ABSTRACT
Literature on higher education in Africa abounds. Yet, such expositions seem to be confined to systematic inquiries that invoke the important enlightenment goal of rationality. My own previous engagement with higher education seems to be biased towards the cultivation of rationality as a response to the seeming decline of the discourse in South African higher education (Waghid 2012). In this contribution, I want to move away from a notion of rationality that invariably situates my thinking in an enlightenment realm without having any room to venture into spaces of playful ruptures full of risk, mess, and difficulty. If ever one wants to think differently about something, one must be willing to play with thoughts about the unimaginative and improbable. It would not be unfair to state that several universities in Africa functioned mainly as Eurocentric pedagogic spaces, as was evident from many of the prescribed books for students that detailed the dominance of European history and culture in colonial and apartheid higher education. In this regard, Taylor (2019) correctly observes that universities in Africa remain largely Eurocentric spaces without having seriously addressed decolonisation. In this chapter, I shall offer an account of what a university in Africa ought to look like, showing how decolonisation, decoloniality, and restorative justice need entanglement within higher education. In this way, higher education (in Africa) would possibly be reconsidered, attuned to notions of decolonisation, decoloniality, and restorative justice.
