African Westernized universities: Hosts of epistemological exploitation and colonization

Abstract

African universities are replicas of Western universities. They are local instantiations of a dominant academic model based on a Eurocentric epistemic canon, a canon that attributes truth only to the Western ways of knowledge production; a canon that disregards other epistemic traditions. This canon tries to portray colonialism as a normal form of social relations between human beings rather than a system of exploitation and oppression. This reality begs for a higher education decolonization agenda. Thus, in this article the authors intend to engage theoretically in a processus of delinking/disobedience by bringing forward other principles of knowledge production and understanding. The traditional role of Westernized universities in Africa has been to train and nurse an elite, to proselytize and westernize Blacks so that they attend to the ongoing subtle colonization of the continent. The forces of globalization and neoliberalism continue to dominate current educational discourses and have only further entrenched Northern epistemological hegemony. The challenge is how to de-link the western epistemic traditions from our curricula, the ways that we teach and assess and the dominant Euro-American theories that underpin our research and scholarship.