Delali Amuzu
3 Publications in AERD
Author Publications
Export PDF“African magic” or “African science”: Issues of technology in African higher education
By Delali Amuzu
African ideas, science, technology, scholarship and worldviews have been disproportionately displaced and marginalized in relevant global dialogues. In academic circles, African methods of knowing have been questioned, undervalued, mocked, misconstrued, and disregarded, causing apprehension. These negative attitudes are internalized via the educational system, stifling agency and conditioning African learners to rely on technology from outside sources, resulting in the exteriorization of innovation and creativity. African inventiveness becomes “African magic” with no real desire to interrogate, explain, or grasp its basic mechanics. This article contends that technology and creative imaginations exist in African societies. The task, however, remains the exploration and integration of African knowledge systems into higher education. The study aims to demonstrate how the interaction of two components of traditional African education—a sense of community and informal learning—could assist in the embrace, facilitation, and mainstreaming of marginalized African technologies. Although the paper may appear eclectic, it is intended to conscientiously push the paradigm that technology has been integral to African education. Regardless of Africa's technical challenges, salvation does not lie in excessive external reliance but rather in investing and building on Indigenous African knowledges/practices in order to establish an African technological identity. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic: African dependency on foreign technology. Lack of interest in African science and technology. Lack of African technological identity. Low technology penetration in African higher education. What this paper adds: The need to explore African science and technology. Mind-set change towards African science and technology. Mainstreaming African achievements in science and technology. Implications for practice and/or policy: Indigenization of science and technology. Indigenous empowerment. Exploring alternate ways of knowing. Changing perspectives on science and technology. © 2023 British Educational Research Association.
Moments Of Dislocation: Reflections on the Colonial Vestiges Embedded in African Higher Education
By Delali Amuzu
Africans have exhibited tremendous resilience, coping abilities, and strategies to survive in multiple spaces globally despite the tensions and challenges associated with the Euro-colonial enterprise. However, the charge to liberate the African mind remains unabated and requires the unpacking of the complexities of the colonial schema, to advance African agency. The colonial is alive and a lack of scrutiny frustrates an understanding of its nuances and the guises in which it manifests, causing the colonised to perpetuate its plans in ignorance. The article presents selected areas where Africans have been de-centred in consciousness. Termed moments of dislocation, these areas are historical, linguistic, inferiorisation of the African being, and journey to the West. Although these themes may not be exhaustive, they offer a path to instigate or sustain conversations about the insidious effects of the colonial, and potentially inculcated into discourses and praxis towards mental liberation. Identifying these disorders contributes to the comprehension of coloniality of knowledge, schooling, power, and being. Through critical African education, these concepts would receive unremitting scrutiny for African agency.
The Elite, Elitism, and Ensuing Conversations in Ghana’s Higher Education: Myth or Reality?
By Delali Amuzu
Contemporary higher education in Ghana and many parts of Africa has European colonial antecedents. In spite of the many goals that it aspired to achieve, a preoccupation was to nurture an elite group. Though widely used, the concept of elite and elitism is vague and hardly conceptualized. It hoovers from status—occupants of the apex or top echelons of an organization/society, to consumption—people with immense wealth. Influence, on the other hand, seems to be a common denominator in both cases. But, does this capture the scope of the phenomenon? This article engages people who have worked in different capacities in Ghana’s higher education space to examine the deeper meanings that could be embedded in elitism, elicits conceptualizations of elitism, and further finds out how elitist higher education is in Ghana. Ultimately, the article intends to initiate a conversation on whether indeed there are elites being produced from the university system. This study was done with reference to an empirical study on decolonizing higher education in Ghana. © The Author(s) 2019.
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