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A few years later he falls in love with a girl and she agrees to marry him but he is unable to pay the very high bride price. His stepfather and his uncles refuse to help him. The rest of the novel relates the series of misfortunes that befall him when he goes to Kampala to try to earn the money he needs. Despite nearly two years away, he earns only a fraction of the bride price, and during his return journey he is robbed.
The novel ends with his arrival home, miserable and penniless. He played for his school, his college, local clubs, his district team and the Uganda national team. It was through this interest in football that he first travelled widely in northern Uganda.
He made many friends and gained more varied experience of the traditions of his people which was later very useful to him. Football also helped him to travel even further afield. In he went with the Uganda team on a tour of Britain. Okot took this opportunity to extend his education. He stayed in England to study. He did a one-year course for a diploma in Education at Bristol University.
He then did a degree course in law at Aberystwyth. It was during this period that Okot lost his Christian commitment. It was also at this time that the direction of his interests changed from the European traditions he had been studying to the traditions of his own people.
While studying the Medieval European tradition of trial by ordeal he recognised a parallel to the traditions of the Acoli. He wanted to investigate this. When he finished his Law degree in he had an opportunity to pursue his interest in African traditions. He moved to Oxford University to study for a B. It was in this period that he developed many of the attitudes he expresses strongly in his poems and academic works.
In his Preface to his book, A frican Religions in Western Scholarship , he tells us of his conflicts with his teachers:. During the very first lecture. I protested, but to no avail. In this book he is strongly critical of the whole idea of social anthropology. He claims that anthropology has always been concerned to support and justify colonialism, and that it should therefore not be studied in African Universities.
The movement towards Ugandan independence persuaded Okot to return home for a short time in He intended to stand as the U. While back in Uganda he took the opportunity to do some fieldwork for his B. He then returned to Oxford. His research now centred mainly on the oral literature of his people.
He then returned to work in Uganda. First he worked in Gulu again, for the extra-mural department of Makerere College. He continued his research in traditional songs, especially investigating the religious ideas expressed through them.
He was also involved with a large group of friends in the creation of the Gulu Festival. He was a performer as well as an organiser, singing and dancing with a group and devising ways of adapting traditional songs to the different performance conditions of the Festival. It is easy to see how songs that Okot was working on could influence the composition of his own poem. In he moved to Kampala. There he tried to carry on similar work by changing the emphasis of the Ugandan Cultural Centre from mainly foreign works to mainly traditional performances.
He was later appointed Director of the Uganda Cultural Centre. He organised an eight-day festival to coincide with the Independence celebrations in October Shortly after this, his career in Uganda was abruptly cut short. While returning from a trip to Zambia he learnt that he had been dismissed. He was later told that his strong criticisms of politicians in Song of Lawino and elsewhere caused this dismissal. Okot packed a great deal of activity into his life, always working hard.
A collection of Acoli songs was published as The Horn of My Love in and in a refreshing version of familiar tales, Hare and Hornbill.
He returned to Makerere University as Professor of Creative Writing but tragically died in within five months of taking up the appointment. Okot wrote the Acoli version of Song of Lawino in a period in his life when he was daily concerned with Acoli traditional songs, both in his research and in his activities in connection with the Gulu Festival. In his work for the Festival, he co-operated very closely with a large group of friends. These are some of the people whose help he acknowledged on the title pages of Song of Lawino.
Naturally when Okot was writing his poem he also worked together with these friends. He read new versions of each chapter of the poem to these people as soon as they were completed and.
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Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Difficulty Beginner Intermediate Advanced. Explore Documents. Enjoy millions of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, and more, with a free trial. Ebook pages 2 hours. Start your free days. Read preview. About this ebook Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are among the most successful African literary works. Song of Lawino is an African woman s lamentation over the cultural death of her western educated husband - Ocol. In Song of Ocel the husband tries to justify his cultural apostasy.
