Past Editorial : March 2020

March 2020

From ‘dumb’ decolonisation to ‘smart’ internationalisation

Damtew Teferra is Professor of Higher Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Founding Director of the International Network for Higher Education in Africa. He is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of African Higher Education. Teferra steers the Higher Education Cluster of the Africa Union’s Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA). He may be reached at teferra@ukzn.ac.za and teferra@bc.edu. 

In 2018, Mahmood Mamdani wrote: “It is striking, in the postcolonial era, how little the modern African university has to do with African institutions.” He goes on to argue that the university “draws its inspiration from the colonial period”.

This article argues for a need to transition from archaic and ‘dumb’ decolonisation monologues to contemporary and ‘smart’ internationalisation dialogues that articulate discourses that strategically situate Africa at the centre of the global political and economic scenes. Read more on University World News.