ABSTRACT

In South Africa—the context of this chapter—indigenous knowledge is commonly understood to encompass local, traditional, non-Western beliefs and practices, as well as alternative, informal forms of knowledge. This chapter argue that indigeneity is an educational practice aimed at cultivating, firstly, an integrated conception of African- and non-African-situated knowledges. It presents a practice that evokes human understandings that relate to being reflectively loyal to local and global contexts and, simultaneously, being reflectively open to what is yet to come, more specifically, an unimaginable, fused understanding of knowledge, which integrates both local and global conceptions of knowledge. A decolonized education has to do with, and is connected to an "imaginative intervention" of the human mind. The chapter examines three ways in which indigeneity potentially guides university teaching and learning. It analyzes how a fused understanding of knowledge can affect pedagogic encounters in African university classrooms.