Abstract

Education in South Africa has always been a contentious matter since the inception of colonization and coloniality, which is rooted in two competing conceptions of education. The first being colonial missionary education, framed as uplifting the Black/Indigenous “savage” from the pits of backward, retarded, and gradual life as detailed by Mudimbe in The Invention of Africa. The second being Indigenous modes of education (along with their role and function) as explicated by Gqoba in his Ingxoxo Enkulu Ngemfundo (A Great Debate on Education). These two competing conceptions continue to define the higher education landscape in the country, as decolonial agitation was substantiated by the student movements of #MustFall.The chapter begins by analyzing Gqoba’s treatment of education. This treatment contextualizes the contestation that defines a philosophy of education as articulated from a South African vantage-point. In the second move, it analyzes AC Jordan’s The Wrath of the Ancestors. Jordan’s novel reveals a textured and layered interplay between western conceptions of education – as they necessarily contend and compete with traditional/Indigenous ideas of education. The main objective is to discern (the aims of education), i.e., what a South African philosophy of education might entail in a context defined by colonial violence, contestation, and erasure.