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Responding to Ethnocentrism

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The concept of Africanisation as a transformatory agenda within Higher Education has become watered down by intellectual rhetoric that seeks to make it fit into global discursive frameworks. Within Higher Education theorizing Africanisation has almost shrunk away into the space of theoretical asylum. This space contains all ‘failed’ Africa theories that were too ethnocentric to fit into dominant discourse and too radical to be an exotic illustration of subaltern intellect.  I once wrote a piece on xenophobia, for my own amusement, calling on the spirit of Kwame Nkrumah to come witness the horrors that have become the United Africa that he once dreamt of. Kwame Nkrumah, because he denounced from the onset the myth of decolonization and the dawning of a new era of post-colonialism championed by the colonizer.

Critics of Africanisation argue that the term is too ethnocentric and promotes paralysis of analysis and relativism.  However, it is within western normative rationalities such violence’s linger by denial of existence of Other forms of ways of knowing and being. Western realities force opposed schools of thought into an enclave of banished theories that have no universal application within a globalized world. Meanwhile the globe has been structured according to western global ethnocentrism positioned as universalism. The theory of Post-colonialism argues that the "Cartesian subject has projected his local worldview as global, foreclosing the local roots of his epistemological and ontological choices" (Andreotti, 2011). We are thus so ready to dismiss and even be revolted at the mention of African ways of knowing and being blinded by a sanctioned ignorance to the fact that production of meaning and establishment of laws and institutions has been globally rooted in western ethnocentrism.

Western/Enlightenment humanism which is based in Western epistemologies has produced the world in binaries of normative west and barbaric other. But we all know this and we have heard this a thousand times. However, the relationship between knowledge production and power in its complexities is placed under enormous pressure because of the speed at which counter transformatory discourses sprout from the North. These come not as negotiations but mandates to the third world: ‘so the thing that’s in now is globalization or internationalization so lets all put all those ethnocentric notions aside and let’s do this globalization thing, it is what’s for the common good.’ A review of post-colonial doctrines from the west such as developmentalism, restructuring and other precarious notions were all aimed at erasure of the colonial history seeking to isolate the Other from her history. Universal norms that advocate for consensus, a common cause and common identity offer two fundamental problems for the Other, the standardized norm will see any opposition to it as deficient or antagonistic usually followed by the need to fix deficiency or difference to promote cohesion and secondly the advocating of difference blindness depolitises difference whilst pushing its hegemonic ethnocentrism agenda (Andreotti, 2011). According to Andreotti, an “un-coercive relationship or dialogue with the other entails a provisional paradoxical construction of a general epistemology that announces the impossibility of general epistemologies.”

There is a trap when thinking and theorizing transformation for institutions to be reactionary to whatever new ‘global’ phenomena is occurring. This deprioritizes and depolitises transformation as an African agenda to make room for the ethnocentric hegemonic epistemologies. Africanisation and Pan-Africanism to me are an unequivocal and united declaration of the 'Other's' ontic and epistemic relevance. Andreotti (2011) argues that it is within ethical solidarities that a disruption of Western contextual realities masqueraded as universal are unearthed and potentially successfully challenged. Africanisation is then a battle cry, not for the sanitization of western enlightenment but a confrontation of western domination not only to offer a critique but to cultivate alternatives to ethnocentrism and dominance. These alternatives are difference sensitive and do not sink into a quagmire of essentialism and homogeneity. It borrows from the strand of post-colonial theory that proposes equality within difference highlighting that each knowledge system is situated, produced and having equal worth in its own right.

Dominance is confining and antagonistic to difference. This confinement of dominance then decides who is a valid producer of knowledge, knower and owner of knowledge and who is merely a consumer, regurgitater, summarizer and reproducer.