 Hello, good morning everyone and welcome to panel one of our conference on the colonizing knowledge production entitled contested spaces epistemic asymmetries, mobilities and identities. And I hope you manage to attend the welcome and the keynote conversation, the that preceded the panel. And, and I am now very pleased to welcome our first panel entitled the colonizing knowledge production after colonizing knowledge. And I will very briefly and introduce the four speakers. And then I will pass it on to them because we have quite limited time. And so I don't want to take too much time out. And we will have also time for the Q&A at the end of the presentations. May I remind you to put your questions in the Q&A box and then we will be we will aim to answer some of them in the time that we have. So I will, the first speaker for the panel are Dr. Awina O'Kage, a reader at the SOAS Center for Gender Studies. And Dr. O'Kage will will present the title of presentation is Africanizing knowledge at SOAS Reflections on the Africa Review. And Dr. O'Kage will be followed by Dr. Monica Otoo from the University of Quasulunatal, who is going to start his presentation is entitled, What is good for the world is good for Africa, Africanization of knowledge production in the context of globalization. And these will be followed by presentation entitled the structure agency problem in the context of the colonizing knowledge by Dr. Mira Sarabatna Tannam from SOAS University of London. And finally, we will have a presentation by Professor Paulus Zulu from the University of Quasulunatal, whose presentation is entitled the colonization and Africanization of knowledge, political or ideological concepts. Without further ado, I will now like to pass on to Dr. Awina O'Kage to start her presentation. Many thanks. Thank you very much Angelica and of course, great congratulations to the team at SOAS and UK ZN that have pulled off this collaboration. It's really a pleasure to be here today. So I have 10 minutes, let me set off my timer and then offer you what my reflections are for today. This talk that I'm giving today is based on a forthcoming paper which is a collaboration between a colleague and I on how to think about internationalization in UK universities using the prism of critiques on African studies. Now the UK universities I'm referencing here are SOAS where I teach and King's College London. The frame for the work is the Africa review process that was co-chaired by Professor Baderine and I in 2020, which was geared at examining how SOAS approached Africa from both a teaching research and partnerships perspective. Internationalization as a framework that anchors this paper is informed by my colleague's work, Professor Aloni Shakin at King's College London, who was vice principal internationalist thinking about how to reorganize a rethink dominant internationalization approaches, so that the ways in which the university that she works for and in approaches internationalization in a manner that's fit for purpose and that's responsive to a changing global environment. Another argument in the paper which is not necessarily what I will elaborate to any depth in this talk this morning is around an argument for an expanded framework for understanding internationalization in higher education and analyzing its role, particularly in relation to the delivery of inclusive education to a more diverse body of students and you will hear aspects of this today. What we ask is how a new internationalization framework might transform teaching programs as well as the student experience. So this presentation in a short while is going to set out the key axis for internationalization that we are interrogating and then I will retreat to looking at the debates on Africa at SOAS and the opportunities for rethinking internationalization that lie within how we grapple with what students and staff are telling us in relation to teaching on Africa at SOAS. Now the three key dimensions of internationalization that we are focused on in the paper at which therefore frame the presentation today. The first dimension is the role of education as driving social change in a global context through a change in outlook and society and really it's the idea that when students come to our universities when we engage in research, what is this broader global change strategy that this teaching and research is geared towards and ideally that our teaching and research is around fostering global consciousness and therefore this should be seen as part of the mission vision and values of any university. The second dimension of internationalization is connected to this idea of mobility right the movement of students and academic staff. More often than not internationalization strategies have often focused on outward mobility. And this has become embedded in policy and practice across academic institutions and here of course you're talking about your study abroad programs, visiting and joint academic appointments have become more commonplace. But what has rarely been addressed is how this international, this dimension of internationalization takes into account the needs or concerns of non-mobile home students, as well as non-mobile international students in essence and interrogation of the class dynamics, as well as the racialized dynamics that shapes who goes out and who comes in and benefits from this dimension of internationalization. The third and final dimension of internationalization that we concern ourselves with is to the extent to which internationalization is integrated into the overall university strategy and much more specifically into its education strategies. So here the focus is on curriculum design, cost development, and that internationalization should become part and parcel of this at all levels. The core argument here of course is that classrooms have become much more diverse and while the substance of teaching and learning and research has largely remained unchanged. Now I want to emphasize here that often when people hear the word internationalization, the assumption is that we are talking about catering to international students coming to universities, for instance, in the global north. But at the heart of it is around the question of global consciousness. So wherever it is that you're located in whatever part of the world in the university, how global is the curriculum, how comprehensive, how robust is it in relation to how students, whether they're home students or international students are experiencing or expanding their knowledge of the world. And again, underlying this idea of changing the substance of teaching and learning is around deemphasizing of course the western as part of teaching and learning, foregrounding diverse sets of knowledges from different parts of the world, not for their regional specificities, but for how those regional dynamics shape and influence our understanding of global concerns. Now why did we focus on area studies or why did it seem like it would be a good idea to do a collaboration that talked about internationalization strategy and to think about area studies as a space from which to rethink what global consciousness means, or to rethink what student experience and a diverse curriculum or a global holistic curriculum looks like. I think most of us who are listening today will know that area studies generally and African studies in particular have had their origins