Abstract
This chapter addresses the challenge of coloniality in the promises of modernity and cosmopolitanism to higher education in Africa by highlighting that Western higher education was founded under classical modernist and classical cosmopolitan perceptions of how the world ought to be ordered (or modernity) and how to nurture planetary conviviality (or cosmopolitanism). When we conceptualize higher education and scholarship within perspectives engendered by narratives of modernity and cosmopolitanism, even if at a critical modernist level, we rule out the problem of coloniality and fall short of being critically critical. I call for an engagement toward a de-bordering, de-centering/de-peripherizing, and de-colonilizing.
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- 1.
We need to read this with the understanding that Western dominance in the knowledge sphere has influenced our perceptions and understandings, or place, of qualifies such as experience and verification in non-Western contexts.
- 2.
The use of ‘so-called’ is intended here as an outright expression of activism and protest against the promotion of some knowledges and cognitive systems (e.g., Western) over others.
- 3.
See Cossa, J. (2011). Al di là del “mito”: un ritrato di Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane negli Stati Uniti d’America. In Luca Bussotti & Severino Ngoenha (Eds), Le Grandi Figure dell’Africa Lusofona. Fra storia e attualità, Aviani Editore, Udine.
- 4.
During my school years as a student at Escola Secundária Estrela Vermelha in 1981–1982, in Mozambique, I took a subject called Educacao Politica (Political Education) which attempted to advance the government’s agenda to create um Homem Novo, that is, a New Man.
- 5.
This is my own addition to capture a historical and structural inception of a new form of cosmopolitanism.
- 6.
My term to refer to coloniality perpetrated by African governments on their people.
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Cossa, J. (2018). Addressing the Challenge of Coloniality in the Promises of Modernity and Cosmopolitanism to Higher Education: De-bordering, De-centering/De-peripherizing, and De-colonilizing. In: Takyi-Amoako, E., Assié-Lumumba, N. (eds) Re-Visioning Education in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70043-4_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70043-4_11
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