Afr. j . polit. sci. (2003), Vol 8 No. 1 
Towards the Establishment of a 
Pan-African University: 
A Strategic Concept Paper 
Dani W. Nabudere* 
Abstract 
For a long time, Pan-Africanists have advocated the establishment of a Pan- 
African University. In spite of various efforts in this direction, the hope has 
failed to materialise. The challenge is that such a university must be a new 
university, not only in the approach to teaching and research, but more fundamentally, 
in its strategic conception and its placement at the base of 
African and human emancipation and liberation. The establishment of the 
Pan-African University should have as its overall goal the provision of 
opportunities for higher and advanced education for students and adult 
learners in the context of a new African-based epistemology and methodology. 
The models of Western Universities which Africa adopted have proved 
completely unsuitable for Africa's needs. 
But for the Pan-African University to set a new path in the search for 
knowledge and truth, it must first and foremost be built on a sound spiritual 
basis that highlights those aspects of African spiritual life that has 
enabled the African people to survive as a human community throughout 
the centuries. It is time that such a task be embarked on headlong. 
Introduction 
Pan-Africanists and people of goodwill towards Africa's advancement for a 
long time have advocated the establishment of a Pan-African University, and 
yet this hope has never been realised despite various attempts having been 
made in this direction. The challenge is that such a university must be a 
new university, not only in the approach to teaching and research, but more 
fundamentally, in its strategic conception and its placement at the base of 
African and human emancipation and liberation. In being a new university, 
it has to play the vital role of freeing knowledge production from narrow 
class, technical, and instrumentalist dominance by a few specialists to a 
broader theatre of recognition of other producers of knowledge, which mat- 
* Professor Dani Nabudere is Executive Director, Afrika Study Centre, Mbale, Uganda. 
1027-0353 ฎ 2003 African Association of Political Science
2 Dani W. Nabudere 
ters in their lives and has validity in their cultural contexts. This is what has 
made the creation of such a university more difficult because its creation 
would not only undermine existing dominant interests, but also challenge 
the citadel of Eurocentric paradigms and western 'scientistic' epistemologies 
of knowledge. 
Yet it is time that such a task be embarked on headlong. As Chancellor 
Williams cautioned us in his last book: The Rebirth of African Civilisation 
[1963], the task of establishing an African University "even when pushed 
on all fronts, as it must be, with the speed consistent with careful study and 
soundness, will nevertheless be like building a cathedral-which one expects 
to see completed in his lifetime or that of his children" [p.212]. Williams 
called for a Master Plan with a clear goal but with which we will begin to 
build, no matter in what small way, but begin to build concentrating on 
those tasks which can be done but which become the foundation for the rest 
[ibid]. In somewhat similar vein in advising on the embarking on this task, 
Professor Kwesi Kaa Prah, advised that it is better to take small steps but 
which, when put together, lead to success. In whatever case, he added, we 
must ensure that "we do not fail".1 
It is for this reason that Afrika Study Centre Trust-ASCT based in Mbale, 
Uganda, wishes to be associated with those institutions, organisations, and 
individuals both on the African continent and the African Diaspora that 
wish to see the fulfilment of this dream in the furtherance of African emancipation 
and liberation. Afrika Study Centre was established and registered 
in Uganda on 2 December 1994 as a Trust under the Trustees Incorporation 
Act, (Cap 147). Under the Act, ASCT has the status of universitas personarum 
with a perpetual succession unaffected by changes in members of its 
trustees, which is capable of owning property and incurring liabilities in its 
own name of suing and being sued in court of law. Therefore, the ASCT has, 
in relation to its property and affairs, and for the purposes of carrying out 
its objects or performing any acts incidental thereto, all rights, powers, and 
privileges which it would have possessed had it been a private individual of 
full legal capacity, except as limited by law. 
At the first meeting of the Board of Trustees, held shortly after its registration, 
it was noted by the promoters of the project that the Trust was the 
collective outcome of the thoughts and efforts of a small group of Ugandans 
of varied intellectual and professional backgrounds who were united by a 
common desire to contribute constructively to the emancipation of Africa 
through study and research. The Trustees had also noted that this was part 
of a multifaceted struggle of the African peoples, both on the African continent 
and in the African Diaspora, who were ceaselessly engaged in the 
human endeavour of uplifting themselves from centuries of degradation, 
exploitation and domination by others who had enslaved and colonised
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 3 
them. Without improving their knowledge of the world around them and 
their memory of their world of the past, they could not foster their authentic 
and wholesome development amidst great historical and contemporary 
odds. 
Among the broad goals of the Trust, the following were central to its general 
vision: sponsoring, promoting, undertaking, establishing and conducting 
research into recognised subjects and academic study, including African 
history, African culture, African society, African links with other peoples on 
other continents now and in the past, problems of transition of African societies 
and the role of African tradition and institutions in the world, as well 
as the dissemination for public benefit the useful results of such research 
by publishing the same for worldwide distribution and consumption to 
include educational establishments throughout Uganda, Africa and the 
World. In addition, the ASC Trust was to establish, set up, promote, organise, 
and maintain or assist in so doing seminars, conferences, public and private 
meetings, displays, libraries, study centres, resource centres, and the 
like-all intended to advance African research and learning. 
Since then Afrika Study Centre has, from its small semi-rural enclave in 
Mbale, eastern Uganda, embarked on a number of research, training and 
collaborative activities that have helped inspire the Trust to pursue the 
vision of the establishment of a Pan-African University in collaboration with 
other institutions and organisations. These have included: 
• Making contacts with individuals, organisations and institutions standing 
for the same ideas as the Trust in order to maintain the image of the Trust; 
• Carrying out some limited research for the production of academic papers 
as well as the writing of monographs and books on current issues of 
African culture and development. One such major book is the manuscript 
now with the publishers entitled: Africa In the New Millennium: Towards 
a Post-Traditional Renaissance, which was submitted to Africa World 
Press in 2000, but which is coming out in 2003. Another, which has come 
out of the political activity connected with the African Renaissance and 
the transformation of the OAU into the African Union (including the 
emergence of continental economic programmes such as the New 
Partnership for Africa's Development-NEPAD,) entitled: The African 
Renaissance and Pan-Africanism, is due to be published also by Africa 
World Press in 2003. 
• Collaborating with other institutions in Uganda, other parts of Africa and 
the world at large. This included collaboration with the Islamic University 
in Uganda aimed at staff development as well as co-hosting of Swedish students 
from Osterlenes Folk High School to double with African students in 
small-scale research in communities and institutions that encourages crosscultural 
learning and understanding. We hope that this programme can lead
4 Dani W. Nabudere 
to the creation of department of African-Skandinavian Studies within the 
Pan-African University. 
• Three-year research programme on violence and conflict in agro-pastoral 
communities supported by Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation of New 
York. This research has resulted in the production of five monographs on 
sub-themes on the subject and a book manuscript entitled: Globalisation, 
Arms Proliferation and Transformation in Agro-pastoral Communities in 
Eastern Africa. As a result of this research, ASCT developed a "Field 
Building" research activity on security in agro-pastoral communities. 
• Collaboration with the Social Science Research Council of New York, supported 
by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in "Field Building" 
research activity aimed at bringing together academic scholars, practitioners, 
and indigenous knowledge experts and custodians. This activity 
was intended to result in the pooling of skills and expertise from these 
sources of knowledge so that such pool of knowledge can be made accessible 
to all users. This activity has led to the questioning of the dominant 
Eurocentric epistemologies which had eclipsed endogenous knowledge 
systems but which are now being recognised. To complete this challenge, 
we have to elaborate further the epistemology and methodology that can 
inform knowledge production in Africa as part of the process of creating 
a truly global knowledge in which African sources are fully recognised 
[Nabudere, 2002]. 
• The promotion of the idea of establishing a Pan-African University. 
Currently the ASC Trust is developing a collaboration arrangement with 
the University of South Africa-UNISA and other like-minded institutions 
of higher learning aimed at creating an African-centred higher education 
(including materials, books, curriculum development, etc.) consistent 
with the need for the African renaissance and African rebirth. 
