“IMFUNDO” THE STUDENT; THE EVOLUTION ADAPTATION, AND PRACTICE OF AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION AT THE KARA HERITAGE INSTITUTE IN PRETORIA SOUTH AFRICA By Clarence George III A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of African American and African Studies—Doctor of Philosophy 2021 ABSTRACT “IMFUNDO” THE STUDENT; THE EVOLUTION ADAPTATION, AND PRACTICE OF AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION AT THE KARA HERITAGE INSTITUTE IN PRETORIA SOUTH AFRICA By Clarence George III This dissertation study (Imfundo) which means education in isiZulu seeks to explore, the practice and evolution of African-centered education at the Kara Heritage Institute from 2016 to 2019. This project seeks to study African centered education at Kara focusing on how the Heritage Institute instills notions of African consciousness, notions of Pan-Africanism, structural pedagogy, and culturally relevant pedagogy. This research project evaluated and observed African-centered education in South Africa at the Kara Heritage institute in Pretoria South Africa. Over 4 years of data collected has yielded a great deal of information about South Africa's unique approach to education, culture, and heritage restoration. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to give thanks to God and my ancestors before and after me! iii PREFACE This project studies African-centered education at Kara focusing on how the Heritage Institute instills notions of African consciousness, notions of Pan-Africanism, structural pedagogy, and culturally relevant pedagogy. This research project has been years in the making. My interest in African-centered schools and pedagogy has been integral to my academic career and development. I first engaged in an investigation of African centered pedagogy and schools at San Francisco State University where I earned my master’s degree in Ethnic Studies. My interest in these particular schools was born out of my interest in ancient African global history and contemporary experience. I also have come to realize the power of knowledge of self. Upon my opportunity to engage in data collection and participatory observations from Ile Omode I discovered the power and potential of a culturally grounded educational experience. Besides, the agency these schools provide children of African descent, they also focused on science and technology. They truly looked to develop students for a dynamic future. When I observed the school, culture demonstrated at Ile Omode it was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It truly reflected a village or better yet a learning community where excellence is the standard. One of the most impressive aspects of this case study was learning performance and outcomes. The students typically engaged in course work that is 2 or 3 grades advanced. Via my original research project, I was made aware of the unique learning environment African-centered schools provide. My interest in these specific spaces has allowed me to travel and explore other African centered schools and African centered pedagogy in practice. In 2016 on a study abroad visit to South Africa I was able to visit an African-centered school called The Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria South Africa. This school is a direct response to years iv of cultural repression and the apartheid government. When I was provided the opportunity to visit the school location it was very impressive. The school is a true beacon of the Pan African spirit. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER ONE: THESIS: AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION ACROSS BORDERS: A SOUTH AFRICAN CASE STUDY ............................................................................................... 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Significance of Kara Institute ............................................................................................. 2 Justification/Rationale for your study ................................................................................. 5 Imfundo: Thesis and Research Questions ........................................................................... 9 Research Design................................................................................................................ 10 Units of Analysis and Scope ............................................................................................. 11 Qualitative Data Sources................................................................................................... 12 Analysis............................................................................................................................. 12 Analytical Frameworks ..................................................................................................... 13 Background ....................................................................................................................... 15 Authors and Research expanded ....................................................................................... 16 Key Terms ......................................................................................................................... 21 Chapter Overview ............................................................................................................. 22 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW: EFFECTIVENESS OF AFRICANA AESTHETICS AND SCHOOLING SPACES ............................................................................. 26 Africana Aesthetics and Schooling Space ........................................................................ 26 African Centered Pedagogy and Practice ......................................................................... 38 African Centered Schools ................................................................................................. 51 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGIES & DATA COLLECTION ........................................ 61 Sources & Data Collected ................................................................................................. 61 Individual Interviews ........................................................................................................ 62 Field Notes and Observations ........................................................................................... 63 Photos and Captions .......................................................................................................... 64 Illustrations ....................................................................................................................... 65 Documents and Artifacts................................................................................................... 70 Instruments ........................................................................................................................ 70 Data Analysis .................................................................................................................... 70 Research Question in Relation to Interview Questions. ................................................... 76 Matrix of Findings and Source of Data Triangulation ...................................................... 77 CHAPTER FOUR: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF KARA IN THE POST-APARTHEID ERA ...... 79 Section 1 The Inconvenience of the Apartheid Government and African education ....... 81 vi Section 2 The Bantu Education Act and its impact on Black people's Education and Experiences ....................................................................................................................... 95 Section 3 The Swatow Uprising and The Impact on Education and Experiences of Black South Africans ............................................................................................................... 103 Section 4 The History and Significance of the Kara Heritage Institute and its Importance to South African Education ............................................................................................ 107 CHAPTER FIVE: FINDINGS: KARA’S AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION MODEL: AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY, UBUNTU, AND CULTURAL RESPONSIBILITY .................. 112 Generated Findings ......................................................................................................... 112 CHAPTER SIX: DISCUSSION: THE CULTURAL RELEVANCE OF AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION IN AFRICA ........................................................................................................ 138 Section I .......................................................................................................................... 138 Section II ......................................................................................................................... 141 Section III........................................................................................................................ 142 Positionality/Reflexivity ................................................................................................. 150 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION ........................................................................................ 152 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 158 vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Data Display……………………………………………………………………………73 Table 21: Research Question in Relation to Interview Questions...……………………………..76 Table 3: Matrix of Findings and Source of Data Triangulation2…………..…………………….77 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Image located on the white wall at the Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria, South Africa. …………………………………….……………………………….………..…………...65 Figure 2: This is an image of the courtyard at the Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria, South Africa. It looks like rural African architecture in a modern Western urban area………… 66 Figure 3: Image of “Indawo lapho kwenziwa khona ukudla” A place where food is made. Located in Pretoria, South Africa at the Kara Heritage Institute…………... ............................... 67 Figure 4: A Depiction of ancient Egyptian personalities located on the outer perimeter white wall at the Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria, South Africa………………….. ..................... 68 Figure 5: The image of Frederick Douglass in South Africa is located on the white wall of the Kara Heritage Institute indicated the global and Pan African nature of the ontology and Epistemology of the Kara Heritage Institute. ............................................................................... 69 ix CHAPTER ONE: THESIS: AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION ACROSS BORDERS: A SOUTH AFRICAN CASE STUDY Introduction Culturally relevant pedagogy, Ladson Billings argues, its centrality in the academic success of African American and other children who have not been well served by our nation's public schools. Native American educator Cornel Pewewardy (1993) asserts that one of the reasons Indigenous children have trouble in schools is that educators traditionally have attempted to insert culture into the education, instead of inserting education into the culture. This notion is, probably, true for many students who are not a part of the White, middle-class mainstream. This work has had a variety of labels including "culturally appropriate" (Au & Jordan, 1981), "culturally congruent" (Mohatt & Erickson, 1981), "culturally responsive" (Cazden & Leggett, 1981; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982), and "culturally compatible" (Jordan, 1985; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1987). This dissertation project seeks to understand the practice, the features, and the elements of African Centered Pedagogy (ACP)/African Centered Education (ACE) at the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. The school mission of the Kara Heritage Institute is to create new pioneers for a healthy South African future. Kara Heritage Institute believes in young people being able to understand the glorious past of African experiences across the continent and the diaspora to forge a new and dynamic African centered nation. By looking at Kara, we can decipher how this institute in South Africa adopted balanced, transformed notions and practices of the African American version of the ACP movement to a South African context. 1 By looking at the Kara Heritage Institute I will be able to elucidate the relationships between the physical spaces for learning and the impact of culturally grounded curricula and pedagogy. A South African case study of African-centered pedagogies continues the work informed by the works of decolonizing African nationalist scholars and practitioners (i.e., Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Steve Biko, and Kwame Nkrumah) who have written important discourses that could be characterized as African-centered education. Nonetheless, in a post-nationalist African global era, it is South Africa that is embarking upon the most exciting African-centered research, particularly through the country’s current Africanizing the curriculum movement and the country’s post-Apartheid Ubuntu education initiatives. In 2009, Molefi Asante wrote that it is particularly important that education officials in South Africa raise the fundamental questions of culture, perspective, worldview, and interpretation in the discussion of facts. The South African case study will be an original contribution to previous studies of African-centered pedagogy given the nascent emergence of re-Africanizing education processes in the country. My research in South Africa will be among the first case studies looking at the effectiveness of African-centered pedagogy abroad as it relates to Pan African liberation movements on the continent. Significance of Kara Institute In personal conversations with the Chief Executive Officer of the Kara Heritage Institute, Dr. Motshekga expressed that the African centered approach can help engage in providing agency to South Africa’s disenchanted youth. The unique presence of Kara provides the youth of Pretoria a village in the middle of a busy city. The pedagogical content of Kara speaks to a Pan- African curriculum that looks at the past and present for contextual understanding. Kara Heritage Institute was first established in 1982. The Kara Heritage Institute is committed to leveraging the 2 knowledge and ethos of African heritage to grow sustainable and empowered communities who have the freedom to shape their destiny with their own hands. One of Kara’s key objectives is to recover and promote Africa’s heritage and indigenous knowledge systems. Moreover, Kara looks to harness Africa’s indigenous resources for moral, social, and economic development and marginalized communities. The physical space for the current location in Pretoria, South Africa was not opened until 2013. This study is important for several reasons. This study seeks to shift the focus on African centered education away from the U.S. and look at ACE on the African continent. There is a tendency within the scholarship of the African centered educational movement to focus on schools within the United States of America that were founded in the Black Power era and post- Black Power era (Gloria Ladson-Billings, Molebatsi Milton Nkoane, A. Wade Boykin, Mwalimu J. Shujaa and M.K Asante). There is limited scholarship on the African centered education movement on the African continent. For example, Msila and Gumbo (2016) discussed the curriculum in postcolonial Africa and how it is still to a large extent confronted by the legacy of colonial education that remained in place decades after political decolonization. The call for an African renaissance has been present in the period marking the nearly four decades of African post-independence. Using South Africa as a case study is important because the history of Black/native South Africans’ struggles for education stems back to apartheid policies that have profoundly impacted debates and policies to heal from said past. As the first African centered school in Pretoria, the Kara Heritage Institute presents a compelling case study for a verity (verity: truth/true principle; variety: numerous) of reasons. Just two decades after the end of the dark apartheid government, 3 it is a beacon of light because it forces scholars that have been studying African centered pedagogy to move outside of the United States. South Africa has been creating and fostering dynamic African centered models that look to secure the complete liberation of Black South Africa in the post-Apartheid era. The Kara Heritage Institute Community Development Program educates communities in the likes of indigenous cultural heritage and African tradition while training them in numerous other skills. The Kara Heritage Institute utilizes the Africanization of the curriculum to foster (create and implement) multiple courses in African culture and history, life skills and communal life, entrepreneurial development, indigenous knowledge systems, and indigenous cultural heritage. The organization’s primary goal is to shape sustainable livelihoods through skills development, assisting communities in acquiring the capabilities, assets, and activities needed to make a better living. The existing ACP scholarship is African-American centered, with little attention to the diaspora and the African continent. I argue that Kara’s Africana Aesthetic makes it a unique site to study. To date, there is no comprehensive study of Kara and the structural pedagogy space of the institution’s Africana Aesthetic. By looking at the Kara Heritage Institute I will be able to elucidate the relationships between the physical spaces for learning and the impact of culturally grounded curricula and pedagogy. It is an ideal location to make sense of: (a) ACE in Africa, (b) the transformations of ACE in a South African context, and (c) expressions of South African Pan-African educational philosophy. This case study documents how space and location are essential for ACE institutions. To date, Kara does not provide a traditional learning service: not only does it educate youth, but it has adult learning programs as well. It serves as a window into expressions 4 of post-apartheid struggles for independence by Black South Africans. As a result, it emerges as a community movement center. Justification/Rationale for your study Akoto (1992) notes that the prominence of integrationist ideals during the last 50 years and legislative and material successes gained during the era of Civil Rights came at the expense of a monumental loss of social, political, and cultural independence by African communities. Therefore, Akoto suggests that an African-centered pedagogy (including Africanized curriculums) include but not be limited to the traditional African historical dynamic of Ethiopia (Kush) that spawned Egypt. It must include Nubia, Punt, and the nameless city-states of the green Sahara, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Ife, Asante, and Zulu. All other cultural-historical constructs that do not derive directly from the described historical continuum must be seen as deviations, mutations, or borrowings. (10) The implied goal of all African-centered pedagogy including Africanized curriculums is cultural centeredness and agency for the seeker of knowledge. Culture consists of the behavioral patterns, symbols, institutions, and values of a society, and is unique to that society. Culture is not a static phenomenon. The attempt to systematically suppress the cultural dynamic of a people is never permanently successful, as is obvious in the resistance to cultural and politico/economic imperialist efforts in African populations on the continent and the diaspora. Akoto (1992) notes that the essence of the historical consciousness for Africans is the “will” and the ability to personalize that history (21). The process of identifying oneself and one’s family in that history, seeing oneself in that history and growing out of that history. The highest manifestation of this historical consciousness corresponds to what Asante calls Afrocentric Awareness, the fifth level 5 of personal transformation. It involves the adoption of new criteria for life. Where African Centered values and definitions dictate the rhythm of one’s life. (25) Africanized education places the life experiences, histories, and traditions of African and African heritage peoples at the center of educational analyses; emphasize the African and African American experience as the core paradigm for human liberation and higher-level human functioning; and, foster for Black students, the self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education. The literature speaks to a history of converging movements by African people to develop a response to the need for an education that provides sustainable liberation. At the center of these actions is a call for a culturally relevant education as a pedestal concept to frame African centered pedagogy and Africanization of the curriculum. There are a plethora of terms that address/define African-centered education. Kofi Lomotey (1990) notes that African-centered education enables African American students to look at the world with Africa as the center. It encompasses not only those instructional and curricular approaches that result in a shift in students' worldview, but it engenders a reorientation of their values and actions as well. This perspective in the South African context is very important because it is a theoretical foundation that has provided a shift in policy and curriculum development. Correspondingly, an African-centered pedagogy stresses that educators encourage African children to look at the world through an African-centered set of lenses that provides them with a more focused vision, has a wider periphery, and more depth. Notwithstanding the overwhelmingly Eurocentric training background and perceptual orientation of the majority of both nation's teachers, an African-centered curriculum demands that teachers look at African children differently. African-centered education is missing from the experiences of most African 6 American and South African children in public and private schools. It requires all educators to realize that academic achievement in and of itself is not enough. Dei notes that Afrocentricity is an alternative, non-exclusionary, and nonhegemonic system of knowledge informed by African peoples' histories and experiences. Afrocentricity is about the investigation and understanding of phenomena from a perspective grounded in African-centered values. It is about the validation of African experiences and histories, as well as a critique of the continued exclusion and marginalization of African knowledge systems from educational texts, mainstream academic knowledge, and scholarship. There have been varied definitions and expressions of Afrocentricity (see Asante 1980, 1987; Karenga 1986, 1988; Keto 1990). What they all share is a concern to present an alternative way of looking at and understanding the Black/Africana world. They also share Asante’s view of centering one’s analysis and perceptions from the groundedness of the African person (1988:6). A cardinal interest of most proponents of Afrocentricity is to move or bring all peoples of African descent from the margins to the center of postmodern history. There are varying ideas about the nature of African-centered education. According to Lee (1992), Lomotey, and Shujaa (1990), an African centered pedagogy should fulfill the following aims: 1) Legitimize African stores of knowledge; 2) Positively exploit and scaffold productive community and cultural practices; 3) Extend and build upon the indigenous language (i.e., the language of the indigenous African people); 4) Reinforce community ties and idealize (the concept of) service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world; 5) Promote positive social relationships; 6) Impart a worldview that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others; 7) Support 7 cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness, and; 8) Promote the vision of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers. (50) Beyond what some may see as the fragmentation of culture along ethnic, religious, ideological, class, and gender lines (Mazrui 1980), lie some common themes that run through the cultures of Africa. The work of Gyekye (1987), Mudimbe (1988), and Okpewho (1992), for example, shows that beyond ethnic pluralism and cultural diversity there are underlying commonalities or affinities in the thought systems of African peoples. Ngara (2008) argues that despite Africa’s immensity and diversities, which include about a thousand indigenous languages, African indigenes show distinct, consistent, and enduring commonalities transcending geographic boundaries and ethnicity. The most enduring commonalities of African-hood include ways of knowing that are grounded in indigenous African cultural traditions, history, and ecology. In former British colonies, Africans used both their indigenous cultural heritage and Anglo-Western knowledge systems. African ways of knowing not only reflect the African worldview but also define African personhood. The African worldview centered around an intimate understanding and appreciation of the relationship between humans, society, and nature. Traditional African cultures spiritualized their universe and endowed the forces that threatened them with supernatural powers (see Mbiti 1982; Peek 1991). Indigenous African ontologies expressed the essence of the relationship of the individual to society and nature. Most things in the natural world were imbued with spirits. These spirits gave power and meaning to whatever the Africans did. The centrality of women and children in society was symbolized in the indigenous African belief in the power and strength of heterosexual fertility dolls. The symbolism of colors (such as red and black 8 clothing worn during periods of mourning the dead among West Africans) was to provide spiritual and emotional support and physical strength to the bereaved. Imfundo: Thesis and Research Questions While conducting preliminary field research in South Africa at the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, given my advances in the Zulu language, I was able to fine-tune a dissertation research agenda that utilizes the Zulu language and culture in the context of African-centered teaching and learning. While there, I was exposed to a new phenomenon due to my ability to communicate in isiZulu. I was able to develop a theoretical framework that I am calling Imfundo ehlela imvelo-Environmental education which loosely translates to “Structural-Pedagogy.” Imfundo ehlela imvelo speaks to the symbolic connection to a culturally relevant space that provides an opportunity for direct interactive knowledge production. The physical and spiritual structure of the space is orientated to speak to the cultural worldview and orientation of a specific group. Due to an organized physical configuration in time, space, and place, Imfundo ehlela imvelo speaks to the deep cultural roots of African culture. There are three main components of structural pedagogy that I would like to develop and explore through the current dissertation: 1) Reflection: how does the structure of the learning institution reflect the student body and how does the student body relate to the physical structure? 