Page 18 - Research & Innovation Report 2020

HUMANITIES

Awakening the African canon

The systematic erasure of African knowledge has stripped society of values and world views
that need to be reawakened through our universities. This is an important undertaking in
revitalising the humanities at Mandela University.

The language and the cultural practices of amaXhosa systems, linguistic and cultural values. These archival records
are gradually disappearing because of the Word and the are historical data and they are heritage. They are important in
present “light”, brought by nations from the West … presenting an African perspective to African historiography.

It is the responsibility of the Xhosa youth to consider “We are focusing on reclaiming these African intellectual histories
with extreme care [the question of] when these and the of the Eastern Cape and arguing for their inclusion in the academic
language disappear, and the dignified cultural practices canon. In addition to contributing to the republication of the works
cease to exist, what else will follow? of Black South African writers and intellectuals from the 1800s,
such as William Wellington Gqoba (1840–1888), Reverend Jonas
S.E. Krune Mqhayi, Preface to Ityala Lamawele, 1014 A. Ntsiko (1860–1915), and Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi (1875–
(translated from isiXhosa original) 1945), our aim is to position our university as an archival site for
such works, especially from influential oonozala (sources of life)
“When talking about coloniality and the role of educational
institutions in including African epistemological frameworks in
curricula otherwise dominated by Western knowledge frameworks,
people tend to link these to contestations about teaching and
learning in the 1980s, or to #FeesMustFall or #RhodesMustFall
student protests, or to philosophers like Walter Mignolo or Frantz
Fanon. These are credible, but what many don’t know is that the
contestations date back to the 1800s in the Eastern Cape,” says
Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Professor Pamela
Maseko.

“In January 2021, we started the Curriculum Conversation Series,
to challenge the faculty to reflect on practices that inform our
scholarship, and start asking critical questions such as: Whose
knowledge is privileged in the academy? How do we respond
to gendered university spaces? How do we reimagine an Africa-
purposed curriculum? It’s a process during which, for example, we
look at the writings in the late 1800s and 1900s of Mqhayi – one
of the early African intellectuals – whose writings in isiXhosa were
a form of political and cultural resistance. IsiXhosa was one of the
first local languages to be systematically written down, a century
before Afrikaans,” says Prof Maseko.

With the advent of missionary education in 1823, black women
and men in the Eastern Cape started to articulate, in writing, their
discomfort with an education that uprooted their knowledge
and values and replaced them with Western values. Prof Maseko
explains: “These writings from the early black African intellectuals
are mostly in isiXhosa, and in newspapers, which they adopted as
platforms to contest missionary censorship of indigenous thought

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