Vusumuzi Dube
THAT the education system was instrumentalised and weaponised by European settler colonialists to shape the African natives into docile victims is no new discovery.
Generations of African scholars, and scholars of the Global South, have documented the many ways in which the settler colonialists used religion and education to marinate the hearts and minds of the natives for colonial purposes.
There is hardly anything new that any scholar can discover on how education and its close cousin, religion, became a weapon in the hands of the colonisers that wanted obedient and easy natives that would willingly follow the commands of their conquerors. What scholars of the present can discover, however, are strategies and tactics of decolonising education, religion and spirituality in Africa.
There is a need for education and religion in Africa to be re-purposed towards the economic, political and cultural liberation of the long-suffering Africans that are yet to touch the fruits of liberation many decades after the political independence of their countries.
The two greatest paradoxes of the African continent are that Africans are the poorest people of the world when their continent is the richest continent in natural resources, and that decades after political independence from colonialism African countries remain unfree, occupying an unfair position in the world economy and polity.
As far as the instrumentalisation of religion in the colonisation of Africa, John Mbiti, the Kenyan philosopher, noted how Africa became a dumping ground of foreign gods and religions.
Mbiti lamented how Africans became notoriously religious, more religious than the missionaries that brought them the gods and the religions. The tragedy is that Africans became more religious and less spiritual in the way in which they became alienated from African spirituality and culture while they took to colonial religions the way ducks take to water.
The Colonial Ivory Towers
In 2020, the academics, Oluwaseun Tella and Shireen Motala, assembled a group of scholars who contributed chapters to the book volume; From Ivory Towers to Ebony Towers: Transforming Humanities Curricula in South Africa, Africa and African American studies.
The contributors came from different universities in Africa, America and the Caribbean. As such the book is a multi-disciplinary, mutli-perspectival, and multi-vocal volume that provides an assortment of strategies and tactics in decolonising higher education in the African mainland and the diaspora.
Just how the colonisers, through the missionaries, built ivory towers out of education systems in Africa is described by different contributors to the good book.
The colonial African schooling system became a factory, a human factory that produced the Africans into colonial subjects that would efficiently do the colonial master’s bidding.
The syllabi and the curricular became an unbalanced and toxic diet of colonial venom that was injected into the bodies of Africans that became alienated and estranged colonial subjects that were uprooted from the African cultural and spiritual soils.
The alienated and estranged Africans were geographically located in Africa but mentally positioned in Europe, white shadows dressed in black skins, pathetically trying to make sense of the African condition and failing dismally.
The more the African became educated in western ways the more he or she became alienated from Africa. As such, educated Africans became the most alienated and estranged from Africa, and more dangerous to the continent and its future.
As a result, we can observe that it is mainly educated Africans that led the fight against colonialism and that also led in the failure of decolonisation of the African continent because of their alienation and estrangement. For the African, in total, the colonial education system was an alienating and estranging monstrosity that was as dehumanising as it was intoxicating.
It was an education system that injected the African with colonial ignorance that was accompanied by colonial arrogance.
Towards the Decolonial Ebony Towers
What is commonly called the decolonisation of education in Africa is the re-purposing of the education system in Africa by re-directing it from coloniality to decoloniality. Ngugi wa Thiongo called it
“decolonising the mind” in Africa. As described in the book under discussion, a decolonised education system and landscape in Africa is one that would be multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary and inclusive.
Education institutions that are decolonised would boast human diversity and a diversity of knowledges.
Education will be liberated from being a commodity to being a public good. Once again education will be liberating and re-humanising in the sense that Paulo Freire enunciated.
What Boaventura de Soussa Santos has called “epistemologies of the South” in reference to indigenous knowledges of the Global South would find a home in the decolonised African university.
The research methodologies and approaches in Africa would also be decolonised to make them more ethical and re-humanising for Africans that would once again become subjects and not objects of history.
An important quality of the book under discussion is the acknowledgement by a number of contributors that the call for the decolonisation of higher education, and education at large in Africa, is not a new call. In fact, a number of contributors documented the history of African scholars of old that called for the decolonisation of education in Africa in the decades gone by.
African intellectual titans such as Walter Rodney, Cheik Anta Diop and Chinweizu, amongst others, are some of the African intellectuals of old that contributed immensely to the call for decolonisation of higher education in Africa and the Global South at large.
As much as the contributors to the book are optimistic about the decolonisation of the university in Africa, their optimism is tragic optimism that is aware of the difficulties ahead.
There is no telling of lies or claiming of easy victories in the book that in my view, is one of the most compelling reads in the canon of scholarly works on decoloniality. In its own way, the book will become a weapon in the hands of researchers, lecturers and students that take decoloniality seriously in the African university.
It is also a book that will give birth to other books in the way it seeks to provoke further research on decoloniality and decolonisation in the African university. Without flattering the writers, one can claim that this is a well-read book in the way in which the contributors read a vast expanse of relevant literature which they deployed in their well-researched chapters.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Northwest University, Potchefstroom Campus, Northwest Province, in South Africa. This piece is an abridged version of a presentation on the event of a book launch. Contacts: [email protected].
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