AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES IN THE 21st CENTURY

03 November, 2005

INTRODUCTION

African universities are part of a fast changing landscape of higher and tertiary education globally. They are part of the new world order, they have to search for new ways of funding, forge mutual partnerships and collaborations not only amongst themselves but also with business, community organizations. They have to be more accountable to the public and societies they serve and also become global entities, which compete for visibility, excellence and recognition.

In South Africa, in particular some of the universities had to engage in mergers. These mergers brought fundamental and irreversible changes in the landscape of higher education in South Africa. Transformation, equity, access, excellence and African scholarship are some of the central concepts that form the common thread of the visions and missions of the newly merged institutions in South Africa. The visions and missions imply a strong recognition of and rootedness into the African conditions and engaging with the universe from a position of strength and contextualised identity. Mandani (1997) puts this in clearer words, “excellence has to be contexualised and knowledge made relevant”. Mamdani also talks about the responsibilities of being an African university which amongst other things serve to adapt our scholarship to the social structures and cultural environment of Africa but by also producing knowledge that takes the African condition and the African identity as its central problem.

Shaping and appropriating African universities in the national and global arenas therefore, is beyond the conventional functions of universities, it includes other variables, areas of intellectual responsibilities and scholarship.

African universities have redefined themselves through their vision and mission. These visions and missions are in line with the broader national ones, the university’s is focused, specialized and limited. The mission of this University challenges us to draw our inspiration primarily from our environment partly by generating developmentally relevant research, be socially responsive and to provide community service. The African context in our vision and the global approaches shape the role and relevance of the higher education in the 21st Century. African universities have to confront some fundamental and difficult questions such as:

Access: who must access higher education, how do we increase and sustain throughputs?

African scholarship and scholarship: In 1956, Pan-Africanist leader, Kwame Nkrumah, said:

“We must in the development of our universities bear in mind that once it has been planted in the African soil it must take root amidst African traditions and cultures”.[1]

Nkrumah’s insight was that for an African university to be truly useful to Africans, and I want to add -- to the world -- it has to be grounded in African communities and cultures. This does not mean that the African University is an insular or parochial entity. On the contrary, the African University is an institution that has the consciousness of an African identity from which it derives and celebrates it strengths and uses these strengths to its own comparative and competitive advantage on the international stage. The African university draws its inspiration from its environment, as an indigenous tree growing from a seed that is planted and nurtured in African soil.

A number of authorities have illustrated in different ways that a University which understands its context and its society is both desirable and necessary:

§ On the characteristics of an American university, a former Harvard President once said: “A university must grow from seed. It cannot be transplanted from England or Germany in full leaf and bearing. When the American university appears, it will not be a copy of foreign institutions, but the slow and natural growth of American social and political habits”.


There are specific areas which I believe universities must focus on if they want to be agency of development, transformation and promotion of democracy. These areas are focus on and strive for:

1. Quality and excellence

The pursuit of excellence as the trademark of the university enjoins academics, students and administrators to pursue merit and excellence. I share Goma’s view (1991) that such excellence must be dictated primarily by African aspirations, and by the quest to deal effectively with the central conditions and problems. Towards the achievement of this pursuit, the University must be able to attract good students from all walks of life and social classes, and to attract, as well as, keep excellence in faculty. Equally important, it is for the University to provide the necessary conducive environment to learning, teaching and social engagement through resources and infrastructure support. Again, quality and excellence talk to issues of access, retention, recruitment and retention, size and shape of our universities and relations with the state.

2. Creativity

The University must engage in teaching, research, community service and skills development in order to acquire and transmit knowledge and skills that work (Ajayi, Lameck, Goma & Johnson 1996). This is particularly relevant to Humanities, professional and development disciplines that respond to social issues, concern themselves with quality of life, problem solving and seek solutions that work

Mission statements of the Universities raise a number of questions for the development, human and social science disciplines, manangement studies, . Some of the questions are:

How to develop the necessary socio-economic environment conducive to quality academic pursuit

· How research can be made to contribute to and play a more active role in the elimination of poverty, hunger, diseases, ignorance as well as production of excellent and creative graduates

· What kind of graduates does our society need in order to face up to the new challenges? How can such graduates be developed into international scholars, professionals or academics?

These are some of the questions which talk to the broadening of scholarship in higher education meeting the challenges of the 21st Century.

3. Relevant knowledge

African universities /universities in Africa are not only expected to be centres of “ academic excellence” but because of the developmental imperatives, they also have to be “centres of relevance”.

Again here, a number of questions come to mind: Do communities look upon our university to provide answers and explanations to issues that bother them? Are we seen to be improving the quality of lives of people? Are we seen to be providing conceptual guidance and critical social analysis?

Are we providing moral guidance and sense of values in the present day South Africa? Do we produce knowledge that takes the African conditions as its central challenge? Can the knowledge or studies we produce embed on external spaces of knowledge?

What are our graduate outputs? Are we producing the highest number of persons who fail by virtue of coming from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds?

4. The developmental university/transformation

As indicated earlier on, universities in South Africa in particular, and Africa generally are expected to participate in the policies and processes of national development. The concept of “developmental university” (Yesufu, 1973; Court, 1974; Saint 1992) was coined to highlight this role. The African university of the 21st Century has to grapple with redefining the notion of academic freedom, ethical accountability in research and social engagements and repositioning itself on the basis of national, regional and global imperatives and declarations. What Achebe (2004,2005) describes as meaning, penalties, responsibilities for African universities is critical in locating and positioning higher education in the knowledge industry and in shaping our future as nations.

