The indigenous knowledge system of Credo Mutwa: a pedagogical challenge in higher education in South Africa

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses the vast indigenous knowledge system of the late Sanusi Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa as a critical and relevant pedagogy that can enhance the transformation agenda of an African university. It argues for the inclusion of Mutwa’s indigenous knowledge to form part of knowledge that will interface with other knowledges and be included in institutions of higher learning. It argues that the constant drives for an African university with an Africanised and decolonised curriculum must be entrenched by recognising indigenous knowledge holders as public intellectuals who can through social cohesion engage with scholars and students in higher education. It is a fact that indigenous wisdom remains a challenge and a contested terrain in higher education as it is observed that not only have institutions of higher learning admitted to the calls to decolonise, Africanise and indigenise the curriculum but these calls have been met with failures to recognise the intellectual emancipating knowledge systems of their very own African intellectuals. It is these tendencies that have led to the blindness of these spaces not to adequately recognise the canonical knowledge of Credo Mutwa, an indigenous knowledge system which innervates through various fields of studies.