The Pan-African University 
The establishment of the Pan-African University should have as its overall goal 
the provision of opportunities for higher and advanced education for students 
and adult learners in the context of a new African-based epistemology and 
methodology. It should enable them the opportunity to acquire and produce 
new knowledge in the context of the African condition and the global environment 
in which we exist. It should provide innovative ways of researching, 
learning, and sharing of knowledge in, and with, the communities in which 
the researchers and learners are engaged in acquiring such knowledge in 
Africa and elsewhere in the world. It is, more importantly, a response to the 
cry of the African people for an African Renaissance and rebirth that can 
reawaken and reactivate their genius and create an atmosphere for self-transformation 
and development to recover what has been lost and forgotten.
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 5 
But for the Pan-African University to set a new path in the search for 
knowledge and truth, it must first and foremost be built on a sound spiritual 
basis that highlights those aspects of African spiritual life that has enabled the 
African people to survive as a human community throughout the centuries. It 
should, as Chancellor Williams, reminds us, go beyond European classical humanism 
with its class, socio-economic and geographical limitations based on 
Greece and the Athenian City-State, which was based on a system of slavery. 
Pan-African humanism must lead to "enlarged humanities" and recapture that 
original meaning of humanity which Western scholars, beginning with Plato, 
in their hollow and lopsided search for material progress, abandoned. By privileging 
"reason" above everything else and abandoning the spiritual aspects of 
life, including the idea of the immortal soul, western scholarship embarked 
on a path that is increasingly bringing humanity to the brink of destruction 
through violence and ecological destruction]. 
The task of contemporary African philosophy is to critique the 
Eurocentric "Idea" and "general philosophy" in its metaphysical belief that 
European humanism is superior to that of the African people. This falsehood, 
which Europe perpetuated and still does, in so many ways, is based 
on the idea that the rest of humanity has to be forced to believe like Europe 
in order to be "humanised" into a singular humanity. This, in the words of 
Tsenay Serequeberhan, implies the "singularisation of human diversity by 
being forced onto a singular track of historical 'progress' grounded on an 
emulation and/or mimicry of European historicity" (Serequeberhan, 
2002:67). According to Serequeberhan, this "pretext" that flattens all difference, 
has to be critically "de-structured" by contemporary African philosophy 
if "our shared humanity" that Kant talks about is to be realised and critically 
appropriated. Indeed for him, the task of contemporary African philosophy-
its critical-negative project-is the critique of Eurocentrism and 
recognition and de-structuring of its speculative metaphysical underpinnings, 
which still holds us in bondage" (ibid: 75). 
The African Renaissance, which should inform the establishment of the 
Pan-African University, must therefore recapture those basic elements of 
African humanism (Ubuntu, sommun bonus, eternal life and immanent 
moral justice) as the opening of the way to a new humanistic universalism. 
This, according to Williams, "is the spiritual and moral element, actualised 
in goodwill among men (and women), which Africa itself has preserved 
and can give to the world" (ibid: 208, 213). 
This task has not been achieved by the existing African Universities, which 
have failed to generate the kind of knowledge environment required for the social 
and economic transformation of their societies. They have continued to reproduce 
dependent Eurocentric knowledge, a knowledge that is dependent on 
its actualisation in centres that exploit the African people and utilise African
6 Dani W. Nabudere 
resources freely. They have failed to transform themselves in centres of learning 
so as to strengthen African independence and development. They have become 
satellite universities of other universities outside the African continent 
serving outside interests and agendas instead of serving the African people. 
The models of Western Universities, which Africa adopted, have proved 
completely unsuitable for Africa's needs. According to Dr Alex A. 
Kwampong, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana, the postcolonial 
African universities came into being at the same time as the birth 
of new African states or soon after the attainment of their independence. 
They were consciously conceived and designed by the new African leadership 
with their former colonial advisers as "prime instruments" for the 
attainment of national independence, as well as the consolidation of that 
independence. But this independence has continued to reflect European 
dominance by Western educated African elites, which continue to peddle 
Eurocentric "development" models. 
Thus in addition to serving the universal and basic objectives of universities 
everywhere, these universities were expected, above all, to promote 
the development and modernisation of their various countries along western 
lines in the process of "nation-building." According to Kwampong, they 
were meant to be "development universities," expected to play much the 
same role as the land-grant colleges of the United States in the nineteenth 
century. But forty years on, the African University and the African governments 
that created them had dismally failed to chart new paths for Africa's 
emancipation and liberation and Africa finds itself in deep, multidimensional 
crises that require deeply thought out solutions and responses, if the 
African rebirth is ever to be achieved (Vilakazi, 1999: 205-6). 
But in embarking on this great task, we have to realise that we are not 
beginning from nothing. The university as an institution of learning and 
knowledge reproduction has its origin in Africa. The Sankore University 
founded in the City of Timbuktu in the Songhay Empire was the latest and 
best of its kind anywhere in the world. The University was the intellectual 
capital of the Western Sudan and provided a vibrant learning environment 
for the learners and the teachers. Felix DuBois in his book: Timbuctoo the 
Mysterious described the scholars at this University in the following words: 
They astounded the most learned men of Islam by their erudition. That these 
Negroes were at a level with the Arab savants (men of exceptional learning) 
is proved by the fact that they were installed as professors in Morocco and 
Egypt. In contrast to this, we find that the Arabs were not always equal to the 
requirements of Sankore (Quoted by Mzamane, 1999: 179). 
Thus before colonisation and the Arab and European enslavement of Africans, 
Africa provided the best institutions of learning that there was at the time. It is
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 7 
recorded that when the Moroccans invaded Timbuktu in 1552, Professor Ahmad 
Baba, the last Chancellor of the University was the author of some 40 books on 
different subjects. He had a collection of some 1,600 books in his library. He was 
exiled and this treasure was destroyed in the hands of the Arab invaders [Ibid: 
180]. The basis of African civilisation was weakened and efforts were made to 
destroy it. But although weakened it did not die nor was it destroyed. 
The physical structures were destroyed but not the soul of the Africans 
who believed in eternal life and immanent moral justice of humanity. It is 
this soul of humanity that survived and that seeks to rebuild what was lost 
of the institutions Africans created in the past, but which have relevance in 
their lives of today's world. Thus, the establishment of the Pan-African 
University does not begin from a vacuum but has a deep heritage of culture 
and civilisational values that must inform its recreation. These institutions 
are to be found within Africa's ancient achievements. They have to be 
unearthed and reclaimed. 
Indeed, as George James points out in his Stolen Legacy: Greek 
Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy, much of the one thousand books 
credited to Aristotle were not his products. Most of them were copied from 
Egyptian texts, which Alexander the Great had looted from the libraries of 
Egypt during Greek conquest and occupation of that African civilisation. 
From his research, James was able to observe that: 
Certainly he could not have obtained them from the Greeks, for that vast body 
of knowledge, which bears his name and which was presented as new, would 
really have been the traditional common possession of all who were members 
of the Greek Schools of philosophy for they would have been the only persons 
inside Greece permitted to win such books; for knowledge was protected as 
secret. Under these circumstances it is evident that the vast body of scientific 
knowledge ascribed to Aristotle, was neither in possession of the Greeks of his 
time, nor was there any one in Greece competent to teach him Science and, 
least of all, on so vast a scale (James, 1992: 129). 
James concluded that the Greeks, among the surrounding nations, were the 
most anxious to obtain the valuable secrets of the Egyptians, in the Ancient 
Sciences, and this opportunity came when Alexander the Great invaded 
Egypt. According to Strabo and Plutarch, who James quotes, Alexander 
entrusted these books in the hands of Aristotle, and upon Aristotle's death, 
the looted books fell in the hands of Theophrastus who succeeded him as 
head of his School. Later the Roman Army looted these books in style when 
Greece fell to them in 84 BC. They were carried by Sulla to Rome, where 
Tyrannio, a grammarian secured copies and enabled Andronicus of Rhodes 
to publish them. 
