A ‘Decolonial Turn’ in Higher Education

Abstract

There is an existential and humane need today to decolonise higher education in Africa by means of a deco/onia/turn that reclaims indigenous African knowledge systems in higher education curricula. In this chapter, it is argued that this reclamation should, however, not exclude and negate European forms of knowledge but should instead be directed at what can be referred to as a fusion of epistemologies, which seeks to integrate both indigenous African knowledge and European forms of knowledge in higher education. African societies have experienced various forms of domination in their histories, such as the slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and globalisation. Central to this domination is the problem concerned with the negation and devaluation of indigenous African knowledge and the hegemony of Western forms of knowledge. Although each African state has its own experience of this domination, it is noted that there is a shared history of colonial and imperial imposition of external ideas and knowledges over much of the continent. One of the consequences of the hegemony of the Western episteme for indigenous African knowledge was the fundamental erasure of the rich knowledge legacy of the African people. Western sentiment often locates authentic knowledge only within its own political and cultural boundaries while, at the same time, concluding that knowledge derived from African people is non-scientific.