These songs were translated from Acholi by the author. They evince a fascinating flavour of the African rhythmical idiom. Language English. Publisher East African Educational Publishers. Release date Dec 29, ISBN The Promised Land. Save The Promised Land for later. Moon Jar: Poems. Save Moon Jar: Poems for later. GraceLand: A Novel.
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Podcast Episode Sept. Save Sept. Podcast Episode How to Promote Worldview Thinking in the Classroom: No matter where you teach, helping students understand worldview is important. The inverse experience of European and North American students is equally telling. In the long run, neither the children of the lowly and poor, who in effect cannot afford the same chance to excel in this type of xenophilia, nor the children of the well-off schooled in such appetites are in a position to contribute towards reflecting the complexity, dynamism and creativity in being African.
African universities have significantly Africanised their personnel, but not their curricula or pedagogical structures to any real extent Crossman and Devisch I was fortunate, as a doctoral student in the United Kingdom UK to watch, with ethnographic instincts, a BBC television documentary on the extravagant mimicry and irrelevance of education in Africa.
Broadcast at 9. When the school was short of chemicals or other equipment, those concerned had to drive for at least five hundred miles for replenishment. The school had cost no less than 15 million British pounds to build and needed not less than 1 million pounds a year to run. Thus, whether educated at the heart of the African periphery or at the very centre of the European metropolis, postcolonial education, like its colonial counterpart, is an impoverished menu of unequal encounters between Africa and the west.
If ancestors are supposed to lay the path for posterity, inviting Africans to forget their ancestors the way postcolonial African leaders like Banda did and have continued to do, is an invitation for Africans to be born again and socialised afresh, in the image of Europe, using European and North American type academic institutions and rituals of ancestral worship.
This renewal, in tune with neo colonial values and institutions is achieved, by the west: promoting beliefs and values congenial to [its dominance]; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself Eagleton , original emphasis.
Even then, people are always capable of unlearning what has defined and confined them to passive submission. To actively teach, define and confine, absolute and meticulous care is taken in choosing teachers and determining curricula. All teachers in the Kamuzu Academy were white, recruited directly from Britain, and,of course paid British rates at a time when few local teachers could make ends meet with their own salaries in the soft local currency. Meanwhile, in Malawi, imported teachers on three-year contracts lived in European-style bungalows with salaries in hard currencies.
The same is now said of professors and other expatriates from African countries suffering economic downturns working in African countries with better economies such as South Africa and Botswana by the citizens of the host countries, who do not always see the Africans in question as relevant and efficient Nyamnjoh , Things seem to change, just as they stay the same throughout Africa.
Almost everywhere, the consultancy syndrome has triumphed over academic values such as excellence in teaching, research and publication. University professors who have failed to migrate are forced to postpone academic excellence.
The Journal of Higher Education in Africa was launched and rapidly become an archive on many of the issues. In this regard, CODESRIA, as a pan-African scholarly network keen on promoting the production and consumption of knowledge informed by African perspectives and epistemologies, is playing a crucial role in re-enlivening and revalorising dismembered and disenchanted beliefs and systems of thought in Africa.
Turning again to our classic example, English was and still is the main language of instruction at the Kamuzu Academy.
In his book, Prisoners of Freedom, Harri Englund highlights the connection between education, lifestyle and language among human rights fundamentalists in Malawi. English and other European languages are given status by associating them with civilisation and enlightenment, while every attempt is made to reduce African languages to gibberish and chase them out of the mouths, ears and minds of African students born into these languages. African intellectuals who want to take the valorisation of endogenous African languages seriously have found themselves swimming against the tides.
Unlike Somalia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Mali, Burkina Faso, Botswana and South Africa, many an African country has yet to demonstrate in principle and practice that literacy, even at primary school level, does not necessarily mean knowing how to read and write a European language. Only a few African countries have bothered to adopt policies that encourage education in African languages.