outside of the context that are being studied. African studies, for instance, in the US emerges in the context of the Cold War period and was therefore very deeply implicated in the explosive conversations around racial politics and imperialism, and somebody like Zelleza has written quite extensively about this. I teach as the unique history in Britain for being the first university to teach African history, and this was shortly after the Second World War period in which the British government was seeking to define its place and its changing interests after the Second World War. African studies therefore as we all know is often framed by the by its role in the history of colonization and rethinking African studies there. That many before me have already made. Right. And this is the fact that all knowledge accumulated throughout the centuries on different aspects of of Africa should be shared with people of the African continent. And one can think about this in relations to artifacts and knowledges sitting in archives in Paris in London in Lisbon, you know, our, our heritage that's seated in spaces far off than the continent from which they originated and owned by you know, imperial powers, if you will. The second is that adequate measures must be taken to facilitate a critical reappropriation of the very process of knowledge production. Again, one can frame this as part of the larger debates, you know that have happened across the African continent since the 1960s, framed through Africanization of knowledge, academic freedom and much more recently. In the 2015 16 period through the fissures for protests in South Africa, specifically, but there's a larger and longer trajectory of these conversations around African icing and the colonizing knowledge that has happened in various parts of the African continent and again, you know, somebody like mom dining has written quite recently about this history and narratives and folks like Paul's a laser as well. The side and central element on rethinking African studies, of course, is around acknowledging the power symmetries in the production and the consumption of African knowledge. In essence, how do we think about knowledge on Africa. How do we think about knowledge by Africans as part of this enterprise of both disrupting what what we consume as African studies do we even need to be talking about African studies, or do we need to be talking about knowledges on Africa, knowledges by Africans that are responding to global challenges and that are framing global debates on various issues. So that we avoid this this kind of nativization of what knowledge is from various regions it might be Africa it might be the Middle East that are framed as so specific to those regions, while knowledges from elsewhere somehow have a much more global appeal and global relevance. So where does source coming to this conversation as I've already alluded to before we have this unique history of being a university that was the first to set up a space within which to understand regions that the British government was had an interest in that interest of course we don't know is as colonialism. We, as a result of that history, our big brand has always been that we remain one of the universities in the UK that offers as a center of African knowledge if you will. There's a range of modules on Africa both at undergraduate and postgraduate level unique in our teaching on African languages, as well as cross cultural studies that sit in different departments. Again, the university has also developed a brand an externally facing brand as a pioneer and leader in the colonization part, part of that is of course around trying to reorganize the way in which so as thinks about regions that was set up to serve a particular role and how you make that fit for purpose in a world that is changing. Now the Africa review therefore is triggered by a moment where we are doing all of this work externally around decolonization. We believe that the institution has done quite a lot to reorganize the ways in which teaching on Africa Asia and the Middle East, which is the focus regions of the university has occurred over time, but students tell us actually very little has changed in the majority of the programs and the modules that they experience, and that there still remains a heavy focus on the western region that still remains a sort of racist if you will approach to thinking about understanding regions of the African continent, and much more importantly the absence of African voices scholarship and points of view within the very syllabi that they're experiencing. So in essence, a lack of coherence between this brand around decolonization and the experience in the classroom. The work was trying to figure out part of our work here I'm referring to the Africa review was trying to figure out how do we develop an approach that seeks to resolve this conundrum that the university find found itself in. And here in closing I want to offer the sets of conclusions we arrived at my 10 minutes is already up. The first was the importance of recognizing that at an institutional level those need to build a shared vision of the colonizing inclusivity is very separate from the colonizing of course so the colonizing inclusivity and interdisciplinary. Particularly in relation to teaching and understanding Africa. The second was the need for much more expansive reading of Africa that was not just about the continent Africa, but Africa in its really in relation to its diaspora. The third was around reducing and trying to blur the disciplinary silos, which then led to situations where people experience had very different experiences of teaching Africa, or understanding issues around the African continent, across the university so you had some sort of perhaps radical useful ways of framing the African continent understanding the African continent in a section of the university but very little may have changed in other parts of the university. And therefore, did the opportunity for interdisciplinary multidisciplinary work have to challenging colleagues to think differently about their teaching and research, but also to create the opportunities for peer learning across by academics and by students who are in Africa, not in in clusters around culture languages politics history, but around a range of transdisciplinary conversations, based on the global challenges that understanding Africa could offer to explaining and interrogating those global challenges. One of the suggestions that came from students was the need to rethink a program, a degree program that was temporarily named Africa and the Africa diaspora degree program that did a couple of interesting things. The first was to see the opportunity of the program as a chance to expand the sort of foot foot traffic if you will, of African and black diaspora academics from various parts of the African continent and the black diasporic world, meaning therefore that you relieved the pressure of one university, providing extensive expertise on a continent that's large on a range of political questions that are quite diverse and instead tapped into wider networks and teaching and joint collaborative opportunities as part of delivering this new vision about Africa and African diaspora studies looks like that again connects to the point around internationalization, which is around outward mobility inward mobility and dealing with the opportunities