The Last Word: The “Africanisation” of communication studies

Abstract

WHERE DO WE STAND WITH THE “AFRICANISATION” OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES?
As academics and lecturers we are well aware of the demands of transformation. Many
of us have been and are going through the demanding, time-consuming and bureaucratic
exercises of SAQAtising our syllabi. In the process, meaningless and unimaginative
templates tend to dictate the academic activity, leaving little to the creative intellectual
mind. We have been and are going through the processes of adapting our syllabi to
outcome-based education and teaching, now to be turned into problem-solving education
and teaching; of turning year courses into semester courses, and probably now converting
them back to year courses; and of merging institutions and, in so doing, trying to marry
different educational philosophies, practices, attitudes and organisational cultures.
At Unisa, the above have been and are taxing experiences. Distance education demands
that every word you utter has to go through a rigorous process of educational planning
and design, writing, evaluation by critical readers, re-writting, re-evaluation, and
proofreading over and again, before it goes through the processes of production and
despatch. Now, a new phase of transformation has entered: the Africanisation of our
courses. But what is Africanisation?
The purpose of what follows is not to problematise and intellectualise the concept. That
is done, more than often, in a stream of academic articles and in discussions among
academics. The discussions usually begin with: “What the hell is Africanisation?” Neither
is the purpose to deconstruct related concepts such as “conceptual engineering”,
“cultural revolution”, “power”, “ideology”, “hegemony” and so on. Somewhere in the
debate, they all feature.
In the following paragraphs I prefer to quote verbatim, and in a paraphrased way, from
two presentations given by two Unisa scholars at a seminar held on 3 March 2005 at Unisa
on the topic of Africanisation. They are Prof. T.S. Maluleke, the Deputy Executive Dean
of Unisa’s College of Human Sciences, and Prof. A.M.B. Mangu of Unisa’s Department of
Constitutional, International and Indigenous Law. The purpose is not to comment on their
presentations, but rather to uphold them as possible yardsticks against which to measure
the resistance to, and/or progress or lack of progress in, the Africanisation of South
African communication studies.