Cheikh Anta Diop has pointed out that until Africa is able to reclaim this 
historical and Promethean consciousness that is embodied in the achieve-
8 Dani W. Nabudere 
ments of ancient Egypt, the history of Black Africans and that of humanity 
in general, will "remain suspended in air." According to him such a history 
can never be written correctly, "until African historians dare to connect it 
with the history of Egypt" (Diop, 1974: xiv-vi). In his view, even the study 
of languages, institutions, etc., cannot be treated properly until this is done: 
"in a word, it will be impossible to build an African humanities, a body of 
African human sciences, so long as the relationship does not appear legitimate" 
(ibid: xiv). 
If the Pan-African University is, therefore, to respond to this historic challenge 
and be part of the correction of this historical distortion and theft of 
African heritages, it has to provide deeply thought out and well-conceived 
vision and mission, with a well articulated strategy to achieve its objectives. 
To succeed, it must be part of the creation of a counter-hegemonic discourse 
which can enable the "triple agenda of deconstruction, reconstruction and 
regeneration" to be undertaken at the same time (Odora, etc., 2002:236). To 
achieve this counter-discourse, the Pan-African University has to try to 
develop the university as a new institution of higher education, which can 
help and contribute to reshaping the direction of education on the continent 
towards a more culture-specific and culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy 
of liberation. 
The Pan-African University must draw from these heritages and provide 
the students, adult learners and the communities with a space in which 
they can learn as well as carry out their research for analysis into dissertations 
and theses after having interacted and been trained by their teachers, 
community experts, and consultants at the University campuses as well as 
in the community knowledge sites. The University should also provide 
them with the facilities necessary for expanding on their existing knowledge 
and, with their teachers and indigenous knowledge experts, carry out 
theoretical formulations and reflections in an interdisciplinary, pluridisciplinary 
and comparative manner. It is to provide conditions for the acquisition 
of knowledge not only for "its own sake" but for the sake of humanity 
and African recovery and rebirth. 
Epistemology and Methodology 
For the Pan-African University to have a real impact and meaningful and 
innovative contribution the University should develop new methodologies 
and techniques for accessing, utilising, and storing all knowledge based on 
an African epistemology and cosmology. This would imply the development 
of an all-inclusive approach, which recognises all sources of human knowledge 
as valid within their own contexts. This requires the adoption of 
hermeneutic philosophy in its African essence (Nabudere, 2002).
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 9 
An African-based epistemological foundation is a prerequisite to the production 
and development of knowledge. Foucault in his book: The Order of 
Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970), coins the concept 
"episteme" from its Greek origin to mean the fore-conception of any investigation 
in the search for knowledge. An episteme is therefore formed before 
hand through an "inner structure of being," which constitutes its order. It is 
this order that arranges the world of being through which the "symbolic disclosure" 
is produced. According to Foucault: 
Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner 
law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, 
and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by glance, an 
examination, a language (Foucault, 1970: xx). 
This means that every speaker or investigator acts in accord with the symbolic 
order of which he/she may at times be unconscious in the activities 
within the given culture and "discourse framework". According to Foucault 
again: "The fundamental structures of a culture - those governing its language, 
its schemes of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, 
the hierarchy of its practices-establish for every man from the very start, 
the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he 
will be at home" (ibid). It is these prior historical forms, which constitute 
the ordered space that makes possible the articulation of particular statements 
while excluding others. 
They also constitute the conceptual framework, which makes it possible 
to establish functional rules of discourse as well as methodologies and techniques 
"with respect to the formulation of statements that are possible in 
the corresponding discourse". The symbolic order that forms this framework 
are, therefore, not merely formal, universal, or transcendental presuppositions 
of discourse or language. "Rather they consist in historically, culturally, 
and discursively specified modes of disclosure in which substantive, 
deeply embedded assumptions about being, nature, subjectivity, time, and 
so on, are introduced as material presuppositions for serious discourse 
about the corresponding domains" (Kogler, 1999: 96). 
Methodology enables these conceptual frameworks to be articulated by 
formulating rules and procedures to be followed in producing knowledge 
within the particular epistemology. These rules and procedures govern the 
construction of the concepts and their use in analysis. Therefore, a research 
methodology is not only important in defining how the research investigation 
is to be carried out, it also determines the instruments to be used and 
how the findings are to be interpreted. Furthermore, methodology determines 
the questions to be posed as well as the issues to be investigated. It 
follows that the "facts" to be found from the research are to a great extent
10 Dani W. Nabudere 
determined by the methodology employed, which is also based on an epistemological 
foundation. The methods, techniques, and tools, which are 
utilised in gathering evidence and the 'facts' in the course of investigation, 
are all determined by the methodology. Methodologies, methods, techniques 
and tools are therefore not 'neutral' instruments to be used by any 
system of knowledge, although a lot can be learnt from them in a cross-cultural 
way. 
In our view, the methodological approach used by researchers should be 
hermeneutical. It should be open-ended to permit cross-cultural communication 
and exchange of ideas and opinions to promote understanding 
between all knowledge systems in their diversities [Habermas, J, 1984]. 
This is an African philosophical approach based on acceptance of pluralism 
and cultural diversity. The name of Hans-Georg Gadamer is associated with 
this line of argument in hermeneutics in which he has stressed the need for 
the "fusion of historical horizons" as the best way of transmitting understanding 
between the different lived histories or experiences of different 
communities as the basis of their existence. Hermeneutics insists on both 
the cultural context as well as the historical contingencies of events as necessary 
in bringing about a true understanding of the different lived experiences. 
Furthermore, hermeneutics has its roots in the African/Egyptian 
mythical figure of Hermes, the messenger of knowledge from the Gods to 
mortals, and that is why "hermeneutics is without reason, named after 
Hermes, the interpreter of the divine message to mankind, (Gadamer, 
1975:98-100). 
This philosophic-pedagogic approach should be used based on the premises 
that encourage self-directed learning, which engages with the knowledge, 
interests, and real life situations that the learners can bring to their 
learning situations. This notion of site-specific knowledge tries to correct 
the Eurocentric tendency to universalise knowledge around Occidental centres 
and sites of knowledge which are privileged to the disadvantage of others, 
claiming to be the only sites of "rationality" and "scientific knowledge." 
The recognition of these other sites and centres creates a truly multipolar 
world of global knowledge drawn from all sources of human endeavour. 
Practically this means that the Pan-African University will identify these 
sites as centres of learning for both the students and the communities and, in 
the process, create directories of experts in African knowledge systems wherever 
Africans are to be found. The student will be allocated to these knowledge 
sites where an expert in the specific area of his/her knowledge will be allocated 
to him/her. In addition, local research assistants approved by the expert 
will be allocated to him/her to guide him/her in accessing knowledge 
from the community and the environment generally. The students will be required 
to spend 20 per cent of their requisite period of learning at this site
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 11 
studying and learning from these local sites of knowledge and their experts. 
During this time, the students will also be required to spend 20 per cent 
of this time teaching the local people some of the knowledge they have 
acquired through the formal educational system in areas of interest to the 
local people. In this way, the students will not be engaged in just pirating 
and privatising knowledge but will also be depositing and banking some of 
his knowledge in the communities in a mutual exchange of learning. The 
students and the communities will in this way have mutually created 
"learning societies" at the site of knowledge, where new libraries of knowledge 
will be created in an organic way. The notes of the indigenous knowledge 
made by the student in the local dialects and languages will be copied 
and deposited into a community library, which will emerge and expand as 
the University expands its work into the communities. 
The gap that has been created between the African elites and their people 
arises out of the fact that the elites were taught through foreign culture, which 
included foreign languages. The result has been that the African elite has acquired 
extensive knowledge, which is not relevant to their communities. In the 
same way, because the elites did not learn through their mother tongues, they 
have not accessed the vast amount knowledge that is still available there. The 
consequence is that we have scholars and intelligentsia that do not understand 
and respect the strength of their cultures and knowledge base, while imbibing 
that of the other cultures. At the same time, we have rural communities that are 
illiterate but are depositories of indigenous and practical knowledge that could 
educate and enrich the education of the elites. 
