Nobel Laureate Prof Wole Soyinka is joining the decolonisation movement at the faculty of humanities at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) as a distinguished visiting professor, BusinessDay reports.
Soyinka is Africa’s only black Nobel Laureate for literature and continues to actively teach and engage in public discourse on global politics and development.
According to Prof Tshilidzi Marwala, deputy vice-chancellor of research and internationalisation at UJ, decolonisation entails changing the movement of knowledge from the developed world to the developing world and that the appointment spoke to this project of decolonising education in the country, the report says.
Marwala said that having Soyinka join the university was a move that shows Africans could have their own literature, which has its own style and flavour.
He further suggested that by so doing, we can then export that literature to the rest of the world and reverse the direction of knowledge that has tended to come from outside due to our colonial history.
University of Johannesburg is one of the largest public universities in the country and, through Soyinka’s appointment, over the next five years it hopes that he will advance academic projects by engaging with issues that confront society, this according to the report.
At the university Soyinka will be mentoring and lecturing “distinguished lectures” where the public is invited to talk about literature, governance and development, among a host of other themes.
Students around the South Africa have advocated for decolonisation in the Fees Must Fall protests, which were first sparked in 2015