And even these countries tend to confine the importance of local languages to adult literacy training and to primary and secondary school education, thereby accentuating the remoteness and irrelevance of universities to the bulk of the population. In many countries, there are ongoing debates on use of mother tongue in the early years of schooling. In some where state policies already exist encouraging mother tongue education, these policies are yet to be effectively implemented. There is resistance from parents who believe mother tongue education will dilute education standards, as students are called to operate in a globalised world and may eventually proceed to universities where instruction is almost invariably in the colonial languages.
Moreover, children of policy makers attend private schools that follow, not the national curriculum, but the so-called international curriculum of European and North American schools. Without a personal interest in mother tongue education and national curricula, it is hard to see how policies in favour of endogenisation can be implemented.
Libraries that are well stocked even with material of direct relevance to critical scholarship informed by African perspectives and predicaments, may find such books and journals under-consulted because of curricula and scholarly traditions that pay scant attention to African sources. This was the case in the film Nothing but the Truth directly by playwright and actor John Kani in which the chief assistant librarian and main character Sipho Makhaya dreamily dusts off the collection of African literature on a bottom shelf and imagines, if promoted, of elevating it to a central space within the library.
The consequence in educational systems of inadequate and inappropriate resources combined with neglect and indifference produces graduates ill adapted to the African condition and market. The coming of internet and its possibilities for uploading and downloading content, together with the rise of digital and open publishing, means greater prospects for and access to African perspectives and perhaps a mitigation of the book famine in Africa.
Even when the finances are there, there is no guarantee that African political and intellectual leaders have the will to do what is right for African education.
By way of example yet again, at the Kamuzu Academy, where the neo- Etonians were trained to recite Shakespeare and glorify the classic philosophers of the metropolis, the library that housed the classics was deliberately designed in the image of the Library of Congress in the United States of America USA. There was European influence everywhere. Parents, he went on, sacrificed too much for their children to acquire values and an education, which were alien to their cultures of origin.
Instead of dwindling and withering away, such neo-Etonian schools are on the increase, as the need to provide an education adapted to and in tune with the needs of globetrotting expatriates and frequent flyer Africans with an appetite and ambition for global consumerism grows. But then, this criticism could well be exaggerated. Commenting on a draft of this paper, Ignatio Malizani Jimu, associate professor of Geography at Mzuzu University in Malawi, agrees the Academy was no doubt an expensive venture but maintains the school was not built for the elite: It was established to make elite of the non-elite given that while Banda ruled, selection into the Academy was not based on being monied but being brilliant.
It is even exaggeration to suggest that students were spoiled. One of my brothers passed through the Academy and many of my friends too, but they are just cool guys.
To some degree this critique reflects the patronizing attitude of the west Ignatio Malizani Jimu, comment, 26 March One can undertake the journey physically or one can do so psychologically through fantasy, admiration and desire with facilitation from education and the media. Either way, one still succeeds in imbibing European influences.
European-style training at Kamuzu Academy-type institutions is not just to compensate for the real Europe and North America where these students have not yet been. It is seen as preparing them for these places, where they ultimately go or yearn to go to make use of the skills they have acquired. It is hard to imagine African students, who have gone through all these stages of westernisation, returning home voluntarily to bear the misery and poverty of un- or underemployment with a stiff upper lip, however English they have become.
Brain drain has been an inevitable consequence, even if not every brain drain has been a brain down the drain. The failure by educational systems in Africa to contextualise standards and excellence to the needs and conditions of Africans has resulted in an intelligentsia with little stamina for the very process of development whose vanguard they claim to be Mamdani A situation compounded by the commercialisation of higher education, heralded by the World Bank and its neo- liberal market logic Mamdani A streamlined or McDonaldised educational system is too standardised, uniformised, technicised, depoliticised and detached to be in tune with the predicaments of ordinary and marginal Africans thirsty and hungry for recognition, representation and upliftment Zeleza and Olukoshi ; Mama The quest for western academic symbols of credentialism —sometimes termed diplomania Robinson — and veneration of qualifications obtained abroad have characterised postcolonial Africa.
