Asinamali marks CAFA's first enquiry into academic freedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Asinamali means 'We have no money' and is a phrase that was often sung in the struggles against apartheid. A key demand of the struggles against apartheid was, in the famous words of the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People in 1955, that 'The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened". But in the ten years since the end of apartheid the South African university system has been rapidly commodified with the result that students who are poor are increasingly being excluded from university education, often at gunpoint, and research and teaching are once again being organized in the interests of elites. But the commodification of education in post-apartheid South Africa has been vigorously contested by student struggles. Thus the old language of resistance is back on South African campuses.
The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) decided to challenge segregation in schools and took the Brown cases to the Supreme Court. After combining the five cases in one large case, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were illegal. Speaking on behalf of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren found that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ had no place. Separate education facilities are inherently unequal.” Brown v Board of Education signaled the end of the legality of segregation.
"The following essays and speeches have been selected from among numerous attempts to address the relationship between educational and the national liberation struggle, All of them were written or delivered in the period 1985-1989, which has been one of the most turbulent periods in our history, more especially in the educational arena." -Neville Alexander
This book seeks to enter the crucial debate on educational language choices in Africa which began with the arrival of missionaries and took varied forms over the years. In her book, Roy-Campbell examines the link between the languages of instruction in former colonies and the kind of knowledge produced in the schools. She explores issues such as who decides which language should be the medium of instruction in schools, the criteria for this decision, and the implications of this decision for knowledge production and reproduction.
Few regions of the world can boast of having the same level of potential and natural endowments as Africa. Yet, it is a tragic irony that the continent is incontestably the most unsuccessful in providing the human and capital resources to sustain itself. It is thus a reasonable intellectual quest to query the intrinsic and foreign factors that account for the illusiveness of success in this realm. It seems, then, that the most logical social institution to turn to at such a time as this is education, most especially higher education. This book, Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa: Paradigms of Development, Decline and Dilemmas is thus a response to such an enigmatic paradox.
This study examines Islamic learning in Ghana over the 20th century. Informed and comprehensive, Islamic Learning, the State and the Challenges of Education in Ghana analyzes governmental attempts to introduce secular education through Islamic schools in a country where Muslims are a religious minority. The policy to bring such schools under the Ghana Education Service (GES) and standardized national examinations threatened the autonomy and proprietorship of the mallams (religious leaders) who had provided private Islamic tuition for generations.
As one of the first comprehensive look at an African university, this book tells the story of Makerere’s colonial beginnings, its efflorescence during the 1950s and 1960s, its calamitous decline during nearly two decades of tyranny and civil war, and its resurgence following the restoration of peace and relative stability. Throughout this history, Makerere has grappled with the fundamental question asked in this book: how to create a truly African university in an increasingly globalized world.
This book will provide further and deeper insight into the Nigerian socio-linguistic situation and its lessons or implications for other multilingual settings, especially with respect to the management of language as a social resource. As a handy, insightful and appropriate example of the African sociolinguistic situation in particular, and multilingual contexts in general, it could be used as a textbook on multilingualism both within and outside Nigeria.
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