Today, there are generally universities in Africa rather than ‘African universities’. The legitimacy of the university in Africa is under serious questions now because of its complicity in racism, patriarchy, sexism, colonialism, capitalism, genocide, epistemicide, linguicide, culturecide, and alienation. In other words, the university in Africa as we know it today is elitist and exclusionary. Therefore, rethinking the idea of the university is fundamental to overcoming its current deficiencies in the Global South. This volume, bringing together a number of national case studies and macro-analyses on the dynamics of changing higher education in the Global South, gestures towards the desired, imagined decolonial African university, which should be a site of multilingualism where African indigenous languages, cosmologies and ontologies become a central part of its identity and soul, intolerant of epistemicides, linguicides, and cultural imperialism, but a site of cognitive and social justice that fully embraces the idea that all human beings are born into valid, useful, relevant and legitimate knowledge systems.
