Stranger in My Own Country

• In Event: Storying Educational Possibilities: Humanizing Teaching and Learning

Abstract

I am from the rural part of Port Shepstone, in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. I come from a society and a family that survived and still survives on informal learning. The learning takes place in diverse events and spaces, such as home environments, izimbizo (traditional community gatherings), istokfela (social clubs), Zulu dance clubs, storytelling, virginity testing, ploughing, herding cattle, and religion. African value systems, the culture, the rites of passage, celebrations, oral history and storytelling are the dominant institutions that educate an African child and the society at large (Graham, 1999). My learning within the contexts was rich and powerful.
My formal educational experience, however, has been saturated by the pain of being in an environment that ignores my culture, language, and tradition. Through this session, I indicate how colonial legacies became evident in my experience as an African student in higher education, and exposes the extent to which South African universities root (or uproot) the African students within their experiences, value systems, epistemologies, and philosophies (Asante, 2014). I focus this session on the need for the decolonisation of South African universities and curriculum. A culturally-relevant curriculum can only be obtained from the diversified and active deconstruction of education philosophies and the inclusion of African narratives. We have an urgent need for a humanising pedagogy (Zembylas, 2018) to combat the pain of the colonial legacy, and it is crucial for academics to be at the forefront of these changes.
Engaging in this storytelling and writing process through this book project made me realise that my experience as an African student in a previously White university has shaped my teaching philosophy into one that focuses on the need for teaching strategies that are influenced by students’ context. Otherwise, higher education will continue to be a provocative reminder of the colonial and apartheid legacies in the new democratic dispensations of the South African university (Bozalek and Boughey, 2012). Mbembe (2016) acknowledges the anti-African curriculum and structures of the universities in the postcolonial regime as perpetuating the un-healing of the past wounds. This means that the structural design and education of the university still serves to colonise Indigenous people. This suggests a need for learning and teaching to address structural injustices and alienating Eurocentric norms and cultures that sideline previously disadvantaged students.
This session therefore articulates the need for the university curriculum to be based on learners’ backgrounds, needs and interests. South African universities must validate students’ “home-based knowledge” (Vandeyar, 2019) in order to actively combat ongoing coloniality. My own experiences as an African student and African academic emphasise the importance of including Indigenous knowledge systems in education. Although South African universities have increased access for Africans, lack of an inclusive and context-based curriculum leads to injustice and exclusion, resulting in the alienation of the voices and experiences of African students. These are the same principles that governed the colonial and apartheid regimes—this is a clear call for decolonisation in the South African higher education system.

Author

• Thembelihle Makhanya, University of Mpumalanga