2) 3) Inspiration: how does the structural space stimulate the learning environment? Modes of inclusion: how do the structure and pedagogy incorporate culturally relevant practices that are unique to that space, place, and time? Using the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, South Africa, I will examine the impacts and effectiveness of “Imfundo” or structural pedagogy. 9 This dissertation inspects the following questions: How have African Americans influenced continental Black Africans development of culturally relevant pedagogies rooted in African culture? How might structural pedagogy be operationalized to be used as a valuable pedagogy for African Centered and culturally relevant education? How has structural pedagogy been used in practice in South Africa at the Kara Heritage Institute? This dissertation project reconnoiters the relationships between Pan Africanism, schooling, African Centered Education, and structural pedagogy. This project studies African Centered Education at Kara Heritage Institute focusing on how they instill notions of African consciousness, notions of Pan-Africanism, structural pedagogy, and culturally relevant pedagogy. This project will illustrate the divergence and convergence of African centered schooling in a South African context. I argue that in addition to syllabus reflection and curriculum change, culturally relevant space and place strongly contribute to the learning experiences of people of African descent. This research will contribute to the debates on transnational exchanges, cultural flows, and global interactions. Also, this dissertation contributes to the making and development of the concept of the African Diaspora and its relationship to Pan Africanism. This project will produce significant new knowledge for comparative education, African centered education and cultural and global studies. Research Design I am strongly enthused to capture the essence of Afrocentricity as a pedagogy in South Africa, to understand how the Kara Heritage Institute adopts methods of ACE from the US and the diaspora. Also, my project will highlight the relationships between Pan Africanism, schooling, African centered education, and Structural Pedagogy. A qualitative/mixed methods approach is appropriate to capture all the appropriate data. The Kara Heritage Institute has 10 developed an optimal circumstance aimed at the inquiry. There will be four primary instruments that will be utilized to collect data, semi-structured interviews, participatory observations, Documents and Artifacts, and Photo Captions. Each targeted participant in which data is collected will be provided a semi-structured interview that will allow the interviewee to expound on their own experience as it relates to answering the question. Units of Analysis and Scope Imfundo-physical-environment, school materials, and student production are primary units of analysis. I have completed three consecutive summers in Pretoria, South Africa collecting preliminary data, which includes 6 (20 to 30 min) semi-structured interviews with adult students and Kara staff. For the past three years, I have collected written and photographic field notes at the site location. The survey for measuring the influence and impact of structural pedagogy was developed from the said body of field notes. Also, I interviewed 5 community members that work with or at Kara. All interviewees have worked with or have worked for Kara Heritage Institute in some compacity within the last 5 years. Both male and female participants were welcome to participate in the research project. I will analyze the content and text of brochures, buildings, wall images, classroom design, captions, and images from the Kara Heritage Institute. This study will include secondary data in conjunction with other methods of data collection such as content analysis. Secondary data analysis will be utilized to code the Kara Heritage Institute’s educational documents and school materials. This method was chosen because it allows me to engage in a breadth of data and systematically approach archives to study the impact of African Centered Education (ACE) as a collective. Secondary data is advantageous to a research project for multiple reasons. It saves the principal investigator's cost and time on 11 any given research project. It gives the researcher access to a plethora of information for a small portion of the cost of collecting original data. The researcher has the option to seek high-quality datasets that cover large representative samples of populations. Secondary datasets may include incomplete data on individuals or segments of populations (McDougal III, 2014. 187). Sometimes secondary analysis can be affected by the problem of reliability when the definitions of variables, attention to a certain social phenomenon, or policies about data collection change over time. Qualitative Data Sources In Africana qualitative research… qualitative data is often considered rich in meaning because it allows research participants to explain phenomena on their terms (McDougal, 2014). The Africana qualitative approach is important because it allows my project participants, Africana people to have agency and become centered in my project analysis and suggested course of change. Through (30-minute) semi-structured interviews… Each participant was asked to participate in a semi-structured interview that will allow the interviewee to expound on their own experience. Through (daily) participatory observations at the Kara Heritage Institute in the classroom, in their office, or on the general research site., I have recorded field observations and relevant information. I used a small questionnaire/survey utilized for the measurement of the influence of structural pedagogy and its effect at Kara can be found in Appendix G. I conduct a critical content analysis of cultural documents to study. Analysis I (Clarence George III) utilized Open Coding and Latent Coding. Latent content can be coded for objectivity. Once I have collected all raw data, (Cultural Documents) that data was 12 converted into a computer-readable format via NVivo software. I assigned numerical values to each attribute or category of each variable. A single data record contains all information on each variable for one person or data point. Analytical Frameworks The base of the study is explanatory research witch, according to Serie McDougal (2014), seeks to understand phenomena by explaining the relationship between variables. Explanatory research is a continuation of descriptive research in that once you have descriptive information about a particular issue, you can go on to explain why or how it occurs or works the way it does. I have analyzed statistical documents from the Kara Heritage Institute as well as books, school materials, and web pages. Due to their applications to culturally relevant pedagogy and their recognition of relationships between Black education and schooling in the historical colonial context, I have also utilized Africana Critical theory (Rabaka, 2002) and Shujaa’s (1994) Education and Schooling Model as analytical frameworks. Africana Critical theory is a theory critical of domination and discrimination in classical and contemporary, continental, and Diasporic African lifeworlds and lived experiences (Rabaka, 2006, p. 133). In addition to critiquing domination, Africana critical theory also critiques anti-imperialistic theory and practice (Rabaka, 2002). The theory draws upon the intellectual and political legacy of historic and contemporary African radicals and revolutionaries as they relate to key questions posed by multiple forms of domination such as racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism that have and continue to influence society (Rabaka, 2006). Rabaka (2002) explains that Africana critical theory is interested in how the thought processes and lived experiences of African people have been affected and influenced, corrupted, and conditioned by imperialism and the invasion and 13 interruption of African history, culture and society, politics, economics, language, religion, familial structures, aesthetics, and axiology; and (2) may be used to critique domination and discrimination and provide a basis for theory and praxis in the interest of liberation. Africana critical theory is a critical theory, the primary purpose is to identify solutions to the most pressing sociopolitical problems faced by African people. While RaBaka’s (2002) approach is appropriate, he is interested in thought processes, I am using the framework to unpack the effects of African Centered Education and its utilization of Africana critical theory to understand the lived experiences of Black people. The education versus schooling model is a theoretical framework for understanding how decision making about education and schooling are influenced by three key factors: a society’s structural conditions, its members’ achievement expectations, and their perceptions about the quality of their lives (Shujaa, 2003). Shujaa (2003) illustrates this process as a series of intersecting circles and bifurcations. Bifurcation one represents any situation in individual’s lives when they evaluate the quality of their lives as either consistent or inconsistent with their achievement expectations. Bifurcation two represents that which individuals attribute their unmet achievement expectations, self or group characteristics, or social institutions. Bifurcation three represents the idea that differing interpretations of one’s relationship to the social order are evident in choosing between public school reform and the rejection of public schooling. Finally, bifurcation four represents parent’s decision to send their children to independent schools for reasons that reinforce the existing social order or for reasons that reflect a desire for fundamental change and the collective advancement of Africana people. 14 Background South African Blacks under the Apartheid government were subject to inhumane living conditions and were exposed to subordinate schooling practices. Educational policies such as the Bantu Education act forced Black people to disadvantage educational spaces. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 legalized aspects of the South African apartheid system, particularly segregated educational systems. Many “tribal” schools, denied proper financial support from the South African government, were forced to close, denying thousands of native Africans an education. Black youth under apartheid grew up with minute anticipation of an optimistic future. The Africanization of the South African curriculum is a project that is parallel to the African centered education movement in America in that both would like to establish a functional space for centered academic and social discourse. The U.S. models of African centered pedagogy and educational practices tended to focus on the K-12 classrooms and place an emphasis on pedagogy and independent institution building. In the South African context today, we see educational developers focus on the development of ACE curricula that is facilitated from R-12 grade R is the year before learners in South Africa start formal schooling and have been part of the General Education Training Band (GET) since 1998. In South Africa, the concept of Ubuntu can be seen as equal to that of Ma’at as an African philosophy that when applied to social aspects of African life looks to be the foundation in which the education process departs. Quite simply it’s the philosophical foundation of a worldview. The unique and historical means of oppression has led Black people in South Africa to question what education models have done and what various models can do. Black people in America and South Africa have shared similar but unique roads to their current situation in the field of education. Like the Africans in America, South African Blacks 15 have enhanced their recognition that education is and should be rooted in a cultural perspective. This cultural perspective means that Black people’s histories and knowledge production is placed at the center of their educational discourse and analysis. Both groups have suffered cultural genocide via educational institutions. Cultural perspective refers to the way that individuals are shaped by their environments as well as social and cultural factors. Ontologically and epistemologically speaking this means that Eurocentric models of discourse are revised as canons of various schools of thought. A cultural perspective also utilizes the unique features of agency and self-resilience. Therefore, any culturally free people have the God-given right to orientate their education system to that of a culturally relevant pedagogy. Authors and Research expanded Afrocentricity is a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture trans-continentally and trans-generationally. This means that the quality of location is essential to any analysis that involves African culture and behavior whether literary or economic, whether political or cultural. In this regard, it is the crystallization of a critical perspective on facts (Asante, 1998). Asante argues that it remains important that we hold back any reductive misunderstanding of the nature of human interaction and the creation of reality. What is meant by this notion of being “outside” is that Afrocentricity traces its theoretical heritage to African ideas and African authors. Asante (1998) suggested that either African people will escape the intellectual plantation that has paraded as universal or will be stifled in every attempt to express their sense of culture. Ama Mazama explains that Afrocentricity is not merely a worldview nor even a theory as such, but rather it is a paradigm that results in the reconceptualization of the social and historical reality of African people (Mazama, 2003a). Mazama argues that the horrendous situation of Black people in Africa and 16 the Americas, was not just a political and economic crisis, but a crisis of culture, theory, and philosophy. There is a difference, as Mazama explains, between Africanity and Afrocentricity. Africanity refers to the traditions, customs, and values of African people. She argues that “Afrocentricity, within the academic context, will best be understood as a paradigm” (Mazama, 2003a, 7). She takes the idea of the cognitive and structural elements of a paradigm and applies them to Afrocentricity. Under the cognitive aspect of a paradigm are three constituents: metaphysical, sociological, and exemplary. However, it is impossible Afrocentrically to conceive of a paradigm that would not have a functional aspect and it is clear that “a paradigm must activate our consciousness to be of any use to us” (Mazama, 2003a, 8). Mazama makes two general scientific advances in the development of theory: (1) she launches the paradigmatic shift in the discourse on Afrocentricity and shows how it is a revolutionary concept for the African world, and (2) Mazama infuses the older ideas of Afrocentricity with a functional, actionable, practical component that energizes the concept. These two achievements are central to an understanding of the Afrocentric idea. Afrocentricity is revolutionary because it casts ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic processes in the context of Black people as subjects and not as objects, basing all knowledge on the authentic interrogation of location. Location is key, to locate a phenom as peripheral or central to the African experience allows the researcher to begin from an orientation that will have meaning for the ultimate analysis of a situation or condition. The Afrocentric method requires scientists to focus on accurate notations and recording of space and time. The value of etymology, that is, the origin of terms and words is in the proper identification and location of concepts. The Afrocentrist seeks to 17 demonstrate clarity by exposing dislocations, decenteredness. One of the simplest ways of accessing textual clarity is through etymology. The Afrocentrist would look to the question of location, control of the hegemonic global economy, marginalization, and power positions as keys to understand the deliberate, assertive, and imperial underdevelopment of African people. Asante (1990) points out that Africology is not to be confused with political science, history, or sociology but is a discipline grounded in the Afrocentric approach to examining human knowledge from an African-centered perspective. Nor is Africology a reverse hegemonic perspective of examining human phenomena. As well as the approach of understanding African phenomena using alternative research tools of content analysis to measure culture and the retention and survival of culture under the scope of Africology. Thus, this is not a monolithic module for measuring African phenomena, but it is an alternative model. An appropriate paradigm for Africology must also combine self-knowledge and self-realization with social action. Africology must move its boundaries beyond the borders of academia and begin to register a concerted impact on the broader community. Asante's (2017) latest work Revolutionary Pedagogy is new research that I look to expand on with two international case studies. This approach will allow the primary researcher to investigate the theoretical framework of Revolutionary pedagogy and its real-time outcomes. Asante's outline of the future of education is very profound. This work is also key and important in exploring what is the future of convergence in the development of new and evolving pedagogical practices. The concept of a Revolutionary pedagogy is the latest concept to hit the academic market. Asante (2017) posits that a Revolutionary pedagogy will require different ways of thinking and maybe even different structural components to the school setting. (7) Educators must be bold enough to look at the war children and adults learn and then implement 18 the kind of apparatus that would capture that learning style and interest thus peeking behind the educational veil. Everything that has to do with the school is pedagogy. Asante suggests that the purpose of education for the Revolutionary pedagogies is to prepare students to live in an interconnected global world with personal dignity and respect for all other people as human beings with the same privileges that one seeks for oneself while preserving the earth for those who will come afterward. A South Africa study of African-centered pedagogies continues the work informed by the works of decolonizing African nationalist scholars and practitioners, including Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Steve Biko, and Kwame Nkrumah to name a few whom all have written important discourses that could be characterized as African-centered education. Nonetheless, in a post-nationalist African global era, it is South Africa in the continent that is embarking upon the most exciting African-centered research, particularly through the country’s current Africanizing the curriculum movement and the country’s post- Apartheid Ubuntu education initiatives. Indeed, in 2009, Molefi Asante wrote that it is particularly important that education officials in South Africa raise the fundamental questions of culture, perspective, worldview, and interpretation in the discussion of facts (Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric South African University, 2009). The South African comparative case study will be an original contribution to previous studies of African-centered pedagogy given the nascent emergence of re-Africanizing education processes in the country. My research in South Africa will be unique because it is the first comparative case study looking at the effectiveness of African-centered pedagogy abroad as it relates to Pan African liberation movements in the continent. The Kara Heritage Institute runs the Kara Heritage School for grades 9-12 and offers accredited courses in African Heritage 19 Studies. J. Ki-Zerbo (1990) reminds us that well before other continents, Africa was a producer of knowledge and teaching systems. The Kara Heritage Institute school chair and principal, Dr. Mathole Motshekga follows an ancient Afro-centric philosophical religious ideology called Karaism the people of light claiming that humanity began somewhere in the Great Lakes region which is a source of African knowledge, culture, and history. My work is unique and looks to and to the fabric of Africana Studies and applied research. The self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education is a very important discussion to have when one seeks a greater understanding between the experiences of education liberation in both the Black American and Black South African struggles. My work looks to highlight how both groups foster Independent Black institutions to develop and sustain liberation movements. In the context of the growing movement to Africanize the South African university, my research study in Africa surveys pleas for the usage of African centered education to reinvigorate the production of knowledge in Africa for the importance of the people in Africa. Extending from the work of my MA thesis (San Francisco State University – MA in Ethnic Studies with a concentration in Africana Studies) – Sankofa Go Back and Fetch It: Notes on Afrocentric pedagogy – my dissertation work contributes to the studies that examine the salient features of commonality and divergence amongst Africans in the Diaspora and Africans on the continent to analyze how each group interjects their own cultural and epistemological content and posture in their pedological practices. My doctoral dissertation will conduct a first- time study of this phenomenon in South Africa. Affirming what Cheikh Anta Diop argued in the Cultural Unity of Black Africa; Black people have a global connection via worldview and deep structural cultural roots. As opposed to surface cultural behavior, which is subject to external change, deep structural cultural roots stand 20 the test of time. History has revealed that when African people are passionate and focused on the same thing that anything can be accomplished; The self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education models and sustainable institutions has been a tent pole for the realization of African agency on the continent and the diaspora. Key Terms The key term as used and to be understood in the operational context of this study: Keywords are tag’s that place meaning and operational function to define it. The key terms will further contextualize the reading understanding and operational illustration of the term. Black Education: The conceptual action of people of African ancestry on the continent and in the diaspora, seeking control over the education and socialization of their children taken away from them and replaced with a slave, colonial, and mission miseducation (Hilliard, Nobles, Shujaa, King, Asante, Madhubuti. 