The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence has invited South African artist Christine Dixie to show her multimedia installation "To Be King" at Iwalewahaus. The artist based in Johannesburg set up her installation and celebrated the exhibition opening on Wednesday, 11 May 2022. The exhibition will run until the end of July. The interview was conducted by Nicole Klug.
As part of the event series "Afrikaleidoskop" Seydou Boundaoné joined the Cluster to present his film "Le Sermon des Prohpètes". In this video he talks with Prof. Dr. Ute Fendler and Marie Nadege Tsogo Momo about his film.
Seydou Boundaoné is a Burkinabe film director, screenwriter and producer. He made his debut in filmmaking in 2012 following a training on six episodes of “Noces croisée”, a TV serial by Credo Média. In 2012, he edited “Wam Peega”, a fictional film by Veenem Films before working as Chief operator on “Le piège de la passion”, produced by 3è Œil Production. Prior to “La colère des enfants soldats”, he directed and edited “Mémoires de célébrités” in 2012. In 2022, his feature “The Sermon of the Prophets” is World Premiered at Carthage Film Festival (JCC, Tunisia).
"The Sermon of the Prophets" is about Abdou Djamal, a 50-year-old leader of an armed group, who passes himself off as a gold digger and a devout Muslim. He lives confined to his home in a district of Ouagadougou, a small town on the outskirts of the capital. He only goes out to attend the mosque and a few social ceremonies. He is a strategist and a master manipulator.
We are keenly interested in understanding how the “glocal” scene intervened in the ways of doing politics, and how strategies of political reproduction of longestablished oligarchies and autocracies could present themselves as absolutely new and antipolitical, claiming for radical reforms in the realms of economy, society, culture and education. India, the Philippines, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Germany, Italy, Colombia, Suriname and Brazil were chosen as empirical cases.
Africanisation, decolonisation and transformation are different conceptual ideas and principles that have emerged at different moments of South Africa’s (SA) history as a way of engaging with colonial-apartheid oppression and its legacies. These three discourses tend to be engaged in isolation from each other and continue to be polarised by many. This non-combined approach, however, has limitations, as it risks limiting our (re)imagination of the future of South African higher education (SAHE) from multiple perspectives. Since the dawn of South Africa’s democracy, transformation has been a favoured discourse and conceptual framework. However, the 2015 Fallist protests revealed that the transformation approach, when applied alone, cannot adequately redress South Africa’s colonial-apartheid legacies in higher education; there is a need to include and be inherently guided by the anti-oppression ideologies that informed resistance against colonialism and apartheid because they articulate(d) a particular vision for what a liberated South Africa should look like. Inspired by Es’kia Mphahlele – who believed that after independence new ideas will demand expression and create organs of public opinion, and a hybridity of ideas will rid formerly oppressed societies of their oppressive practices – this article explores and analyses the discourses of transformation, decolonisation and Africanisation relative to the South African higher education system. Having considered South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, and how it has impacted the present day higher education system, I ultimately propose a hybrid-pluriversal approach that combines insights from all three frameworks. Potentially, this approach can positively impact the ongoing process of redressing colonial-apartheid legacies in the South African education system.