of blended learning to address class questions to address racialized communities that are often written out of these programs. I'm going to stop here so that I allow Monica to come in and I will raise some of my final points during the Q&A. Thank you very much. Thank you. Greetings, everyone. This is Monica from the University of Pasadena. The title of my presentation is what is good for the world is good for African, Africanization of knowledge production in the context of globalization. Before I begin my presentation, I would like to bring to the attention of the audience that I'll be using the concepts of Africanization and equalization interchangeably at least for the sake of this presentation. Thank you. I will be sharing. Sorry about this. The computer is giving me attitude now. Sorry. I seem to be experiencing a problem with my laptop. Without the slideshow Monica, without the slide. All right. Okay. Thank you. My topic again is what is good for the world is good for Africa, Africanization of knowledge production in the context of globalization. Like I said, before I begin my presentation, I want to draw to your attention that I'll be using the concepts of equalization and Africanization interchangeably for the sake of this presentation. So my presentation is centered around for key questions for quick key questions. Okay, my presentation is centered around for key questions. These are what is the discourse on about this is about to examine the nexus between globalization and Africanization or decolonization. Why is this important to Africa in the context of knowledge production? How is the African scholarship responding to this discourse? What does the decolonial discourse offer? Globalization remains a contested area among southern economies because of the obvious reason of asymmetrical power relationships that exist between the north and the south. And again, because most of the narratives around globalization has been theorized from northern perspectives, which of course indicates a perpetuation of the colonial difference as we see as explained by Escobar that most northern theorists seem unwilling to consider that it is impossible to think about transcending overcoming modernity without approaching it from the perspective of colonial difference. This form of theorization has produced counter-discusses from which scholars of the global south are fighting against the northern epistemological hegemony. Prominent among these counter-discusses is the decolonial church scholarship, which aims to deal with the unreservable debates around the three central realities coined by Cornel 2007 of global local homogeneity and difference, distressed and concentrated powers, which also deals with the works that were dealt with Zeleza and his colleagues in a book titled African universities in the 21st century, where they stress the emergence of the new knowledge economy that yields to issues of access quality, equity, access quality, equity, authority, accountability, diversification and differentiation, internationalization and indigenization, representation and responsibility, global visibility and local courage, because we are living in a globalizing world that we are interconnected. Now the next question is, what is good? What is good about globalization? Now we realize that the world we're living in right now, political identities have transcended historical, historical trajectory to include current practices through which identities are now defined. And scholars, especially those from the global south, are involved in doing this Eurocentric totalizing claim to consider these claims as being the singular authoritativeness of universal character, typically assumed and portrayed in academic thought. Globalization can change the content of our theorizing, as explained by Richard Twin 2014. Globalization has the potential to respond to an agenda of global thinking that transcends the north-south local global subject-object binaries in favor of plurality and inter-visality in the construction of knowledge. The next slide we'll be looking at the why. The African academia is relevant part of the global economy and globalization as we can understand that through which our academic vibrancy and vitality is measured to inform knowledge, production and dissemination. Internationalization of the African academia has compared many institutions on the continent to embrace global standards that celebrate productivity and excellence. The medians of interdisciplinary configurations and research agendas meet the rapid mobilizing and technological innovations. The knowledge economy is central also to nation building and national development. The academia is where potentials are unleashed, skills nurtured and communicated to the outside world for development and progress of society and humanity. So skimming and scanning through the literature on globalization and Africanization, three streams of thoughts were identified. These are the idealists, the moderates and the extremists. The idealist engagement with the issue of globalization from an African perspective, they believe that for African scholarship to enter the scientific fraternity, knowledge fraternity, they have to approach it through a concentric knowledge paradigms. The moderates are caught between the idealist and the extremists and here they embrace the idea of thinking global and acting local, which lends to the discourse of localization and indigenization of global knowledge systems. The extremists are of the position that globalization is not healthy for Africa, because they are totally opposed to the project of globalization because they believe that globalization is a desperate attempt to deprive an African of his or her natural cultural influence. My concluding remarks are based on the common features that we are aiming at crafting for the 21st century and beyond. Rather for us to craft a common future of inclusivity that does not discriminate against other knowledge systems, we have to desatriculate orthodox epistemologies in favor of indigenized articulations that reflect the African experience. We also have to look for what works for Africa with a global outlook, finding conventions zones of ontopistemological mix to inform global thinking for vibrant scholarship and development of our society and the world as large. We also have to start engaging with meta theory to cater for contextual and pluralistic approaches while attempting to globalize local experiences. In my mind, we aim at looking at plurality and intervisitality to allow cultures to communicate with each other that we may have a global response to issues and then address them from multiple social realities. Thank you. Thank you, Monica. We now move to the next presenter Mira Savratamnam. Mira, the floor is yours. Thank you. I'll just ask Monica to stop sharing her screen if that's all right. Thank you, wonderful. It's lovely to be here. Thank you all very much for coming along and for sparing some time in on your Thursday. And it's just an absolute delight to be here together in whatever part of the world we are, of course, facilitated by internet access and I'm conscious here that as I talked to you it's easier to talk to some of you who are thousands of miles away than it is to speak to some of my students who don't have high quality internet connections at home and the rest of it. So when we think about the rearrangement or the