2005). People of African Ancestry: This term is inclusive and extends globally to all peoples who identify with an African heritage, on the continent, and in the Diaspora. This term is not phenotypically limited to skin color or melanin production in the epidermis. Racial Identity: racial identity involves an individual's continual, and at times, highly conflictual assessment of the people who comprise his or her external ascribed reference group as well as the people who comprise other racial groups. The process of determining which group to identify entails choosing the qualities that appear most desirable to one's social and political environment (Thompson and Carter, 1997). Critical Cultural Pedagogy: is a philosophy of education described by Henry Giroux as an educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop 21 consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action (H. Giroux, 2006). Afrocentric Pedagogy: is education designed to empower African people. A central premise behind it is that many Africans have been subjugated by limiting their awareness of themselves and indoctrinating them with ideas that work against them (Shockley and Cleveland, 2011). Afrocentricity: is a cultural ideology, dedicated to the history of Black people a response to global racist Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions by revisiting this history with an African cultural and ideological center (Asante, 1987). Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: is a pedagogy that recognizes the diverse cultural characteristics of students from different ethnic backgrounds and adjusts teaching methods to account for this diversity culturally relevant teachers display cultural competence; skill at teaching in a cross-cultural or multicultural setting. It enables each student to relate to course content through his or her cultural context (Billings, 1995). Chapter Overview Chapter I is the introduction to the dissertation project. In this chapter, I have provided context to the rationale for developing this project. This chapter opens with a statement of the problem and a discussion of the research questions. This chapter provides the reader with contextualization and positionality of the current dissertation project as it relates to the field of Africana Studies. Chapter one will contain the method section as well. In this section, I have identified the theoretical framework in which the data is analyzed. Also, this section provides the reader with the step by step approach to the research project. The reader is provided with the 22 tools and instruments that are to be used to gather and analyze data. Using qualitative research, the researcher makes use of non-numeric observations of phenomena. Qualitative approaches to research are often carried out using research methods such as interviews, questionnaires, field observations, and analysis of cultural documents. These methods often produce data in the form of words, descriptions, and images to explain phenomena and develop theories. This section will also identify the targeted populations that will contribute to the data collection as well as the research sites in Pretoria, South Africa. In chapter one, I provide a discussion on the idea of structural pedagogy as it relates to education, African aesthetics, and Pan Africanism at the Kara Heritage Institute. Chapter one also is the foundation of Chapter two which will contain the literature review for the project. In chapter II, the literature is divided into three sections of discussions: African Centered Education, African-Centered Pedagogy & Practice, and Africana Aesthetics & Schooling Space. Chapter two is an interstitial discussion, which provides a histography of the literature that highlights the gaps between African centered pedagogy and Africana aesthetics as it relates to structural pedagogy. This chapter offers a rationale for this South African case study. The second chapter introduces the academic discussions of the effectiveness of African-centered pedagogy beyond the United States as it relates to Pan African liberation movements on the continent. Chapter III will house the analysis and methodology procedures. Chapter three will focus on themes generated from coding the six-interviews, twenty-Documents and Artifacts, fifteen- Captioned Photographs, and four years of field notes and observations. Each of the six interviews has been fully transcribed in full length and stored in Nvivo computer software where each interview was coded and organized in the appropriately themed bucket organized by the eight aims of (ACE). The data display (Table 1.) reveals the rich correlation between the interview 23 questions, interview responses, Captioned Photographs, Documents and Artifacts, and Observations and field notes, as they relate to the generated bucket themes. The second data display (Table 2.) presents the Research Question in relation to the Interview Questions. The third data display (Table 3.) presents the Matrix of Findings and Sources of Data Triangulation. Chapter four is very important because it contextually presents a truncated history of South Africa and the significance of Kara in a post-apartheid era. This chapter is broken down into four sections to complete the aforementioned tasks. Opening with the introduction of the apartheid government and its impact on indigenous nations and communities in South Africa. It's very important to develop an understanding and a grounded perspective for people who read this body of work to understand the multitude of variables that have come into play that gave birth to schools like the Kara Heritage Institute. Chapter four will provide the rationale and historical overview of the need for an African centered pedagogy in practice at the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria South Africa. (Section I); the inconvenience of the Apartheid government and African education. (Section II); the Bantu Education Act and its impact on Black people's education and experiences. (Section III); the Soweto uprising and the impact on education and experiences of Black South Africans. (Section IV); The history and significance of the Kara Heritage Institute and its importance to South African education. In chapter V entitled; “Kara’s African Centered Education Model: African Spirituality, Ubuntu, and Cultural Responsibility. I present the generated findings. In this chapter, I discuss the nine major themes that have emerged from the collected data as it relates to the literature and African Centered Education. In chapter VI, I present a discussion of the results from the overall research questions to this project which are the following; 1) How have African Americans influenced continental 24 Black Africans development of culturally relevant pedagogies rooted in African culture?; 2)How might structural pedagogy be operationalized to be used as a valuable pedagogy for African Centered and culturally relevant education?; 3) How has structural pedagogy been used in practice in African Centered Schools?; The three main components of Structural Pedagogy: a) Reflection: how does the physical structure of the learning institution reflect the student body and how does the student body relate to the physical structure?; b)Inspiration: how does the structural space stimulate the learning environment?; c) Modes of inclusion: how do the structure and pedagogy incorporate culturally relevant practices that are unique to that space, place, and time?; And 4) How does African Centered pedagogy compare in terms of formulation and impact in the US and South Africa? In chapter VII, I will provide my final thoughts and reflection on the project. In this section, I will discuss my conclusions, recommendations for future research, and policy implications. I will offer a discussion of implications for pedagogical practices and Africana cultural exchange in the field of education. It is here that I will contribute to future research opportunities and educational policy as it relates to children and learners of African descent. or Black women, hair has always been important to identity formation. 25 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW: EFFECTIVENESS OF AFRICANA AESTHETICS AND SCHOOLING SPACES Chapter II presents academic historiography of literature that centers robust and analytical discussions on, Africana Aesthetics and Schooling Space, African-centered Pedagogy and Practice, and African Centered Education. In this chapter, the literature is divided into three sections: Africana Aesthetics and Schooling Space, African centered Pedagogy and Practice, and African Centered Schools. Chapter II is an interstitial discussion, which provides a histography of the literature that highlights the gaps between African centered pedagogy and Africana aesthetics as it relates to structural pedagogy. This chapter offers a rationale for this South African case study. It introduces the academic discussions of the effectiveness of African- centered pedagogy beyond the United States as it relates to Pan African liberation movements on the continent. Africana Aesthetics and Schooling Space This literature review is exploratory since I am currently constructing a philosophical underpinning to the theory of Imfundo ehlela imvelo-Environmental Education, or Structural- Pedagogy. I am using the term and developing the concept to speak to the symbolic connection to a culturally relevant space that facilitates interactive knowledge production. The physical and spiritual structure of the space reflects the cultural worldview and orientation of a specific group. Existing literature on Africana aesthetics tends to focus on art, dance, and other lived expressions of Africana experiences. While they do include architecture and classroom space, they neglect to put the aforementioned in conversation with lived expression, which speaks to the understudied relationship between physical space and the educational outcome for people of African descent. 26 This section represents a collection of literature that speaks to a multidiscipline approach. It has been assembled to reflect the gaps in scholarship and practice that this dissertation project looks to address. Imfundo ehlela imvelo, or Structural-pedagogy as I use the term and develop the concept, speaks to the symbolic connection to a culturally relevant space that provides space for direct interactive knowledge production. The literature on the subject of Africana aesthetics tends to focus on art, dance, and other lived expressions of Africana experiences. While they do include Architecture and classroom space, they neglect to put it all together in a conversation that speaks to the physical structure and its relationship to the educational outcome for people of African descent. This section represents a collection of literature that speaks to a multidiscipline approach. Linda J. Myers (1987) notes that culture has been defined as the total way of life of a people. Myers posits that a people's way of life may be examined at the level of sensory observation or surface structures, which are subject to relatively rapid change, constrained by time and space, and nongenerative in nature. Another level of analysis may be the deep structure, which is archetypal, not bound to the specific group, and generative in nature. At the deep level of structural analysis, evidence of a certain set of rules or systems is sought that affords diagnosis of the features of empirical phenomena (Hammel, 1972). Nobles (1980) identifies the deep structure of culture as the philosophical assumptions (e.g., ontology, epistemology, axiology, cosmology) underpinning and reflected in the culture's worldview, ethos, and ideology. The outward physical manifestations of culture and its artifacts (i.e., specific languages, specific knowledge of tribal origins, customs, and rituals, African socio-economic organization, and so on) are amenable to change and/or destruction. Thus, we can, therefore, speak reliably in terms 27 of a European conceptual (definitional) system as well as an African conceptual system, each being distinctly different from the other in terms of basic survival thrust and fundamental character (Baldwin, 1980). Africana aesthetics are a fundamental part of deep structural roots as it manifests in social space. The function of the African aesthetic is rooted in the communication of the collective experience, philosophy of the beautiful; standards by which a culture assigns a value to its cultural production. The manifestation of the African aesthetic is simultaneously specific and general. Soul Shava (2015) states that the essence of the African aesthetic is its representation as a construct of African people on the continent and people of African descent in the diaspora that articulates African culture, identity, and spirituality. The African aesthetic embraces a rich variety of creative forms and styles peculiar to people of African origin that incorporate a combination of practical, physical, material, temporal, and spiritual aspects. It includes African artistic expressions— visual and performative images, verbal arts (poetry, oratory performance), rhythm, music (song and dance), dress, hairstyles, cosmetics, designs (African architecture and decorative patterns), and crafts in and from Africa. It can be decorative and ceremonial as well as serve a functional purpose. Shava (2015) posits that various architectural designs are distinctively African in origin. Different ethnolinguistic groups employ distinctive styles of architecture, and structures are both functional and decorative. Most African architecture uses materials that are readily available in the natural environment, such as mud, wooden poles, grass thatch, cow dung, and stone. Traditional African housing designs vary from the dome or beehive-shaped huts of the Khoi, San, Swati, and Zulu to circular walled huts made of poles and mud (dagga) with conical (pole and grass-thatched) roofs such as those of the Shona and Ndebele, to quadrangular dwellings 28 with flat or gabled roofs, such as those of the Igbo or the Ashanti and other Akans. In West Africa, the compound house form predominates, though the shapes of individual homes range from circular to conical to rectangular. Distinctive and well-known African architectural design structures include the Great Zimbabwe ruins (a city comprising a high stone wall enclosing the traditional circular walled huts with conical roofs), the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, and the pyramids of Egypt. Robert Douglas (2015) further states that an explication of an African aesthetic requires an operative definition of aesthetics. Admittedly, the term evolved out of the Greek word aesthetikos, which means merely “perceptive,” but the term aesthetic is widely held to connote a philosophy of beauty. Douglas notes that although many African ethnic groups do not have a specific word or term like the word aesthetic, they do place great value on their artistic productions. Furthermore, Africa's expressive arts can be identified because their character is distinctive from that of other cultures' artistic modalities. Although no exact formal philosophy of African art exists, when the practice of African art is scrutinized over time and space, it speaks volumes. The Africana aesthetic also serves a strong commemorative function. Douglas notes that other examples of how different African ethnic groups share an aesthetic of a spiritually- based art are the mother-and-child figures of the Asante, the Yoruba, the Senufu, the Bamana, the Bakongo, the Chokwe, and the Makonde, to name just a few. All of these mother-and-child images serve the same purpose as the earlier image of Auset holding Heru. Many African scholars agree that a primal reason for African people's art from prehistoric times forward is that it serves a survival function that involves giving physical form to the spiritual meaning. African artistic expression is older and more numerous than any other group's artistic achievement the world over. Douglas (2015) posits that there is no separation between 29 form and content in African art. A broad analysis of the form of Africa's art, from its masked spiritual representations to its expressive sculptural statues to its textiles and tapestries, reveals cultural productions that are complex— brightly colored with multifarious patterns and/or embellished with intricate designs. This type of expressive elegance is also exhibited in Africa's other expressive art forms, such as music, dance, and theater, as well as in different religious rituals. The richness of African music and dance has long been accepted and documented as a viable contribution to world culture (4). Rowland Abiodun further extends the conversation of African aesthetics as it relates to education. Abiodun (2001) postulates that while it may have been useful to utilize only Western theoretical paradigms in the study of African art history and aesthetics early in the twentieth century, it has now become imperative to search carefully within the African cultures in which the art forms originate and to use internally derived conceptual frameworks in any critical discourse on African art (15). The aforementioned statement is very important for this literature review due to the connection Abiodun makes between aesthetics, education, and culture. Abiodun (2001) further expresses that in the years to come, African art will take on new dimensions that no one has yet imagined— dimensions that will not only connect it more fully and effectively with cognate academic disciplines but will also fulfill many of the yearnings and aspirations of distinguished scholars in the field. The present interest in the exploration of African art through "sight" and "sound" will include the element of “soul”. (16) Abiodun (2001) argues that in a bid to allow the culture to speak for itself, scholars need to give more credibility and importance to primary sources, which consist mainly of oral traditions, than to secondary sources, which may have become authoritative simply because they were in print. The recognition of how important African languages and literature is to the 30 understanding of African art will lead to a reconsideration of many "closed" issues, theoretical frameworks, and artistic concepts; a redefinition of much terminology; and a reappraisal of the present style and techniques of displaying African artistic production. Abiodun in my estimation foreshadows an epistemological shift. “Elementary School Students Preferences and the Classroom Learning” by Leona M. Johnson (2006) take a deep look at fifth-grade students’ perceptions of learning preferences for individualistic, competitive, cooperative, and communal learning. This study also examined students’ perceptions of their classroom learning environment, including what students liked best around the classroom and their favorite learning activities. The important takeaway from this article is its discussion on space and its relation to education and people of African descent. Johnson opens with a virtuous contextual discussion of the importance of the classroom learning environment. Johnson (2006) notes that over the past 20 years, the importance of the classroom learning environment has been increasingly recognized (Aldridge, Fraser, & Huang, 1999). Characteristics of effective classrooms that research has identified as increasing student engagement include a positive and caring learning climate in which constructive student and teacher social interactions take place (Johnson, 2003; Wang, Haertel, & Walber, 1993). Johnson (2006) argues that very few studies have examined African American students' perceptions of the learning environment (Howard, 2002; Waxman & Huang, 1997; Wilson, 2002). As an exception, Waxman and Huang (1997) confirm in several preliminary investigations that African American students have different perceptions of their instructional and classroom learning environment. (506) Also, the focus on learning preferences captures students' voices relative to their viewpoints on the process of how students learn and assess student perceptions of the classroom learning environment relative to learning instruction. Johnson posits that the student's perception 31 of learning preferences and the classroom environment can shed light on what works best for the student in a classroom setting (506). Johnson cites emerging research that focuses on the learning preferences of African American children in the areas of cognitive development and socialization. Johnson notes that findings from these inquiries suggest that African American cultural factors influence the psychological process and cognitive outcomes of African American students and their achievement. Johnson postulates that researchers have found that pedagogy in contemporary American schools is much the same as during the last half of the 19th century (Perreault, 1995). Sirotnik (1983) and Goodlad (1984), for example, found that contemporary teachers "out-talked" students by a 3:1 ratio; that teachers devoted little time to the questioning of any sort and almost no time to open questions calling for complex cognitive and emotional responses; and that whole-class instruction predominates, with almost no independent, small-group, or cooperative student work. Schools influence students to be individualistic and competitive in their work activities (507). Johnson (2006) notes that a more recent group learning method that takes advantage of Afrocultural expression is the communal learning approach, which highlights the interdependence of students. This concept has been widely discussed in the literature on the African American experience and prescriptive pedagogy (Akbar, 1979; Albury, 1993; Allen & Boykin, 1992; Boykin, Jagers, Ellison, & Albury, 1997; Foster, 1983; Nobles, 1991). Johnson (2006) concludes the article with implications for policy and practice, noting that, based on this research study, there are implications for policy and practice as well as research. The importance of students' viewpoints on learning preferences and the classroom climate can potentially be a powerful contributor to enhancing educational outcomes. As the culturally diverse population 32 continues to grow, it is becoming important to increase the achievement of culturally diverse students (Daeschner, Munoz, & Barnes, 2004). Colonial and Slave structures as well as apartheid and general white supremacy structures, were created, including boarding schools, to separate children from parents and communities and cultures, and especially mission schools to destroy the worldviews and to stigmatize colonized and enslaved peoples as savages, primitives, and pagans. The current culture wars over the school curriculum are a continuation of a newer form of ideological structures of hegemony that follow the old path of separating children and communities from their traditions (Schlesinger, 1998). People of African descent need to recognize the importance of education and schooling under the pressures of hegemonic influence. Shujaa notes that the failure to take into account differing cultural orientations and unequal power relations among groups that share membership in a society is a major problem in conceptualizations that equate