Despite revolutions, ongoing student protests, and long-standing transformational efforts, African higher education remains steeped in a colonial model, with current structures, approaches, and purposes paralleling Western universities. The doctorate, the highest level of formal education one can attain, reflects this commitment to Western…

Since the end of the twentieth century, there have been a large number of Africans in Guangzhou occupying multiple emplacements and engaging in diverse activities so that a whole zone of the urban area is designated 'Little Africa.' The article investigates the linguistic landscape in the African living areas of Guangzhou from a multimodality…

The decolonization of applied linguistics is a critique of applied linguistics (see Phillipson, 1999; Phipps, 2018 and Pennycook & Makoni, 2020). We argue for a shift toward the Global South, in particular Africa, and for the importance of paying attention to 'race' as a significant category of analysis in applied linguistics in Africa. Three…

This paper explores the relationship between language education and identity realization and the consequences of choosing either an Indigenous or a colonial language education approach. The focus is on the African postcolonial context; however, the arguments are also substantiated by examples from other parts of the world. I argue for a…

Globalisation is increasingly affecting universities worldwide. In African contexts, language policies exhibit an inheritance situation in which countries continue to implement policies which favour colonial languages in education. This paper investigates the Malawian higher education context and the ways in which staff engage with…

This research, conducted at a major university in Tanzania, investigated the personal experiences of multilingual students vis-à-vis the government's language policy requiring Swahili as the language of instruction (LoI) at the primary level and English at the secondary level. The participants, who spoke 25 different languages as their L1, were…

Framed by decolonial theory, this paper explores how language and literacy ideologies, including Anglonormativity, or the expectation that children should be proficient in a standardised version of English and are deficient if not, shape language and literacy practices in South African classrooms. While not legitimised, the use of fluid language…