Doctoral training in Africa still Western clone – Study

Are doctorates awarded by African universities caricatures of Western higher education in terms of conceptual, ethical and philosophical approaches that cannot decolonise African knowledge systems? Three scholars from the University of South Africa (UNISA) say the answer to this question is yes.

Professor Mishack Gumbo, a specialist in technology education with specific reference to indigenous knowledge and curriculum, Professor Christopher Knaus, a sociologist and race scholar, and Professor Velisiwe Gasa, the head of graduate studies and research at UNISA, have called for intensive reconstruction of African PhDs and other doctorates.

In the study, ‘Decolonising the African doctorate: Transforming the foundations of knowledge’, published in Springer’s journal Higher Education on 30 January 2024, the three academics argue that production in African universities has continued to reinforce Western hegemony and values over the African continent.

“Despite revolutions, ongoing student protests and long-standing transformational efforts, African higher education remains steeped in a colonial model, with current structures, approaches and purposes paralleling Western universities,” the researchers say.

Few studies written in indigenous languages

Highlighting the South African experience, the researchers note that almost all PhDs are written in English or other European languages, even when the study is about an African language. In this regard, the researchers argue that doctoral candidates formulate knowledge through Western thinking instead of focusing on developing knowledge that would be relevant to the continent’s development agenda.

In that context, the study castigates any form of academic colonialism that promotes a Eurocentric approach whereby the linguistic barrier limits what counts as knowledge and who is validated as knowledgeable.

Subsequently, to address anti-African perspectives in doctoral education, the study stresses that there is an urgent need to embark on a continuous anti-colonial struggle that “respects indigenous approaches to knowing the world, recognising indigenous land, indigenous peoples, and indigenous sovereignty”.

According to the researchers, a jump start could be made by acknowledging African world views based on ubuntu as learning principles in African universities. Ubuntu is an African philosophical concept that is embedded in the idea of the common bond of humanity as opposed to individualism. They assert that African indigenous learning approaches downplay individuality in favour of communal viewpoints.

Explaining this African philosophical perspective in his book African Religions and Philosophy, (1969), the late John Mbiti, who was a professor of theology and philosophy at Makerere University in Uganda, argued that the overall African world view is summarised by: “I am because we are and, since we are, therefore I am.”

Local knowledge, practices marginalised

Gumbo and his associates also point out that academic differences are widening between Western and indigenous researchers regarding approaches to research methodologies. Whereas, Western researchers tend to claim individual ownership of knowledge, indigenous researchers have long argued that one cannot discover knowledge, as knowledge already exists in the land and peoples.

Currently, that radical approach to research in higher education is being emulated by many African decolonial academics who think that African-based doctoral education has retained a commitment to what Gumbo and his team describe as “Western extraction-based research”.

Tracking South African doctoral education from 1946 when a South African university awarded a doctoral degree to a black person, Gumbo’s group argued that indigenous knowledge and practices have suffered marginalisation when it comes to seeking solutions to social problems.

Nevertheless, although doctoral graduates in South Africa and other African countries have increased steadily over the years, the study notes that doctoral education at African universities has, to date, remained like that at European universities. According to Gumbo and his associates, doctoral education in Africa has remained rooted in the exclusionary infrastructures of the European higher education tradition.

Research principles outdated, colonial

Drawing insights from Dr Ranjan Datta, an assistant professor at Mount Royal University, Canada, whose research is mainly about the decolonisation of indigenous peoples, Gumbo’s team urged African researchers to liberate themselves from a “fixed Western and academic mindset” to fit within many peer-review publications.

However, they admitted that it would not be easy in that, whereas many researchers challenge these principles as outdated, unethical and colonial, these practices remain the foundation of research preparation in African universities, ensuring that scholars there enact the same anti-African research.

The researchers singled out doctoral education programmes as “the societal levers to eradicate linguistic exclusion, intellectual hazing, and racism.

“We see doctoral education as the key to decolonising because doctoral graduates hold intellectual leadership roles in public and private educational, cultural, historical, and social institutions,” Gumbo and his associates state.

According to the three UNISA researchers, African universities must urgently break free from producing academic doctors prepared in isolation from African indigenous communities. Quoting Dr Rosemary Chigevenga, a psychology lecturer at the Great Zimbabwe University, in the study ‘Decolonising research methodologies in the Global South: Experiences of an African social scientist’, Gumbo’s study notes that research in Africa should benefit the communities from whom knowledge is drawn.

The position of Chigevenga’s study that the researchers refer to is that African research methods and processes borrow heavily from Western theories of knowledge which mostly ignore the values and norms of the researched. “Such an approach becomes more beneficial to the researcher than the researched and, in that case, efforts should be made to change the face of African research so that it captures the essence of African philosophies,” Chigevenga stated in her study.

Race-consciousness needed

To achieve that goal, the UNISA scholars propose radical reforms that would not only change how research is done in doctoral education programmes but also the purpose and value of schooling.

They also argue that doctoral graduates should be able to confront racism and inequalities. Citing the South African experience, they state: “While many in South Africa argue for an overly simplistic non-racial orientation, we recognise that race-consciousness continues to be needed.”

They propose that doctoral education should increase African voices by allowing local languages to be used in all stages of research processes and avoid the use of languages that are unfamiliar to the research participants. According to Gumbo’s team, doctoral education on the continent currently rewards students who speak and write within the linguistic confines of colonial academia.

In the researchers’ view, doctoral education in Africa should continually engage in an anti-colonial struggle against the denial of African languages, philosophies and cultures in knowledge production.

However, there are indicators that the pathways to academic decolonisation through reforms in higher education and the production of doctorate graduates will not be easy. The issue is that, at a practical level, the PhD studentship model in African universities is still highly individualistic and conforms to Western models of the production of doctorates in terms of research methodologies, supervision and postgraduate support seminars and workshops.

Ubuntu not seen in STEM

Further, whereas ubuntu had been lauded as a philosophical gateway to academic decolonisation of higher education in Africa, its spirit is largely rooted in social sciences and humanities, while it has a weak foothold in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

As Gumbo and his associates point out, entry into and through doctoral programmes in Africa remains too small, and one wonders whether such a group would engineer a successful revolution in higher education amid likely strong resistance from institutions and academic leaders who are bred and grounded in the tradition of Western conceptions of knowledge and doctorate production processes.

In this case, the challenge is whether the doctorate, the highest level of formal education one can attain, will continue in African universities being rooted in Western tradition or it will invoke the spirit of ubuntu with a view to developing the next generations of scholars and researchers who will uplift African knowledge systems and philosophies into the mainstream of global academia.