schooling and education. Schooling is a process intended to perpetuate and maintain the society’s existing power relations and institutional structures that support those arrangements. “Suahunu” by George J Sefa Dei (2012) provides a wonderful discussion of how the inclusion of structural space, pedagogy, and classroom space can affect students of color. Dei introduces what he calls the “trialectic space” which speaks to new analytical systems for understanding indigenous communities. Dei notes that the idea of the “trialectic space,” challenges conventional ways of knowing to acknowledge what hitherto is assumed not to be “knowledge” in dominant circles. Central to the trialectic space is the question of ontological space, innate, intuitive ways of knowing associated with long-term dwelling within particular historical spaces. (824) When we think of the trialectic space through the temporal, for example, the particular relationship between space and time, we come to speak also about colonial 33 histories and the “socio-onto-genesis” that constitute a body of knowledge (also see Fanon, 1967). Dei argues that trialectic thinking constitutes working with embodied histories of our myriad identities through space, time, and colonial geographies. These moments are interwoven and interrelated and do not constitute partitioned bodies of knowledge (824). Dei (2012) posits that trialectic thinking involves understanding the socio-cultural environment through the ontological self and social reality. The ontological is discursively produced, involving how the subjectivity of learners comes to be shaped and formed through local societal practices (824). Dei notes that his interest in the trialectic space lies with interpreting the experiences within schooling and education by looking at the material existence of young learners through culture, aesthetics, language, and politics. Critical to the discussion about trialectic space is recognizing the epistemological vanguard that guides and continues to inform the institutionalized knowledge production project. In thinking of the trialectic space of “suahunu,” one of the challenges is to come up with strategies that work to introduce/affirm/reinscribe counter and oppositional knowledge, that is, the knowledge that has been positioned outside the limits of the institutionalized ways of knowing or bodies of knowledge. This would require decolonizing education. Dei argues that African and other Indigenous peoples had been producing local, culturally rooted knowledge long before colonialism imposed its will. This knowledge over time, as passed down by generations, has come to mold young learners. If colonization is understood as the imposition of one particular way of doing things (see Dei, 2000; Dei & Asgharzadeh, 2001; Dei & Kempf, 2006), when we open the space for multiple ways of knowing and understanding, we begin to undo colonial knowledge regimes. In this effort to decolonize, we must remember that the work is not to undo Western ways of knowing, but rather to undo the 34 hold they have on what is considered legitimate knowledge. In thinking through the trialectic space of “suahunu,” African and Indigenous learners can engage the everyday knowledge conventionally disseminated within the variant spaces of schooling and education. Dei (2012) argues that the concept of “suahunu” as a trialectic space points to how African and Indigenous learners come to know the essence of their lived experiences. Dei (2012) suggests that, with learning in a trialectic space, contemporary students can subvert conventional schooling and the colonizing associated practices. Trialectic space of “suahunu” embodies local Indigenous languages, an affirmation of the African/Indigenous spirituality, and a much-needed ancestral connection. (826) Trialectic space provides a spiritually grounded, anti-colonial approach to education that can dialogue with how African and Indigenous learners become alienated from their local surroundings and social environments and, conversely, also to counter Eurocentric cycles of knowledge production. Dei notes that Education through a trialectic space must be about understanding what identities mean to the young learner and the politics required in making such identifications. Spirituality plays an important role in learning in a trialectic space. “Suahunu” provides a trialectic space to come into a form of action-oriented spirituality, to come into ways of knowing that bring an ethic of care and affirmation onto the identity of the African and Indigenous body, and to act positively to change current social conditions. Dei also argues that among the theoretical suppositions of the anti-colonial framework is the insistence that the transformation of educational realities must start with the issue of reconceptualizing education, for example, asking new questions about the what, how, and why of education (827). Anticolonial approaches to schooling and education would examine how such local voices shift beyond mere critiques of the current order to transformative options that genuinely educate all learners. The “African-centered paradigm” can be conceptualized as a 35 worldview. African-centered education would stress notions of culture, centering learners’ histories, identities, and experiences, focusing on the learner’s agency to bring about change in personal and community lives. Culture is critical to knowledge production. Dei (2012) argues that a culturally grounded perspective that centers African/Indigenous people’s worldviews would help resist the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives. Dei (2012) notes that the trialectic space recognizes histories are steeped in tradition, culture, spirituality, and social identities. The trialectic space troubles how colonial education has fostered a sense of the dominant (colonizer) telling our (colonized) histories. The trialectic space allows us to contest histories and questions as to who tells others’ histories, how, and why. History is power in terms of its omissions, negations, silences, denials, and absences (829). Knowledge is socially and collectively created through interactive processes among individuals, groups, communities, and natural worlds. Knowledge comes from individual, family, and community interactions, as well as through the interactive processes with nature. Dei (2012) argues that knowledge is about searching for wholeness and completeness. This wholeness is a nexus of body, mind, and soul, as well as the interrelations of society-culture-nature. (831) Dei suggests that there is intellectual merit in working with the idea that every social activity is sacred. Dei notes that learners are accountable for the knowledge they produce. A sacred trust must exist among learners to utilize the knowledge we all produce with a degree of ethical responsibility and care. Dei makes a connection between structures, body, learning, healing, and spirituality. The understanding of the sacredness of human activity as involving mental, spiritual, emotional, physical, and metaphysical acts and interactions brings a holistic interpretation of the human experience. Dei (2012) posits that the spirit is linked to learning and producing knowledge. For effective learning, the spirit must be centered in an environment 36 where bodies come to know. This environment, a trialectic space, is a spiritually centered space connecting place, spirit, and body. (832) Dei (2012) argues that spiritual identity is a salient, fundamental, analytical concept offering an entry point in understanding the lived experiences of all learners. Knowledge is spiritually driven or anchored. Knowledge gained in this space is embedded or imbued with the spirit. The spiritual becomes the axis on which knowledge rests, that is, the substructure or foundation for understanding the social, cultural, economic, material, and political. Therefore, understanding the spirit constitutes an important basis of ontological, epistemological, and axiological knowings of the trialectic space. As it relates to physical space and education Dei (2012) closes this awesome work noting that knowledge sits within the trialectic space of the traditional, experiential, and intergenerational communication and understandings, as well as from visions, intuitions, dreams, and the exposure to the outer world (also see Castellano, 2000, in another context). In connecting the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual to the social and material, the rights and responsibilities to Land and Mother Earth are seen as more than relations to the physical. Space is also viewed as more than a social space. Every space has a reverence to it. This section was composed of literary work that explored the intersections of physical space, education, deep cultural structures, spirituality, and interactive African centered pedagogy. This section is unique because it looks to tie a group of literary works together to forge a consistent discussion about the philosophical underpinning of theory to (Imfundo ehlela imvelo- Environmental Education) Structural-Pedagogy. The section has made it possible to further enhance my ideas about space learning and pedagogy grounded in an Africana perspective. 37 The relationship between a physical structural space for learning and the student body's cultural milieu is essential. Culture to a people is like water to a fish. Cultural productions are all around us be they implicit or explicit, so it only makes sense that a connection is made between the physical environment in which one is being educated. African centered schools have very distinct displays of Africana Aesthetics outside and inside the classroom space. In addition to a unique curriculum and culturally grounded and culturally relevant pedagogy, African-centered schools seem to be unique institutions that utilize structural space as a pedagogy for the enhancement of learning outcomes. This legacy was present in ancient Kemet. It’s also important to recognize the work of George J.M. James, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, R.A. Schwaller de Lubiez, and many others. In the pioneering work The Temple in Man; Sacred Architecture and the Perfect Man, Schwaller de Lubiez provides an academic systematic discussion on the function of education as it related to architecture and cosmology. Schwaller de Lubiez posits that; “Man, know thyself and thou wilt know the Universe and the Gods”. The Temple of Luxor was constructed to explain these things. (86) African Centered Pedagogy and Practice Africana Educator Peter C. Murrell Jr. posits that an African centered pedagogy is a deep-seated understanding of African American experiences, culture, and heritage and the ways that this understanding informs successful teaching of Africana children. Murrell (2002) notes that pedagogy includes teachers’ awareness of their own culturally mediated values and biases, as well as an understanding of how success and failure are rooted in larger societal and institutional structures. (xxiii) African centered pedagogy is necessary to appropriately address the social, cultural, and historical context of the schooling experience of Africana children and the disconnection between African American cultural heritage and contemporary educational 38 practice. Dei argues that Afrocentric education uses African culture and cultural values as a weapon of liberation and as counter knowledge to fight Euramerican ideological domination in the schools (Gordon 1990:97). Afrocentric education, however, must be more than emancipatory or liberatory pedagogy (Freire and Shor 1987) imbued with self-reflection, critique, and social action (Ellesworth 1989:300; Giroux and McLaren 1986:237; Gordon 1990:102). Afrocentricity as an intellectual paradigm must focus on addressing the structural impediments to the education of the African student by engaging her or him to identify with her or his history, heritage, and culture. Akoto (1992) notes that the prominence of integrationist ideals during the last 50 years and legislative and material successes gained during the era of Civil Rights were gained at the expense of a monumental loss of social, political, and cultural independence by African communities. Therefore, Akoto suggests that an African-centered pedagogy (including Africanized curricula) should include Nubia, Punt, and the nameless city-states of the green Sahara, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Ife, Asante, and Zulu. All other cultural-historical constructs that do not derive directly from the described historical continuum must be seen as deviations, mutations, or borrowings. Culture consists of the behavioral patterns, symbols, institutions, and values of a society, and is unique to that society. Culture is not a static phenomenon. An implied goal of all African-centered pedagogy, including Africanized curricula, is cultural centeredness and agency for the seeker of knowledge. Africanized education places the life experiences, histories, and traditions of African and African heritage peoples at the center of educational analyses. ACE emphasizes the African and African American experience as the core paradigm for human liberation and higher-level human functioning. The attempt to systematically repress the cultural dynamism of a people is not 39 always a permanent success, as is evident in the resistance to cultural and politico/economic imperialist efforts in African populations on the continent and the diaspora. Akoto (1992) notes that the essence of the historical consciousness for Africans is the “will” and the ability to personalize that history. The process of identifying oneself and one’s family in that history, seeing oneself in that history and growing out of that history. The highest manifestation of this historical consciousness corresponds to what Asante (1998) calls Afrocentric Awareness, the fifth level of personal transformation. It involves the adoption of new criteria for life. Where African Centered values and definitions dictate the rhythm of one’s life. The literature speaks to a history of converging movements by African people to develop a response to the need for an education that provides sustainable liberation. At the center of these actions is a call for a culturally relevant education as a pedestal concept to frame African centered pedagogy and Africanization of the curriculum. Africana scholar Kofi Lomotey (1992) notes that African-centered education enables African American students to look at the world with Africa as the center. It encompasses not only those instructional and curricular approaches that result in a shift in students' worldview, but it engenders a reorientation of their values and actions as well. This perspective in the South African context is important because it is a theoretical foundation that has provided a shift in policy and curriculum development. There are varying ideas about the nature of African-centered education. According to Lee (1992), Lomotey (1992), and Shujaa (1990), an African centered pedagogy should fulfill the following aims: (1) Legitimize African stores of knowledge; 2) Positively exploit and scaffold productive community and cultural practices; 3) Extend and build upon the indigenous language (i.e., the language of the indigenous African people); 4) Reinforce community ties and idealize (the concept of) service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world; 5) Promote 40 positive social relationships; 6) Impart a worldview that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others; 7) Support cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness, and; 8) Promote the vision of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers. Notable among these scholars are Shulman (1987), whose work conceptualizes pedagogy as consisting of subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge, and Berliner (1988), who doubts the ability of expert pedagogues to relate their expertise to novice practitioners. Bartolome (1994) has decried the search for the ‘right’ teaching strategies and argued for a “humanizing pedagogy that respects and uses the reality, history, and perspectives of students as an integral part of educational practice”. (173) Culturally relevant pedagogy rests on three criteria or propositions: (a) Students must experience academic success; (b) students must develop and/or maintain cultural competence, and (c) students must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order. Culturally relevant pedagogy: Ladson Billings argues that being "culturally relevant" is central in the academic success of African American and other children who have not been well served by our nation's public schools. Native American educator Cornel Pewewardy (1993) asserts that one of the reasons Indian children have trouble in schools is that educators traditionally have attempted to insert culture into the education, instead of inserting education into the culture. This notion is, probably, true for many students who are not a part of the White, middle-class mainstream. This work has had a variety of labels including "culturally appropriate" (Au & Jordan, 1981), "culturally congruent" (Mohatt & Erickson, 1981), "culturally responsive" (Cazden & Leggett, 1981; Erickson & Mohatt, 1982), and "culturally compatible" (Jordan, 1985; Vogt, Jordan, & Tharp, 1987). 41 Culturally relevant teaching requires that students maintain some cultural integrity as well as academic excellence. Proponents suggest that for too many African American students, the school remains an alien and hostile place. This hostility is manifest in the "styling" and "posturing" (Majors & Billson, 1992) that the school rejects. School is perceived as a place where African American students cannot "be themselves." Culturally relevant teachers utilize students' culture as a vehicle for learning. Culturally relevant teaching does not imply that it is enough for students to choose academic excellence and remain culturally grounded if those skills and abilities represent only an individual achievement. Beyond those individual characteristics of academic achievement and cultural competence, students must develop a broader sociopolitical consciousness that allows them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities. Freire brought forth the notion of "conscientization," which is "a process that invites learners to engage the world and others critically" (McLaren, 1989, 195). However, Freire's work in Brazil was not radically different from work that was being done in the southern United States (Chilcoat & Ligon, 1994) to educate and empower African Americans who were disenfranchised. Ladson-Billings called for “a culturally relevant pedagogy that would propose to do three things: produce students who can achieve academically, produce students who demonstrate cultural competence and develop students who can both understand and critique the existing social order”. (474) By “cultural competence,” Ladson Billings was speaking of supporting students in maintaining their community and heritage ways with language and other cultural practices in the process of gaining access to dominant ones. In her third tenet, Ladson-Billings also called for the development of an explicitly critical and praxis-oriented stance in students. 42 Using Afrocentric pedagogy appropriately enjoins Black students to have a strong sense of identity, history, and culture to deal with some of the problems of their existence in this juxtaposed postmodern position (J. Sefa, 1994). This pedagogy is effective in addressing these problems because of the unique approach of centering the individual's ethnic-cultural group experience simultaneously in historiography and a contemporary model. As already established in the literature review, a stranded pedagogy is insufficient in the conveyance of culturally relevant material. This dramatically transforms the learning experience from one that is stranded to liberating. Cherry A. McGee Banks & James A. Banks (1995) posits that one of the most prevalent of these misconceptions is that the integration of content about diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial groups into the mainstream curriculum is both its essence and its totality. Thus, the debate about multicultural education has focused primarily on content integration (e.g., the nature of the canon) and has largely ignored other important dimensions of multicultural education (Sleeter, 1995). To be effectively implemented in schools, colleges, and universities, multicultural education must be broadly conceptualized, and its various dimensions must be more carefully delineated. J.A. Banks (1993b, 1993c, 1994b) has conceptualized multicultural education as consisting of five dimensions: content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowering school culture and social structure. Equity pedagogy can be defined as teaching strategies and classroom environments that help students from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural groups attain the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to function effectively within, and help create and perpetuate, a just, humane, and democratic society. 43 Carol D. Lee; Kofi Lomotey; Mwalimu Shujaa (1990) all are in agreement when they note that African-American people need an African-centered pedagogy because racism and worldwide Eurocentric hegemonic attitudes and practices are still the order of the day. The existing pedagogy in public education remains European-centered. Despite the upward mobility of many middle and upper-middle-class African-Americans, most African-Americans remain in poverty and do not achieve educational parity in American schools (Lomotey, 1990). The status of most African-Americans relative to whites has not changed significantly throughout the history of the United States. In this regard, Haki Madhubuti (1990) summarizes key points from a report by the National Research Council (Jaynes & Williams, 1989): Currently, most theories of learning and development produced by Western educational research tend to reproduce and reinforce Eurocentric paradigms. Conclusions are drawn from observations of white, middle-class samples and postulated as universal norms for development and learning (Apple, 1979; Banks, 1988; Miller-Jones, 1988; Ogbu, 1988; Saving the African American Child, 1984; Slaughter & McWorter, 1985; Stigler & Baranes, 1989). An African- centered pedagogy is needed to support a line of resistance to these conditions; it is needed to produce an education that contributes to achieving pride, equity, power, wealth, and cultural continuity for Africans in America and elsewhere. An African-centered pedagogy is necessary to foster an ethical character development grounded in social practice within the African community. The African cultural character is neither monolithic nor static. However, even in its historical and geographic formations whether Yoruba or Zulu, African-Brazilian or African- American there is an ontological foundation that remains constant (Asante, 1988; Diop, 1978; Karenga, 1990; Mbiti, 1970; Nobles, 1980; Sofola, 1973; Stuckey, 1987; Warfield Coppock, 1990). That constant is well represented in the ancient Egyptian concept of Maat. 44 Limitations of Afrocentric pedagogy include keeping African students out of the mainstream and promoting cultural separatism. Critics argue that African students will fail to acquire a sufficient grasp of mainstream culture if they spend too much time studying their own culture. Knowledge of African American history does not help much with the Scholastic Assessment Tests, and it leaves the regular school curriculum unreformed. Connell (1994) stated, “Social justice is not satisfied by curriculum ghettos. Separate and different curricula have some attractions but leave the currently hegemonic curriculum in place. Social justice requires reconstructing the mainstream”. (44) The African mind has a connection to a rich scholarly history combined with the wisdom accumulated in the present age; both must be willed so that both past and present are utilized to trail-blaze a healthy future. As the first people on the planet and the victims of countless continual genocide in multiple frameworks and domain space of society; people participating in the African experience must take a vested interest in “bootstrapping” (in a Black nationalistic context) and use those communal qualities of the African worldview to resurrect the African mind for a dynamic diverse, yet Afrocentric future. What should be noted is that the African centered model of approach has a strong convergence with what Dei (2000) calls Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is appropriately discussed within an anti-colonial discursive framework. This framework is both a counter/ oppositional discourse to the denial and repudiation of the repressive presence of colonial oppression and an affirmation of the reality of recolonization processes through the dictates of global capital. Like postcolonial theory, an anti-colonial framework is a theorization of issues, concerns, and social practices emerging from colonial relations and their aftermath. It is an epistemology of the colonized, anchored in the Indigenous sense of collective and common 45 colonial consciousness. ‘Colonial’ is conceptualized, not simply as ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’, but rather as ‘imposed and dominating’. The point that Dei (2000) is conveying is that people look for pedagogical spaces and techniques to combat oppression and engage in active resistance. More specifically, the term/notion ‘Indigenous’ refers to knowledge resulting from a long-term residence in a place (Fals Borda 1980). Roberts (1998: 59) and others have a clear conceptualization of ‘Indigenous’ as knowledge ‘accumulated by a group of people, not necessarily Indigenous, who by centuries of unbroken residence develop an in-depth understanding of their particular place in their particular world’. ‘Indigenous’ signals the power relations and dynamics embedded in the production, interrogation, and validation of such knowledge. It also recognizes the multiple and collective origins as well as collaborative dimensions of knowledge and affirms that the interpretation or analysis of social reality is subject to different and sometimes oppositional perspectives. (Dei et al. 2000: 5) Sleeter (2011) brought great depth and perspective of the historical development of culturally relevant pedagogy. Sleeter (2011) notes that over the last two decades in many countries, culturally responsive, multicultural, and bilingual approaches to teaching have largely been replaced by standardizing curricula and pedagogy, rooted in a political shift toward neoliberalism that has pushed business models of school reform. The recent culture wars over the school curriculum are a continuation of a newer form of ideological structures of hegemony that follow the old path of separating children and communities from their traditions (Schlesinger, 1998). More and more publicly funded, large scale off the shelf, cookie-cutter standardized programs for public schools, mainly urban, mainly minimum competence, mainly non-culturally responsive. 