Instead of seeking autonomous creative social reproduction through education — not easy to come by in any case Bourdieu —, African elites are still very much dependent on ill-adapted colonial curricula, sources and types of knowledge that alienate and enslave, all in the name of modernity. Education for Africans has, in the main, tended to be an exercise in self-evacuation and devaluation of all that took pre-colonial generations wisdom, cultural creativity and sweat to realise.
The fact that Africans have placed and continue to place a very high premium on getting educated in the west or in local variants and franchises of European and North American institutions has only compounded the problem. In South Africa for example, despite numerous local universities and a relatively long history of university education, a doctorate from Britain or the United States of America is still valued higher than anything obtained locally.
Some Africans would rather graduate from Oxford, Harvard or the Sorbonne, even if this means changing their specialisations to accommodate the limited academic menu offered in these heavyweight western universities. Parents continue to send their children to Europe, North America and elsewhere for education, with the conviction that a degree even from a commercialised and second-rate western university is worth a lot more opportunities than one from a purportedly top university in Africa, unless such African universities are those generally perceived to be western universities in Africa, such as some in South Africa.
Could this extraversion and xenophilia in matters educational explain the inability to radically transform curricula even when their irrelevance is widely recognition? And could this explain as well why struggles amongst academics over appointments and promotions sometimes have very little to do with the scholarly merit of what is endorsed or contested?
Europe and North America have for decades dominated the rest of the world with their academic products and cannons of knowledge production Gareau ; Ake ; Zeleza ; Canagarajah ; Nyamnjoh b; Mama In the social sciences and humanities, under which most of African studies falls, the west has been consistently more advanced and expansionist than underdeveloped and dependent regions of the world.
This approach and practice to scholarship not only demonstrates American power to define and determine the knowledge systems of the world. In another study focusing on International Relations, Kim Richard Nossal reached similar conclusions. In this context, perspectives sympathetic with the predicaments of Africa have suffered a great rejection rate by university curricula, reviewers for publishers, and academic peers who stick to their conceptual and methodological spots however compelling arguments to the contrary Ake ; Nyamnjoh b.
Little wonder therefore that disciplinary debates even in the 21st century can be so uneven across geographies, between African and Africanist scholars, and among various racial and social categories. Following the war, America, as a superpower exported its cultural values, through educational aid and the social sciences. In Africa, intellectual dependence is further exacerbated by lack of resources for research, and the fact that even the available resources can be wasted, underused, or badly used.
And without serious investments in research, western informed curricula is recycled, and teaching and learning remain void of African perspectives and ignorant of in depth understandings of African realities. African scholars are doomed to consume not books and research output of their own production or choice, but what their affluent and better placed counterparts in North America and Europe produce. Cooperation takes the form of North American and European universities calling the tune for the African pipers they have paid.
This concerns even the field of African studies, where Africanists appear as gatekeepers and Africans as gatecrashers Mkandawire ; Berger ; Zeleza ; Prah ; Mama Because the leading journals and publishers are based in Europe and North America and controlled by academics there, African debates and perspectives find it very difficult getting fair and adequate representation.
African academics who succeed in penetrating such gate-keeping mechanisms have often done so by making serious sacrifices in terms of the perspectives, methodologies and contextual relevance of their publications and scholarship Prah The situation is hardly facilitated by the infighting amongst senior and well connected scholars, who indulge in backstabbing, delight in frustrating others and using them as stepping stones.
It is common for academism to pave the way to political activism, not necessarily to advance the development of knowledge but rather ambitions of dominance outside the academy. And little wonder that the study of Africa continues to be dominated by perspectives that privilege analogy over the historical processes that should qualify Africa as a unit of analysis on its own terms Mamdani, ; Imam ; Amadiume ; Nnaemeka ; Oyewumi ; Mama The suggestion to study and understand Africa first on its own terms is easily and uncritically dismissed as an invitation to celebrate African essentialism and exceptionalism.