The elite looks at their village compatriots as ignorant and illiterate, 
while the villagers look upon the elites as agents of foreign culture and economic 
interests. Hostility exists between the two and there is no trust 
between them since relationships between them is based on top-down 
"development" dictates passed on by the elite to the "ignorant masses". This 
is the reason why African cultures and civilisation have stagnated, only 
changing to accommodate foreign inspired solutions. As Herbert Vilakazi 
has argued: 
The peculiar situation here is that knowledge of the principles and patterns of 
African civilisation remained with ordinary, uncertificated men and women, 
especially of those in rural areas. The tragedy of African civilisation is that 
Western-educated Africans became lost and irrelevant as intellectuals who 
could develop African civilisation further. Historically, intellectuals of any 
civilisation are the voices of that civilisation to the rest of the world; they are 
the instruments of the development of the higher culture of that civilisation. 
The tragedy of Africa, after conquest by the West, is that her intellectuals, by 
and large, absconded and abdicated their role as developers, minstrels and 
trumpeters of African civilisation. African civilisation then stagnated; what 
remained alive in the minds of languages of the overwhelming majority of
12 Dani W. Nabudere 
Africans remained undeveloped. Uncertificated Africans are denied respect 
and opportunities for development; they could not sing out, articulate and 
develop the unique patterns of African civilisation (Vilakazi, 2002: 203). 
Vilakazi adds that Africa therefore finds herself in an awkward situation. 
Africa needs to develop an educational system founded upon and building 
on the civilisation of the overwhelming majority, yet her intellectuals are 
strangers to that civilisation. They have no spiritual or intellectual, sympathetic 
relationship with the culture and civilisation embracing the masses 
of African people. "The biggest spiritual and mental challenge to African 
intellectuals is that in this massive re-education process, (which is necessary) 
the only teachers they have are ordinary African men and women who 
are uncertificated, and who live largely in rural areas." He concludes: 
We are talking here about a massive cultural revolution consisting, first, of our 
intellectuals going back to ordinary African men and women to receive education 
of African culture and civilisation. Second, it shall break new ground in 
that uncertificated men and women shall be incorporated as full participants 
in the construction of the high culture of Africa. This shall be the first instance 
in history where certificated intellectuals alone shall not be the sole builders 
and determinants of high culture, but shall be working side by side with ordinary 
men and women in rural and urban life. Intellectuals must become 
anthropologists doing fieldwork, like Frobenius. But unlike academic Western 
anthropologists, African intellectuals shall be doing field work among their 
own people as part of a truly great effort aimed at reconstructing Africa and 
preparing all of humanity for conquering the world for humanism (ibid:204). 
Vilakazi is quoted here at length to demonstrate that the exercise we are trying 
to set in motion here has occupied the sharpest minds on the African 
continent. He is also quoted at length because of the relevance of his ideas 
to what we are trying to do-and more so on the issue of linking the rural 
communities to centres of high learning. Vilakazi challenges all of us to 
wake up to this challenge and create a new University that will resurrect 
the deep values of African humanism [Ubuntu) that is so badly needed in 
today's gadgetised and digitised world without the human touch and spirit. 
The Pan-African University is intended to bridge that gap. 
This approach would be one which departs from the one-sided western 
"Africanist" who, in his/her search for the "authentic" African and the 
depository of genuine Africa discourse, seeks to locate the "real" African, 
seeks to establish an iron wall between "the man in the bush" vis-a-vis the 
westernised educated African. While the problem Vilakazi poses is a real 
one, there exists nevertheless a link between the two components of African 
society. A non-African cannot play the role the African elite is required to 
play in the transformation of his/her society, nor can the creation of a new 
African University be established without both of them. Therefore, the new
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 13 
approach seeks to build on the unity of the two social forces as necessary for 
the reconstruction of Africa from ruins inflicted by Europe. 
Just like Vilakazi, who would like to see the African intelligentsia being 
tutored by their "uncerticificated" men and women to jointly produce a new 
African high culture that would be at the base of the African Renaissance, 
Y. V. Mudimbe too would like to see the emergence of a "wider authority" 
of a "critical library" of the westernised African intellectual's discourses 
developed together with "the experience of rejected forms of wisdom, which 
are not part of the structures of political power and scientific knowledge" 
(Mudimbe,1988: x-xi). This is a useful reminder despite the fact that 
Mudimbe himself "lamentably fails to emancipate himself from the vicious 
circle inherent in the deconstructionist stance" of how this "usable past" 
should be used by African " experts" to construct an "authentic" African 
episteme. (Masolo, 1994: 179). The object of the Pan-African University is 
indeed to overcome this epistemological divide between the "uncertificated 
Africans" and the African intelligentsia. 
African languages shall therefore be at the centre of developing the 
University at all knowledge sites. Language, as Cabral rightly pointed out, 
is at the centre of articulating a people's culture. He points out that the 
African revolution would have been impossible without African people 
resorting to their cultures to resist domination. Culture is therefore a revolutionary 
force in society. It is because language has remained an "unresolved 
issue" in Africa's development that present-day education has 
remained an alien system. Mucere Mugo quotes Franz Fanon who wrote: 
"to speak a language is to assume its world and carry the weight of its civilisation" 
(Mugo, 1999: 218). Prof. Kwesi K. Prah has argued consistently 
over many years that the absence of African languages has been the "key 
missing link" in African development [Prah, 1998]. 
It follows that the Pan-African University has to build its curriculum on 
the basis of promoting African languages at the sites of knowledge and at 
the same time try to build libraries at those sites in the language of the people 
living there. They shall be promoted as languages of science and technology. 
This implies a complete revamping of the epistemological, cosmological 
worldview of the present day discourse. It will also mean the application 
of different methodological and pedagogical approaches to learning 
and research in African conditions. 
For instance, ICT should enable to serve the multicultural and multilinguistic 
base of African countries, which demand user interfaces to work 
within given cultural contexts, graphic literacy, language interfaces, etc: 
The diversity of language and high illiteracy rate demands applied research on 
the appropriate systems platform for local community environments, such as 
generic voice applications (automated voice responses and recordings, library
14 Dani W. Nabudere 
systems, synthesised voice output for web documents, and so on.... 
Opportunities offered by the growth of ICTs that make it easier to design tools 
for illiterates and others with impairments of the visual, language or motor 
faculties required for reading (Bounemra, K; Soltane, B & Adam, L, 1999:341). 
According to the three authors quoted above, research on tools for community 
participation in higher education requires the representation of local 
alphabets in a digital environment by mapping them and creating new 
applications and for purposes of communication; information search and 
retrieval using local languages which therefore requires the representation 
of local languages and hence the need for tools that can be used to search 
and retrieve information using local languages. 
This requires considerable work in setting standards, developing sophisticated 
search algorithms, designing tools and creating search engines for 
specific languages. This would mean the development of African languages 
through its application to technology by developing translation tools to create 
speech production dictionaries, simple single-word language and sentence 
translation facilities in order to assist the illiterate speakers (ibid: 341- 
2). Thus development in general human welfare would result in the development 
of African languages applied to technological research, management 
and change. 
The methodological approach should also be one that uses open and 
resource-based learning techniques available in the actual learning situations. 
It has therefore to draw on the indigenous knowledge materials available 
in the locality and make the maximum use of them. For instance, in 
the area of agriculture, the local practices of inter-cropping and use of shifting 
cultivation that take account of the ecological conditions have to be 
drawn upon for purposes of learning since this brings new knowledge that 
is relevant if the local communities consider them necessary. The aim is not 
to counter-pose "scientific" techniques and tools to the local science and 
knowledge materials. This enables a more legitimate framework for understanding 
the relation between the two approaches by the learners 
(Crossman & Devitch, 2002: 113, 116-7) 
It also means that instead of lamenting the absence of "laboratories" and 
other technical equipment for science education, teachers and students, 
while awaiting such amenities, are able to use the environment as a "living 
laboratory". As Tema has correctly observed: 
A positive spin-off of this practice may be that it will teach students some of 
the practices that are in danger of extinction with advancing urbanisation. 