46 It is noted that within departments, there is little consensus about what culturally responsive pedagogy is. It is also noted that unlike culturally responsive pedagogy, neoliberal reforms that purport to address racialized achievement gaps treat racism and culture as if they do not exist. Although racial achievement gaps in the United States have been a focus of attention, most solutions have emphasized offering all students the same curriculum, taught in the same way, although they are based on the language, worldview, and experiences of white English speakers. The findings suggested that practitioners of culturally responsive pedagogy generally struggle more with the implications of structural and cultural analysis. Sleeter (2011) notes that liberalism, which emphasizes individualism, is far more prominent in mainstream ideology than critical perspectives, so educators tend not to question assumptions of liberal multiculturalism; the problem is that institutions reflect the ideas of the dominant group and that group prefers to see African peoples as individuals, not as an ethnic group. Shockley and Cleveland's (2011) work illustrated the philosophical and theoretical principles behind Afrocentric pedagogy. The method used in this study was the Africalogical critical ethnographic case study approach which was best suited to unveil the theories and practices of these Afrocentric educators since Africology requires deep knowledge of the history and background of informants and ethnographic requires prolonged field engagement. The findings suggested that major educational challenges faced by Black children and communities have shaped the current interest in Afrocentric education in the United States. Implications of the findings suggested that ideological and what seem to be irreconcilable differences between Afrocentric educators and those in the mainstream have polarized the two groups. While Afrocentric education receives very little mainstream public attention, the act of 47 ignoring the comprehensive offering being made by this group of educationists aids and abets in keeping Black children in the lowest possible tiers. The limitations of this study are its lack of quantitative data. The objective of quantitative research is to develop and employ measurable models, theories, and/or hypotheses about phenomena to illustrate a given trajectory. Afrocentric pedagogy on a macrostructural level addresses reform or change of standard structural models of education. Afrocentric pedagogy on a microanalytic level places emphasis on the lived experience and culture of the individual in the education model. This notion is important because it suggests that Afrocentric pedagogy can serve to address problems that youth of African descent face both on a macrostructural and a microanalytic level. Educator and historian, Virginia Richardson's (2003) work were very important. Richardson puts forth a strong critique from the inside perspective of constructivist pedagogy. She begins with a short history of constructivist pedagogy and its relationship to constructivist learning theory. The major difference between the social and psychological approaches is one of focus. In both approaches, there is an assumption that meaning or knowledge is actively constructed in the human mind. However, social constructivism focuses on how the development of that formal knowledge has been created or determined with power, economic, social, and political forces. This includes both its structure and the epistemological frameworks in which it is embedded. The psychological approach focuses on how meaning is created within the individual mind and, more recently, how shared meaning is developed within a group process. The methods used in Richardson’s (2003) article were a review of a collection of historical literature and empirical observation of data collected on the subject matter. It is important to note that an empirical focus on the relationship between teaching and student learning does not necessarily require an experimental study that compares constructivist and 48 traditional instruction. The findings concluded in the article suggested; there is a strong movement in the direction of developing an understanding of constructivist pedagogy based on constructivist learning theory. Implications of this conclusion would suggest that such an experimental design might be helpful for policy purposes, but agreement on the outcomes of instruction would be difficult to achieve since the goals of the two approaches are quite different. Limitations presented in this work are small but significant; there are several aspects in thinking about constructivist pedagogy that requires strong and rigorous work, approached with constant attention paid to the possibility of ideological bias. Perhaps the most critical area of work in constructivist pedagogy at this point is determining ways of relating teacher actions in a constructivist classroom to student learning. Asante (2017) posits that a Revolutionary pedagogy will require different ways of thinking and maybe even different structural components to the school setting (7). Also, educators must be bold enough to look at the way children and adults learn and then implement the kind of apparatus that would capture that learning style and interest thus peeking behind the educational veil. Everything that has to do with the school is pedagogy. Asante suggests that the purpose of education for the Revolutionary pedagogist is to prepare students to live in an interconnected global world with personal dignity and respect for all other people as human beings with the same privileges that one seeks for oneself while preserving the earth for those who will come afterward. Revolutionary pedagogy is a philosophy of education that seeks to overturn ordinary thinking, methods, and practice of creating and delivering knowledge to children by employing Africological, Kemetological, and rhetorical techniques to reset the instructional focus for children. Asante (2017) notes that it was Ladson-Billings (1995) who argued that it was essential 49 to be aware that many studies of student failure often located the source of student failure in the nexus of speech and language. Ladson-Billings noted that the; “next step for positing effective pedagogical practices is a theoretical model that not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools and other institutions perpetuate (16). Revolutionary pedagogy is not merely about culture but culture and agency. The idea is more about the assertion of African or Latino or Asian cultures as pedagogically important without necessarily identifying critical perspectives because the assertion of our agency itself is a full critique of any kind of domination. There are five aspects of Revolutionary pedagogy: 1) relationships; the core of our humanity is our relatedness first to our family and then our community and other entities, political, religious, or artistic; but ultimately, we are bound together by our humanity. 2) Ethics; thus, all traits that support harmony, balance, order, truth, righteousness, justice, and reciprocity are at the core of the protection of humanity, the universe, and the self. 3) Values; in an interconnected world, the sustaining of the world depends upon recognizing global diversity and responding to global sharing with other human beings. 4) Literacy; is the state of being knowledgeable of a particular category of knowledge. For example, scientific literacy allows students to understand and appreciate concepts such as climate change, race as an illusion, nuclear energy, and fossil fuels. 5) Reasoning; reasoning is the ability to determine quantitatively and qualitatively answers based on evidence and facts. Hence, critical thinking and creative communication together allow the student to arrive at conclusions and adequately and effectively present such results in written or oral forms. 50 African Centered Schools Asante (1991) argued that, if African Americans were taught within the context of their history and culture, they would find it easier to relate to the knowledge that was presented to them and would be more likely to see themselves as actual participants in the learning process, rather than as observers of someone else’s history and culture. According to Jacob H. Carruthers (1995), “The African-centered education campaign, which is designed to reform education in the United States, is related to the chronic failure of the education system to provide equal educational results and opportunities for African Americans”. (1) The cultural differences theory suggests there is little connection between the school curriculum and the home environment or culture of the students. The curriculum is not culturally relevant, and, therefore, students cannot see any connection to their cultural/personal identity (Hale, 1986; Wilson, 1987). The African American educational movement became a test of their capacity to restructure their lives, to establish their freedom. Although they appreciated the Northern support, they resisted infringements that threatened to undermine their initiative and self- reliance. The fact-points are very important to keep in mind when one looks to situate the proper contextual position and responses to the needs of Black people. Anderson (1988) notes that, in the history of African American education, the political significance of slave literacy reaches beyond the antebellum period. Many of the educators and leaders of the postbellum years were men and women who first became literate under slavery. Moreover, many prominent post-Civil War Black educators who were not literate as slaves received their initial understanding of the meaning of literacy under bondage. Post-slavery experiences continued to reinforce and shape a distinctive Black American consciousness of the literate culture. 51 Richardson (2000) suggests the implementation of an African-centered curriculum is complex because of the complex past and present of African Americans. Students’ ideas of “making it” in academia influence the academic personas they adopt or have been trained to adopt. The diversity within the African American community brings with it the clash of diverse ideologies and class intersections. Most did not escape the experience of miseducation. For as many African Americans who come to college “prepared,” an equal or greater number arrive not prepared for college-level work. This idea of preparedness is in and of itself telling. Over the past four to five decades African Americans have responded in several ways to the “post-segregation era” policy conditions that tended more often than not to neglect the fundamental needs of Black people. A new approach to cultural and social issues has been ushered in by the general discussion of Afrocentric scholars who have challenged the old theories of communication, social institutions, artistic developments, and economics by suggesting that Africans must be studied from the standpoint of agency. Nobles (1990) contends that most mainstream American educators and scholars have rendered the relevance of culture to education as, at worst, the “something” which is irrelevant to the task of education and should be disregarded (i.e., They don’t see color, we should just teach children, etc.). Carmen Dragnea & Sally Erling (2008) brought insight into the need to study effective Afrocentric pedagogy and illustrate clear issues in education equity from an African American perspective; The Effectiveness of Afrocentric Schools in Closing Student Success and Achievement Gaps. The intent of using this body of work is to bring foresight to Afrocentricity as a potential solution to addressing the achievement gap. Offering African students an African- centered education is one way to provide adequate education to the large numbers of African children who may be at risk. African centered education is committed to cultural as well as 52 academic and social goals. Inside African-centered schools, teachers teach Black students about their culture, about life, and their role in society and the world while maintaining high expectations and demanding excellence. Since the early 1970s, there have been a vast number of inquiries and scholarly analyses about how to improve the educational experience of racial minority student populations. Durden's (1970) work, African Centered Schooling: Facilitating Holistic Excellence for Black children is one such example. Durden (1970) excels in illustrating the need for a holistic approach when engaging in educating African populations, the discontinuity between the experience of the teaching force and the students they teach, and the disconnect between students’ home and schooling experiences. Colonial and slave structures, as well as apartheid and general White supremacy structures, were created, including boarding schools, to separate children from parents and communities and cultures, and especially mission schools to destroy the worldviews and to stigmatize colonized and enslaved people as savage, primitive, and pagans (Hilliard, 1995). More and more we see publicly funded, large scale off the shelf, cookie-cutter standardized programs for public schools, mainly minimum competence, non-culturally responsive (Hilliard, 2006). Hilliard suggests that Black achievement is attained through strategic partnerships with parents. There is a strong need for internal dialogue within the African community to address both the common school experience with others and the African community’s responsibility for the broader socialization approaches. The limitations of the literary work are its failure to capture the potential of application to multiple cities and states due to research methods and empirical examples. The limitations can be challenged if strategic efforts can be instilled to ensure that 53 quality dialog takes place and be maintained between parents/community and educators that speak to the needs of group-specific geopolitical issues. Woldegiorgis & Doevenspeck (2013) posit that though ‘modern’ higher education systems in Africa are largely a product of European colonial frameworks, various studies indicated that the practice of education at all levels was there in pre-colonial settings of Africa. Prominent scholars in African higher education like Ajayi et al (1996), Assie-Lumumba (2006), and Lulat (2005), extensively documented the genesis of African higher education tracing back to the pyramids of Egypt, the obelisks of Ethiopia, and the Kingdom of Timbuktu. Abjayi et al (1996), for example, have reported the existence of one such academy referred to as the Alexandrian Academy or the Universal Museum Library at Alexandria between 331 and 642 A.D. It is also on record that in 859 A.D, the Al-Quarawiyyin University was established at Fez in Morocco while the Al-Azhar University at Cairo was established in 970 A.D. in Egypt (Lulat, 2005). The 2,700 years old tradition of elite education of Ethiopia with an African script called Ge’ez could also be taken as an example of a higher form of education in pre-colonial Africa. Thus, the existence of complex civilizations and higher education learning spaces in Africa before the arrival of Europeans indicates that the practice of education at all levels was in place in pre-colonial settings of Africa. Horsthemke (2006) posits that the idea of ‘the African university’ is usually accompanied by an emphasis on Africanisation of education, and knowledge, on changing the demographic profile of students, staff and administrative bodies, educational syllabi and curricula, and the criteria for research activity and throughput. The idea of ‘Africanising’ universities is frequently couched within a conception that is explicitly ‘Afrocentric’. On the other end of the spectrum, doubts about the idea of ‘Africanising’ universities frequently give rise to a kind of 54 ‘Afroscepticism’. The idea of ‘Africanising’ universities is frequently couched within conception and language that is explicitly ‘Afrocentric’. Afrocentrism does not simply mean teaching students about Africa, its history, cultures, philosophy, and values. It means ‘placing Africa at the center’, historically, culturally, philosophically, and morally (Schiele 1994, 152; Ani 1994). It encompasses the view that Africa is the cradle of humankind and the locus of the first great civilizations from which all others derive (Asante 1980, 45; Asante 1987, 170; Van Sertima 1999; Seepe 2000). Msila and Gumbo (2016) note that education in Africa in the 21st century has to operate in both a post-colonial and globalizing context. The curriculum in postcolonial Africa is still to a large extent confronted by the legacy of colonial education that remained in place decades after political decolonization. Colonial education was hegemonic and disruptive to African cultural practices, indigenous epistemologies, and ways of knowing. The call for an African renaissance has been present in the period marking the nearly four decades of African post-independence. The self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education is a very important discussion to have when one seeks a greater understanding between the experiences of education liberation in both the Black American and Black South African struggles. Both groups foster Independent Black institutions to develop and sustain liberation movements. Jensen (2012) points out, for example, the focus of student organizations, especially in historically Black institutions, shifted from protests against the illegitimate government to demands for unrestricted access to higher education, expanded financial aid to needy students, and relief from personal debt to the institutions (p. 304). This combination of politics, legislation, and performance measures enforced on institutions a stronger managerial responsibility towards student organizations. 55 Mswazie and Mudyahoto (2013) note that there is a strong rationale for the Africanization of the curriculum. Mswazie and Mudyahoto argue that the impetus to Africanize post-colonial education systems came from many sources. The cost of ignorance about each other has become far too great for Africa and the Diaspora to bear. As Diop (1982) observed, African Egyptian civilization is the distant mother of Western cultures and sciences, most ideas we call foreign or European are often nothing but mixed up, reversed, modified, elaborated images of the creations of our African ancestors. The Africana project seeks to rescue and rehabilitate the histories, intellectual traditions, and wisdom philosophies of Ancient Africa. The second important reason for designing this framework is the realization among scholars that Euro-centric models of development, namely liberal and Marxist blueprints have failed to emancipate Africa from its grinding poverty (Bell,1986). The third most compelling reason for conducting this study relates to the global ecological crisis that has been prompted by anthropocentric models of development endemic to Western culture. The dominant and youngest contemporary human civilization-Western in its orientations and values has undoubtedly improved and added value to the quality of human life on the planet. Older civilizations from the African, American, and Asian contents have bequeathed principles, values, codes, and philosophies that have sustained and promoted harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. Durden's (1970) work, African Centered Schooling: Facilitating Holistic Excellence for Black children, is one such example. The method applied by the Durden (2007) study was using a collection of empirical data consisting of observations, historical documentation, and interviews. The conclusion is taken from results of the implementation of African centered schooling strategies, at Chick Elementary and Sanford B Ladd who is among the top-performing 56 in the state of Missouri, suggest that; in addressing achievement among Black students in the United States, educational researchers and scholars have begun to challenge and question the ideological and pedagogical constructs that threaten the holistic development of Black students. Mwalimu J. Shujaa (1994) and others have noted that African centered cultural knowledge must be passed on, Black people must create their educational institutions. Regina A. Bernard Carreno (2006) was insightful in highlighting the production of knowledge. The method used in the Carreno (2006) work was a compilation of empirical data and theoretical conceptual understanding. The findings suggested that there is a strong disconnect for Black children in a traditional Euro American learning format. The disconnect between what goes on in urban college classrooms, and what is stereotyped as graduate study, particularly at an Ivy League institution or private college, leaves many urban undergraduates minoring in Black Studies less than hopeful at obtaining a graduate degree in the field. The implications of these findings suggested that professors in the field, regardless of the field they originally came from, are under the gun, and against the clock to turn around research production. The aforementioned methodologies help us understand why contextualization and further analysis of Afrocentric/culturally relevant pedagogy is an important liberation tool for change, away from standard models. There are five reasons why African-centered education is needed: (1) to restore the truth to the curriculum; (2) to develop a framework for cultural equality as we move further into the 21st Century; (3) to provide an apparatus for the restoration, maintenance, and development of the African culture; (4) to provide the leadership in educational reform; and (5) to address the nature of the population composition in the United States (Carruthers, 1995). According to Duncan (2012) Asante, Authur, and Schlesinger “stressed that the current traditional curriculum 57 found in many public schools in the United States alienates Black children.” Dei (1995) used the narrative discoveries of Black youths in a Canadian inner-city relative to their experiences in the public school system, as one means of exploring the need and relevance of an “African-centered” school. Independent Black Institutions focus on African American culture as the basis of the curriculum. When schools categorized as Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) administer standardized achievement tests, the students enrolled usually perform one to three years ahead of their peers in public schools. It was also found that “students from (IBI’s) enter more traditional school systems better-prepared than the average student because of their high academic competence and exposure to a wider variety of the educational content” (Lomotey & Brookins, 1988: 167). Kunjufu (2009) stated that one of the problems of public schools is the “failure to understand the cultural and developmental needs of Black children”. (1) Fisher (2009) notes that (IBI’s) did not begin with the emergence of the Black Power and Black Arts movements; institution building for people of African descent in the context of the U.S. began during the enslavement of African people in the Americas. (6) Educational research, however, is limited in its treatment of Black writers, poets, and their institutions in school and in out of school contexts that specifically focused on the self-determination and self-reliance of Black youth, their families, and teachers made critically important in the1960s and 1970s. Institution building that guided the Black Power and Black Arts movements provided rich cultural maps for following the trajectory of literate practices among Blacks. Research examining the lives of Blacks in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals the intersection between reading, writing, speaking, and action. 