reconfiguration of our spaces clearly in the future broadband democracy is going to be one of those issues that comes up. So anyway, my talk today is called the structure agency problem in the context of decolonizing knowledge and like we know I'm going to start my stopwatch so I don't colonize your time too much. Why is this question being asked actually this question emerged as part of thinking about my teaching I teach on a third year undergraduate course here called decolonizing world politics. And in many ways the talk today is actually a reflection on some of the themes that have come out through the discussions with my students and in that sense it's sort of is dedicated to them as my my interlocutors and co thinkers. So what is the structure agency problem and why have I brought it up now. And so this actually comes from my own undergraduate studies a long, long time ago and I haven't thought about the structure agency problem for a long time. But in sociological theory, the structure agency problem is understood as a way of thinking about where agency comes from and the extent to which human action is determined by the social structures around them by their cultures by the languages by the material organization of the world, and all the possibilities for creativity for freedom for change for moral responsibility in terms of determining the outcomes. And crudely speaking in the Western tradition, liberals have been understood as emphasizing individual agency and rationality, and structuralists Marxist and other kinds of structuralists have been understood as emphasizing the role of social structures, but the way that this debate has unfolded and probably where it's at now in a lot of the Western kind of spaces is some version of structuration theory that's a sort of way of trying to understand agency as structured but not determined by the resources on which it draws. So in terms of how that works in decolonial theory, I would argue that actually prior to this debate kind of happening in the Western Academy, it was a central concern of anti colonial thought. If you look at WB Du Bois and his conception of how black agency comes about, and even though it's within the context of a very oppressive structure, African Americans could play a central role in the Civil War, and in resisting racism. In this sense Du Bois is part of a broad tradition which is Pan Africanist which is anti racist which is decolonial in thinking about what are the possibilities for agency under highly oppressive highly violent structures. And importantly, I think they concluded that of course agency was possible but it would have to draw on resources other than those provided by those structures to cut forward to a influential account of structure and agency under conditions, Franz Fanon is the obvious reference point and he has been highly influential, and he continues to be highly influential and highly referenced within debates. But this is interesting because his answer to the structure agency problem is actually quite a stark one and it's one which I think is in some respects the most radical. For Fanon it starts with the structure the colonial structure is absolutely violent, and in that sense, it is visited on the body of the native is embodied in the responses of the native to colonialism, and that violence is therefore both necessary and inevitable as a way of resisting that structure okay so this violence of the colonial order impels this violence response, and this is the condition for the rebirth or for decolonization. And so for non's world of structure and agency in some senses very stark there is violence in the structure there must be violence in the agency. If we look at more recently influential writings we come to the concept of the coloniality of power which has some inheritances from the phononian tradition. The coloniality of power is a concept obviously developed in Latin American context by thinkers such as Annabel, Annabel Kierchano, but it's also become influential in other debates and I'm thinking of course of Cervelo and Glova Gasciani's work on coloniality in Africa. The coloniality of power concept is a structural concept right it's fundamentally an account of how modern world order is structured by relations of coloniality and that this deeply saturates our conceptions of gender are conceptions of authority, of course of the economy and of subjectivity. And for the most pessimistic accounts and I would include Glova Gasciani within this, the effect has been a total colonization and a continued colonization of the minds and the economies and the ways of being in Africa and elsewhere. And the metaphor here again is a very stark one it's like, it's like Fanon it's a very kind of total conception in Glova Gasciani's metaphor it's a snare it's a cage that the colonized live in. So what is the vision of liberation here of course for Fanon it's the sort of violent overthrow of the system. The coloniality of power literature. It's about indigenous thought and we've heard some arguments here for the need to recover and recapture indigenous thought as a means of opposing your eccentric thought. And this is important, but it begs the question where do these resources come from if the structure of coloniality is so total right if it is constitutive is if it is hegemonic. If it arises our minds and empties our brains, then where is it possible for agency or liberation to come from. So one might argue that, as many of the Latin American school have done so that it's indigenous thought and they're talking here about the indigenous peoples of the Americas, it's indigenous thought that provides a way of counteracting like Eurocentric and colonial modern knowledges and in part of doing this then a D linking exercise is advocated in terms of how one goes forward. However, I would say that for feminists in particular this solution has never been wholly adequate. Why because feminist particularly third world feminist African feminism, feminism in the global south has been dealing with the multiple intersecting forms of domination that include coloniality include patriarchy which include capitalism and so on. I would argue that the authenticity of the idea is not enough to forge a pathway for liberation, and that for most feminist thought and here I'm generalizing somewhat but and I look forward to discussing this maybe for most feminist thought. The issue is not simply the origins of the idea but its usage right if you are being beaten by your husband it doesn't matter whether the ideology behind it in some respects as a European ideology or or an indigenous one. The best is that feminist thinkers from the global south have actually got a conception of liberation or understanding of the structure agency debate, which could be more productive for thinking about how we decolonize knowledge. And this is because the emphasis is not so much on a zero sum game if you like between structure and agency, and the emphasis is not on agency as the ability to commit master acts of mastery and acts of violence. Instead it's about recreating the relations that we engage in about cultivating alternatives and about transformative action that transformative action is not this kind of total delinking although it may involve acts like that. But it's about, in my view, emphasizing a dynamic and a direction of travel that uses the resources around it and deploys them in a liberating