There is little patience with anything African, even by Africans. In this sense, a colonial epistemology that marries science and ideology in subtle ways for hegemonic purposes has dominated social science in and on Africa, and coloured perceptions of Africa even by Africans. This dominant epistemology has not always been sensitive to new perspectives that question the conventional wisdom and myopic assumptions of the coloniser.
It has stayed largely faithful to a type of social science induced and informed more by fantasies, prejudices, stereotypes, assumptions, ideologies or biases about Africa and Africans. Given its remarkable ability to reproduce and market itself globally, this epistemology has emptied academia of the power and impact of competing and complementary systems of knowledge Mudimbe x-xi.
Although research on and in Africa has shaped the disciplines and our convictions of a supposedly universal truth Bates et al. Under the dominant colonial epistemology, most accounts of African cultures and experiences have been generated from the insensitive position of power and quest for convergence and homogeneity. Explicit or implicit in these accounts is the assumption that African societies should reproduce colonial institutions and European ideals regardless of feasibility or contextual differences.
Few researchers of Africa, even in African universities, have questioned enough the theories, concepts and basic assumptions informed by the dominant epistemology. The tendency has been to conform to a world conceived without them Chinweizu ; Mafeje Missing are perspectives of silent majorities with vibrant but untold stories.
The dominant epistemology is thus deprived. It is littered with defective accounts of voiceless communities recounted by others. Correcting this entails paying more attention to the popular epistemologies from which ordinary people draw on a daily basis, and the ways they situate themselves in relationship to others within these epistemologies.
Considering and treating the everyday life of social spaces as bona fide research sites entails, inter alia, an ethnographic, participatory approach of active immersion in the popular in truly democratic, interdependent and interactive ways. However, because the popular epistemologies in question have been actively discouraged and delegitimized since the colonial encounters, there is need to revalorise them and the supposedly silent majorities shaping and sharing them.
To avoid the limitations of blanket assumptions, there is need for systematic and critical non-prescriptive research into these silent epistemologies of silent majorities. What is needed however is not so much pointing to isolated individuals perceived to be doing the right thing, but a critical mass of scholars and non-scholars networking and working together strategically towards achieving the valorisation of marginalised humanity and the creative diversity of being African.
Gerdes , , ; Djebbar and Gerdes has researched and published on mathematics, geometry and logic long practised by Africans in productive and decorative activities like mat and basket weaving, ceramics and sculpting, and in riddles and storytelling, and often illustrated by design patterns drawn on the ground and reflected in infinitely complex and varied dance steps, drum rhythms and melodies.
Equally instructive is research into local notions of time and calendars, ecological knowledge, farming, fishing and pastoral techniques, taxonomic knowledge in fauna and flora, pharmacopoeias and medical aetiologies, and diverse traditions of healthcare. Epistemological restoration and conviviality entails moving from assumptions to empirical substantiation of claims about Africa.
Hence the importance of questions such as: Who are these ordinary silent people? What do they do for their living? What is the nature of their epistemologies? Where do Africans, brought up under and practising the colonial epistemology, position themselves? How ready is the elite to be led by the silent majorities, further silenced with our elitist discourses? The angel may well be in the belly of the beast, just as the beast may well be in the belly of the angel. The colonial epistemology has survived in the continent more because it suits the purposes of the agents of neo colonialism than because of its relevance to understanding African situations.
Those who run educational programmes informed by this epistemology are seldom tolerant of challenge, stimulation, provocation and competing perspectives at any level. They want their programmes to go on without disturbance. They select as trainers and lecturers or accept and sponsor only those research questions and findings that confirm their basic assumptions on scholarship and the African condition. But African universities, academics and researchers have the responsibility to challenge such unfounded assumptions based on vested interests, hidden agendas or the habitus of colonial hierarchies of humanity and human agency.
Challenging and changing a system of thought is by no means an easy task, especially because scholars in Africa rely on these very agents of cultural devaluation of Africa to fund and disseminate their research. Few in positions of power and control would accept research critical of their ideas and practices, especially in a context where relations of unequal exchange with the outside world have already considerably diminished negotiating power and control of African scholars.