58 Potts (2003) references the long history of emancipatory schools including the freedom schools of Reconstruction and SNCC. Also highlighted were “liberation schools of the Black Panther Party, the Malcolm X Academy in Detroit, Sankofa Shule in Lansing, the Institute for Positive Education/New Concept Development Center in Chicago, the Benjamin E. Mays Institute in Hartford, and the schools affiliated with the Council of Independent Black Institutions (CIBI)”. (173) Lee points out that public schools at best may be able to: 1.) Foster skill development in literacy, math, the humanities, and technology 2.) Instill citizenship skills based on critical reflection about the political system within which the student exists, compared to the democratic values that should undergird it. 3.) Provide historical overviews that highlight the contributions of all ethnic groups to “the storehouse of human knowledge”. (308) Lee (1994) maintains that even if these three were supported by public school education, the need for African Americans to achieve “ethnic pride, self-sufficiency, equity, wealth, and power” would still not be met (308). Independent Black Institutions (IBI’s) “represent the laboratory schools for the development of pedagogy and projects that reflect African worldviews and interests”. (174) In current discussions about African-centered curricula, educators are debating what the specific content should be and who should teach it. This is a much-needed dialogue if the quality of education afforded to African American children is to be improved and the ultimate survival of the African American community ensured. The historical and contemporary models of (IBI’s) provide a ready-made model for those who desire to provide African-centered education for African American students. The (IBI) model is a useful one that inspires parents and teachers in the public schools because it (1) demonstrates that African Americans can effectively educate 59 their children, (2) illustrates African American institutional development and financial independence, and (3) provides a training ground for tomorrow's African American leadership. Independent Black Institutions (IBI’s) is not a new phenomenon in the education of African-American youth. For example, there were African American free schools during Reconstruction (Anderson, 1988; Bennett, 1964; Harding, 1981) and the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights movement (Howe, 1965). The two historical poles of this continuum for the Black independent schools since 1970 have provided the most contemporary stage for the practice of African-centered pedagogy. However, to articulate a more cohesive educational philosophy sensitive to both current and future conditions, researchers and practitioners must collaborate in a lab school setting; a research lab school setting must have the philosophical and material resources as well as the historical practices to provide adequate support for the collaborative activities. Black independent schools and African-centered educational researchers make an ideal alliance, for implementation conclusions and practices drawn from such an alliance offer relevant and tested sources of curriculum content and pedagogical principles for the African- American component of multicultural curricula in public schools. Overall, the presented literature was very helpful as an amalgamation of literary works that brought forth a complex subject matter. African centric pedagogy is a viable means of improving the performance gap between White and Black children. Also, further study of the effectiveness of African centered pedagogy is pivotal. Some of the most visible patterns in most of the research presented were the lack of quantitative and empirical data to support the theoretical framework (Shujaa, 1994; Smith, 1999; Yosef Ben-Jochannan, 1972; Carreno, 2006). The gap between empirical data collected and qualitative affirmation can become problematic. 60 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGIES & DATA COLLECTION The methodology for informing my research is an exploratory case study. Merriam, (1998) explains, “the case study is an intensive description and analysis of a phenomenon or social units such as an individual, group, institution or community”. (8) According to Creswell, “case studies are a design of inquiry found in many fields, especially, evaluation, in which the researcher develops an in-depth analysis of a case, often a program, event, activity, process or one or more individuals”. (43) This case study looks to explore the varying ideas about the nature of African Centered Education. Hence, my study provides a detailed account of the voices of the stakeholders of (ACE) at the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. The strategy used to recruit the research participants was through my professional and personal networks within Michigan State University and the Kara Heritage Institute. The selection criteria for interviewees were adult learners and administration staff who worked or were affiliated with the Kara Heritage Institute. The participants within this study consisted of two administrators, two adult student learners, and the C.E.O at the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. The participants agreed to participate by consent form in the one in one interview. I, (Clarence George III) recruited my participants by way of an open invitation. Sources & Data Collected The data collection strategies implemented within this study were (1) field notes and observations, (2) six, one on one interviews, over four years, (3) documents and artifacts provided by the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, and (4) photos with captions of the Kara Heritage Institute collected over four years. Before conducting observations for the project, I 61 established an observational protocol including detailed procedures for the collection of information. The observational protocol allowed me to record information in descriptive notes. In an observational protocol, Creswell (2014) acknowledges, “descriptive notes are portraits of the participants, a reconstruction of dialogue, and a description of the physical setting, accounts of particular events or activities”. (244) I (Clarence) documented reflective notes, detailing personal thoughts, feelings, problems, and impressions of the settings. Individual Interviews My analysis of the six, one on one interviews are rooted in correlation to the eight primary aims of (ACE) noted by Lee (1992), Lomotey, and Shujaa (1990). Content analysis will allow the primary researcher to systematically analyze the hidden and visible content in text and other document material (McDougal, 2014). This method allows the researcher to identify aspects of text and communication practices that are difficult to see or may go unnoticed through ordinary reading, viewing, or hearing (McDougal, 2014). In this section, I apply content analysis to six, one on one interviews conducted over four years at the Kara Heritage Institution in Pretoria, South Africa. An interview protocol is utilized by a qualitative researcher for recording and writing down information obtained during the interview (Creswell, 2014). My interview protocol included instructions and standard procedures that were consistent for each one on one interview conducted. These procedures included audiotaping and handwritten notes to be transparent in the data collection process across all one on one interviews. My protocol required that I start out building rapport with the interview participants. Building rapport with our research participants involved getting background information regarding the research participant’s family upbringing. Observational content analysis is based on a coding system that measures the utilization of; the 62 eight aims of (ACE). This section looks at six, one on one interviews with the C.E.O. Dr. Mathole Kherfo Motshekga; two adult student learners, one teacher named Thendo Netshimboni, and a project coordinator named Makgatho Motshekga over four years from 2016 to 2019. I chose these six interviews because they were open-ended semi-structured interviews that captured the pedagogy in practice and outcome in the most organic domain space. Besides, the lengthy interviews, observational notes were considered as well. Field Notes and Observations Field notes have been gathered and organized for over four years. During my visits to the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, South Africa over the course of four consecutive summer visits, I was able to observe and participate in several activities and educational programming. The primary utilized field notes and observations are based on my general observations and interactions with the staff and students at the Kara Heritage Institute. In the descriptive field notes, I also focused on the subject of presentations that were presented. All presentations that I attended over the duration of this study have provided me with a rich bucket of observed data that should be able to speak to the practice of African Centered Education. One event that stands out when reviewing my field notes was the presentation of the book series entitled, “African Freedom Fighters”, which including myself had a total of four speakers on various topics of African cultural restoration. My general assumption gathered from my observations is that students both young and old felt that cultural restoration and heritage appreciation was important to the African Renaissance. During my observations, I was able to note sidebar conversations that seemed to affirm the notion of culture as a foundation for the South African future. During their educational programming events, speakers discussed the importance of the youth’s ability to learn African 63 history. During the “African Freedom Fighters” presentation, I (Clarence George III) observed the interactions between peoples and students of African descent. These events allow the local community to engage in cultural restoration presentations to which they would not otherwise have access. The African Freedom Fighters series was sponsored by the Awareness Publishing Group and is presented around South Africa. The programs also allow students to provide each other support, mentoring, and a forum to discuss racial agency and heritage restoration. The events at Kara provide a study space for Black students who prefer to interact with individuals who are of similar consciousness. Photos and Captions During the duration of my preliminary and primary investigations, I have been able to unmask a rich collection of photos and captions that have accompanied my field note observations and interactions. The photos are organized by the second iteration of themes generated and coded accordingly. The placement of each photo is organized by the visual representation and accompanied caption. Photos have been collected over four years and reflect a diverse presentation of images that capture time and space and the evolution of African Centered Education and Structural Pedagogy at the Kara Heritage Institute. Fifteen photos were used for coding purposes. The caption that accompanied each photo was organized in its appropriate theme as indicated by the image and keywords in the photo caption. 64 Illustrations The five illustrations are examples of the 15 photos and captions that were utilized to provide a theoretical analysis that reflects a diverse presentation of images that capture time and space and the evolution of African Centered Education and Structural Pedagogy at the Kara Heritage Institute. Figure 1: Image located on the white wall at the Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria, South Africa. 65 Figure 2: This is an image of the courtyard at the Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria, South Africa. It looks like rural African architecture in a modern Western urban area. 66 Figure 3: Image of “Indawo lapho kwenziwa khona ukudla” A place where food is made. Located in Pretoria, South Africa at the Kara Heritage Institute. 67 Figure 4: A Depiction of ancient Egyptian personalities located on the outer perimeter white wall at the Kara Heritage Institute located in Pretoria, South Africa. 68 Figure 5: The image of Frederick Douglass in South Africa is located on the white wall of the Kara Heritage Institute indicated the global and Pan African nature of the ontology and Epistemology of the Kara Heritage Institute. 69 Documents and Artifacts The Documents and Artifacts were collected meticulously throughout four years. Among the collected documents are the Kara Heritage Institute book manuals and course materials. In addition to the aforementioned materials, I have collected program flyers and handouts from the educational programs over the years. The Documents and Artifacts are organized in numerical codes that were assigned to each piece of data that was coded. Each document, for example, has been organized by the content presented on the cover page and the first four pages of major content or text. Each document was coded based on the text and content that corresponded to the generated themes. Twenty individual pieces of data points were collected from this data set. Instruments The data for content analysis was collected by a code sheet. In each category, the primary researcher inputs the citation and the description of the observed theme. Each category was created to capture the relationship between the pedagogy in practice as it relates to the eight aims of (ACE). Also, there was a ninth theme generated in the second round of latent coding. Data Analysis Each of the six interviews has been fully transcribed in full length and stored in Nvivo computer software where each interview was coded and organized in the appropriately themed bucket organized by the eight aims of (ACE). The data analysis process was very revealing to what was being communicated by the data sets. I originally located eight primary buckets using Nvivo computer software. When conducting manifest coding I noticed an additional new theme generated by the data sets. After separating the data, during latent coding I generated a correlation to nine common themes as they relate to the African Centered Education in Pretoria, South Africa. The next step led me to create a table model similar to the Anfara model. This step 70 helped me see the emergent patterns within the nine major themes. The data display process helped me understand the rationale for the nine major themes because these themes were the most discussed features in the literature and contemporary scholarship. The data display (Table 1.) reveals the rich correlation between the interview questions, interview responses, Captioned Photographs, Documents and Artifacts, and Observations and field notes, as they relate to the generated bucket themes which are; 1)Enlightenment Transformation with African Spirituality and Heritage, 2) Cultural Responsibility to one’s self and community, and 3) The Practice of Ubuntu. The second data display (Table 2.) presents the Research Question in relation to Interview Questions. Table two highlights specific interview questions that correlated to the overall research questions and major inquiry. This table allows the reader and the researcher to locate specific interview questions as they relate to responses to research questions. The third data display (Table 3.) presents the Matrix of Findings and Sources of Data Triangulation. Table three allows the reader and the researcher to locate the nine major themes which are; (1) Kara Heritage Institute implementation of programs for South African spiritual transformation; (2) Kara development and legitimization of African stores of knowledge; (3) Kara supports cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness; (4) Kara Institute positively exploits and scaffolds productive community and cultural practices; (5) The Kara Heritage Institute extended and builds upon African indigenous language (i.e., the language of the indigenous African people); (6) The Kara Heritage Institute promotes the vision of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers; (7) The Kara Heritage Institute promotes positive social relationships; (8) The Kara Heritage Institute imparts a worldview that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others; (9) The Kara Heritage Institute reinforces 71 community ties and idealizes (the concept of) service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world; and the ability to locate each data source with which those themes correlate. Also, (Table 3.) highlights the triangulation between 4 data points (Interviews, Observations, Documents & Artifacts, Captioned Photos) that share a commonality with the nine major themes. 72 Table 1: Data Display Generated Themes Enlightenment Transformation with Cultural Responsibility to one’s self The Practice of African Spirituality and Heritage and Community; Ubuntu; Second Iteration Spiritual transformation; Interview questions Q8AD#1, Q1AD#2, Q2AD#2, Q4AD#2, Q7T, Q8T, Q2AD#1, Q3AD#1, Q4AD#1, Q5AD#1, Q7AD#1, Q8AD#1, Q9AD#1, Q13AD#1, Q16AD#1, Q4IC, Q7IC, Q5M, Q4T, Q8T, Q8AD#1, Q13AD#1, Q16AD#1, Q7IC, Q2AD#1, Q8AD#1, Q9AD#1, Q4T, Q1T, Q4T, Q6IC, Q16AD#1, Q7IC, Q8AD#1, Q13AD#1, Q7AD#1, Q13AD#1, Q7T, R2AD#1, R6AD#1, R9AD#1, R10AD#1, R11AD#1, R17AD#1, R18AD#1, R1AD#2, R4AD#2, R5AD#2, R8AD#2, R24IIC, R2IC, R7IC, R11M, R10T, R6AD#1, R9AD#1, R15AD#1, R22AD#1, R3AD#2, R7AD#2, R8AD#2, R19M, R6T, R8AD#1, R12AD#1, R15AD#1, R2AD#2, R8T, #14 Caption: West African Cultural Icons, #5 Caption: Garvey in South Africa, #6 Caption: Martin Luther King in South Africa, #9 Caption: Pan African Queens and Kings, #4 Caption Frederick Douglass in South Africa on the wall of Kara Heritage Institute, Interview responses R9AD#1, R1AD#2, R6AD#2, R9AD#1, R11AD#1, R12AD#1, R15AD#1, R18AD#1, R9AD#2, R3IC, R7M, R28M, R8T, R10T, R2AD#1, R5AD#1, R8AD#1, R9AD#1, R11AD#1, R12AD#1, R16AD#1, R17AD#1, R18AD#1, R7AD#2, R24IIC, R25IIC, R27IIC, R28IIC, R2IC, R4IC, R7IC, R9M, R10M, R11M, R26M, R4T, R10T, R7AD#1, R10AD#1, R22AD#1, R8AD#2, R9AD#2, R7T, R24IIC, R3IC, R7IC, R15M, R19M, R4T, R7T, R9T, R5AD#2, R27IIC, R28IIC, R2T, R3T, R4T, R6T, R9T, R10T, R5AD#1, R7AD#1, R11AD#1, R12AD#1, R4AD#2, R6IC, R1M, R19M, R7T, Captioned #1 Caption: Photographs: Are organized based on keywords that accompany the photograph. Photos are coded by assigned numbers. African Circle of Solar worship, #13 Caption: Spiritual Transformation space, #10 Caption: Scenes from ancient Egypt in Pretoria, South Africa, #3 Caption: Cheikh Anta Diop on the white wall at Kara Heritage Institute, #8 Caption: Egyptian art on Solar chapel, #11 Caption: Inside African Solar Chapel located inside the white walls of the Kara Heritage Institute, #15 Caption: Zulu food hut(iQukwane) at Kara Heritage Institute, #2 Caption: Rural Africa in the modern city, #7 Caption: Solar Monograms on the Solar chapel, 12# Caption South African Cultural Icons on the white wall at Kara Heritage Institute, 73 DA;1.2Lp.1ph.1, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.4, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.10, DA;7.1Lp.1ph.1, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.1, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.2, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.3, DA;8.2Lp.8ph.1, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.3, DA;9.2Lp.8ph.5, DA;9.3Lp.9ph.1, DA;2.1Lp.4.ph3, Table 1 (cont’d) Documents and Artifacts Produced by the Kara Heritage Institute DA;1.2Lp.1ph.1, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.4, DA;1.LCp, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.1, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.4, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.6, DA;3.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;3.1Lp.5ph.5, DA;4.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;4.1Lp.4ph.5, DA;4.1Lp.5ph.5, DA;4.1Lp.5ph.6, DA;1.2Lp.1ph3, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.4, DA;2.LCp, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;5.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;5.1Lp.5ph.2, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.2, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.3, DA;8.2Lp.8ph.1, DA;9.2Lp.8ph.5, DA;9.3Lp.9ph.1, DA;5.1Lp.4ph.4, DA;5.1Lp.5ph.2, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.3, DA;9.1Lp.7ph.2, DA;8.2Lp.8ph.1, DA;9.1Lp.7ph.1, DA;8.1Lp.8ph.1, DA;9.LCp, DA;9.1Lp.7ph.3, DA;9.3Lp.9ph.1, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.1, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.3, DA;1.2Lp.1ph.2, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.3, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.4, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.5, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.5, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.6, DA;2.1Lp.4ph.10, DA;3.LCp, DA;3.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;3.1Lp.5ph.5, DA;4.LCp, DA;4.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;4.1Lp.4ph.5, DA;4.1Lp.5ph.5, DA;5.LCp, DA;5.1Lp.4ph.4, DA;5.1Lp.5ph.2, DA;6.LCp, DA;6.1Lp.4ph.1, DA;6.1Lp.4ph.5, DA;7.LCp, DA;7.1Lp.1ph.1, DA;8.LCp, DA;8.1Lp.7ph.3, DA;8.2Lp.8ph.1, DA;9.LCp, DA;9.1Lp.7ph.1, DA;9.1Lp.7ph.3, DA;9.2Lp.8ph.5, DA;9.3Lp.9ph.1, DA;1.LCp, 74 June 26th, 2017; Noted that; Program Info notes, the program was titled “African Freedom Fighters”, learning African History. It is a series of books for children and young adults. This collective series looks at 11 African leaders who [navigated] their respective countries to life post- independence of their respective. June 26th, 2017; The speaker notes; The main speaker for the event was the minister of general education for all of South Africa. She spoke of the importance of reading and being aware of one’s cultural legacy. *She said it was important that we celebrate the day June 26, 1955, the Freedom Charter in South Africa. -- called for social cohesion. The other speaker’s speech focused on the character development of youth and children. He called them “progressive revolutionaries”. It’s about identity for youth & young people. June 28th, 2017; Noted that; The book series, African Freedom Fighters is a set of 10 books about brave African men who fought for their country's freedom. The books describe their early lives, their education, their political careers, and how they each became the leaders of their independent country. June 26th, 2017; Note: The chief of the Institute is [going] around greeting his guests and looks to be having a conversation with each one of them briefly. Table 1 (cont’d) Observations and field notes: Brief description of the Observations and or field notes. Jun 14, 2017; Noted that; Took pics of the [Serenity] walls of the institution. It’s a very global and ancient representation of African liberation personalities. Jun 14, 2017; Observed a discussion and one person noted that; It’s essential because ahh, the cultural space should give effect to the spiritual worldview & cultural space that informs people’s existence. In other words, it has to provide a foundation for what people are, it has to do with identity. June 26th, 2017; Noted that; Structural pedagogy is in full effect at this location. You see things representing ancient cultures of the Nile Valley, West Africa, South, East, & North Africa respectively. June 26th, 2017; Noted that; The second speaker noted that the book series was a Pan African effort to the history of African Freedom Fighters present as a collective Pan African movement. “It’s important to the role of education in the life of the youth”. The second speaker noted that the book series was a Pan African effort to present the history of African Freedom Fighters as a collective Pan African movement. “It’s important to the role of education in the life of the youth”. So, the Kara Institute seeks to groom the African youth and children to follow in the footsteps of those giants who were Africa’s young pioneers. The legacy we want to leave behind is that of grooming African youth and children to take up the battle left behind by those African pioneers. 