kind of direction. So looking up on what Professor Embebe was saying in the keynote about new planetary consciousness I was thinking about the work of Dr. Wangari Professor Wangari Mattai and the Greenbelt movement as a better model potentially of radical action than the models of the Haitian Revolution or so on which are often referenced in the in the coloniality of power literature. This is called work the Greenbelt movement. This is a group of women who are going out to plant trees in defiance of the local state and in terms of international capital planting trees to reclaim the landscape to remake their environment. And so this is about the kind of literal transformation of the conditions. So if planting trees is a European practice of course Europeans plant trees, and they do so in ways which can take forward if you like the capitalist extractive relations with nature. The Ethiopian Ethiopian government plants trees but in such a way which doesn't necessarily mean that it's not engaged in other kinds of colonial practice. It's not so much the idea itself that needs to be indigenous but of course the Greenbelt movement was informed by indigenous conceptions of conservation. But it's the fact of doing a transformative action which transforms the relationship between the communities in the environment and the state, which confronts the disposability and the degradation and the deputation, the depth depredation of the environment. I would argue that by emphasizing the authenticity of the practice to the place against if you like the imported models of development and well being that this represents a way of thinking about decolonization in the contemporary age. One which is a more practical and in some respects more radical account than the account that we get from for non and maybe through the coloniality of power some of the literature. Now I'm slightly making oppositions where maybe there's more compatibility for the sake of the argument. So just to conclude what I'm saying I suppose what I'm saying is what coloniality can be understood as is not necessarily just a mental cage or a snare that we have to escape and delink from because that leads us to a very pessimistic view of what's going on that may even lead to resignation. But instead decolonization understood as a practical activity in a colonial landscape that seeks to be transformative helps us set forth not the new man of Fanon which is kind of free of his colonial shackles, but a new person who has re calibrated the relationship between the structure and the persons within it, and which has transformed the space. This is less in some respects spectacular and less violent than revolution, but it is revolutionary and it does in some respects challenge coloniality at its root. So I'll stop there and hope to engage with the questions. Thank you very much Mira, very inspiring contribution. I will now pass it on to Professor polo Zulu. We can see you. Welcome. And please you can start your 10 minutes contribution. Thank you. Thank you very much. Am I audible. Yes, yes. Yeah, we can hear you and we can see you. Thank you. In this paper I'm arguing that decolonization and Africanization seem to be contradictory concepts, particularly if one considers the broader, wider meaning of decolonization as a children member did say this morning. Particularly, we are using a very narrow sense, and I refer particularly to the process movements road must fall as others. And I find that contested spaces, if you still make a symmetry is mobility is an identity is as the title of this conference is best to locate decolonization and Africanization within the domain of politics, rather than the domain of academia. A more appropriate conceptualization would be in tennis internationalization, advancing Africa's contribution to the global movement for change in the curriculum. I'm concentrating on the curriculum in particular, because I think conceived in the narrow sense that we do decolonization and the curriculum would pro decolonization of the curricula would present unforeseen problems, probably obfuscating rather than enlightening. The curriculum generally serves a number of purposes, three in particular, one generation of knowledge to instrumental where the curriculum prepares individuals for entering to the market space the qualifications, and the deadly problem Now with regard to the second in particular, even the first with very problematic but that's concentrated on the second. I cannot conceive of a scientist or an accountant or a medical for that matter trained within a specific geo localized curriculum. In the international world. This has been much clearer in South Africa where trying the narrow sense probably has not demonstrated much. I'm taking for instance here examples in the attempt to collaborate with indigenous healers in the treatment of HIV and AIDS. And we are now probably 2025 or more years in that up to now the dominant form of treating HIV and AIDS is antiviral treatment. And the indigenous helps have been of no help whatsoever. To me, therefore, issues of decolonizing the curriculum appeal more to the political and to the populist, rather than being real. And here saying, if we want to move to move forward, we have to be honest within ourselves as well. Africanization and digitization and used interchangeably. I do not negate the role of local knowledge, local experience. But I do not think that we can accentuate that against international and global experiences will probably find ourselves lagging behind a lot. Now I'm trying to draw patterns with what happened in politics up to now from the 1960s college. And then political systems spoke of decolonization. But as we all know, none challenge to the colonial boundaries. None. The citizenship is a long colonial lines drawn by the colonial boundaries. So I do not understand how one would have spoken of decolonization in politics, while at the same time maintaining the infrastructure as it was. So what I am saying in short in this paper is that at times we use emotive language in order to appeal to the public. The process run the risk of throwing out the baby with the bad water, because in the mind of the ordinary people. The use of such terms in the narrow sense negates progress. A children members said this morning a chauvinistic localized approach to the solution of the world's problems. In my words, it's not decolonization. So we have to be very careful. There is no denial that Africa has made serious contributions to the development of knowledge, even of technology. And I do not see why we are shy to say that, instead of being on the time defensive and projecting ourselves as victims of circumstance, particularly victims of colonialization. Every nation in the world has been colonized. They grafted what was there from the colonial system built in the new that they themselves developed and produced the new. I have not heard of an African of an Asianized curriculum. I think this is very pertinent. Because the more narrowly we want to develop. The more we harm ourselves, then open ourselves to global influences and forces, if we see them in the negative sense, we're not going to assimilate and use them as positively as we should in order to develop. That is the point. If you come to the curriculum per se as a curriculum. There are aspects of the curriculum that are neutral and not at all subject to normative interpretations and normative