Epistemic injustice and the need for Indigenizing Higher Education:

A Philosophical Discourse

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to reflect critically on the prevailed epistemic injustice and the importance of indigenization among African higher education. Epistemic injustice is an injustice embedded in knowledge. Exclusion and silencing; methodical distortion or caricature of one's meanings or contributions; and belittling of one's status are some of its manifestations. Universities are supposed to be institutions where knowledge is produced and disseminated. With remaining epistemologically subservient to the Western hegemony, African universities however, participated in perpetuating the existing epistemic injustice. Their history of establishment, as an institute that produces the necessary manpower for the smooth functioning of the colonial enterprise, have still kept defining their essence in another form, i.e., alienation. For their intrinsically alienated underpinning, the type of university that many African countries inherited and developed anew have only used them for being a periphery at the global stage of knowledge generation and extending the deep rooted epistemic injustice. Overcoming such a challenge, this piece, with the help of analyzing intensive literature and deployment of a discursive reasoning approach, invokes on the need for indigenizing curriculum and attaining decolonization. Indigenizing involves renovating curriculum and teaching practices to embrace indigenous knowledge. The incorporation of indigenous knowledge facilitates epistemological decolonization of the continent via its institutions of higher learning. To this effect, Philosophy, and perhaps African philosophy specifically, despite an endless debate of proving its existence, have assumed an indispensable role in empowering Africans through articulating a philosophical locus taking in to account the context and cultural idiosyncrasies of the African.