decolonization debate as it pertains to Southern Africa. Further, these interrogations are no less factual today than when they were uttered in 2016 by the erudite scholar known
INTRODUCTION. DECOLONIALITY AND DECOLONIAL EDUCATION: SOUTH AFRICA AND THE WORLD
ALTERNATION, 2020
Any unpacking of the terms employed in the title, such as ‘decoloniality’ and ‘decolonial education’ requires an understanding of how these terms have been employed, what we understand as their meaning, how we carry out the work in their name, and to which purpose. Decolonial education is always in the present, and as such, our concern is then with the moment of insurgence, interrogation, and resistance to colonisation – the act that is in the moment of, that moment of execution, an in-progress process that is constantly unravel- ling, a process that involves the undoing of colonisation in the flesh, through thoughts and ideas enacted through the body of the subject(s) who under- stands and identifies the features of colonialism that hamper the continuity of a dignified lived experience – the subject acts, entrenches its decolonial position, enforces it, breaks with coloniality despite the shunning, the punish- ment the colonial threatens to inflict, despite the cunning coercion of compli- city disguised as collegial congeniality. This in-the-moment process, is also an in-the-present one, a warding off of persistent, vigilant coloniality that has many tentacles, even if it hides under the rubric of democracy, such as in contemporary South Africa where the agents of coloniality draw from a bottomless pit of historical White privilege to refuel their attacks.