What is an ‘Africanised’ curriculum?

I WAS intrigued by Professor Lindelani Mnguni’s call for “decolonised” and “Africanised” curricula to ensure that our university students graduated on time (“Educational Imbalance”, The Star, January 9).

When Prof Mnguni prescribes an Africanised curriculum for our students to graduate on time, the inference is that they fail to do so on account of non-Africanised, Eurocentric curricula. A university curriculum is a work-inprogress; never complete and always making itself relevant to the needs of its students, the community and the country. I acknowledge that our universities must be rooted philosophically in African soil, but what is an “Africanised” curriculum?

I am aware that in the humanities a great deal of indigenous history and local content has been a part of the curriculum at some universities for over a decade.

Ask a serious medical graduate what he or she thinks of incorporating IKS when a patient has a gunshot wound, or cancer, and you will not be too pleased with the response!

If we teach about the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck and alongside that history we teach our students about the dispossession of the land occupied by the indigenous people, to me that would constitute a balanced academic curriculum, perhaps answering to an “Africanised” notion of the curriculum. But if we told our students that all the white settlers were thieves, or that Jacob Zuma, with his machine gun, fought a pitched battle with white Afrikaners in the middle of Durban’s former West Street, that would not only be a tendentious reading of history, but an egregious falsification of it, and I can sense this happening already.

Serving the narrow interests of a political ideology, or the interests of students who scream “decolonisation”, “Africanisation” and “fees must fall” to disrupt the academic project just around examination time, will only serve to promote a parochial and intellectually bankrupt curriculum.