\n<\/p>\n
African universities need to capitalize on what makes them African and reclaim how they are presented to the rest of the world, university leaders have told a Times Higher Education<\/em> event.<\/p>\n Kenneth Matengu, president of the Association of African Universities, said if universities on the continent were intent on decoupling the higher education system from Western ideals, more thought needs to be given to what this means in practice.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to ask the questions, when we are talking of decolonizing education, what we actually mean, and what does this look like when organizing higher education? How does it work?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Matengu, also vice chancellor of the University of Namibia, noted that there are more than 3,000 ethnicities and over 2,000 languages spoken in Africa, so institutions should consider \u201chow they are represented.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAccess to knowledge is limited to English, French and German. It\u2019s limited to no more than 10 languages. So to what extent are we really Africanizing this space? Our voices are limited in the systemic transfer of knowledge\u2026even a paper written by a top academic in his own mother tongue has no chance of being published in a top-tier journal,\u201d he told THE<\/em>\u2019s Africa Summit in Nairobi.<\/p>\n Matengu said Africa\u2019s higher education leaders needed to ask themselves: \u201cWhat do we actually have in Africa\u2014African universities, or universities in Africa?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor us to be able to say that we have African universities, we have to be able to have knowledge of sovereignty. We are not completely in charge of our knowledge sovereignty at this stage, whether that is in terms of saying, what is actually valid knowledge? Are we taking into account African values?\u201d<\/p>\n Puleng LenkaBula, principal and vice chancellor of the University of South Africa, said African institutions must \u201ctake the future\u201d and \u201creclaim the future,\u201d adding that universities in the region need to reclaim how they are presented.<\/p>\n \u201cAfrica does not suffer from a knowledge deficit, it suffers from a knowledge\u2013to\u2013real-world impact deficit,\u201d she said, explaining that \u201cmultiplicities of innovations that come out from us\u201d do not receive the impact they deserve.<\/p>\n \u201cCan Africa produce knowledge? We know that the answer is yes. The real question is, are African universities structured, resourced and empowered to transform knowledge that translates into meaningful innovation and social transformation?\u201d<\/p>\n She said universities are \u201cstill reeling\u201d from structural adjustment programs introduced in the 1980s, which saw funding drastically cut and forced universities to become self-financing. <\/p>\n \u201cThat followed the role of universities in contributing to the development of projects and aspirations of the people of Africa. It also made African universities sites of basic research and not necessarily complex research.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" African universities need to capitalize on what makes them African and reclaim how they are presented to the rest of the world, university leaders have told a Times Higher Education event. Kenneth Matengu, president of the Association of African Universities, said if universities on the continent were intent on decoupling the higher education system from<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[8121,2851,11935,489],"class_list":{"0":"post-47917","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-african","9":"tag-means","10":"tag-reclaim","11":"tag-universities"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}