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Decolonizing Education: 'In My Own Tongue'
Trailer: Decolonizing Educati0n
In 1890, colonized communities in Zimbabwe sang a song called Chemutengure — a simple tune about an ox-cart, coded with resistance to a new order arriving on their land. More than a century later, a Zimbabwean storyteller sat down to write his doctoral thesis about that song. And he made a decision that would make academic history: he wrote it entirely in Shona. Not translated into Shona. Not summarised in Shona. Written in Shona — from the first page to the last — at a South African university, in a system built almost entirely around English. In this episode, the story of Dr Ignatius Mabasa.
The word decolonize gets used a lot. But what does it actually mean — in the classroom, in the curriculum, in the lives of African students? Decolonizing Education is a new limited series from the African Studies Department at Penn State University, bringing together first-person testimonies, interviews, and honest conversations about knowledge, power, and belonging. Subscribe now. The conversation starts here.
A child walks into a classroom fluent in the language of their grandmother's stories. By the time they walk out, they've learned that their language doesn't belong on the page. That the words for love, for grief, for justice that they grew up with aren't the words that count. This happens across the continent, in numerous languages, but it's strikingly the same story — in Harare, in Lagos, in Kampala, in Lomé. In this episode, what does it cost — and what does it make possible — to be educated in a colonial language?