Researchers genuinely seeking the de-establishment of science narrowly construed, the democratisation of education and research, and the reversal of systemic and systematic intellectual poverty in Africa are more unlikely to find mainstream support and funding. Providing for Popular Epistemologies Domestication as a dialogical epistemological shift can only begin to take shape if research by Africans critical of conventional wisdom in academia is greeted with recognition rather than censorship, caricature or derision Obenga Forging such mutuality, in a spirit of partnership and interdependence, would help re-energize African scholars and allow for building a genuinely international and democratic community of researchers.
Global conversations and cooperation among universities and scholars are a starting point in a long journey of equalisation and recognition of marginalised epistemologies and dimensions of scientific inquiry. But any global restructuring of power relations in scholarship can only begin to be meaningful to ordinary Africans through educational institutions and curricula and pedagogies in touch and in tune with their predicaments.
In this connection, academics and researchers from and on Africa cannot afford to be blind to the plight of African scholarship whatever the pressures they face and regardless of their own levels of misery and need for sustenance. Nearly three decades ago Fonlon made a plea for African universities as spaces for genuine intellectuals dedicated to the common weal. For African universities and researchers to contribute towards a genuine, multifaceted liberation of the continent and its peoples, they ought to start not by joining the bandwagon as has been their history, but by joining their people in a careful rethinking of African concerns and priorities, and educational approaches Copans , ; Zeleza and Olukoshi ; Mama Here, as with popular epistemologies, the way forward is to encourage carefully thought through research, which from inception brings out endogenous African methodologies and perspectives.
And one cannot assume methodologies and perspectives are African simply because those doing the research and the thinking proclaim themselves African or look African. What are the origins? What assumptions underlie the content?
What practicability and outcome? Through greater reconnection with and adaptation to local and national socio-cultural contexts African universities might overcome functional and philosophical difficulties and make themselves more relevant to the needs of the countries and communities of peoples they serve Crossman and Devisch , ; Crossman ; Zeleza and Olukoshi a; Olukoshi and Zeleza b; Devisch ; Mama Initiatives for reconnecting universities to lived life and embedding research in African communities should be encouraged.
If Africa is to be party in a global conversation of universities and scholars, it is appropriate that this is done on its own epistemological and methodological terms, with the interests and concerns of ordinary Africans carefully negotiated, navigated and blended with those of the elite, in the African tradition of accommodation and appropriation.
These epistemologies and methodologies need systematic researching and consolidation into publicly accessible repertoires to be drawn upon by institutions and individuals, for scholarly and popular endeavours. Knowledge production and consumption in Africa remain incomplete without the systematic integration of all conflicting and complementary epistemologies, and space for scholarship and perspectives of all persuasions. As I conclude this paper, I can hear many of my readers screaming with frustration and inflamed by burning questions.
When shall it end, this blame game that African intellectuals play relentlessly — that has become a way of life? When the best scholars in and out of the continent have since independence ended their papers and books the way I have, who do we expect to come up with the appropriate epistemologies and methodologies we are recommending?
We speak of the masses and ordinary Africans, who exactly are they? And how frozen in time and space have they been since before colonialism? When shall we begin to put our action where we put our rhetoric?
When shall we graduate from mourning to doing? Who is to effectively mobilise whom around the crystallisation of these epistemologies and methodologies? Is it the young and upcoming generations that fascinates the world with their infinite abilities to navigate and manipulate myriad identity margins? Or is ours merely a case of preaching without practice, text without context? If that, how honest are we about this decision to keep ourselves distant from what we write about or bring to the market place as African knowledge?
How can we be taken seriously by ordinary Africans, our students and our peers locally and globally, if we continue to sound like a broken record, stuck at the point when colonialism was in town? The test of our theoretical prescriptions must be in the practical implementation. Why has it taken me, Professor Francis Beng Nyamnjoh, this long to admit something this obvious? May someone less blinded by sight, someone less keen on keeping up appearances, step forward with leadership on this thorny resilient issue that makes Africa always a winner in the blame game.
