Decolonizing the University in Africa

Since the euphoria of independence in the 1960s and subsequent attempts at decolonization of university education through promotion of perspectives grounded in African realities and experiences, African universities have almost without exception significantly Africanized their personnel but not their curricula, pedagogical structures, or epistemologies in a systematic and productive manner. Even a late arrival to political independence such as South Africa has, however reluctantly, embarked upon and covered some mileage toward Africanization of university personnel. Hardly addressed in any meaningful and transformative manner (even in countries that gained independence in the 1960s or shortly before), however, is the tradition of knowledge production and the epistemological order that informs it. This paper argues that any serious attempt at making African universities uncompromisingly inclusive institutions through embracing African traditions of knowing and knowledge production would require looking beyond the academy in its current configuration for inspiration. It uses the example of Amos Tutuola—a man of limited formal colonial education, and his writings depicting African universes as inspired by his Yoruba cosmology and ontology, to make the case on the reservoirs of insights and wisdom in the lived experiences of ordinary Africans, waiting to be tapped and channelled into the lecture halls of universities to refresh minds and reconfigure practice in the interest of a more relevant scholarship. The paper baptizes as convivial such a scholarship that dwells less on zero-sum games of absolute winners and losers, encourages a disposition of incompleteness and humility through the reality of the ubiquity of debt and indebtedness, and finds strength in themes of interconnections, interdependences, compositeness, and incompleteness of being that Tutuola’s writings exude.