African Scholarship and its Integration within the Global Knowledge Economy : Reflections from within the University of KwaZulu-Natal

Abstract

Over the decades there have been continuous efforts to position African scholarship within the global knowledge economy. Against the backdrop of marginalisation and domination, the champions of African scholarship have been engaged with political, ideological, and philosophical agendas that attempt to legitimise the African knowledge enterprise. Using an anthropological lens, this paper presents the nuanced local/global dialectics related to the recognition of African scholarship. The paper is based on the reflections of a selected number of academics of African origin from the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It highlights their subjectivities towards the elusiveness of this concept and attempts to seek its relevance as a knowledge space within the global knowledge economy. Branded as the premier university of African scholarship, UKZN has embarked on vigorous curricular, pedagogical and research initiatives that seek to bring the meaningful transformation needed to position the institution as a truly African university. This meaningful transformation can only be achieved if knowledge production in on Africa is cognisant of an African worldview, encompassing African cosmological, ontological, and epistemological perspectives. Interviews with those who participated in this study revealed the need for African scholarship to go global. Although this was emphasised, the approach to it revealed three streams of scholars who are termed in this paper as the idealists, the moderates, and the extremists. Despite their varying subjectivities, the conclusion drawn from the interviews pays allegiance to Afrocentric paradigms as the only way African development can be achieved as it connects with other global knowledge systems.