Last Word

Abstract

WHERE DO WE STAND WITH THE “AFRICANISATION” OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES?As academics and lecturers we are well aware of the demands of transformation. Manyof us have been and are going through the demanding, time-consuming and bureaucraticexercises of SAQAtising our syllabi. In the process, meaningless and unimaginativetemplates tend to dictate the academic activity, leaving little to the creative intellectualmind. We have been and are going through the processes of adapting our syllabi tooutcome-based education and teaching, now to be turned into problem-solving educationand teaching; of turning year courses into semester courses, and probably now convertingthem back to year courses; and of merging institutions and, in so doing, trying to marrydifferent educational philosophies, practices, attitudes and organisational cultures.At Unisa, the above have been and are taxing experiences. Distance education demandsthat every word you utter has to go through a rigorous process of educational planningand design, writing, evaluation by critical readers, re-writting, re-evaluation, andproofreading over and again, before it goes through the processes of production anddespatch. Now, a new phase of transformation has entered: the Africanisation of ourcourses. But what is Africanisation?The purpose of what follows is not to problematise and intellectualise the concept. Thatis done, more than often, in a stream of academic articles and in discussions amongacademics. The discussions usually begin with: “What the hell is Africanisation?” Neitheris the purpose to deconstruct related concepts such as “conceptual engineering”,“cultural revolution”, “power”, “ideology”, “hegemony” and so on. Somewhere in thedebate, they all feature.In the following paragraphs I prefer to quote verbatim, and in a paraphrased way, fromtwo presentations given by two Unisa scholars at a seminar held on 3 March 2005 at Unisaon the topic of Africanisation. They are Prof. T.S. Maluleke, the Deputy Executive Deanof Unisa’s College of Human Sciences, and Prof. A.M.B. Mangu of Unisa’s Department ofConstitutional, International and Indigenous Law. The purpose is not to comment on theirpresentations, but rather to uphold them as possible yardsticks against which to measurethe resistance to, and/or progress or lack of progress in, the Africanisation of SouthAfrican communication studies.