Publish and Flourish is an annual event that recognizes the accomplishments of our faculty and staff who have published a book within the past year. In connection with the Office of Research, the UW Tacoma Library celebrates the achievements of our campus community. The UW Tacoma Library purchases all faculty and staff publications to make them available to the UW community. This week we are highlighting:
Decolonising African Higher Education: Practitioner Perspectives from Across the Continent
Editor: Christopher B. Knaus with Takako Mino and Johannes Seroto
Department: School of Education
“Across the African continent, college student activists have long fought to decolonise African institutions. Reflecting ongoing Western colonisation, however, Indigenous African languages, thought, and structures remain excluded from African universities. Such universities remain steeped in Eurocentric modes of knowing, teaching, researching, and communicating. Students are rarely afforded the opportunity to learn about the wealth of knowledge and sustainable wisdom that was and is generated by their own home communities. Such localised Indigenous African perspectives are critical in a world committed to anti-Black racism, capitalist materialism, and global destruction.
This book thus clarifies decolonial efforts to transform higher education from its anti-Black foundation, offering hope from universities across the continent. Writers are university administrators and faculty who directly challenge contemporary colonial education, exploring tangible ways to decolonise structures, curricula, pedagogy, research, and community relationships. Ultimately, this book moves beyond structural transformation to call for a global commitment to develop Indigenous African-led systems of higher education that foster multilingual communities, local knowledges, and localised approaches to global problems. In shifting from a Western-centric lens to multifaceted African-centrism, the authors reclaim decoloniality from co-optation, repositioning African intellectualism at the core of global higher education to sustain an Ubuntu-based humanity.” — Routledge
Review (from Routledge):
“This is a tasty collection of well researched and conceptualised chapters on the urgent matter of decolonising higher education in post-colonial Africa. The book contributes substantially to unravelling a prevailing conceptual paralysis on the subject of decolonising higher education and will be an excellent companion for researchers, students, policy makers and practitioners with a focus on disrupting the stranglehold of the western canon on Africa’s higher education.” — Felix Maringe, Professor of Higher Education, University of the Witwatersrand
While we’re working to add this to our collection in the UW Libraries, you can still check out Decolonising African Higher Education through one of our worldwide partners. Need help? Ask us how!
Find out more about the author here.