75 Table 21: Research Question in Relation to Interview Questions Research Question Interview Questions 1) How have African Americans influenced continental Black Africans development of culturally relevant pedagogies rooted in African culture? 2) How might structural pedagogy be operationalized to be used as a valuable pedagogy for African Centered and culturally relevant education? 3) How has structural pedagogy been used in practice in South African at the Kara Heritage Institute? There are three main components of structural pedagogy: I2C, I4C, I7C, 2M, 3M, 4M, 5M, 6M, 8M, 9M, 1T, 3T, 4T, 5T, 7T, 8T, 2AD#1, 5AD#1, 7AD#1, 8AD#1, 9AD#1, 11AD#1, 16AD#1, 3AD#2, 4AD#2, 6AD#2, 9AD#2, II2C, II3C, II4C, II13C, II14C, I3C, I5C, I6C, 10M, 12M, 1T, 3T, 4T, 5T, 7T, 8T, 2AD#1 (1, 2,4) 7AD#1, 11AD#1, 12AD#1, 13AD#1, 14AD#1, 15AD#1, 16AD#1, 17AD#1, 1AD#2, 2AD#2, 3AD#2, 4AD#2, 5AD#2, 6AD#2, 7AD#2, 8AD#2, 9AD#2, II2C, II13C, II14C, I5C, I6C, 11M, 8T, 11AD#1, 14AD#1, 6AD#2, 9AD#2, II14C, a) Reflection: how does the structure of 12M, 11AD#1, 4AD#2, II14C, the learning institution reflect the student body and how does the student body relate to the physical structure? Inspiration: how does the structural space stimulate the learning environment? b) 11M, 12M, 3T, 4T, 11AD#1, 1AD#2, 3AD#2, 5AD#2, 7AD#2, II14C, 11M, 12M, 4T, 7T, 12AD#1, 13AD#1, 2AD#2, 5AD#2, 8AD#2, II13C, II14C, c) Modes of inclusion: how do the structure and pedagogy incorporate culturally relevant practices that are unique to that space, place, and time? 4) How does African Centered Education compare in terms of formulation and impact in the US and South Africa? I4C, I7C, 2M, 3M, 4M, 5M, 6M, 8M, 9M, 1T, 3T, 4T, 5T, 7T, 8T, 2AD#1, 3AD#1, 5AD#1, 8AD#1, 9AD#1, 11AD#1, 16AD#1, 1AD#2, 2AD#2, 3AD#2, 4AD#2, 5AD#2, 9AD#2, II3C, II4C, II13C, 1 Interview Question Codes; I= first interview with C.E.O., AD= Adult Student, II= second interview with the C.E.O, AD#2= Adult student number 2, T= Tando, M= Makgatho Mestheko 76 Table 3: Matrix of Findings and Source of Data Triangulation2 There are varying ideas about the nature of African-centered education. According to Lee (1992), Lomotey, and Shujaa (1990), an African centered pedagogy should fulfill the following aims: 1) p 3) Extend and build upon the indigenous language (i.e., the language of the indigenous African people); 4) Reinforce community ties and idealize (the concept of) service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world; 5) Promote positive social relationships; 6) Impart a worldview that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others; 7) Support cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness, and; 8) Promote the vision of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers. (50) Source of Data Major Findings I O DA CP Category 1: Enlightenment Transformation with African Spirituality and Heritage 1. The Kara Heritage Institute has implemented programs for South African spiritual transformation 2. Kara develops and legitimizes African stores of knowledge. 3. Kara supports cultural continuity while promoting X X X critical consciousness. Category 2: Cultural Responsibility to one’s self and Community 4. The Kara Institute positively exploits and scaffolds 5. The Kara Heritage Institute extended and builds productive community and cultural practices. X X upon African indigenous language (i.e., the language of the indigenous African people). 6. The Kara Heritage Institute promotes the vision X of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers. Category 3: The Practice of Ubuntu 7. The Kara Heritage Institute promotes positive social relationships 8. The Kara Heritage Institute imparts a worldview X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X O X O X O O 2 Findings Key: X = Present, O = Not Present I = Interviews, O = Observations and field notes, DA= Documents and Artifacts Produced by the Kara Heritage Institute, CP = Captioned Photographs 77 Table 3 (cont’d) Major Findings I O DA CP that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others. 9. The Kara Heritage Institute reinforce community ties and idealize (the concept of) service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world. X X X X 78 CHAPTER FOUR: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF KARA IN THE POST-APARTHEID ERA "Social cohesion is our primary objective; through learning about the cultures of other nations, we can discover the common roots of humanity and break down social barriers to achieve a powerful and unified identity," (Dr. Mathole Motshekga, Chair, Kara Heritage Institute, and School, Pretoria, South Africa). Chapter IV contextually presents a truncated history of South Africa and the significance of Kara in the post-apartheid era. The chapter is broken down into four sections to complete the aforementioned tasks. The first section opens with the introduction of the apartheid governmental policies and their impact on indigenous nations and communities in South Africa. Section two provides the reader with a history of the Bantu Education Act and its impact on Black people's education and experiences. Section three highlights the influence and the history of the Swatow uprising and the impact on education and experiences of Black South Africans. The final section provides the lynchpin that ties all previous sections in the chapter together. It highlights the history and significance of the Kara Heritage Institute and its importance to South African education. I focus on the policies in the first section of Chapter IV because I believe it is important that I provide the reader with contextual examples of the variables that contributed to the development of the Kara Heritage Institute. The policies implemented by the Apartheid government specifically targeted Black South Africans in order to undermine their agency in the nation-state. It's very important to develop an understanding and a grounded perspective for people who read this body of work to comprehend the multitude of variables that have come into play that contributed to the birth of schools like the Kara Heritage Institute. 79 We need to open this discussion with an understanding of the development and conceptualization of the Kara Heritage Institute. Originally, the Kara Heritage Institute was conceptualized by Dr. Mathole Motshekga in 1982 as a space for like-minded Africans to share and exchange their experiences of liberation and oppression. This space was initially nonformal until the first building was established in Mamelodi, South Africa in 1995. However, as it evolved, it developed into an institutional space that provided African Centered Education for the people of South Africa. Various factors led to the development of the Kara Heritage Institute such as the Apartheid regime, the Bantu Education Act, the Soweto uprising, and the post- Apartheid Black Power movement. These events created the desire and the necessity to promote and develop culturally relevant institutions that provided Black South Africans agency. Karaism is the ancient theology of Africa that dates back to the beginning of recorded history. It was the foundation of ancient African religion and philosophy and its influence permeates African traditions and cultural history to this day. The name ‘Kara’ means sun or light, and thus the spiritual Philosophy of Light that defines the ancient spiritual beliefs of Africa became known as Karaism. Some 14 centuries before the birth of Christ, Karaism took root during the reign of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Thothmoses III, the legendary founder of the great Solar (Kara) Society, which taught the spiritual Philosophy of Light. In the ancient city of Annu, later known as Heliopolis (City of the Sun) located in the area of present-day Cairo in Egypt, Thothmoses III commissioned the building of his famous sun temple, which featured the Khemetic pillars later know as Cleopatra’s needles. These legendary pillars were inscribed with sacred inscriptions derived from the teachings of the Ancient Ones of Khem, the priesthood of the Horus kings from the land of Khem (in the region of Africa’s Great Lakes) who founded the ancient empires of Ethiopia and Egypt. Chapter IV provides the rationale and historical overview 80 of the prerequisite for the emergence of African centered pedagogy and practice at the Kara Heritage Institute in Pretoria, South Africa. Section 1 The Inconvenience of the Apartheid Government and African education When looking at, or even discussing contemporary movements in South Africa Hirschmann (1990) posits that Black politics in South Africa changed dramatically after 1976. (11) Just like Africans in America, the daily reality of Black South Africans is complex, to say the least. Hirschmann (1990) suggests that the most readily and immediately mobilizing element in the struggle, Black racial solidarity, was losing some of its currency. Black solidarity in South Africa was fixed in a posture that observed that the predominant percentage of people who are beneficiaries and oppressors are white, yet still there is a small but growing number of Black officials, policemen, informers, and Bantustan leaders who cooperate in the oppressing, as well as the Black bourgeoisie who benefit from the system, have also continued to challenge race as the prime analytical and strategic category. Hirschmann (1991) notes that early in the 1960s the South African government had managed to quell Black resistance through the use of force, arrest, legislative restrictions, and an effective police-information network; Black leaders were imprisoned or banned or fled the country, and the long-established A.N.C. and the more recently formed breakaway Pan-Africanist Congress (P.A.C.) were proscribed (3). It goes without saying that the American Black Power movement and the posture of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, the politics of liberation, and Black liberation theology, were all influential. Hirschmann (1991) suggests that from Africa, the thoughts and analyses of the negritude writers, notably Leopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Kwame Nkrumah found their way into this evolving new framework of student thinking. (4) In South Africa, the white- dominated National Union of South African Students was increasingly seen by Black students as 81 not being able to advance their particular interests. Hirschmann (1991) argues that white students were taken more as a hindrance than a help to Black African students’ cause as they saw it. (5) The indication of their broadening perspective, the students initiated the formation of the Black Peoples Convention (BPC) to perpetuate their views to a wider target audience. Like all political movements, the BPC was not united on all themes and emphases, nor was it ideologically sound. The centrality of race was held to be the source of the continuing struggle in South Africa. The challenge to this flavor of structural oppression required a re-interpretation by Black people themselves of the meaning of Blackness. Black South Africans were poised to define their identity according to their values, and this involved a strong positive assertion of pride in being a Black person. (5) Duncan, Thomas (1996) posits that racially segregated education was a central pillar propping up the apartheid system in South Africa. The 1953 Bantu education act centralized control of Black education and linked tax receipts from Blacks to expenditures; on average, spending on whites was more than 15 times larger than that on the average student. Black South Africans adopted a variety of strategies to cope with their problems. Many were preoccupied with day-to-day survival. In the reserves, for example, where families were split by the periodic absence of men, women were assuming the full burden of maintaining the domestic economy as well as bringing up the children. Africans who had received a missionary education--clerks, teachers, clergy, and small businesspeople periodically tried to harness the resentments of the Black masses to counter white hegemony. In 1912, Africans founded a nationwide organization called the African National Congress (ANC). The ANC survived official obstruction and was destined to become a formidable instrument of resistance in the second half of the century. They 82 broke away from white churches and formed religious communities where African leaders acted without white intervention and where Christianity was adapted to African culture. Glücksmann, Ralph (2010) notes that the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892 instituted limits to the Black franchise based on financial means and education, and the Natal Legislative Assembly Bill of 1894 deprived Indians of the right to vote (32). The Glen Grey Act of 1894 instigated by the government of Prime Minister Cecil John Rhodes limited the amount of land Africans could hold. In 1905 the General Pass Regulations Act denied Black South Africans the right to vote, limited them to fixed areas, and inaugurated the infamous Pass System. The Asiatic Registration Act (1906) required all Indians to register and carry passes (34). In 1910 the Union of South Africa was created as a self-governing dominion, which continued the legislative program: the South Africa Act (1910) enfranchised whites, giving them complete political control over all other racial groups while removing the right of Blacks to sit in parliament; the Native Land Act (1913) prevented Blacks, except those in the Cape, from buying land outside "reserves"; the Natives in Urban Areas Bill (1918) was designed to force Blacks into "locations"; the Urban Areas Act (1923) introduced residential segregation and provided cheap labor for industry-led by white people; the Color Bar Act (1926) prevented Black mineworkers from practicing skilled trades; the Representation of Natives Act removed previous Black voters from the Cape voters' roll and allowed them to elect three whites to Parliament. The United Party government began to move away from the rigid enforcement of segregationist laws during World War II. Amid fears integration would eventually lead to racial assimilation, the National Party established the Sauer Commission to investigate the effects of the United Party's policies. The commission concluded that integration would bring about a "loss of personality" for all racial groups. 83 Three years after the inauguration of the Union, without consulting any Africans, Louis Botha's South African party administration, under strong pressure from its rural supporters, enacted a crucial law. The Natives Land Act (1913) prohibited Africans from purchasing or leasing land outside the reserves from people who were not Africans. The tensions in the system intensified during World War II, when South Africa participated on the side of Great Britain and its allies, to the dismay of numerous Afrikaners. Under wartime conditions, the economy expanded and diversified particularly rapidly, drawing more and more Africans into the urban labor market. Leonard notes that during the years 1910 to 1939, the successive South African administrations were all concerned to consolidate white power in the new state. The Natives Representation Act (1936) drastically weakened the political rights of Cape Province Africans, removing those who were qualified to vote from the ordinary voters' rolls and giving them instead the right to elect three white people to represent them in the House of Assembly, the dominant house of Parliament. The policies that were created in the early 20th century by the Apartheid government were specially created to destabilize Black South African intellectual, economic, and political assertions of agency. Voting access helped influence educational policy. By 1910, whites had undermined most of the Black inhabitants of South Africa. The people whom whites grouped as the Colored People, whose ancestors included the indigenous hunting and herding inhabitants of the western part of Southern Africa, owned scarcely any land; but many Bantu-speaking African farmers were still able to practice subsistence farming, modified but not destroyed by oppressive whites. During the ensuing years, however, the new state applied a comprehensive program of racial segregation and discrimination and gained control over the African peasantry. In 1936, fresh legislation created the South African Native Trust, managed by whites, and empowered it to buy more land for Africans from funds provided 84 by Parliament. By 1939, the trust's purchases had brought the augmented African reserves to 11.7 percent of the area of South Africa (122). The Apprenticeship Act (1922) gave unionized white workers a secure position by setting educational qualifications for an apprenticeship in numerous trades. That made it impossible for most Africans to be apprenticed since they lacked the means to meet the prescribed educational level. Those decisions created pervasive racial discrimination in manufacturing and public works, in sectors like the mining industry. Poverty among whites was reduced at the expense of the Black population, by giving whites sheltered employment at uncompetitive wages in public works and such state enterprises as the railroads. Over the years, South African towns acquired a characteristic dual form. The largest and most conspicuous part was a spacious modern town, consisting of a business sector where people of all races worked during the day and suburbs of detached houses, ranging from opulent to mediocre, owned by white families and served by Black domestics. Separated from the modern town was a Black location, where mud, clapboard, or corrugated iron buildings, with earth latrines, stood on tiny plots of land and were served by water from infrequent taps along the unpaved paths and roads. Most teachers in the mission schools were Africans, who, being overwhelmed and poorly paid, could provide no more than a rudimentary elementary education. The history syllabuses and textbooks expressing the dominant assumptions of the period treated the history of South Africa as the record of white settlement and had no empathy with African culture, the African side of conflicts, or the condition of Africans since the downfall. Africans who lived on white farms had exceptionally hostile experiences. The cultural suppression of Black South Africans was central to apartheid policy and essential to the political reaction of Black South Africans to the apartheid government. African teachers were at times underpaid and overwhelmed. 85 "Unskilled and easily replaceable," as well as "isolated and illiterate," they were "assembled in tiny clusters, and separated by vast distances and wretched poverty from others, even within the same district." Africans used a variety of ploys to improve their lot. William Beinart and Colin Bundy have demonstrated in eight case studies from the Transkei that "peasants/migrants were trying to defend their rights to land, their ownership of cattle and other resources, and their ability to affect local political processes". (56) Three political organizations strove to improve the lot of the subordinated peoples on the national scale: A Colored organization, the African Political Organization (APO), founded in 1902; an Indian organization, the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), which was founded in 1923, and the South African Native National Congress (later known as the African National Congress, or ANC), founded in 1912 (89). According to the Global Nonviolent Action Database3, the ANC recognized it was their duty to support the people in their actions in opposition to the Act. On 23 April 1955, ANC volunteers held early morning meetings and prayer sessions followed by a march to ten schools to formally enact the boycott. Each school was closed by noon that day due to the boycott. Also, the database notes that the most influential force of opposition against the boycott was the federal threat issued on 15 April 1955. This statement declared that boycotting children would not be re-admitted into any South African school if they did not return to school within ten days. Although most Black parents did not approve of the effect that the Bantu Education Act would have on the education of their children, they did not reject the value of education in general. Sporadic attempts were made to create more radical movements. The most spectacular such organization was founded by Clements Kadalie, a mission-educated African from 3 Lakey, George. "Global Nonviolent Action Database." Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore College (http://nvdatabase. swarthmore. edu) (2011). 86 Nyasaland (modern Malawi). In 1919, Kadalie formed a small trade union among Colored dockworkers in Cape Town; by 1928, it had swollen into a nationwide Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), claiming a membership of more than 150,000 Africans, 15,000 Coloreds, and 250 whites. By then, it was primarily a rural movement, tapping, especially, African sharecroppers' and tenant laborers' land hunger and exasperation as white landowners were squeezing them while they were struggling for economic survival. The ICU organizers were frustrated Africans who had had a few years of missionary education but had not fulfilled the expectations of upward mobility engendered in their schools. They regarded the leaders of the ANC as "good boys" who were tied to the apron strings of white liberals. As more and more Africans became committed to urban life, they created a vigorous proletarian culture. The towns and squatter camps were uneasy places, boiling with discontent. Survival was made possible for many people by making a precarious living in the informal economy. Between 1939 and 1948, the racial division among South African workers became sharper than before. This was largely because the wartime expansion involved changes in the structure of manufacturing industries. International events added to domestic pressures for reform. The propaganda of the Allies during the war against Nazism was anti-racist. In response to those domestic pressures and external developments, the government-appointed numerous committees, and commissions, staffed by reform-minded white people, to investigate the racial problems of the country and to plan. In their reports, they criticized specific hardships experienced by Black South Africans but cast their recommendations within the established segregation framework. By the end of World War II, a new generation of Black leaders, faced with the growing gulf between African realities and African expectations, was seeking more effective methods of 87 resistance. In 1943, the annual conference of the ANC adopted a statement, Africans’ Claims in South Africa, which cited the Atlantic Charter and set out a bill of rights calling for the abolition of all discriminatory legislation, redistribution of the land, African participation in collective bargaining, and universal adult suffrage. That year a group of young professional Africans founded a youth league as a pressure group in the ANC, stressing the need for African self- reliance and unity. The ANC's position on education is expressed in the following principles; The state has the central responsibility in the provision of education and training4. • The provision of education and training shall be planned as part of a coherent and comprehensive national social and economic reconstruction and development program, including a national strategy for the development of human resources, and the democratization of our society. • A nationally determined framework of policy and incentives shall ensure that employers observe their fundamental obligation for the education and training of their workers. • Education and training policy and practice shall be governed by the principle of democracy, ensuring the active participation of various interest groups, in particular teachers, parents, workers, students, employers, and the broader community. • In the process of ensuring education and training for all, there shall be special emphasis on the redress of educational inequalities among historically 4 Jansen, Jonathan D., and Yusuf Sayed. Implementing education policies: the South African experience. Juta and Company, Ltd, 2001. 