“The academic space is not a safe space to be an indigenous person”; Responding to the Trauma of the Settler-Colonial University Through African Indigenous Knowledge System (AIKS)-Informed Pedagogy

Abstract

The colonial university has long existed as a site of traumatic incorporation of western knowledge systems into the lives of indigenous populations across the world. Western academic styles of teaching and learning in South Africa reenact indigenous traumas of violent loss of identity and the spiritual relationship to the wider world of self, family, community, ancestors and the environment on which the indigenous South African health model is based. As a result, academia in South Africa becomes a space in which the trauma of violent and unequal incorporation into the colonial social world is reproduced. Like other societies shaped by settler colonial domination, South African education systems have historically excluded indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous identities through both violent and subtle methods, including language and appearance policies aimed at disciplining and subduing the indigenous body.

What has been termed ‘intellectual colonization’ sees the ongoing dismissal of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) as inferior, or as a resource to exploit. AIKS have been an object of study for anthropologists since the discipline’s inception, but the ontological possibilities it offers to transforming teaching practice from within have not been taken up. This has subsequently led to a situation in which academia exists as an unsafe space for indigenous people to engage with knowledge. There has been much discussion about the decolonization of education in South Africa, but very rarely are these decolonial discussion efforts met with actual change in pedagogical approaches.

We reflect here on attempts to integrate indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) into the curriculum and pedagogical approach of an Anthropology Hons course in an English-Medium South African university in the Eastern Cape, Rhodes University. We argue that sharing understanding of content, and incorporating teaching practices, from an AIKS approach can enhance learning, and complement existing academic practices of text-based enquiry to produce a knowledge-transmission experience grounded in indigenous modes of learning which might mitigate the violence and trauma of the colonial university’s locking of students into one ontological frame presented as ‘normal’.

Keywords: indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), decolonization, indigenous health models, university pedagogy.