And the question is how do they disembark or creatively negotiate for freedom: peacefully lest they plunge the rockets while they are on board. Seen in terms of interconnecting hierarchies of knowledge systems, the popular epistemologies of Europe or the west were just as much a victim as those of Africa, even if the hierarchy of races meant that the ordinary people of Europe and North America rightly or wrongly identified or were identified with the simplistic dualisms implicit in the elite epistemologies My final paragraph provoked a lot of comments.
I also think this provides a starting point for a very interesting ethnography Catherine Louise Jackson, comment, 13 April What he has in mind is to move away from a critique of colonial inheritance to a critique of neoliberalism and developmentalism that have dominated intellectual discourse. He writes: How did the radicalism of the past get wiped out? Where is it re- emerging? Where is new creative and transformative thinking taking place and why?
And can decades of neo-colonial education prevent the outbreak of struggles that we have seen in Tunisia, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Swaziland, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, etc.? Firoze Manji, comment, 24 April This questioning reinforces the complexity of challenges facing Africa and the importance of historical ethnographic approaches to investigating current predicaments — neoliberalism, developmentalism or otherwise —, to ensure that 10 Ifi Amadiume, comment, 5 April 11 M.
The comments by Manji question the extent to which one can hope to redress the herculean challenges touched upon in this paper, using conventional vehicles of scholarship — journal article, book chapters and books. The purpose of this paper is to make the point that as long as the colonial and colonising epistemologies remain the dominant framework, the mere passage of time or changing nomenclature ceases to bring about fundamental shifts in unequal relationships between Africans and the epistemologies that shape their realities.
Even when the conceptual rhetoric is right, it must be translated into practice. Way Forward These reactions reiterate the central concern of the paper: what way forward? If one were to opt for restitution, what are its possibilities and challenges?
What lessons could we draw from truth and reconciliation processes in Africa? Or from yet-to-be-fruitful demands by some African leaders that Africa has to be compensated for slavery? If colonial and colonising education can be regarded as another form of slavery, how possible is it to effectively demand for restoration? Still in other words, the extent to which genuine hybridity and negotiated identities are possible would depend on how ready Africans and non-Africans alike are to challenge a world where identities are claimed and denied through an emphasis on exclusion, not inclusion.
If Africa is dancing in a circle of intellectual captivity, how do Africans break the circle to set the terms in research processes? Might it be possible to think with scholars advocating Africanism without throwing the baby of African dynamism and creative encounters with difference out with the bathwater of white supremacy?
How, and to what extent, should regional and pan-African organisations play an effective part in the elaboration and implementation of new and relevant educational policies and ethics?
Is it also possible to think of the role of what has been called nonformal education? What roles beyond tokenism can families, neighbourhood groupings, local and regional common initiative associations, local and global social and professional networks, NGOs and advocacy forums, mainstream and social media play in the creative restoration processes?
Colonial education started uprooting Africans right from primary school. The colonial school imbibed with colonial epistemologies put Africans in greenhouses on their own soil. Reconnecting them to Africa and African ways must happen at multiple levels. Could fostering the production of international associations within and between professional colleagues, disciplines and fields of study and promoting debate on creative platforms among colleagues, researchers, experts and artists from the surrounding communities and through a plural partnership involving North—South and South—South networking be a way forward for such multi-versities?
Could the integration of local knowledges into curricula envisage not merely seeking to apply standard scholarly methods on local realities but the careful negotiation and blending of epistemologies?
How many scholars are ready to seriously consider genuine co-production of knowledge with people who may not have been to school in a formal sense but whose knowledge of the world simultaneously feeds and challenges knowledge produced within the framework of the dominant epistemologies projected and sustained by resilient colonial education? This is not to say sighted the blind would necessarily know the elephant, for reality is much more than meets the eye.
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