Introduction: African Higher Education and the Praxis of Research, Innovation, and Internationalisation

Abstract

The African higher education landscape has experienced a myriad of success and challenges in the past five decades. This has turned the landscape into a complex one, enmeshed in a rich dose of colonial legacies, globalisation, decolonisation, COVID-19, and internationalisation focused on North-South partnerships amongst others. While researchers globally have contributed immensely to the growth of research in African higher education, scholars within the African higher education landscape have also contributed immensely to the growth in higher education both on the African continent and globally. The fact that some African universities make it into the top 500 universities worldwide in different rankings testifies to this assertion. Tamrat (2022) argues that the Covid-19 pandemic created an avenue for innovation in African higher education through diversified means of educational delivery, approaches to research and innovation, and in other ways. Since the wave of independence spread across Africa in the fifties and sixties, the role of education on the continent has always been a debatable one. Two schools of thoughts emerged in the wake of independence which have continued to dominate conversations around research, innovations, and internationalisation in African higher education today. Writing about these schools of thought championed by Ali Mazrui and Walter Rodney, Mamdani (2016, p. 72) argues that