Most urban children do not have an idea of how all the items mentioned above 
are constructed. Thus, conservations of traditional African culture could be 
achieved during science and mathematics lessons (Tema, 2002:137).
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 15 
Here Tema was referring to how much mathematics is contained in the construction 
of a hut, and how much physics is contained in the construction 
of a drum. He adds, quoting Mbeki in the appeal for an African renaissance, 
that the challenge of an African science educator is, in the words of Mbeki, 
to "encourage her (who carries the burden of colonial domination to rebel) 
to assert the principality of humanity". This can be done, Tema adds, by 
having "the courage to bring the contextual knowledge of the African 
learner into the classroom and make it a subject of study, and a scaffold to 
assist learning" (ibid: 136). 
The issue of practical methodology has therefore to be faced squarely if 
we are to make a meaningful change in African education. The Pan-African 
University should be the starting point. One of the fundamental problems 
facing African economies and African scholarship is the dependency syndrome. 
This condition has replaced colonialism in the form of neo-colonialism. 
According to philosopher, Paulin Hountondji, research in Africa 
has been extroverted (externally oriented) just like African economies 
because knowledge production is a specific form of production "akin to the 
production of goods" [Hountondji, 2002: 26, 28]. He demonstrates how this 
was done in colonial France by showing how research centres were established 
in the metropole based on colonial agricultural production. It is these 
centres, which interpreted the raw research done in the colonies. This heritage 
has continued up to the present so that research by African universities 
remains at the level of collection of data while interpretations of it is 
done at the external centres of knowledge and power. 
Tema questions whether this is the correct method of conducting 
research. He quotes Jensen who argues that the problem with African 
research is not the problem of lack of research skills, but one of epistemology. 
Jensen argues that it is the later, which decides the research issues. He 
argues that in his view, therefore, "instead of using methodology as a starting-
point for introducing students to research, universities should develop 
students' skills to identify the questions worth studying. It is hoped, that 
with this approach, students would unearth their own issues and questions, 
and thereby become internally motivated to conduct their own research" 
(ibid: 135). 
On this issue we would like to add that the students and learners must 
decide the issues and the questions to be investigated not in isolation, but 
together with those involved in the issues to be investigated on. This then 
raises a deeper matter than that of method and goes back to the issue of 
epistemological foundations for knowledge production, which must be 
African-centred. This is why Tema's other point about the student introducing 
his/her "prior knowledge" into the classroom as the beginning of 
learning attains significance. In this context, the student's prior knowledge
16 Dani W. Nabudere 
would mean allowing students to use their "traditional world-view against 
the scientific paradigm." He quotes Baimba as saying: 
Traditional beliefs which make sense of the world to traditional students, often 
conflict with what is taught in science lessons. Hence, for the majority of students, 
meaningless information given them in science lessons is often shelved 
to be used only for the purpose of passing school examinations. Once outside 
school, it is traditional knowledge which they use to make sense of the world 
(Quoted in Tema, 2002:131). 
This means that the student is denied from learning science from his/her 
actual lived experiences. The student is assumed to be an empty slate- tabula 
rasa-on whose brain knowledge can be implanted without experiential 
and contextual background. Learning already assumes a minimum level of 
prior knowledge and that minimum is passed on to the student in her/his 
mother in the context of the culture of that person. This must form the base 
of education otherwise the whole exercise of education turns out to be alien 
culture imposition. 
But more fundamentally, the idea of a new University in Africa must aim 
at recovering those high spiritual virtues of humanity that have been 
sidelined in the modern chase of materiality, as we pointed out earlier. 
Chancellor Williams has called this the "New Humanities" in University 
and college education. 
Curriculum Development 
The above implies the need to develop a new curriculum that takes these 
epistemological, cosmological, methodological and pedagogical challenges 
into account. Hence the curriculum should be culture-specific and knowledge-
source-specific in its orientation. As such, curriculum development 
should aim at: 
• Increasing African knowledge in the general body of global human 
• Creating linkages between the sources of African knowledge and the cenknowledge; 
tres of learning on the continent; 
• Establishing centres of learning in the rural communities and ensure that 
these communities become "learning societies"; 
• Linking knowledge to the production needs of African communities; 
• Ensuring that science and technology are generated in relevant ways to 
address problems of the rural communities where the majority of African 
people live and that this is done in African languages; 
• Reducing the gap between the African elites and the communities from 
which they come by ensuring that education is available to all Africans 
and that such knowledge is drawn from the communities.
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 17 
As already pointed out, to engage in interdisciplinary and pluridisciplinary 
approaches will require that we take aboard African knowledge systems. This 
will need a redefinition of these disciplines into more conjoined intellectual 
arenas. Life situations cannot be studied in isolation of related life problems, 
[n the European experience, social and human science disciplines appeared 
because of real problems, which needed to be studied and understood. Today, 
Africa's problems, challenges and concerns require comprehensive and allsided 
approaches that can deal with issues in a holistic manner. The curriculum 
development must take up these methodological challenges. 
This does not mean abandoning the existing social and human science 
disciplines. All it means is that these disciplines must now be subjected to 
interrogation and problematisation in ways that can enable us to synthesize 
some of them into new related subject matters. This requires curriculum 
development and since it also requires other deep considerations of epistemology 
and methodology, time will be required to develop them and subject 
them to seminars and consultations across the board with other stakeholders 
in African, the Diaspora, and others globally. 
But there has to be a break that sets in motion the new paradigm. We 
must reject the basis of the present Western University, which began with 
the noble idea of being a place of learning for masters and their students. 
Originally this was associated with the idea of rendering mutual aid. Later 
we see the University becoming a place where western knowledge became 
privileged as the "Universal" norm while degrading other knowledge and 
belief systems of other societies. Still later the University became a place 
where religious studies were abandoned and students were relegated to 
"secular" education, which increasingly came to be linked to secular utilitarian 
concepts of possessive economic individualism. In this way, each 
man became his own priest. He (not she) became an egoistic knower able 
to produce knowledge for the market and for himself. Classic education 
became the preserve of the gentleman of leisure who could enjoy its fruits 
for its "own sake". Such education placed premium on mental and intellectual 
development linked to the search for materialist "good life" and ignored 
character of individuals "as it unfolds in interaction with his fellows" 
(Williams, 1993: 202-3). 
As Chancellor Williams correctly points out, the purpose of the University 
should concern itself with the development of the whole person, and, "therefore 
fully integrated with whatever spiritual and moral forces there are in the 
world". It should lead to the "actual improvement of human life on this planet" 
[ibid: 203]. Our task, William adds, "is to determine the general line of (the) 
march towards a higher civilisation than now exists in the world today, and to 
carefully, step by step, develop a concrete and realistic scheme by and through
18 Dani W. Nabudere 
which the advance is to be made" [ibid: 199]. The scheme, which Williams 
proposes, is to establish a University, which breaks with this tradition of greed, 
and establish an "enlarged humanity." He proposes the creation of a department 
of the New Humanities as the core department in the division of the 
University concerned with research and advanced studies. Says Williams: 
It will have the task of enlisting the services of the world's best thinkers of the 
work of developing a science of humanity through studies expressly aimed at 
better human relations. It is to be at the heart of the entire educational system 
and, therefore, the nation" (Ibid: 219). 
