Transformative internationalisation must involve alumni

“We, the participants in the Global Dialogue, hosted by the International Education Association of South Africa (IEASA) on 15-17 January 2014 in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, representing nine national, six regional and nine other organisations with national, regional and global responsibilities, from around the globe, declare our commitment to emphasise the importance of decision-making and practices in the development of internationalisation activities that are imbued by ethical considerations of inclusivity.”

The Nelson Mandela Bay Declaration signalled the recognition by stakeholders within higher education internationalisation of the need to rethink and consider different modalities of international collaboration. It is now five years later and the discourse has changed dramatically.

During the Global Dialogue not a single participant referred to the dangers of nationalistic or, as other authors call it, ‘alt-right’ supporters. Even though discussions about the impact of globalisation on higher education internationalisation were foregrounded during the debates, they did not dominate the discussions.


The focus was, however, on addressing higher education internationalisation inequalities which are enhanced by globalisation and are said to create a complex, unjust global reality.

With the current global state of affairs characterised by a dynamic plurality of contexts, any future Global Dialogue would have quite a different agenda. It could depart from the realisation that any future global engagement should be defined by an understanding that such engagement should not only be framed by local, national and global contexts, but also by the complex entanglements of the conditions in and between them.

Hybrid cultures

According to Dr Devindra Malhotra, who gave the “Challenging the Knowledge Hegemony of the West” keynote at the Global Dialogue event, what we observe in the world today are “overlapping migratory movements of cultural formations against the backdrop of global division of labour”.

Cultures are not frozen in time; and their evolution, for both good and bad, is dependent on the nature and scope of interactions between different societies. What we have today are hybrid cultures in different countries as a result of what Malhotra terms “continual and often negotiated discursive discourse”.

We are currently witnessing a change in national identities and cultures and innovations in international academic exchanges and engagement by higher education institutions. This will play a crucial role in determining the emergent global identity.

Internationalisation of higher education can no longer be seen to be practised only within and by higher education institutions. It needs to leave ‘the university’ and live in the broader society. The notion of entanglement accentuates reciprocal, uneven connections between different contexts and their unforeseeable side effects.

The current debates in South African higher education institutions are a good example of this. They could provide different forms of engagement that offer new innovative answers if the colonial entanglements and continuing efforts of decolonisation were phrased differently in ways that show that internationalisation of higher education and the global connectedness of higher education institutions form part of a complex entangled reality.

This reality cannot be un-entangled without the realisation that the consequences of doing so are unknown. The same is true for the degree to which anti-globalisation spills over into anti-higher education internationalisation.

It is thus necessary that part of the future debate includes a real engagement with the different local communities influenced by institutional internationalisation activities. To begin to have a global impact the local and global should be joined together through those alumni who have returned ‘home’.

The benefits of global engagement

The following illustrates the opportunity that presents itself to South African higher education. The South African higher education system has become one of the most internationalised in Africa since it opened its universities to the world in 1994. It has maintained on average a 7% international student body, with more than 90% of these students coming from other parts of Africa.

An analysis of the data for the past five years indicates that more than 5,000 students from other parts of Africa have graduated with PhDs and more than 7,000 with masters degrees. As most of these graduates return to their country of origin, the value of their mobility becomes imperative.

The establishment of an East African Alumni chapter by Nelson Mandela University in 2009 provides an excellent example of what should be done to introduce regular interaction between the ‘global’ and the local, enhancing the connection between the global, the South African experience, and the local, the home country.

The translation of the global to the local will, however, only impact the local community beyond the university community if intentional internationalisation activities are implemented through alumni.

Planned activities such as the celebration of the South African independence day and the centennial celebration of the birth of Nelson Mandela by alumni with the South African High Commission in Uganda in 2018 not only allowed alumni to reconnect with their alma mater, but it demonstrated the connectedness of alumni. It further demonstrated the benefits of global engagement and the internationalisation of higher education to the broader community.

The value of such interactions should not only be measured by the value to the university that provided the education. The focus should also be on how it has connected the East African communities with the South African community beyond the higher education institutions within these countries.

The conversations should focus on understanding and explaining the complexities of entangled sustainabilities, providing guidance in developing local answers to complex issues that can only be solved through the fusion of the knowledge developed during the intellectual experience that straddled, internationally, different indigenous and modern knowledge domains.

Nico Jooste is director of the African Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation (AfriC), South Africa.