Education

A second year comes to a close and we find ourselves in an extremely difficult position as a student movement.

South African students and a small number of progressive academics began a campaign in early 2015 to decolonise the curriculum at universities ‘by ending the domination of Western epistemological traditions, histories and figures.’ In part

In the afternoon of the 24th August 2016, the HoD of Politics at University of Cape Town addressed to me a letter, whose contents we shall in a moment discourse about. He opens the letter with the following salutation, “Dear Lwazi.” He could as well have written, “Dear Dr.

As a fifth year graduate student soon finishing his assignments for the award of a PhD, and proud of the new regime of learning at Makerere Institute of Social Research (having joined Makerere University as an undergrad in 2004, and have never left), commentators claiming that MISR’s PhD project

Hosted by Jimma University’s young and enthusiastic College of Law and Governance along with the Vice President’s Office of Research and Community Relations, this 5-day writing workshop brought 36 scholars from nine countries to Jimma, Ethiopia.

On 11 May 2015 a memo was delivered at my house inviting me to a meeting: “Invitation to a meeting with an appointment sub-committee to look into the renewal of appointment of Dr. Ibrahim Abdullah”.

[Opening remarks prepared for Ali Mazrui International Symposium, organized by Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, New York, USA, and Twaweza Communications, Nairobi, Kenya. The Symposium took place in Nairobi, Kenya from 15 to 17 July 2016.]

Professor Adam Habib, the Vice Chancellor of Wits University, said in January when students were protesting for free registration: “This strike is conducted by only 30 people who are disrupting registration and learning and it is therefore illegitimate”.

Political interference in Africa’s universities is not new. Universities’ governance was seen as “captured” for narrow political rather than academic ends during the 1980s and 1990s.

I am currently hemmed in, battling anti-intellectual forces at our so-called citadel of learning—a broken citadel of learning, as creaky as it is disused; bearing all the hallmarks of its slavery and slavish heritage which we continue to reproduce ad infinitum, even as we sink deeper and deeper i