sources. For instance, to be precise, I can see how you can Africanize mathematics, Africanize biology, Africanize accounting, Africanize physical science, etc, etc. In 2019 has probably put some sanity, particularly to countries like South Africa, where one sees the role of science as science being enhanced rather than a narrow conception and a political interpretation of what science means. But what I want to say is that what Africanization into colonization in the narrow sense of the concept is wisely and particularly used in the protest saddles are emotive populist concepts rather than logical academic formulations. Denying the psychological damage that colonization inflicted intellectually on the indigenous populations through undermining indigenous indigenous practices. It is not denying that Africans has to have to engage with the past and rectify needs and fallacies by demonstrating through research and scholarship that Africa has substance and that she can equally contribute to the global knowledge system as anyone else. But the claim that anyone can decolonize or Africanize an educational system while keeping both its framework and structure is fanatious. While this might appeal to sentiment practically it is unimaginable. One has not heard, as I say, Asian eyes in the curriculum, despite a good number of Asian countries having their own current as such as the Chinese and Japanese characters and etc, etc. Where we aspire to create, we probably need a different terminology, let's we engage in a humble, humble, semantic thing. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Zulu, brilliant presentation. I enjoyed it. I will now pass it on back to Awino Orkech who is going to take the question from the Q&A box. Many thanks Awino. Absolutely. So colleagues, colleagues who are on the panel, I'm sure you've been tracking the questions on the Q&A. So I'm not really going to play role of moderator. And so maybe what I'll do is Mira, there are a couple of questions for you. Have you had a minute to look at them? So maybe we can just start off with you if you had some quick responses. Sure. I mean, I'll start with Elaine's question, which is about the implications of a recalibrated relationship of structure and agency for educational engagements in higher education. So I think part of this has already been articulated in some of the critical pedagogy literature and it emphasises I suppose two things. So one is giving students the tools that they need to approach their world in a way which empowers them but also helps them kind of collaborate. So the importance of teaching critical thought and being able to teach thought that allows the critique of hegemonic forms of knowledge. And then the second thing is about educational practices themselves as being meaningfully, not just prefigurative, but themselves part of the rehumanising process if you like. So engaging in pedagogy which teaches how we can relate to each other in a way that doesn't involve sort of domination and speaking over in educating, in creating an educational environment that prioritises collaboration rather than individual kind of competition in a way which prioritises ethical engagement, prioritises listening. Some of us are starting to do some of these experiments in our classrooms. Of course the wider system is one in which it wants us to rank and sort students as individuals rather than as humans if you like, as people embedded in relationships engaged in collective projects. And so some of the experiments that I think are worth pursuing in this respect are ones which teach students the ethics of decolonial practice as well as the critical thinking that they need to challenge the world around them but also themselves right and so we all sort of absorb little stereotypes or chivalrous as we've moved through the academy and I think we need the capacity to critique those as well. Thanks. Did you want me to pick up one of the other ones. Maybe you can pick up on one more there's one here in relation to how COVID-19 might shift conversations around the coloniality of power. Are you seeing that one. Yes, I do. Thank you. No, that's an excellent question. And I think as was mentioned in the keynote this morning, the coloniality of power does certainly give us purchase on the spread and the response to COVID-19 it gives us a purchase on if you like the radical exploitation of nature and the industrialization of food production that led to the conditions in which the COVID disease could emerge and spread around the world as well as the differentiated vulnerabilities that different populations have to the disease and so we see already that the death rates of COVID-19 very closely mirror situations of economic and racialized privilege both north south and within the global north. That said, it's also true that the COVID pandemic reveals new kinds of vulnerabilities that we have not already considered vulnerabilities around interconnectedness vulnerabilities around let's say the bearing of risk and so on. And so I think we need to be mindful that what constituted coloniality in the past is not necessarily the kind of framework that best mirrors, let's say the structure of vulnerabilities and disposability today. Thank you very much. So this is not from the chart. This is actually from me, Professor Zulu. You know, I think that part of the arguments that folks who talk about the colonizing knowledge make is not around the localization of knowledge per se, but an acknowledgement around the histories of disciplines, for instance. So no one is arguing that the colonizing biology looks like a specific thing, but it's around the erasure of knowledge around some of the ways in which those disciplines have developed that people are calling for re-centering. So when somebody talks about business or commerce and just saying, how can you decolonize that? Perhaps it's about people saying can we re-center and acknowledge, you know, different forms of knowledge production processes that exist in certain contexts that have been stolen, you know, as a result of globalization or the ways in which, you know, global capital works. So I want to push you a little bit to expand on this idea because you might be taking us back on some frontiers that we might have passed with colleagues in particular fields, given the erasures of knowledge that we have seen in very many fields based on the argument that you can't decolonize biology, you can't decolonize physics, what are you talking about? And then when people and us, a whole range of histories that have been silenced or ignored, then people say, ah, oh, so that's what you mean. I agree with you entirely. But this is not how we use the concepts in everyday language. And this is not how we also respond in everyday language. That's why I made a distinction between a narrow interpretation and a broad interpretation of decolonization. If, for instance, we use a broad interpretation of decolonization, and we even look at the COVID situation as it is now, and we look at governments across the world to say who has, if colonization means the subjugation, in a sense, of any species of humanity by another species of humanity, then you are perfectly correct. But this is not how we are using the terms colonization and decolonization. We seem to be attaching the structures of power to the Berlin Conference of 1984 in the African sense to start with. And the people, therefore, do