Chancellor Williams goes to some length to explain the philosophy behind 
the ideas of a science of humanities. He believes the central idea in this 
philosophy is life. He argues that since neither western science nor religion 
have given satisfactory answers to three questions: Where do we come 
from? Why? And where are we bound?," it becomes a duty of the African 
University to provide space for discussing these questions, which are 
eternal. Such a free exploration and discourse that gives every human being 
a right to an education and exploration is the very expression of human 
freedom and will help to debunk one-sided theories such as those advanced 
by Darwin's Origin of the Species and their advocacy of "survival of the 
fittest-" theories that have given licence to particular power groups to exterminate 
the weak ones. Instead, the enlarged humanities and the science of 
humanity should explore cooperative ways of survival of the entire humanity 
in the spirit of Ubuntu or humanness, which holds / am because We Are. 
The approach put forward here by Chancellor Williams suggests a reorganisation 
of the disciplines of the social and human sciences as well as 
the natural sciences into a holistic approach of learning. The reorganisation 
should lead to the breaking down of the over-compartmentalisation and 
over-fragmentation of faculties, departments, and branches of knowledge. 
It should explore the reunification of allied disciplines such as anthropology 
(also sub-divided into sub-disciplines such as social anthropology, cultural 
anthropology, political anthropology, ethnography, physical anthropology, 
etc.), history, sociology, economics, political science, cultural studies, area 
studies, etc., into unified fields of study. 
These disciplines have been so fragmented that there is no basic understanding 
between them. Through them, knowledge has been narrowed so 
much that, in isolation, it no longer makes sense. This sub-division also 
encourages snobbery and elevated pride, which are based on hollow selfesteem. 
The "knowledge" they wield is in many cases irrelevant to the 
needs of society as a whole. This also creates a false "independence" and 
"neutrality" of the knowledge-bearers as well as a much elevated "academic 
freedom", which is elevated above society in general. The Pan-African
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 19 
University must be people-centred and community-based in which the freedom 
to learn and speak belongs to everyone. 
It should be remembered, as Michel Foucault has correctly noted, that 
today's social and human sciences were themselves the product of historical 
necessity in the European society. These sciences did not inherit a certain 
(preordained) domain "which it was then their task to elaborate with 
positive methods and with concepts that had at last become scientific". They 
did not appear because "of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific 
problem, some practical concern". According to him, at that juncture 
when it became necessary to analyse "man" in society, "it was decided to 
include man among the objects of science". The human sciences appeared 
"when man constituted himself as both that which must be conceived of 
and that which is to be known." He adds: 
There can be no doubt, certainly, that the historical emergence of each of the 
human sciences was occasioned by a problem, a requirement, an obstacle of 
a theoretical or practical order: the new norms imposed by industrial society 
upon individuals were certainly necessary before psychology, slowly, in the 
course of the nineteenth century, could constitute itself as a science; and the 
threats that, since the French Revolution, have weighed so heavily on the balance, 
and even on the equilibrium established by the bourgeoisie, were no 
doubt also necessary before a reflection of sociology type could appear 
(Foucault, 1970:344-5). 
Moreover, many of the social science disciplines and their methodologies, 
methods and techniques were created in defining moments of colonisation 
by Europe over non-European societies in the process of subjecting their 
knowledge systems to European dominance. A discipline such as anthropology 
and its sub-disciplines is a good example in this respect. Most of the 
"traditional" disciplines are also grounded in cultural worldviews, which 
are either antagonistic to other beliefs systems or have no methodology for 
dealing with them. Some of them draw their methodologies and techniques 
of research from studying the "other" societies that were regarded as primitive. 
In this respect, it can be stated emphatically that the colonies were the 
testing laboratories of Western science (Smith, 1999: 65). 
Thus a process of redefining the boundaries between the different 
disciplines in a Pan-African University is the same process of reclaiming, 
reordering, and, in some cases, reconnecting "those ways of knowing", 
which were submerged, subverted, hidden or driven underground by colonialism. 
As Linda Tuhiwai Smith has correctly noted of native Australian 
knowledge systems, which were colonised: 
In terms of the way knowledge was used to discipline the colonised, it worked 
in a variety of ways. The most obvious forms of discipline were through exclusion, 
marginalisation and denial. Indigenous ways of knowing were excluded
20 Dani W. Nabudere 
and marginalised.... Discipline is also partitioned (like land-DWN), (where) 
individuals (were) separated and space compartmentalised. ... This form of 
discipline worked at the curriculum level, for example, as a mechanism for 
selecting our 'native' children and girls for domestic and manual work. It 
worked also at the assessment level, with normative tests designed around the 
language and cultural capital of white middle classes (Smith, 1999: 68). 
Creating a holistically defined curriculum will, therefore, of necessity, mean 
reasserting African ways of knowing and ordering of knowledge. Such a 
process of reclaiming our own ways of knowing is in fact a libratory 
process, which must be reflected in the academic curriculum by participatory 
research in which the masses of the African people must participate. 
Thus it is incumbent on African scholars who live in this age with the 
specific problems and concerns of the moment to work together with the 
"uncertificated" African men and women to determine the nature of our 
social science disciplines and to pursue them in ways that can address societal 
problems. Since our problems are multidimensional and multifaceted, 
it is necessary that they be investigated from in multidimensional and holistic 
manner. It is this that calls for interdisciplinarity and pluridisciplinarity 
in our methodologies. The interdisciplinary approach also draws from the 
African-centred approach, which was holistic and complementary as 
opposed to the dualistic Newtonian deductive approach that established a 
body-mind dichotomy. 
The interdisciplinary and pluridisciplinary approach and methodology 
will facilitate access to the theoretical resources of the various disciplines 
and also entail the combining of the natural sciences with the social sciences 
and the 'humanities' so as to have a holistic understanding of nature 
and the way it relates to human kind and society in general. The study of 
African society will also not just be theoretical- it will have to delve into 
political and ideological questions, which science has to underlie. 
The study and research will reflect the daily dealings of society and the 
challenges of daily life of the people. Therefore, as Semon Pathe Gueye has 
pointed out, the problematic of the African Renaissance must be tackled 
through a fruitful dialectic between theory and practice, intellectual elaboration 
and practical experience. He adds: 
This dialectic will be based on, and underlined by, a permanent and constructive 
dialogue between the scientists and politicians who are committed to the same 
objective of renewing our continent, but also between the masses and the elite, 
who pretend to think and act in their name but sometimes confine themselves 
to intellectual speculation that has nothing to do with the daily life of the common 
people. The concept which will result from our discussions would be able 
to meet the needs and demands of the masses and to become, in their hands, a 
powerful instrument for positively transforming their current situation and opening 
the prospect of a better future (Gueye, 1999:244).
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 21 
The basic idea is to redefine the role of the University in the world today 
and define its specific responsibilities for enhancing human civilisation in 
general. This requires the widening application of the hermeneutic philosophy 
that recognises the basic unity of human endeavour through "discourse" 
which, according to Heidegger, expresses "the intelligibility of 
Being-in-the world" (Heidegger, 1962: 204). 
ASC Trust, in carrying out this task, has entered into a collaborative 
arrangement with other institutions of higher learning to promote and 
advance the process of curriculum development in the contest of these realities. 
We have created a collaborative arrangement with the University of 
South Africa-UNISA-in a joint venture to develop such an African-centred 
curriculum based on a hermeneutic approach. More efforts will be made to 
enter into similar arrangements to broaden this process, which has to be on 
going. Furthermore, the effort will involve post-graduate students who have 
to embark on research at the sites of knowledge so that the new curriculum 
reflects the actual knowledge on the ground. 
Taban lo Liyong, Head of the Centre for African Studies at the University 
of Venda, South Africa, who has been involved in elaborating an Africancentred 
curriculum for the teaching at the Centre, has argued that each discipline 
must elaborate and extend its curriculum to embrace the African 
indigenous worldview, or social practices, or scientific and technological 
usages and developments. 
According to Liyong, past technological developments and achievements 
of Africa, their techniques, arts and artistries, the products and processes of 
production and their techniques must be studied with a view to "modernising 
them." At the same time, he argues that technological innovations 
from Europe and Asia "should be married to the native ones to produce a 
third new and appropriate technology." In whatever event, he advocates 
that the "African rhythm should control the speed of adoption or adaptation; 
African ethos of communal care and spiritual life should determine what 
we get from outside or keep from our past" (Liyong,, 1999). 
