An Afrocentric
South African University
By Molefi Kete Asante
There is a unique situation that
now confronts South Africa in the educational arena, one that
should never return to confront any society. Institutions that
were based on white supremacy, not simple the separation of races,
are being challenged to find relevance within a free, democratic
South Africa. It is particularly important that educational officials
in South Africa raise the fundamental questions of culture, perspective,
worldview, and interpretation in the discussion of facts. While
all of these ideas are difficult to track in a multifaceted world
and in a pluralistic society one thing must be clear and that
is the demand for relevance in education is not so much a demand
for fitting people to jobs as it is for fitting them to life.
Given the latter opportunity people will create their own jobs
and find their way in the larger world based on their solid foundation
in their own culture, perspective, or worldview. I am interested
in this essay in the university because at the level of the university
one does not only find training going on but also the production
of knowledge, the creation of concepts, the promotion of ideas,
and the institutionalization of worldviews. The implications for
an educational system that has depended upon the white supremacist
political structure for its sustenance intellectually and economically
are great. In the first place there will be resistance to change
particularly if it is change that will create a more open university
and bring ideas and information from other parts of the world.
Obviously the South African whites were confident that they could
create an educational system that isolated them from the rest
of the world in terms of human knowledge while at the same time
further isolating the black majority from interactions with other
African cultures, the African diaspora, the African past, and
the revolutionary movements of the world. The university, normally
an institution of intellectual and artistic contact, became a
bastion of the same white privilege that cloaked the rest of the
nation.
A university is expressive of
the best ideas and ideals of a society and represent in many ways
the traditions of a people and as such it serves as a fundamental
center for the transmission of skills and values, ways of thinking,
and optimism for the future. The fact of the matter is that the
vast majority of black South Africans have been educated in the
Eurocentric mode whether or not the education took place in a
white or a black institution. The locus of the education has little
to do with the results. Since a university bears the mantle of
authority and is adorned with the semblance of fact the education
that is dispensed is often accepted without question.
Those Africans who have argued
and questioned the denial of ourselves and our stories in the
context of the university have frequently been failed, suspended,
or white-balled. The idea is to mold Africans who have Eurocentric
ideas, attitudes, opinions, tastes, and desires, and who therefore
are ready to defend those things that are European even if they
are antagonistic toward Africans. Every subject in the curriculum
of the Eurocentric university is permeated with white supremacy;
a student completes the curriculum to his or her psychological
peril.
After examining the catalogs
and brochures of several major South African universities it appeared
to me that in literature very few of the African literary masters
appear in the curriculum on world literature. Writers such as
Nicolas Guillen of Cuba, Abdias do Nascimento of Brazil, Richard
Wright, Langston Hughes, John O. Killens, Charles Fuller, August
Wilson, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin of the
United States, Manuel Zapata Olivella of Colombia, Estupinan Nelson
of Ecuador, Leopold Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal, Chinua
Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie of Nigeria, Derek
Walcott and Wilfred Cartey of the Caribbean should be an active
part of the literature curriculum and be studied alongside the
very many eloquent Southern African writers such as Wally Serote,
Herbert Vilikazi, Alex La Guma, Lawrence Vambe, Bessie Head, Masizi
Kunene, Mphahlele, and Stanlake Samkange and many others.
Every aspect of Eurocentric training
mastered by African youth contributes to Eurocentric social, economic,
and cultural domination if it is not counterbalance by an Afrocentric,
that is, African agency, perspective. While a Eurocentric education
has validity for the transmission of European culture, it negates
most African cultures and values because of its insistence on
cultural domination. The fact of the matter is that this notion
of cultural domination is based on the belief in African inferiority.
I contend that this belief, however deeply rooted in South African
society, must be challenged and confronted at every instance.
African culture in the 21st century will be, if anything,
a critique of domination of the sort imposed by Europe during
the 19th and 20th centuries.
What is needed in South African
are Afrocentric universities where human knowledge is presented
from the standpoint of African people. The attainment of knowledge
is a universal quest which is always achieved through one's own
eyes or through the eyes of another. Why should it be that Africans
are required to master the thoughts and opinions of Europeans
before they know the thoughts and opinions of their own people?
Why should not there be dynamic centers of education for the thorough
exploration of issues of society, psychology, history, mathematics,
and legal philosophy as well as every other art or science from
the standpoint of Africa? These centers of learning, which may
be built on the sites of the old apartheid universities, black
and white, should be opened to universal knowledge but should
not be factories for the glorification of Africa, as they have
been and often are for the glorification of Europe, but rather
institutions which find their inspiration in the cultural and
intellectual traditions of Africa. As such they will critique
even the use of Western names for the social sciences and arts
and raise more first order questions about the role of terms such
as civilization, education, democracy, and universalism. This
is the real business of the intellectual of the new South Africa.
At the present time most South
African universities remain inserted into the Eurocentric system
designed to maintain the Eurocentric system of world domination.
This is the truth despite the fact that Africans are in charge
of some of these institutions. It is rather like many of the black
colleges in the United States where the mastery of Europe culture
has received a premium over the mastery of African culture. One
of the greatest educational thinkers in America's history was
the scholar Carter G. Woodson who argued in his 1933 book, The
Miseducation of the Negro, that most black colleges taught
about white music, white art, white philosophies but not about
African art, music, and philosophies. While the South African
universities may not be as slow to change as the black colleges
were when Woodson made his charge about their use of the white
model of education to teach black students, it is usefu to remain
cautious and wary of any education that does not begin at home.
All mature societies educate their children about their own cultures
first. Extracting the South African institutions from such a system
will be a major task since many people have vested interests in
the institutions as they have been developed.
W. E. B. DuBois, the greatest
scholar of African descent and perhaps the most significant American
intellectual of the 20th century, wanted to see a university
where the total learning and cultures of the Africans people were
expressed. Prior to his death in l963 Kwame Nkrumah, President
of Ghana, discussed with DuBois the possibility of an African
university devoted to the cultures and practices of African people.
Such a university if constructed in South Africa would have to
begin with the African rather than the European model. It would
have to have Egypt and Nubia as the classical fountains for education
rather than Greece and Rome. It would have to be dedicated to
the transformation of the theoretical concepts that emerge out
of the African context into real, active, ordinary ways of improving
the lives of people. There is the possibility in this of a totally
different orientation to human studies.
Such a course is possible now
in South Africa but it will take a bold leader or leadership to
capture the day and erect the kind of structures that are necessary
for advancing the idea in the country.
