Abstract
Higher education policies ideally become enablers of one’s identity, cultural knowledge, personal well-being and social belonging. Yet this basic fact is not always adopted by those who hold levers of power to affect system wide change. Equally true is that the primary need to make sense and to belong is nurtured at institutions of higher learning, which should seek to develop a generation of scholars and professionals who will serve the societies in which these institutions are situated. The counter reality to this expectation, however, is that colonial education has historically discouraged integration of students into the societies they should serve, used curricula based on foreign philosophies and alienated them from their indigenous knowledge systems). This chapter provides a summary of the issues discussed in the previous chapters. It brings to the fore the question: how could a post-apartheid South African university transcend a dehumanizing and colonial identity of oneness to an inclusive one based on African multilingualism? A wide array of studies presented has shown that language and identity are inextricably connected, and that they both predict academic achievement. This concluding chapter explains institutional identities based on a new understanding of multilingualism and offers possible alternatives for post-apartheid African universities.
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Makalela, L. (2022). To Be and to Know: Towards a Decolonized Multilingual University. In: Makalela, L. (eds) Language and Institutional Identity in the Post-Apartheid South African Higher Education . Language Policy, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85961-9_9
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