We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted…

Schools in southern Africa use tourism partnerships as a source for establishing philanthropic funding and philanthropic networks. In these partnerships, there is often an exchange of funds for use of the school for tourism purposes. Little is known about the influence of tourism on schools. Drawing on interviews with teachers and tourism…

This paper describes a relatively new active learning approach--Design Thinking--and its adoption in two comparative politics courses. I draw on my experience using Design Thinking in political science courses to offer instructors another pedagogical tool in the active learning toolkit. I outline the rationale for adopting a Design Thinking…

While many U.S. residents like listening to African stories, hearing African stories is difficult because designing effective curricula and teaching about African contexts appear to be a major challenge in U.S. social studies education. Drawing on postcolonial theory, we analyzed the discourses of two contemporaneous historical documents to…

Angifi Dladla's poetry and teaching doctrines are considered tools for consciousness raising, healing and popular education for decoloniality. Through "ku femba", an age-old practice that serves as a channel to cast away evil spells in a society bedevilled by violence, Dladla displays the relationship between man, ancestors and the…

This paper proposes a re-examination of the histographies of theatre for development (TfD) which takes into account the background influences, cultures and agendas of complex networks of actors, organizations, governments, and higher education institutions in which the practice and praxis of TfD revolve. The article introduces and reflects on my…

In this essay, I argue that Somali identities exist within a long history of immigrant aspirations toward what scholars call "whiteness" and their resistance to being identified within identities associated with Blackness. There are two main frames of my argument. First, I show that Somali-Americans' resistance to Blackness seems to be…

Apartheid rested on a division of the senses as much as it did on a reductive politics of racial subjection and its accompanying violence. As an instance of the division of the senses, it produced a condition of stasis in which history and a post-apartheid future were increasingly marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse, and a moral…

The poem "Ritmos negros del Perú" by Afro-Peruvian writer Nicomedes Santa Cruz recovers Afro-Peruvian history and agency through the retelling of the journey of a mythical grandmother. Through the retelling of her story, the poet claims blackness and African roots as pillars of Peruvian culture. In so doing, Santa Cruz opens the door not…

This study explores how libraries mediated interactions between black readers and texts in twentieth century South Africa. By situating libraries as vital infrastructures of reading, I critically examine how librarians tried to build the habit of reading within black communities. Beginning in the 1930s with the Carnegie Corporation of New York's…

Seamus Heaney (like Stimpson and Parker in this issue) speaks of: "A historic dialectic [which] exists between the beautiful and the bestial". In this speech, delivered on 13 December 2012, Njabulo Ndebele reflects on the stories South Africa tells itself about past atrocity, as a way of achieving "the future we have desired".…

African knowledge remains at best on the margins, struggling for an epistemological foothold in the face of an ever dominant Western canon. At worst, African knowledge is disparaged, depreciated, and dismissed. It is often ignored even by African scholars who, having gained control of the academy in the postcolonial context, seemingly remain…

This paper argues that the "institutionalisation" model used by universities to spearhead the intellectualisation of African languages is a non-starter for taking African languages in new creative directions. The major constraint for African language literary culture is that written output has historically been heavily bent towards…

The digital economy and the global pandemic, together with the effects of climate change, have taken a human toll affecting the pace of everyday life, creating an exponential increase in anxiety and stress related diseases. Today's complex, globalised world creates a need to challenge and reconceptualise educational priorities. In an increasingly…

In 1998 the Northern Examination and Assessment Board selected the poem 'Nothing's Changed' by the South African writer Tatamkhulu Afrika as the last of its ten "Poems from Other Cultures and Traditions." Published in the NEAB "Anthology" (1998), 'Nothing's Changed' became a favourite at GCSE for its vivid depiction of…