Pandering to pedagogy or consumed by content: Brief thoughts on Mahmood Mamdani's “teaching Africa at the post‐apartheid university of cape town”

Graaff, Johann

doi:10.1080/02533959808458650

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The periodisation is racialised', Mamdani 1998:4. 8. Graaff similarly criticised Mamdani for his emphasis on content over pedagogy (Graff 1998). Prior to the debate UCT's Vice-Chancellor Ramphele publically criticised Mamdani's "very hierarchical, archaic and patriarchal image of what a professor should be," insisting instead that UCT faculty are "people who are struggling with transformation as a general rule and are not as ignorant of Africa as he thinks", Duffy 1998.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pursuing Excellence in a ‘World-Class African University’: The Mamdani Affair and the Politics of Global Higher Education

Kamola¹

2011

JHEA

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Four years after the end of apartheid, the administrators of the University of Cape Town (UCT) suspended Mahmood Mamdani, then chair of the Centre of African Studies, from his teaching obligations because they deemed his course – ‘Problematizing Africa’ – too theoretically difficult for incoming students. The ensuing showdown between Mamdani and the university administration culminated in a spirited public debate over how to best ‘trans- form’ the historically segregated university to achieve racial integration. Less commented upon, however, is the fact that this debate coincided with UCT’s efforts to brand itself as a ‘World Class African University,’ attract greater funding from foreign institutions, privatise its campus services, and adopt National Qualifications Framework (NQF) standards. In other words, UCT – like many post-apartheid universities – was busy remaking itself into a ‘global’ university. Taken in this context, Mamdani’s argument for the importance of ‘teaching Africa in an African university’ takes on a new resonance. This article re-reads the 1998 curriculum debates as also a struggle for academic autonomy within a neoliberal university. Doing so offers the op- portunity to think about the political strategies of pedagogy, while pro- viding students and faculty a compelling model for how they might resist the neo-liberalisation of higher education within their own institutions.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pursuing Excellence in a ‘World-Class African University’: The Mamdani Affair and the Politics of Global Higher Education

Kamola¹

2011

JHEA

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“… 6 See the contentious responses to Mamdani, such as Martin Hall (1998) and Johann Graaff (1998). See also Kamola (2011).…”

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Rethinking Knowledge Production in Africa

Adebanwi¹

2016

Africa

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Jean and John Comaroff enthusiastically claim that Africa constitutes a rich site ‘of new knowledges and ways of knowing-and-being … that have the capacity to inform and transform theory in the north, to subvert its universalisms in order to rewrite them in a different, less provincial register’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). What role, then, can the African university – which, as described by Jeremiah Arowosegbe, is in a lamentable state – play in creating and generalizing these ‘new knowledges’?

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The ebb and flow of the fortunes of African studies at the University of Cape Town: an overview

Ntsebeza

2020

Social Dynamics

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Pandering to pedagogy or consumed by content: Brief thoughts on Mahmood Mamdani's “teaching Africa at the post‐apartheid university of cape town”

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Pursuing Excellence in a ‘World-Class African University’: The Mamdani Affair and the Politics of Global Higher Education

Pursuing Excellence in a ‘World-Class African University’: The Mamdani Affair and the Politics of Global Higher Education

Rethinking Knowledge Production in Africa

The ebb and flow of the fortunes of African studies at the University of Cape Town: an overview

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