What Would the Decolonisation of a Political Science Curriculum Entail? Lessons to be Learnt From the East African Experience at the Federal University of East Africa

The Organic Crisis and Epistemic Disobedience in South African Higher Education Curricula:Making Political Science Relevant

“…Although the organic crisis within the Political Science curriculum pre-dates the 2015-2016 South African higher education student movement's clarion calls for transformation and curriculum inclusivity (see for example Hlatshwayo & Fomunyam 2018), the focus on the discipline has increasingly exacerbated. Arguing about the epistemic disconnection in how the discipline refuses to draw from African lived experience and continues to re-centre Euro-American thought and lives, Mngomezulu & Hadebe (2018) argue that it is possible to transform the discipline without necessarily 'weakening the discipline's stature'. What this stature looks like or its underlying mechanisms and principles are not interrogated and explained.…”

“…What this stature looks like or its underlying mechanisms and principles are not interrogated and explained. For Mngomezulu and Hadebe (2018), the colonial history of universities in South African is that of byproducts of imperial and colonial contact which tended to privilege western thought in the curriculum, which continues to manifest itself in contemporary times. One way of responding to this coloniality within Political Science is their call for de-linking western thought and re-introducing African knowledge systems in the curriculum.…”

“…Unlike Mngomezulu and Hadebe's (2018) argument for the inclusion of African knowledge systems within higher education curricula as a decolonial ethic, Matthews (2018) calls us to critically reflect upon, and problematize colonial texts, knowledge, assumptions, and values that have developed as part of the 'colonial encounter and how it is rooted in an attempt by the colonial powers to assert themselves through delineating an 'other' which can be unfavourably contrasted with the coloniser'. Matthews suggests that rather than proposing the inclusion of African indigenous knowledge system within an untransformed curriculum, as suggested by Mngomezulu and Hadebe (2018), and to some extent, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018), we need to recognize the epistemological entanglement in the colonial library, and how advancing a decolonial project in Political Science would demand drawing both from the colonial library and local intellectual contributions, in fashioning a different intellectual trajectory, rather than committing to an Africana essentialist conception of knowledge. In this argument, Matthews responds to the critique offered by Makgoba (1997), Msila and Gumbo (2016), and others who proposed Africanisation as an alternative framework to decolonization, in the processappealing to the precolonial stereotype of an African individual who is outside of globalization and multinational/multicultural contact (see for example Samuel 2017).…”

“…One of the disciplines that has come under sustained and intensive scrutiny has been the discipline of Political Science, which has been accused of facing an existential crisis because of its irrelevance and refusing to teach local, indigenous knowledge systems (Matthews 2018; Mngomezulu & Hadebe 2018;Tselapedi 2016). In this article, I first begin my outlining my conceptual and theoretical tools of 'organic crisis' and 'epistemic disobedience' in how they were understood and analysed in this article.…”

How diverse is your reading list? Exploring issues of representation and decolonisation in the UK

“…Calls for decolonisation highlight the dominance of Eurocentric curricula which 'reinforce white and Western dominance and privilege while at the same time being full of stereotypes, prejudices and patronising views about Africa and its people' (Heleta 2016: 2). Whilst these demands have a long history, it is recent student protests, such as #RhodesMustFall, that have reignited these debates (Le Grange 2016; Mngomezulu and Hadebe 2018). In this setting, the university curriculum represents a necessary opportunity to deliver change in higher education and beyond, as 'a microcosm of and impetus for broader societal transformation' (Le Grange 2016: 3.…”