We think this is the correct approach because besides recognising other 
systems of knowledge, it leaves open the need for African systems of knowledge 
to acknowledge and learn from others in a discourse of cross-cultural 
understanding. But we do not agree that in developing a new curriculum, 
each discipline should elaborate an African-centred curriculum to embrace 
African indigenous world-view and practices in that particular discipline. 
This would be "adding" to the confusion of fragmentation, which would 
render the African world-view that should be holistic to the heap of the 
existing fragmented knowledge. 
We acknowledge that the territory from which we are operating is a hostile 
one and what Taban lo Liyong proposes is an engagement in a kind of
22 Dani W. Nabudere 
"guerrilla warfare" on hostile territory. But we must go beyond that and capture 
the truth in Chancellor Williams' paradigm, which builds on a holistic 
hallenge to the western fragmentation. Indeed this is how I would be 
inderstanding Liyong's appeal that African rhythm should control the 
rocess. In my view, it should not only control the speed, but should more 
undamentally, aim at the content and the quality of the development of the 
:urriculum. 
We agree with these observations broadly as a basis for debate and work 
n progress. The field of curriculum development needs to go beyond the 
>resent day approaches and move towards integrated and synthesized 
inowledge. Privileging African-centred curriculum must go beyond a narow 
conception of what is purely African to include such knowledge within 
he wider synthesised framework of global knowledge. There are several 
evels at which this can take place. There is the level of integrating the tralitional 
African depositories of knowledge with modern science teaching 
ind the application of technology into a holistic knowledge. This would 
mply the integration of both the cognitive and conceptual frameworks in 
ปoth systems of thought and understanding. The question, however, is can 
he duality between rationality and non-rationality be synthesised? If this is 
lone, it will mean a new form of knowledge that has meaning and signifiance 
of human life and human community as a global entity with its diverities. 
We agree with Fatnowna and Pickett when they say that to achieve the 
hove synthesis, would in one sense, be a "return" but also a "a re-integraive 
process of recovering wholeness". In this sense, according to them, such 
ntegration "goes beyond itself because the same process engages us in 
ransformation". It is a dialectical transformation of the different parts that 
xisted before, but which now exist in new form and with a new content. It 
5 a transformation, which involves the liberating of knowledge at both ends 
if the sites of knowledge as well as "being intimately bound up with the 
ransformation of values and a sense of belonging to a whole-earth, a perpective 
that privileges the local within commitment to the global". This 
ssentially is a transformation of human consciousness "both driven by and 
lecessary for those changes in knowledge systems" creating a "relational 
lature of things" (Fatnowna and Pickett, 2002: 222-3). 
The process of establishing the Pan-African University and the developnent 
of the new curriculum will very much be assisted by the fact that the 
Jniversity will at first offer postgraduate courses. It means that the students 
vho engage in this transformative education will be part of the designing of 
he new curriculum in the process of their assignments in the different 
ields of study. Responding to the call for a completely new approach, these
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 23 
students will visit actual sites of knowledge where they will learn and relate 
to them in a cultural-sensitive way. In so doing, they will already imbue a 
new form and sense of content in the new curriculum. Together with their 
teachers at the campuses and knowledge sites, they will build, define and 
articulate a new approach to producing knowledge, which will reconnect 
with the African world. The fact that the African social discourse is still 
coherent and un-segmented will provide a cementing element to the crafting 
of a new curriculum. Thus new disciplines and subjects will be defined 
by the actual theoretical development, practice and the application of new 
theory being developed by the students and the communities. But to begin 
the process, a minimum design of a curriculum will be necessary and this 
can be undertaken in collaboration with other institutions already devoting 
attention to this important matter. 
African-Based Pedagogy 
The above epistemological foundations and methodology based on the need to 
develop a new curriculum already implies a different pedagogy to teaching 
and learning. If we are to draw our inspiration and materials for our learning 
from real life situations of the African people, especially in the rural areas, we 
have to adopt those pedagogical methods and techniques that inform their 
philosophy of life, their worldview and their lived experiences and practice. 
The key to developing an African-centric pedagogy will arise from the fact that 
the University will be based in the knowledge-specific sites where African experts 
of different branches of knowledge are to be found. These sites will help 
to define the content as well as the pedagogy. Initially, the students will, on 
the basis of existing knowledge, undergo methodological workshops where 
the African-based pedagogical tools of teaching and passing on knowledge are 
used in those cultural environments. 
African systems of communication, learning, entertaining and socialising 
are based on the spoken word or orature. One of the processes of privileging 
western knowledge has been the undermining of the oral tradition and orature 
in general. Walter Ong has pointed out in his extensive work on orality and literacy 
that the widespread use of literacy in the west has brought about a cultural 
mutation in the encoding, storing and transmission of knowledge, which 
has had profound consequences for the recognition and mobilisation of endogenous 
knowledge. Many scholars have pointed out that cultures based on 
oracy for encoding, storage, and transmission of knowledge share their knowledge 
in very practical community-based, interactive multisensual transactions. 
Crossman and Devisch, for instance, state that: 
Oracy is very dependent on the participants' culture-specific habitus, bodily 
dispositions, culture of speech/rhetoric, and (gender-, status-, role-and agespecific) 
styles of communication. Oracy anchors memory in the (rhythmic.
24 Dani W. Nabudere 
performative and ritualising) body and in particular in the heart as the source 
of sentiments and morality, and the seat of both secrecy and opacity with 
regard to the memory and interpretation of life-events. Oracy favours 'figuration,' 
a recognition of polysemic reality informed often by unknowingly-by 
metaphor. Literacy, in contrast (at least alphabetic or lineal writing) entails a 
techne that anchors knowledge in vision (more traditionally called observation) 
and in the homogenising text. Writing also produces a 'distancing representation' 
of ideas in line with a more solitary and critical interaction with 
the text and its claims to authority. ... In summary, literacy has favoured an 
essentialistic dynamic of 'literalisation' in which knowledge is equated with 
mirroring 'ostension' or the 're-representation' of reality (Crossman & 
Devisch, 1999:114). 
Crossman and Devisch add that the techno-science and the massive power of 
the conjoined media promote a form of methodologisation (with emphasis 
on procedure rather than substance), operationalisation, prospect and 
homogenising order as techniques of government and science management. 
This essentialising undermines other forms of knowledge, especially those 
in "speech communities" and "communities of conversation" based on 
oracy to the extent that it marginalizes and destroys useful and practical 
knowledge in those communities, which could be of importance to the 
other communities in the world. For instance, during the establishment of 
the Medieval University in Europe, the first university in southern Italy 
utilised the African practice of palaver and to teach law students rhetoric, 
speechifying and oratory. This is today's legal art called advocacy, which 
has encompassed other areas of human communication. 
These pedagogical approaches, which are implied in oracy, contain forms 
of art and techniques to which they give expression, which are essential for 
adult learning. They create for the scholar cognitive shifts in the way new 
knowledge is accessed and acquired as well as opening up new culture-specific, 
cognitive horizons such as parody, drama and performative arts, 
which they could not access before. This also changes the process of knowledge 
exchange and negotiation, of roles of power as well as influence, 
which have been denied these forms of expression as well as their power. By 
mainstreaming these forms of expression, the agents of these forms of 
expression gain visibility and recognition in knowledge creation and production. 
In this way indigenous tales, stories, proverbs, legends, myths, 
symbols and epics come back to life. These cultural forms of knowledge 
incorporate people's philosophies of life, norms, values in a kind of "moving" 
and "living library." 
Mucere Mugo of Kenya has perfected the combination of literal and oral 
techniques of learning and transmitting knowledge and messages in her 
acidic work. She has used orature interludes as a methodological approach 
in critical analysis as a way of developing an emancipatory and libratory
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 25 
education and culture. The interludes "punctuate" the literal discourse and 
the discussion. She does this because she argues that literacy should not be 
privileged over orate traditions, consumed by the majority of African people 
(Mugo, 1999: 211, 225). We agree with this approach. 
