The paralysis in South African universities following protests by students demanding free, decolonized education persists. In an impressive show of solid defiance reminiscent of the nationalist struggle against apartheid, students at Wits University have issued a raft of demands to administration, even as there are no signs that a solution to the crisis is within sight.

A decolonised curriculum will not neglect other knowledge systems. Universities still have to develop graduates knowledgeable about the world and all its complexity. However, the education must be free from Western epistemological domination, Eurocentrism, epistemic violence and worldviews that were designed to degrade, exploit and subjugate Africans and other formerly colonised peoples.

South Africa’s population is 86% black. Yet between 2010-2014, the Department of Politics at the University of Cape Town has graduated only two black MA students. In 2015, 97% of black applicants were denied admission to the Masters programme. To-date there is not a single black South African enrolled in the programme. Has this exclusion become a way of carving out the task of thinking and intellectual production as an exclusive white preserve?

To tell whether Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has failed to implement the doctoral programme at Makerere Institute of Social Research requires that one is either a doctoral student, a teacher on the programme, or has done fieldwork at MISR with a research question on Mamdani’s ambition and its logistical requirements. Anything other than that is sheer gossip.

During this recent workshop on decolonizing publications and creating writing cultures, particular dilemmas and nuanced opportunities for the decolonization of knowledge were revealed and they are expounded at length in this reflection. It is our hope that this detailed reflection can serve as a rubric of important lessons for critical and Pan-African scholars who are immersed in decolonizing projects in their respective spaces and institutions.

In a long-running dispute, powerful people within the administration of the University of Sierra Leone are doing everything they can to push out Prof Ibrahim Abdullah. The latest report of an illegally constituted committee reveals the extent to which Prof Abdullah’s enemies are willing to go to deny him justice.

Prof Ali Mazrui was known for making penetrating comparisons of seemingly unrelated individuals, things and groups. It is fair to say that he was also a great classifier in general; nothing was unclassifiable for Mazrui whether it was racism, sexism, Africanity or slavery.

In an antagonistic relationship defined by an imbalance of power between two forces, the oppressor and the oppressed, who is illegitimate? Protests by students, workers and other oppressed classes can never be illegitimate. In any case, it is not the part of those enjoying the privileges of the status quo to decide how the oppressed should understand and deal with their reality.

Most of Africa’s political and economic elites retain a keen interest in determining how universities’ leadership is constituted. More and more student activities at universities are being organised along political party lines, which attests to new forms of politicisation.

The famous college, the oldest institution of higher learning in West Africa, is collapsing under the weight of incompetent leadership, poor facilities and lack of capacity. Only urgent, thoughtful intervention can save Fourah Bay College from imminent death.

The joint university experiment, by pooling resources within the same sub-region and drawing on the different strengths of the three member colleges and their respective host countries, represents an early and instructive model of South-South cooperation. 

Prof Adu Boahen who joined his ancestors ten years ago, left a worthy legacy to all Ghanaians, especially with regard to what must concern them most – living in freedom as proud citizens; a people able to choose their own governments, and prepared to be unsparing and vocal in their critical evaluation of the performance of those governments, once elected.

The ruckus kicked up by Dr. Stella Nyanzi’s nude protest against Prof Mahmood Mamdani, director of Makerere Institute of Social Research, refuses to die down. Responding to an article by three fellow graduate students in support of Dr. Nyanzi published in last week’s issue of Pambazuka News, another student now offers a different take on the controversial academic and the situation at the institute.

Gone – maybe forever – are the days when thirst for knowledge to improve oneself and to contribute to a better society drove young people to seek higher education. These days university students and products of related institutions would only be able to perfectly reel off the names of rappers, footballers and DJs as well as post countless meaningless material on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the like – with little understanding or interest in the realities of their society.

The project of genuinely decolonizing the university must be part of an inclusive task to transform the wider society of which the academy is an integral part. It is a long term undertaking which surely starts with the audacity to name the elephant in the room: white supremacy.

Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda is in turmoil following a confrontation that saw one lecturer, Stella Nyanzi, stage a nude protest against the institute’s director, renowned scholar Mahmood Mamdani. The conflict has exposed serious administrative problems at the institute. A group of international scholars have waded into the controversy by addressing a petition to the Vice Chancellor of Makerere University.

If the controversial government program sounds too good to be true, it is. Given the inadequate research and planning, the partnership plan will have no impact on quality, little impact on innovation and it will do little to improve Liberia’s education system.

In January, Liberia's education Minister George Werner announced that the entire pre-primary and primary education system would be outsourced to Bridge International Academies to manage. The deal will see the government of Liberia direct public funding for education to support services subcontracted to the controversial private, for-profit, US-based company.