The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
The immediate goals of transforming and decolonising the University and higher education in Africa include the centreing of African languages and knowledge systems in the curricular and the syllabi.
So far, colonial and European languages have been the principal media of instruction and Eurocentric theories and methods of knowledge making have occupied the front seat.
As a result, what is ordinarily called the African university is actually the Western university that is geographically located in Africa but in form and in content remains a Western university purveying Western sense and sensibility. Since languages and knowledges do not walk on their own two legs but are carried by human bodies, the centering of Western languages and knowledge systems in African universities also means that Western people become the central people and principal points of reference in the university in Africa.
Even if there are many black and African doctors and professors in African universities, they circulate in the corridors as second hand experts and professionals not authorities in the subjects, topics and themes that they teach in. The Western expatriates, some European academic tourists in the corridors and the many dead white philosophers whose books occupy the top drawers in the libraries remain the authorities and owners of what is considered quality knowledge.
A black and African psychologist is not really a psychologist until she or he has mastered Sigmund Freud, and a black and African sociologist is not a sociologist until a competence in handling Max Weber is displayed, for example. Since Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, one Austrian and another German, are products of Western history and culture, the meaning is that Western history and Western culture are the tradition of knowledge, Africans and blacks are mere receivers and consumers of Western knowledge.
The African university remains so much of a Western university such that one is sure, almost in every university in Africa to find what is paradoxically called a Centre for African Studies, in Africa. African senses and sensibilities, the knowledge systems, histories and languages are consigned to a mere centre or department at the corner there, while Eurocentric studies true to their nature as imperial studies occupy the entire academy.
The God of quality and religion of standards
Whenever the centreing of indigenous African knowledge systems and African languages are mentioned in the African university, a cry about quality and standards is raised. The coming into the University of a Mass of black bodies as experts and the arrival of a multiplicity of African languages as media of instruction is supposed to be a kind of invasion and corruption that will totally expel quality and suspend acceptable standards of education and knowledge production. Simply, quality knowledge has come to be associated with white bodies, European languages, theories and methodologies.
In perspective, Sigmund Freud produced quality knowledge in form of psychoanalysis in that he generated a method of detecting and repairing the damage that societal problems do inside a human being. Karl Marx produced quality knowledge in that Marxism became a science that helped demonstrate the evils of capitalism and propose a possible solution. In short, the quality of knowledge is in its usability and in its functionality to and in society, its relevance to contemporary questions and exigencies. When Christianity arrived as a spirituality and knowledge system it was not considered quality knowledge because the Christ proposed a kingdom that was not of this world when the Jews urgently needed a messiah to deliver them from Roman rule. It is with such contempt that Christianity was received leading to the physical crucifixion of the Christ.
Psychoanalysis and Marxism were also received with contempt to start with but gained acceptance and even classic status in society as their utility value in understanding the world was established. Well after the death of the Christ, Christianity itself gained currency and worldwide acceptance when its explanations of the world and proposals of another world were understood and related to. The power of a language and a knowledge system perfectly resides in its relevance to society and usability. Knowledge is quality knowledge in how it provides strong answers to the strong questions that confront a people in their daily lives.
The myth that quality knowledge and quality education are the property of white bodies from the Western world is exactly that, a myth and a fiction. Africans in Africa, using African languages are perfectly capable of producing and circulating understandings of the world that are relevant to the condition of African people in the world. It is a monumental fallacy that once upon a time in the university there was a paradise where quality was assured and this heaven of quality education and knowledge production is now threatened by ambitious blacks and Africans who want to take over the universities. Quality knowledge and quality education have always been like beauty that belongs to the eye of the beholder, not a god that fell from the sky one day. Quality education and quality knowledge are designs and inventions of societies that depend on the needs of those particular societies at given times.
Rigour beyond the myth of quality
While quality and standards of education are highly subjective myths and inventions whose measurement depends on who the judge is, rigour in study and knowledge production is the property of all serious people. At the University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, at some point, one physicist Dr Themba Dlodlo proposed and experimented with the teaching of physics in pure IsiNdebele.
The physicist who had the habit of delivering public talks in canonical Ndebele language went on to rigorously translate complex concepts and terms of the subject and science of physics into isiNdebele, demonstrating that the Ndebele language could be used to teach that hard science of physics. At best Dlodlo received applause, at worst he was regarded as a brave dissident scientist. The physics that Dlodlo taught was no longer just physics the science that was received from the West, but it became physics as understood from the Ndebele historical and cultural experience, domesticated and localised.
Decolonially, Dr Themba Dlodlo did not lower the quality and standard of physics but he simply brought it closer and truer to the relevant experience of his people, while it remained physics and an international science. Away from the rigid Eurocentric philosophical categories of Continental Philosophy and Analytical Philosophy, Enrique Dussel and other Latin American philosophers have developed what has been called Post-Continental philosophy that includes the thoughts of indigenous Latin American, African and Asian thinkers.
Under Post-Continental Philosophy as an academic category, philosophers of the Global South like Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe, and a number of African liberation leaders such as Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, and others have found recognition as philosophers not just entertaining novelists and agitated political activists and polemicists. One attribute of these thinkers of the Global South is not just quality and standards of work, but they exude rigour. Rigour defines thoroughness in thought, and the combination of both power and beauty in expressing ideas and insights. A reading of Izibongo Zamakhosi, the Praises of Kings rendered in Zulu/Ndebele poetry easily demonstrates how rigorous traditional and indigenous poets could be in combining poetry, philosophy, history and even prophecy in one narrative.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: [email protected]