Each of these tags,” says Achebe, “has a meaning, and a penalty and a responsibility...”[2]

A meaning; a penalty; a responsibility.

We have to face all three of these difficult concepts if we are to reconfigure ourselves as an African university in an African country, rather than – as Nadine Gordimer suggested in reference to South Africa – as “an Africanized outpost of the West”.[3]

We have to face and indeed overcome the penalties of a colonial history: -- the valorization of western academia, insufficient levels of pride and faith in African achievements, a heritage of complex racial dynamics, an unequal distribution of national resources.

But most importantly of all, we have to face the responsibility of being an African university, for it is here that I suspect we will also find our most honorable identity; an identity that will also give us a distinctive brand. These responsibilities are moral, intellectual and inspirational and they are served by adapting our scholarship to the social structure and the cultural environment of Africa.

The language Question

I would like to touch briefly on the question of language

It would be remembered that in South Africa, the language question in education was one of the issues that led to the student uprising of 1976. It is this uprising that served as a catalyst for a series of events culminating in the democratic political dispensation in the early 1990s. Like her sister African states in the aftermath of formal independence, South Africa has to deal with the question of language – particularly, the language to be used in the courts, educational institutions, and the public sphere in general. During the apartheid era the situation was very simple: English had already established its hegemony by virtue of being associated with the colonial enterprise. On the other hand, Afrikaans nationalists actively promoted the use of Afrikaans as a second national language, using massive state resources to achieve their objectives. Black/African languages remained the languages of the Bantustans and never achieved national prominence beyond those borders.

It is perhaps this association of Black/African languages with the apartheid mission that led to some eminent Black scholars such as Mphahlele actively promoting the use of English as a medium of instruction. Mphahlele wrote as follows on this matter:


….the [South African] government has decreed that the African languages shall be used as the medium of instruction right up to the secondary school. The aim is obviously to arrest the development of the black man’s mental development because the previous system whereby English was the medium for the first six years of primary education produced a strong educated class that has in turn given us a sophisticated class of political leaders and s sophisticated following – a real threat to white supremacy (Quoted fro Ezekiel Mphahlele, letter to the Editor, Transition, 11, 1963).

As Ngugi wa Thiongo notes, the then government of South Africa did not restrict the use of language simply because it is inherently the best educational medium per se; it did so in order to limit access to the revolutionary literature available in the English language. There is reason to believe that being educated in a language other than English retards one’s intellectual development. There is a wealth of scientific literature that has been produced in French, German and other languages. For example, it is highly doubtful that intellectual giants of the German School of Critical Thought, such as Habermas, would have reached their intellectual potential if they had received their education in a language foreign to them. There is also a wealth of philosophical literature in Japanese ad Chinese, produced by communities who can hardly speak the Queen’s language. Would the communities have reached this level of intellectual sophistication if they philosophized about their people in a language foreign to them? That is highly doubtful.


Mother tongue education and concept Formation: The Russian School of Thought

To the contrary, there is strong evidence indicating that mother tongue education plays a major role in the child’s ability to form concepts, especially in the early childhood years. This literature has come many from the Russian scholarly tradition, and is represented mainly by the seminal work of Vygotsky. Vygostky, a Russian psychologist, argued that the development of mental concepts takes place at two levels. First, the child learns at the social plane, where significant others at his/her life, such as the parents, peers, and the like, play a critical role in educating the child. In the African tradition, the significant others could be extended to include the entire community, which is expected to provide social and moral education to the child. Later on, the child internalizes what he has learnt, and is now in a position to manipulate concepts on his or her own, without external assistance. If one assumes that there is substance to this socio-cultural view of learning, how is the African parent expected to meaningfully play that scaffolding function of enabling the child to master abstract concepts, if the concepts are being taught in a language that is foreign to both parent and child? It is not surprising that for the African child generally, learning merely becomes rote memorization for the sole purpose of passing examinations: learning is not internalized and owned by the child and it has no immediate applications outside the formal classroom environment (abstract not easy to related to ones broader life experience or even generate one owns repertoire of life competences). For the African child, there is this wide discrepancy between his or her lived world and education. For her/him, education is reduced to disowning not only his or her language but his lived experience and identity as well. Of course, the African middle class continues to play a major role in this, as noted by Frantz Fanon. For some of them, education has become synonymous with mastering European languages. It is not unusual to find African parents who derive immense pleasure from the fact that their children not only speak a European language without an accent, but also of the fact that they are completely ignorant of their own mother tongue. The high school experiences of high school learners in the 1ate 1960s and early 1970s, where mother tongue such as IsiZulu were made so difficult and abstract (emphasis on phonetics, for example) that the learner developed a negative disposition to the language and the “its not worth it” attitude.

For me, the question of language is closely linked with issues of access, retention, academic literacy and throughputs later when the learner enters tertiary education. Language is a critical issue for discourse and study for educator in training, scholars of language and sociolinguistics and scholars of language policy.

We are now delving into matters of identity, which we cannot explore at length here. Suffice to say that education, as demonstrated by the language question, is not a neutral process. To the contrary, it represents the very process by means of which subjectivities and negative valuations – ways of thinking about oneself and the world – are crafted. Kwesi Kwame Prah reflected as follows on this: