Using the metaphor of the elephant and the three blind men, this paper discusses some elements of the scholarly debate on the postcolonial turn in academia, in and of Africa, and in anthropology in particular. It is a part of the context in which anthropology remains unpopular among many African intellectuals.
Africa has always been an important source of rich information for knowledge production. There has always been a curiosity about Africa that has served different imaginations and interests.
On the occasion of the inaugural issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, we examine the many contradictions, contestations and possible pathways to decolonization.
This article explores decolonial priorities in Indigenous Studies, raises questions about the pedagogical approach, and challenges the primary educational goal for students, arguing that Indigenous Studies has become fixated on a simplistic decolonisation of Western knowledge and practices.
The article’s focus is the relationship between culture, indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), sustainable development and education in Africa. It analyzes the concept of sustainability with particular reference to education and indigenous knowledge systems.
If my experience of anthropology in and on Africa is anything to go by, there has been too much of engaged or public anthropology and too little of anthropology as an intellectual pursuit animated by rigorous contemplation and practice on and around a set of shared curiosities.
In this introduction, we outline the general conceptual framework that ties the various contributions to this special issue together. We argue for the importance of anthropology to “take on” mobility and discuss the advantages of the ethnographic approach in doing so. What is the analytical purchase of mobility as one of the root metaphors in contemporary anthropological theorizing?
The higher education system in Africa and South Africa in particular, is still too academic and distant from the developmental challenges of African local communities. The integration of African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) into the higher educational system could improve its relevance.
This paper draws on Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally.
Like other so-called ‘parallel’ practices in medicine, traditional medicine
(TM) does not avoid criticism or even rejection. Nyika’s article
‘Ethical and Regulatory Issues Surrounding African Traditional Medicine
in the Context of HIV/AIDS’ looks at some of the issues from
a traditional Western ethical perspective and suggests that it should