Applying Ayittey’s Indigenous African Institutions to generate epistemic plurality in the curriculum

Abstract

South Africa has recently experienced turmoil in its tertiary sphere. While much of it derived from students' financial grievances, an equal amount of discontent emerged because of ideological disgruntlement (Angu 2018;Nyamnjoh 2016;Pillay 2016). Increasingly, segments of the student populace rebelled against what they experienced as colonised or Eurocentric paradigms in South African universities. A statue of Cecil Rhodes, based at the University of Cape Town, came to be seen as a symbol of black oppression and pain. This sentiment reflects Mbembe's (2015:2) suggestion that 'Cecil Rhodes belonged to [a] race of men who were convinced that to be black was a liability'. The current study is concerned with conceptualising curricula that reverse students' experiences of alienation or pain by replacing these with belonging. Carolissen and Kiguwa (2018:1-2) acknowledge that experiences of belonging may be shaped by power relations in universities. Such power relations, in turn, emerge from numerous variables that are not 'unidimensional' in nature but entail 'complex intersectionalities' (Carolissen & Kiguwa 2018:3). In these configurations, variables such as race, gender, culture or ideological orientation are efficacious. But as Carolissen and Kiguwa (2018:3) acknowledge, in South Africa, 'black students […] despite [their] legitimate student status […] continue to experience their rights Background: South Africa's institutions of higher learning are currently experiencing a dispensation in which calls for curricula transformation and decolonisation reverberate. While the need for curricula evolution is generally accepted, there appears to be a lack of awareness of methodologies which are applicable to changing curricula. To this end the study proposed the incorporation of Ayittey's text Indigenous African Institutions into mainstream curricula for the following reasons: It is a rich source of indigenous African knowledge and includes history and information which relate to all disciplinary faculties and their areas of teaching. Aim:The following conceptual study aimed to highlight the value of George Ayittey's seminal text, Indigenous African Institutions of 2006, towards implementing curricula in South African universities that are epistemically diverse.Setting: This study is contextualised in higher learning spaces in the African context. Method:The methods of this study involved a textual probing of previous discourses on epistemic diversity in university curricula that value pre-colonial African history. The study also highlighted pre-colonial African modes of organisation as emphasised in Ayittey's texts, which are relevant epistemic sources for dissemination in contemporary, African scholarly. Results:The results of the study indicated that Africa's pre-colonial era contains rich sources of indigenous and epistemic knowledge required for social organisation during that era. Ayittey's text describes how African cultures gave form to relationships between families, communities, nations and the natural environme...

Social Realist Ontology for Analysing BRICS Educational Governance: A Higher Education Perspective

“…While it appears the South African government and affected parties have temporarily quelled youth protests, possibly through increasing financial assistance for tertiary study, the ideological tensions remain. Persistent calls from students and scholars in South Africa decry what they perceive as the marginalisation of African epistemologies and instruction of indigenous African modes of organisation (Eybers, 2019;Mampane, Omidere & Folake, 2018) . There is a sense that while South Africa's higher education system is transforming, due to the urgent challenges of poverty and unemployment, which affect the youth, it is not changing at the required pace.…”

Intersections of Decolonial and Global Citizenship Principles in Academic Literacy Curricula

“…Academic literacy course developers in South African universities are currently confronted by petitions of decolonial and global citizenship education (GCE) ideologies. While those of a decolonial orientation seek the embedding of African epistemologies and knowledge of indigenous African systems of organization in the curriculum (Eybers 2019;Kumalo 2018), GCE scholars argue that literacy practices should enable increased student awareness of their membership as global citizens (Andreotti 2014). The stance of this study is that such interrogation is necessary if the discipline of academic literacy is to contribute meaningfully toward the emergence of a more socially just African continent and world (Rambiritch 2018).…”

A reflective analysis of articles published in the journal of Transformation in Higher Education (2016–2020): Beyond transformation?

“…Decolonisation and decolonising became key to, or even equal to, transformation in higher education during and after the #mustfall protests in 2015-2016. Decolonisation and decolonising are explicit or implicit in titles, abstracts and keywords related to notions such as epistemic violence and Eurocentric hegemony (Heleta 2016), Africanisation (Horsthemke 2017), colonial and decolonial identity and subjectivity (Bazana & Mogatsi 2017;Becker 2017;Mabille 2019), black consciousness and black studies (Bazana & Mogatsi 2017;Lamola 2018), indigenisation and indigenous knowledge (Eybers 2019;Horsthemke 2017), decolonial curriculum (Nyoni 2019), postcolonialism (Gearon 2019;Nell 2020) and decolonial philosophy (Matolino 2020). This reflection is done through a decolonial lens.…”

“…Interrogating epistemology, epistemological practices and curricula are crucial to transformation in higher education. Authors in this journal have robust engagements with epistemology, epistemological practices and curriculum (Eybers 2019;Gearon 2017Gearon , 2019Heleta 2016 Ramrathan (2016) explains how transformation in higher education since 1994 has mostly taken on a number-counting, instrumentalised modality. The saturation of neo-liberalism and capitalism remains embedded in South African curricula practices.…”

“…The #mustfall protests unmasked brutal alienation through race, class and gender at South African universities (Bazana & Mogotsi 2017;Becker 2017;Eybers 2019;Lamola 2018;Nyoni 2019;Rothmann 2018).…”