Unisa calls for Afrocentric education
“When one is denied their status as a human, their knowledge is also denied.”
A Unisa think-tank was recently seized with making sense of giving tertiary a human face.
The forum said colonisation had resulted in social inclusion, racism, inequality and dehumanisation of higher education.
The panellists, including Unisa’s change management unit director Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and policy analyst and author Nompumelelo Runji debated the transformation, decolonialisation of higher education institutions and the laws that governed transformation.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni said colonisation was the cause of the the dehumanisation of higher education by denying other people their equal status as humans for the purposes of enslavement.
“Inclusion and exclusion can therefore not be depoliticised so those who have been denied humanity must first enjoy restitution,” he said.
He said the denial of humanity had changed the way the African had thought of himself.
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Unisa said the forum was meant to allow experts and students to discuss how higher education needed to restore the African.
Unisa principal and vice-chancellor Professor Mandla Makhanya said: “We must raise critical consciousness on inequity, power, privilege and oppression as these occur in many universities.
We need to invite African ideas into this discussion and, within the university, continue working towards social and cultural inclusivity, as well as sustainability, through intellectual networking, epistemic justice and environmental ethics.”
Ndlovu-Gatsheni said when one was denied their status as a human, their knowledge was also denied.
He said: “There is a definite link between the epistemological question and the ontological question. With today’s topic… the fact that we are talking about it, we are acknowledging that the domain of higher education is also a domain of rehumanising. Universities were, on many levels, complicit in the process of dehumanising.”
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Ndlovu-Gatsheni said in rehumanising higher education, “including the restoration of Africa as a legitimate epistemic site of knowledge”, African knowledge must be affirmed.
Runji said inequality remained the biggest threat to the gains of the past decades.
“Part of this inequality is elevating Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies above African ones in the academic environment,” she said.
Ntando Sindane, postgraduate research assistant in the College of Law said he was frustrated that literature only presented Eurocentric views and authors.
“To rectify this imbalance white thinkers need to be relegated to secondary sources, and replaced with black African intellectuals as primary sources,” he said.
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“The curriculum must be changed. Not only the content but also the matter of how we teach, how we learn, how we gather information.”
He said professors needed to view the student as a bearer of information instead of an empty vessel they could fill with their knowledge.
On the under-resourcing of African language development, Sindane said universities should close their departments of English and Afrikaans, and use those resources to empower African languages.
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