The search for ecologies of knowledge in the encounter with African epistemicide in South African education (original) (raw)
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As the 21 st century dawned, some African intellectuals were already contemplating an education system based on African philosophy and African values. These intellectuals were motioning for an education system that would uphold the indigenous knowledge systems (Makgoba, 1996; Seepe, 2004; Higgs and Van Wyk, 2007). This group also contends that through education, African societies will be enhanced if education reflects the local indigenous knowledge systems. Other critics though, believe that africanising education institutions, will not only lower standards, but that it will also be incongruent to globalisation as indigenous knowledge systems will not be compatible with modernisation. The article comprises of a literature study focusing on the challenges arising as a result of several stakeholders, whose proposals include the africanisation of knowledge in formal education institutions in Africa. The article also examines whether formal (africanised) education has the potential to democratise and transform society. As South Africa is gradually changing socially and politically, many see education as a vehicle for improving the political, social and economic landscape.
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With continued calls for the Africanisation of the University curricula in South Africa, it has become urgent that the subject of Africanity be placed centrally in this discourse. This suggests that we engage the colonial and apartheid baggage that essentially contributed to African epistemicide. One of the objectives of colonialism was the goal of conquering Africa and relegating her people to the status of being sub-humans. In doing that, it needed to present Africa and her people as "dark" and "backward" respectively. Thus, African Weltanschauungen were dismissed and her peoples deemed to have no culture and no conception of god. Yet, the names of the gods of the African peoples were deliberately translated to refer to the god of western Christianity and this confused the Africans. Western Christian theology no doubt played a pivotal role in ensuring that the goal of total and comprehensive conquest by Western colonialism would be attained. This article argues that any attempt at countering the extent of African epistemicide must be accompanied by a degree of deliberate political will, and must reckon with the fact that the university in Africa, thus far, is but a transmission belt of Western epistemologies, which reaffirm the myth that European existence is qualitatively superior to any other forms of being-human-in-the-world.