Life Long Learning 
Life-long learning has recently become a clarion call of many countries of 
the developed world as well as international organisations as a new 
approach to learning in the 21st century. Yet this educational approach is 
deeply embedded within the African culture and epistemology. According 
to Mugo, learning and culturalisation in African societies were considered 
continuing processes "that took place from birth until death with the family 
unit, extended family, the village and the entire community participating". 
She adds: 
This extended, collective participation in educating children and inculcating 
cultural ethos, however, did not replace the efforts of the professionals who 
taught very specialised knowledge and skills, especially at a given milestones 
of the journey of life. The education was also very practical in conception and 
methodology. It was oriented towards problem posing and problem solving at 
individual and communal levels (Ibid: 213). 
Mugo refers to the work of Jomo Kenyatta in his anthropological work about the 
Gikuyu: Facing Mount Kenya, and Julius Nyerere's Arusha Declaration and 
Tanzania Ten Years After Independence, as approving this method of learning 
and as justifying them on the basis of the long African cultural experience. 
The new concept applied in new conditions by the international community 
is important for African education at this juncture because it 
enables us to open up new institutions and processes of learning to the 
masses of the people to whom Prof. Vilakazi referred to as "uncertificated" 
African men and women to attain higher learning. But the idea of life-long 
learning is not new, as pointed out above. In the case of the developed capitalist 
world, it emerged as part of the effort to deal with growing unemployment 
in the industrialised countries after the mid-1980s with the advent 
of globalisation. Before that it applied to adult learning, especially in the 
Scandinavian countries, where life-long learning was seen as continuing 
education. Later it became a means by which workers could be retrained for 
different kinds of 'flexible' employment. 
However, the 1997 UNESCO Fifth International Conference on Adult 
Education held in Hamburg, Germany, advanced our understanding of the 
concept to a new level. The concept and strategy took on a wider meaning. 
In article 19 (a) of the Agenda for the Future adopted by the Conference 
(CONFETIAV), the international community committed itself to:
26 Dani W. Nabudere 
Open schools, colleges and universities to adult learners: 
i. by requiring institutions of formal education from primary level onwards 
to be prepared to open their doors to adult learners, both women and 
men, adapting their programmes and learning conditions to meet their 
needs; 
ii. by developing coherent mechanisms to recognize the outcomes of learning 
undertaken in different contexts, and ensure that credit is transferable 
within and between institutions, sectors and states; 
iii. by establishing joint university/community research and training partnerships, 
and by bringing the services of universities to outside groups; 
iv. by carrying out interdisciplinary research in all respects of adult education 
and learning with the participation of adult learners themselves; 
v. by creating opportunities for adult learning in flexible, open and creative 
ways, taking into account the specificities of women's and men's lives. 
These commitments fit in very well with the vision and objectives of the 
Pan-African University for they provide for the mechanisms and strategies, 
which can enable us to bring adult learners to formal institutions of learning 
and remove the divide between informal, non-formal and formal education 
in line with African traditions and cultures. It also provides for the 
cooperation in research between the university and the communities, as 
well as providing for the recognition of learning outcomes obtained through 
their own contexts outside the formal system of education. 
Other bodies have taken up the CONFINTEAV Agenda as well. Under 
article 1 (a) of the World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty- 
First Century, it was stated that the core values of higher education are to: 
provide opportunities for higher learning and for learning throughout life, giving 
to learners an optimal range of choice and flexibility of entry and exit 
points within the system, as well as an opportunity for individual development 
and social mobility in order to educate for citizenship and for active participation 
in society, with worldwide vision, for endogenous capacity building, 
and for the consolidation of human rights, sustainable development, 
democracy and peace, in a context of justice. 
The first university to take up the Hamburg CONFINTEAV commitment seriously 
was the University of Murnbai (Bombay), which in article 9 of their 
Mumbai Statement on Life Long Learning, Active Citizenship and the Reform 
of Higher Education argued that in their understanding the transformation 
to genuine life long learning: 
requires a holistic approach which (a) supports the institution becoming a life 
long learning community itself; (W i n t e8r a t e s academic, financial and administrative 
elements; (c) provides structures which are responsible for organisational, 
staff, student and curriculum development and community engagement; 
and (d) aligns the various supportive structures such as academic information 
systems, library provision and learning technologies to the new mission 
of universities in learning societies.
Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University 27 
The statement continued to point out that the key purpose of life-long learning 
was active citizenship, which was important in terms of "connecting individuals 
and groups to the structures of social, political and economic activity in both 
local and global contexts. Democratic citizenship highlights the importance of 
women and men as agents of history in all spaces of their lives" (Article 3). 
These Mumbai positions point to the importance of the Pan-African 
University beginning to build on the foundations of the link between the 
university and the community. It also emphasizes the fact that life long 
learning is dependent on both the individual and the social context and that 
learning occurs in institutions, but also anywhere and anytime throughout 
life. What is crucially important is to recognise it and work on that basis for 
higher education to become part and parcel of the daily life of individuals 
and communities. This is the only way in which education can become a 
practical right for all human beings. 
This approach means that life-long learning enables students and adult 
learners to learn at different times, in different ways, for different purposes 
at various stages of their lives and careers. It is thus connected with providing 
learning opportunities throughout life. It also means that in institutions 
of higher learning, all members of the institution are learners and that 
at different times these members will take different roles as educators, students, 
administrators, cleaners and other support staff positions. 
These positions were picked up, adopted and developed further by the 
University of the Western Cape, South Africa. In the Cape Town Statement, 
characteristic elements of a life-long learning higher education institution 
were laid out. These were to be used as an instrument to assist transformation 
within the institutions of higher learning. These elements have been 
taken into account in this concept paper and will continue to be used to 
develop and monitor various activities to ensure proper development of the 
system. 
Thus applied to African conditions, the concept of life-long learning can 
meet the needs of rural communities who are denied access to higher education. 
This can be done by adopting the idea of recognition of prior learning 
which enables learners to be accredited for different kinds of learning they 
have acquired through different contexts of their lives. This recognition is 
based on the idea, according to the Cape Town Statement, that there are different 
"ways of knowing", if when valued, enable marginalised social groups 
to be full participants in the creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is 
also based on the recognition of resource-based learning environment accessible 
to learners wherever they are and not just on campus. The adoption of 
this approach requires the university to make provision for self-paced independent 
study by providing students and learners "to study effectively wherever, 
whenever and whatever pace is appropriate for them" (p. 11)
28 Dani W. Nabudere 
The concept of life-long learning also widens the scope lor students and 
learners in course presentation and opportunities to enrol for and study 
courses which include the use of multi- and combined-media delivery and 
support, utilising the technologies, both old and new, and the flexible learning 
structures of open and distance learning, such as those suggested here 
of identifying and locating sites of knowledge which can also be centres of 
learning for rural communities. The multi- and combined media delivery 
and support would include the provision of print, correspondence, mass 
media (such as radio), occasional face-to-face tutorials and study groups as 
well as the provision of information communication technologies in rural 
areas as well. We have argued the feasibility of such an approach for pastoral 
communities through community-based telecentres of learning 
(Nabudere, 2002b). 
The application of Information Communication Technologies (ICT), will 
also promote the linkage between science and technical research in the 
University and its link to production units, as well as encouraging technological 
research in rural communities, which are underserved by modern 
technology. It will also encourage applied research relevant to local technologies 
with which people have some familiarity. Improved connectivity 
will also enable the removal of hindrances to good higher education such 
as limited staff resources, poorly prepared students, outdated curricula, 
declining academic quality and lack of library resources. By providing 
higher education access to remote rural areas through distance education, 
the Pan-African University will be able to reach out to a wider student body 
in line with the principles of life long-learning. 
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Endnotes 
1. This came out of a consultation between Prof. Prah and members of the Task 
Force of the Afrika Study Centre, at the Sheraton Hotel, Kampala, on 10th 
December, 2002.