There is much talk on the need to ‘decolonize education’ in Africa. However, usually this restricts itself to calls for reforming the University curriculum. On 9 February 2021, I published a blog on the website of the ‘Africa Knows!’ Conference on this issue. In it, I argue that decolonizing education should go beyond decolonizing the University curriculum: it should start with a re-thinking of the educational pyramid as a whole. Instead of conceiving it top-down (as was the case in the colonial period), it should be re-thought bottom-up.
In order to do that, the role of indigenous languages as medium of instruction should be taken into account; they are now too often the ‘elephant in the room’.
Read the whole blogpost here: https://www.africaknows.eu/decolonizing-the-curriculum-is-that-all-there-is-to-it/
In addition, I gave a talk at the Conference on ‘Culture and Language – Empowering and Disempowering Ideas’. The paper it is based on is at researgate.net. The talk itself can be seen on Youtube – it runs from minute 20.54 to 30.50.
The talk was also the topic of a podcast interview by Roos Schepers in two parts: one and two.
africanations 