Epistemic Uprisings: Africanising Doctoral Education and Reclaiming the Intellectual Soul of the University

African higher education stands at a pivotal epistemic threshold, where the pursuit of global relevance often masks an ongoing intellectual subjugation. Nowhere is this contradiction more starkly visible than in doctoral education, a space still tethered to Euro-modernist logics that valorise detached objectivity, linear rationalism, and disembodied knowledge. These paradigms, often inherited uncritically, re-inscribe colonial hierarchies under the guise of methodological neutrality and academic excellence. In this presentation, I advance the provocation that doctoral education in Africa must be recast not as a site of intellectual mimicry but as a battleground for epistemic liberation, a space for insurgent scholarship that reclaims Africa’s right to theorise itself.

Framed within the context of the Doctoral Training Suite at the University of Zambia, a six-module curriculum designed to disrupt colonial knowledge architectures, Prof Chipindi explores how epistemological sovereignty can be enacted through intentional curriculum reconfiguration, supervisory decolonisation, and scholarly resistance to citational dependency.

Rather than romanticising indigeneity or essentialising African knowledge, he proposes a critical-creative praxis that fuses theoretical depth with political urgency. This work reframes African universities not merely as instruments of capacity development but as autonomous sites of world-making, spaces where the intellectual soul of the continent is defended, reimagined, and set ablaze.

Speaker: Prof Ferdinand Mwaka Chipindi, University of Zambia

Date: 30 July 2025

Time: 13:00 to 14:30 (SAST)

Venue: Online via MS Teams.

For more information as well as the MS Teams link, please contact Mikateko Mathebula at MathebulaM@ufs.ac.za.

Invitation to RAHEdA Webinar_30July2025