not understand decolonization in the case of freeing human species from domination by other human species. Rather, they still keep on. And when they talk about Africanization again, they sort of think we can go back and produce an African curriculum. We can make an African contribution to the broader curriculum, but we cannot produce an African curriculum, because it would not be able to exist in a global situation. And that's what I am saying, that we have to be very careful, and even in the way we write, and if we are going to do that, we probably need also to change the terminology. As I was talking about the internationalization and globalization and the contribution of Africa into this context, instead of the Africanization, because Africanization is definitely a chauvinistic concept. The whole issue of indigenization and glorifying the past, as if it had no forms, probably perpetuates the practices in another form. That's what I meant. Thank you. Thank you very much for that clarification, which I hope has also clarified a lot for those in the audience. There's a question here around which I'd like you to also help us clarify. I have some views on it, but it's directed at you. Thank you. That most of the debates about decolonization and Africanization come from folks in the West. Can you speak to the role of indigenous African based scholars and researchers in the decolonization, in the decolonization agenda, decolonization here is in quotes. That's for you, Prof. For me. Well, there's been a great contribution of by Africans into, I probably stick to the fields that I know, although through reading also, as I did say, starting from the Great Wall of Mali to the University of Timberton. Africa has always had a road. I glanced a few days ago into what they called the top 10 African inventors and I was shocked to see the amount of contribution that Afro Americans and even Africans. And there's the Bill Gates of Africa, who I quote at the end of my paper when you do see the paper in the final instance, who has, in a sense, a revolutionized computer it is not a word that I'm familiar with. But in the fields of philosophy and political science in particular, I mean you have African Giants like we read you in philosophy we have African Giants like Pauline Houghton G in philosophy. We really have contemporary Giants like Achille and Ben. If you listen to his presentation this morning, I mean it was astounding to use one word. Yes, there's been a lot of contribution by African scholars. And that's why I am saying why are we always taking a defensive approach to this subject. Because the more we be more in the past and project ourselves or portray ourselves as victims of something we are not going to progress much further. It's very easy to go back and more to move forward it's a difficult process and I'm saying, can we conjure up terminology that is going to make us go forward. Yeah, absolutely thank you very much Angelica I don't know how much time we have left but I just wanted to make two quick comments. The first is that I think there's a tendency, a false tendency and I say this as a as a newcomer to the West to assume that all of these conversations about Africanization decolonizing knowledge with thinking universities, you know engendering universities critical approaches to knowledge on the African continent are rooted in diaspora and scholars or Africans located in the diaspora and I think we do a great injustice to our colleagues who started this conversation in the 60s across various universities in the African continent so somebody who asked this question in the chat I just want to say this is not a diasporic conversation. This is not a conversation that starting with Africans outside the continent it has been very rooted in on the continent and with African scholars. I always refer people to pause the lessons work because I think he does an amazing historical overview around the conversations and academic freedom and rethinking universities across different moments historical moments on the African continent so I would just to look at that as a primary text and much more recently given COVID-19 dynamics has done quite a number of video interviews so if reading is not your thing. The number of interviews is done on extensive interviews that he has done on YouTube. The second thing as well is that I believe there has been an immense evolution and I know that I might only be speaking with a better knowledge of the East African region and sections of Southern Africa but I think the evolution in curriculum because somebody is asking a question in the chat about primary school and secondary school education has been a significant evolution I all of my studies were based in the African continent and I remember, you know, studying curriculum that was telling me about, you know, the first person to discover like Victoria being, you know, you know some chops some white explorer, and that the people who are in school right now are not studying that so I think there also has to be an acknowledgement. Around the energies that have gone towards curriculum reform across the African continent and if there are certain parts of the African continent where that has not happened I think we should we should avoid a sort of this widespread brush that our curriculum still portrays this kind of erasure of knowledge which is what I'm always much more concerned with, because when you talk about the first person to discover Moisatunya, which we popularly know as big force, it's around the assumption that you know there were no local people who are interacting with those big what we know as big force today for the longest time. So you really underscore lots of African scholarship, lots of African engagement, intellectual public engagement from the African continent. This is not a diasporic conversation. This is not a conversation that's happening from without the African context and I think perhaps the invitation that that question is making for us is around the need to make public, you know, to have an archive somewhere that makes public this this contributions, so that we do cannot see ourselves as what Prof is saying, as as as folks who are intervening into an environment in which we were never there we have always been part of this global conversations we have shaped this global conversations. And it's around encouraging particularly those in global northern, you know, universities in the global north to see studies on Africa to see knowledge on Africa shaping the Canon as influencing the Canon rather than something you add as flavor as you know salt and paper, you know as part of your curriculum teaching Angelica, give me a sense of time so that I see how many more questions to take. Yes, I'll give you 10 more minutes. We can go five minutes over the set time so yes you got 10 minutes left. Okay, so maybe what I can invite the panelists to do because I do not see any more questions maybe I'll answer one more question that was directed to me, then invite the panelists to just offer their final reflecting thoughts. There was a question that was asked around the, you know, at source what what what students mean or what do they feel what's the feeling of decolonization for them when they invoke this word. And for me how I've understood it has been in three main ways. The three main way the first of these is that a desire to for the studies on Africa in particular