Nigerian Nobel laureate’s novel idea for tackling hatred
Writer Wole Soyinka suggests students should spend their first year at university learning the value of humanism, writes Fiona Forde
Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka says the decolonisation of SA’s university curriculum will take time, just as it had in his home country Nigeria. Speaking on the fringes of an education summit at the University of Johannesburg last week, the 82-year-old playwright, poet and political activist described curriculum transformation as an "unending process" that requires constant effort. "You need to expand and diversify all external information coming from institutions across the world, until there comes a time — and it will come — when the word colonialism doesn’t even feature when you look at the curriculum. It will become obsolete. But it takes time. "Even in Nigeria, the curriculum is not entirely decolonised. But it is drastically different from when I began teaching immediately after independence (in 1960)," he says. SA is still in its infancy in its attempts to decolonise education, Soyinka says, "but the direction is good". "During a recent visit to the University of Cape Town, wher...
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