Repurposing the university in Africa against an explicit racist epistemology

Abstract

The university in Africa is, historically speaking, a function of its colonial history and this has had severe implications for knowledge production and the nature of such knowledge in Africa. Logically, the Europeans classified themselves as fully human and, therefore, they declared humanity to be in its greatest perfection in the race of whites. The thesis advanced in this essay is that while it is indisputable that European epistemology constitutes a pyramid of knowledge, it is equally valid that African epistemology also independently and rightfully includes another pyramid of knowledge. Thus, this conceptual essay, which methodologically uses desktop research, looks at the prospects and challenges of reasonably reversing epistemicide as an ethical imperative for epistemic liberation with social justice as a necessary complement for repurposing the African university for the renewal of the continent. Towards this objective, Africans will need to dispense with their status anxiety or worries stemming from considerations of what Western academic orthodoxy would think, especially in light of deceptions that repurposing the university to be relevant to the African condition will lower standards and assertions that efforts at indigenisation offer no
creative breathing space.