for for experiences of knowledge is an Africa, not always to be framed from the western Canon, so that you're always talking about Africa because it's being explained to you by somebody else. The second which is connected to that is a recentering of African knowledges, knowledges as part of their experiences of studying and understanding various parts of the African continent and the thematic questions on the African continent and what I saw as for many of us who work on Africa, and from the African continent when we talk about Africa we're not talking about sub Saharan Africa we're talking about Africa in its entirety. This work, you know, so a sort of invocation around needing to see more black scholars more African scholars as part of the experience and that's why this program that I was talking to you about that this that students and staff collaboratively developed as part of reimagining what a program a degree program on Africa could look like at servers was part of an emphasis on that how do we bring the voices and sense of experiences that are sitting in different parts of the world to bear in how students interact and understand studies on Africa so that might be scholarship from the Caribbean that might be scholarship from Brazil, you know the general black diaspora in addition to scholarship from the African continent itself. Monica let me start off with you for your final closing comments and then I'll go to Professor Zulu and close out your mirror. Monica are you there. If not we can start off your mirror. Thank you. Thank you, I will know. I would like to reflect on what what has posted concerning the specific about what is good for the world that is good for Africa. In the paper I have indicated how the Chinese, the Asian Tigers have taken advantage of global processes to indigenous or global models that work for them, so that it could develop. The matter of fact globalization is a reality that each society that part of that African humanity has to be part of it. So this is an inevitable path to cross. And we need to just be proactive. Yes, there is a history that be devoured African civilization, but we, this is the reality. This is the order of the day globalization advanced technology and some advanced technology and a communicative channels is there is a reality. So we need to transcend this historical trajectory and begin to be proactive about what is happening around us to better our lives as as people as part of humanity. So the African humanity need to embrace this new phenomena and begin to engage with them for their development and their interaction with the outside world. Thank you. Thank you very much, Monica. Mira, I know you have to leave shortly. And so I think I would just close out by saying, I suppose what I'm saying is that the colonization should be understood as a practical project of liberation in which the origin of ideas can be important but can't be the limit of our horizon for what we imagine when we think about liberation and engaging with other things that have understood liberation in a more multidimensional, more gorilla kind of creative way. I think helps us get out of that cage so that we're not always asking the first question is where does this idea come from instead of like what are the purposes to which these ideas are put. And I think hopefully that can be a way to negotiate our futures collectively. Thank you, Mira Prof, your closing comments. Yeah, thank you. As I say I was very much impressed by Professor Achille and others. Conception of the colonization this morning. What that led me to think was, is there a possibility, which they should be of cascading. These meanings and nuances much more lower than we are doing at present. For instance, much changes coming at the university is coming from the university from the student activists. But they come with a very narrow political agenda. As I'm saying people never concede and I'll probably use my experiences in my own country. People never conceive of the elites in power as colonizing. Literally, we can say they are corrupt, a number of people do know that, but they have never literally gone to the roots of corruption. I'm not talking about the moral rules in this instance. I'm talking about the power configurations that if colonialism was an international project on a world project. To say that literally, I'm running short of a word here and appropriate word that that that that innocence polarized humankind into those who have and those who do not in those who do in those and to whom things are done. And if we are to develop curricula of liberation, we probably have to revisit the terminology because it can be very destructive. Now, a number of people were put off by the road must fall in because not only because of the practices, but because also if one subjected to the intellectual language, it did not stand the test. And I'll be very brutal here. The statue of rose must fall, but the buildings must not fall. What does one then think about that type of thinking. Oh, it's the politics of convenience. And these are things that I am saying we should try and attend to in our in the development of the intellect of our students and some of these must start developments must start at the undergraduate level. If at all we want to decolonize in the true sense of the word, the curriculum. Thank you very much colleagues as Anthony sauna for joining us today. I know that many are frustrated with the format of only being able to ask questions and you'd have wanted to have a much more robust conversation and particularly prof many would like to challenge you and I'm sure they will find you and challenge you on some of your arguments. It's the nature of the format that's a bit limiting. I really just want to emphasize on my part in my closing remarks is to acknowledge that the ways in which we think about an approach questions of decolonization or from where I stand the politics of knowledge production and the systems of power that are implicated in knowledge production are deeply connected to the way in how we come into it whether it's to family scholarship political science historians, seeking to look back at the past, seeking to focus on the present, seeking to use the contemporary moment as an opportunity to understand the global so it's really different vantage points I cannot underscore enough that the work of reorganizing how we think about ourselves how we value ourselves to start from the, from the earliest point from from primary school I see that in debates here in the UK around the curriculum racism structural racism and anti blackness, and the fact that several times and students walk into my classroom, a postgraduate classroom this is a master's classroom, they're telling me I'm the first black person to teach them that cannot be an okay thing, because that also continues to send particular messages about who know as, who are the purveyors of knowledge are. And so the questions about inclusivity, diversity and knowledge production processes are deeply interconnected, these are complex conversations, and I hope that we continue to have them. Of course I'm going to plug the keynote that I'm chairing with the Desiree Lewis on African feminist knowledge production and decoloniality that's happening tomorrow please sign up and join us for much more expanded presentation of this as Santeni Sana sign up for the next panel and be well and take care.