Unisa online - A curriculum relevant to Africa

Prof Dei during one of the lecture's

Upon the invitation of Prof Dzvimbo, Prof George Dei from the University of Toronto arrived at Unisa to deliver a series of guest lectures and seminars at the College of Education from 9 to 14 November. The topics ranged from ‘Indigenous knowledge in the academy’, to ‘Rethinking democracy, good governance, and development in Africa’, to ‘Towards a messy utopia in the academy: the desires and challenges of inclusive education in the 21st Century’. Prof Dei also offered a supervisor support workshop titled: ‘Studying, researching and teaching African Indigenous knowledge’s: challenges, possibilities and methodological cautions’.

In an interview held after delivering the series of lectures, Prof Dei touched on a broad range of subjects. He said that there were many challenges when looking at ways of knowing in a world which contains multiple knowledge systems, which he called the power of multi-centric knowledge space. He argued that for too long African Indigenous knowledge had been devalued, marginalized or ignored in the search for knowledge about the human condition and social realities. He noted that when doing research into indigenous cultural realities, it remains important to not only affirm the relevance of such knowledge clusters, but also, to test the validity of our data and also credit the source where the knowledge originally came from. There are challenges in breaking down the knowledge-divide, or the binary system, which allows for a tendency for certain knowledge to be privileged and to masquerade as universal while failing to acknowledge significant philosophical differences among knowledge systems as well.

Prof Dei with Prof Nareadi Phasha

African scholars also need to develop their own home grown indigenous solutions to problems when working with indigenous knowledge, said Prof Dei. The cultural custodians of indigenous knowledge often are the elders and community leaders who have much to share about how African people do things and solve problems. Despite this, the data gained from an elder should still be tested with rigour for its validity and relevance, as with other knowledge forms. All knowledge gathered must be appraised critically so that data is not turned into something romantic or exotic. Prof Dei stated that power relations in knowledge production can also play a major role in indigenous research and multi-varsity environments. One of the tests of this, though, is whether it is relevant to the community. There are many sciences and the Eurocentric science/approach makes up just one of them.

African scientists have a responsibility to bring their knowledge base to the forefront and validate indigenous ways of knowing and if what they postulate is valid, said Prof Dei. In that process it is very important to interrogate the context and to centre that thinking and research in Africa. There are issues of power and limited resources and a need to break away from Eurocentric paradigms. On the question of schooling, education and knowledge systems Dei posed the question: “How do we define success?” A student can be academic or socially successful and our definitions of success should be inclusive as to engage social and academic success. In the Africa worldview all things are holistic and intertwined with each other, such that the cultural, political, spiritual and material economic realities cannot be separated. African scholars must be critically engage refining the curriculum to reflect African realities and break away from the purely European standards of measurements, said Prof Dei. To do this, he reasoned, educators should be accountable for what is being developed for the curriculum and they have a collective responsibility to put in place a system of checks and balances to stop the abuse of academic power.

Interested onlookers at one of the lecture's

Prof Dei also identified African languages as a huge problem for which solutions must be found. A language is intertwined with the identity, culture and resistance (resist that which is foreign) of a people. Thus, within institutions for higher learning academic centres are needed for the study of indigenous African languages. This is essential for the decolonization and Africanization of African education, argued Prof Dei.

Prof Dei also touched on an understanding of inclusivity and asked that we see inclusive schooling and education as more a question of power, identity, and knowledge. He suggested the need to expand our understanding of inclusion to highlight questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, language, religion and culture. Inclusion is to challenge power, injustice and who gets to define the ‘normal’. It is a work in progress and a continual process.

Finally, in his conclusion, Prof Dei stated that leadership needs to take bold and courageous steps to bring people together to create a new future and a new dawn for scholarly activities in an African context. “We must be thinking outside the conventional proverbial box and design our own academic futures,” said Prof Dei. In so doing it is important to work together as allies, as a community of learners who find that they have a shared cause. He ended off by saying that, “Any academic community is as good as we collectively make it.”

Click here for a transcript of the ‘Indigenous Knowledge in the Academy’ lecture

Click here for a transcript of the ‘Studying, Researching and Teaching African Indigenous Knowledge’s: challenges, Possibilities and Methodological cautions’ workshop

Click here for a transcript of the ‘Rethinking democracy, good governance and development in Africa’ seminar

Click here for a transcript of the ‘Towards a messy Utopia in the Academy: The desires and challenges of Inclusive Education in the 21st Century’ seminar