88 disadvantaged groups such as youth, the disabled, adults, women, the unemployed, and rural communities. • There shall be mechanisms to ensure horizontal and vertical mobility and flexibility of access between general formative, technical, industrial, and adult education and training in the formal and non-formal sectors. • There shall be nationally determined standards for accreditation and certification for formal and non-formal education and training, with due recognition of prior learning and experience. • The education process shall aim at the development of national democratic culture, with respect for the value of our people's diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, and shall encourage peace, justice, tolerance, and stability in our communities and nation. * Education shall be based upon the principles of co-operation, critical thinking, and civic responsibility, and shall equip individuals for participation in all aspects of society. Afrikaners were deeply worried about the state of race relations. Nearly all believed that the state should do more to maintain white supremacy and the "purity" of the white "race." They fluctuated as to how that should be done. (And, certainly, a form of education was central in this effort as a form of justification and propaganda). In 1946, the National party appointed a committee, chaired by Paul Sauer, a senior party politician, to prepare a policy statement on the racial problem. The Sauer report treated Indians as an alien, unassimilable element in South Africa. It recommended the rigorous segregation of the Colored People, the consolidation of the African reserves, the removal of missionary control of African education, and the abolition of the 89 Natives Representative Council and the representation of Africans in Parliament. The label given to this policy was Apartheid, a coined word that Afrikaner intellectuals had begun to use in the 1930s. The Nationalist government also gave fierce expression to its determination to maintain white supremacy in postwar South Africa. Much of its early legislation coordinated and extended the racial laws of the segregation era and tightened up the administration of those laws. The term apartheid, however, soon developed from a political slogan into a drastic, systematic program of social engineering. At the heart of the apartheid system were four ideas. First, the population of South Africa comprised four "racial groups": white, Colored, Indian, and African-each with its own inherent culture. Second, Whites, as the civilized race, we're entitled to have absolute control over the state. Third, white interests should prevail over Black interests; the state was not obliged to provide equal facilities for the subordinate races. Fourth, the white racial group formed a single nation, with Afrikaans- and English-speaking components, while Africans belonged to several (eventually ten) distinct nations or potential nations-a formula that made the white nation the largest in the country. Translated from the Afrikaans meaning 'apartness', apartheid was the ideology maintained by the National Party (NP) government and was introduced in South Africa in 1948. Apartheid called for the distinct development of the different racial groups in South Africa. On paper, it appeared to call for equal development and freedom of cultural countenance, but the way it was implemented made this impossible. Apartheid-made laws forced the different racial groups to live separately and develop separately, and unacceptably unequally too. It tried to stop all inter-marriage and social mixing between racial groups. During apartheid, to have a friendship with someone of a different race generally brought misgiving upon you, or worse. 90 More than this, apartheid was a societal system that severely disadvantaged the majority of the population, simply because they did not share the skin color of the rulers. Many were kept just above destitution because they were 'non-white'. Broadly speaking, apartheid was delineated into petty-apartheid, which entailed the segregation of public facilities and social events, and grand-apartheid, which dictated housing and employment opportunities by race. Before the 1940s, some aspects of apartheid had already emerged in the form of minority rule by European South Africans and the socially enforced separation of Black South Africans from other races, which later extended to pass laws and land apportionment. Apartheid was adopted as formal policy by the South African régime after the election of the National Party (NP) at the 1948 general election. A codified system of racial stratification began to take form in South Africa under the Dutch Empire in the late-eighteenth century, although informal segregation was present much earlier due to social cleavages between Dutch colonists and a creolized, ethnically diverse enslaved population. With the rapid growth and industrialization of the British Cape Colony in the nineteenth century, racial policies and laws became increasingly rigid. Cape legislation that discriminated specifically against Black South Africans began appearing shortly before 1900. Davies, Ron J. (1981) "The spatial formation of the South African city" argues that the first apartheid law was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949, followed closely by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which made it illegal for most South African citizens to marry or pursue sexual relationships across racial lines. The Population Registration Act, 1950 classified all South Africans into one of four racial groups based on appearance, known ancestry, socioeconomic status, and cultural lifestyle: "Black", "White", "Colored", and "Indian", the last two of which included several sub-classifications (p. 19). Places of residence were determined by 91 racial classification. From 1960–1983, 3.5 million non-white South Africans were removed from their homes and forced into segregated neighborhoods, in one of the largest mass evictions in modern history (p. 20). Most of these targeted removals were intended to restrict the Black population to ten designated "tribal homelands", also known as Bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government announced that relocated persons would lose their South African citizenship as they were absorbed into the Bantustans. Apartheid sparked significant international and domestic opposition, resulting in some of the most influential global social movements of the twentieth century. It was the target of frequent condemnation in the United Nations and brought about an extensive arms and trade embargo on South Africa. During the 1970s and 1980s, internal resistance to apartheid became increasingly militant, prompting brutal crackdowns by the National Party government and protracted sectarian violence that left thousands dead or in detention. Some reforms of the apartheid system were undertaken, including allowing for Indian and Colored political representation in parliament, but these measures failed to appease most activist groups. When it comes to the extraordinary history of South Africa as it relates to oppression and Black people, one can see some strong similarities in the trajectory of the experiences of Black people. As a person of African descent in the diaspora, one can't help but notice the striking similarities of the apartheid regime in South Africa as compared to the segregation/ Jim Crow era for Black people in the United States. This point is important as one explores the relationship of liberation struggles in the African world. I have come to realize and appreciate the strong correlation from one nation-state to the other. A recent trend in scholarship that observes social movements has focused on how social movement organizations, influence not only their contenders but also other social movement 92 organizations. Black people from both nations seem to influence each other both in movements and activities despite being located in different countries. Soule (1997) posits that from the early 1960s to the early 1990s the issue of the immorality of the South African system of Apartheid was a concern on college and university campuses throughout America. The above-mentioned statement is important because it indicates agency and resistance as key aspects of ideological thought that inform the foundation of Africanizing curriculum movement in both South Africa and America. Just like the anti-Apartheid movement and the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, the Black Power movement set out to capture the agency and knowledge production that was culturally relevant to Black folks in America. In the Black Power movement, the explosion of Black student activism in the 20th century took many witnesses by surprise. So, just like in South Africa and the Black Consciousness Movement, the political atmosphere presented an opportunity for people on the margins of mainstream society to have a voice in their nation's educational institutions. The Black Power movement on campus had a strong intellectual dimension. When it comes to the adoption of new consistent behavior, I argue that campus study groups were extremely significant in shaping new racial identities and consciousness. The students were passionate about finding ways to translate theory into practice. The elements of Black pride and celebration of Black culture linked the Black Consciousness Movement back to the writings of W. E. B. DuBois, as well as the ideas of pan-Africanism and the Negritude movement. It also arose at the same time as the Black Power movement in the United States, and these movements inspired each other; Black Consciousness was both militant and avowedly non-violent. The Black Consciousness movement in South Africa was also inspired by the success of the FRELIMO in Mozambique. 93 Just like the Civil Rights movement focused on addressing the humanitarian needs of Africans in America, the Ubuntu movement enhances human rights discourses that have been forever present in the struggle against systems of colonial and capitalistic domination, oppression, and exploitation in South Africa. Africans educated in European colonial mission schools and versed in Western political ideas and conceptual frameworks observed losses of land and limitations on the franchise. The Pan-African posture in response to oppression in challenging spaces is not unique to South Africa. Thomas (2008) notes that the South African efforts to promote an indigenous knowledge system linked to collectivist solidarity values for nation-building and development projects are not outliers. Though embedded within a development model framework, Julius Nyerere’s (1961) philosophy of family hood, or communitarianism, ujamaa, and the politics implemented in independent Tanzania between the 1960s and 1970s bear a similar ethos to the isiZulu Ubuntu expression of the individual's independence with the community (p. 44). Also, it holds that the voices of the educated elites have expounded on Ubuntu, but the most compelling accounts of how Ubuntu is lived come from the everyday lives of common folk, especially in rural settings for example. The South African constitution’s recognition of the institutions of traditional leaders and customary laws means that the Ubuntu worldview still plays an important role in society, and therefore education. Mokgoro (1998) notes that conclusively, indigenous African culture cannot be sidelined because it contributes to a culture of respect and adherence to human rights in South Africa. Scholars must come to appreciate that Ubuntu/ism can be employed to create responsive institutions for the advancement of constitutionalism and a culture of human rights in South Africa in multiple ways; 1) by promoting the values of the new constitution by translating them into more familiar Ubuntu values and tendencies; 2) by harnessing some unique Ubuntu value 94 tendency approach and/or strategy; 3) by promoting and/or aligning these aspects of Ubuntu with core constitutional demands. (20) The constitutional court is one of the fundamental institutions of an inclusive democracy that emerged from a negotiated transition away from apartheid. Section 2 The Bantu Education Act and its impact on Black people's Education and Experiences In 1953 Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, 1950-1958, and Prime Minister from 1958-1966 piloted the Bantu Education Act through parliament. It introduced an education policy that is sometimes depicted as one “based on the assumption of an inferior potential in African minds” and as “explicitly designed to prepare Black people for an inferior place in society” (Davenport and Saunders, 2000:674). Hermann Giliomee (2009) notes that the restructuring of the education system for Black children had become an urgent priority after the Second World War. Almost all Black education was under the control of missionary societies, which were mostly Anglican and Roman Catholic. (190) The second-class church for the 'non- whites' as they were usually called. The 'natives', that is the Africans, were at the bottom end of the scale of this second-class church. A reduced amount of personnel was allocated to them, their institutions were mainly, though not exclusively, of poor quality; they were treated in a paternalistic manner and, in general, they were entirely segregated from the white Catholic community who did not know or care about their existence. The Catholic Church seemed to mirror the inequities of the apartheid regime. The poor schools, poorly paid teachers, and the type of syllabuses that came from the government made it look as if the church was collaborating. Giliomee postulates voluntary contributions by the church and the fees paid by parents were not sufficient to provide mass education. School buildings were in poor condition and classes too large. During this period most schools were understaffed, and there was a severe shortage of competent teachers. 95 According to an article in the Journal of African Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 215 (Apr. 1955) African people would become masters of their education. The change in curriculum informal educational space occurred officially in 1996. But informally Black South Africans were educating themselves all along. R. H. W. Shepherd (1955) noted that the main goal was to inaugurate a new regime in the education of Africans with two key steps: (1) permitting the system of apartheid to place the education of the Bantu under the control of the Native Affairs Department, a step which implied taking it away from the control of the Provincial Councils of the Cape, Transvaal, Orange Free State, and Natal, which had been responsible for the primary and secondary education of all races and dealt with the education of Europeans, Coloreds (mixed-blood) and Indians; and (2) to take Bantu education out of the hands of the churches and missions, which had borne the burden of it since its inception about 210 years ago, and to place it in the hands of the Black people themselves, through committees or other tribal authorities working under the Department of Native Affairs. The demand for education forced missions to take in far more children than they could effectively teach. Giliomee (2009) suggests that educational restructuring was also linked to the need to re-establish discipline and order over Black youths. The breakdown of the system of missionary schools and growing political militancy among the Black youth gave rise to several explosions of Black anger at leading missionary schools. In 1946 both Lovedale and Healdtown, the most prestigious Black schools were rocked by serious troubles (Hyslop, 1999:10-20). By 1948 there was little resistance among whites to the state assuming control of Black schools and expanding primary education on a mass scale. The most serious divisions were those over secondary education for Black people and the contents of the syllabus. The syllabi always reflected a white Afrikaans cultural-historical orientation. 96 To achieve these objectives, Kamwangamalu (2004) notes that in 1953 the apartheid government introduced legislation known as the Bantu Education Act. Briefly, at the heart of this policy, was, among other things, (a) the dire determination by the apartheid regime to reduce the influence of English in Black schools; (b) the imposition in these schools of the use of both Afrikaans and English on an equal basis as media of instruction; and (c) the extension of mother- tongue education from grade 4 to grade 8 purposely to promote the philosophy of Christian Nationalism. The Black understudies resisted this policy. They saw education in their mother tongue as a dead end, a barrier to more advanced learning, and a lure to self-destruction. Also, they saw such an education as a trap designed by the apartheid government to ensure that the Black students did not acquire sufficient command of the high-status languages (English and Afrikaans) for it would enable them to compete with their white counterparts for well-paying jobs and prestigious career options (Alexander 1997:84). Giliomee (2009) suggests there was a long-lasting debate over the contents of the syllabus for Black schools. By 1948 the primary school syllabus was specially devised for Africans, but the secondary school syllabus was largely the same as for white pupils (Kenney, 1980:117). Against the missionaries and urbanized Black South Africans clamoring for a common education system under the same department, were those who buttressed a differentiated form of education that was less academic and more practical in positioning. Giliomee also points out that some South African liberals questioned the value of academic training for Black people in South Africa. (194) Giliomee (2009) provides some interesting statements contextualizing the statistical movements of the Black educational trajectory pre-Bantu Act. Giliomee notes that most children dropped out at an early stage, but there was also an expansion of secondary education. The target 97 set in the Eiselen Report of 1951 of doubling secondary school enrolment within 10 years was achieved in 1959: the numbers rose from 20,000 to 43,496. The successful candidates in both the Matric and Senior Certificate examinations rose from 330 in 1955 to 871 in 1966, and the pass rate rose from 46% to 56% (Hartshorne, 1992: 68-69). In 1953, the final year of the old system, 90 candidates obtained the matriculation exemption and 169 received the Senior Certificate; the pass rate was 47%. The SA Institute of Race Relations was strongly critical of Bantu education but conceded that the syllabuses were an improvement (Horrell, 1968:58). Hartshorne (1992:41) concluded that, apart from an emphasis on the social institutions of traditional African society and a limited vision of the “Bantu’s place” in the wider society, the syllabuses, in general, were “very much the same as those used in white provincial schools and were an improvement on those in use previously”. Giliomee (2009) also notes that active Black resistance to the system that was introduced in 1954 came mainly from the personnel of the church schools and training colleges. The Black urban elite strongly opposed the policy, but most parents accepted it and boycotts failed for nearly two decades (Hyslop, 1993:393-410). Criticism of the system revolved around two main issues: language and funding. In line with Eiselen’s recommendations and international practice, the mother tongue as a medium of instruction was extended well beyond the existing 4 years. In 1959 the public examination for Standard 6 (the eighth school year) was for the first time written in one or other vernacular language instead of English. The Black opinion never became reconciled to the extension of mother tongue education beyond Standard 2. Once the homelands received a measure of self-government, they quickly reverted to mother-tongue education for only the first 4 years (Hartshorne, 1992:199). 98 The discussion of the impact of the Bantu Education act on Black South Africans must be understood primarily as an issue of language and access to resources. Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu (2004) argues that because education plays such an important role in employment and in gaining access to political power, mother tongue education or its denial is as important as any other aspects, political and economic planning among them, with which South African policy-makers appear to be mostly concerned. Kamwangamalu draws attention to two key issues in language economics, namely (I) the relevance of language as a defining element of economic processes such as production, distribution, and consumption; and (II) the relevance of language as an element, in the acquisition of which individual actors may have a good reason to invest. The above statement provides a contextualized image of the education systems in South Africa during the Apartheid political era. It also speaks to the systematic marginalization of indigenous culture. Kamwangamalu (2004) postulates that the debate around the issue of the medium of instruction, or, in “South-Africa speak,” the “language of learning and teaching,” has been going on since the country liberated itself from apartheid in 1994. On the one hand, the renewed interest in mother tongue education appears to derive from the findings, documented in several studies around the world, that students perform better at school when they are taught through the medium of their mother tongue rather than through the medium of a foreign language (e.g., Akinnaso1991; Webb2002; Auerbach 1993). Kamwnmgamalu ( 2004) argues that if African languages are to be accepted, even by their speakers, as a viable medium of instruction throughout the entire educational system, they must be given the buying power that English and Afrikaans have in the South African linguistic marketplace (132). 99 Kamwnmgamalu (2004) links Black pupils’ resistance to the Bantu Education Act and the apartheid regime’s determination to impose it, on the bloody Soweto uprisings of the 16th of June 1976. The Soweto uprisings resulted in two particularly undesired outcomes: they boosted the status of an already powerful language, English, over both Afrikaans and African languages in Black schools and Black communities at large, and they led the African people to equate education in their languages with an inferior education. Since those ill-fated events of June 1976, mother-tongue education in African languages became stigmatized in South Africa, and (this is a very important point) that stigma lingers on to this day. Felix Banda (2000) notes that Afrikaner nationalists perceived education as a weapon through which to advance Afrikaans and reduce the influence of English in South Africa. Black education suffered the most under the changes that followed. Particularly, with the Bantu Education Act of 1953, Afrikaner nationalists swiftly implemented mother-tongue education and systematically reduced the role of English while increasing that of Afrikaans. The switch in the medium of instruction was delayed until secondary school (Lanham,1996; Branford,1996). At that point, Blacks were to learn through both English and Afrikaans as media of instruction. Although there was strong opposition from both white and Black communities to such draconian education measures on an unwilling Black population, the policy was enforced. Banda (2000) postulates that the lack of consultation with stakeholders, the removal of experienced and trained teachers, lack of funding, and generally the lack of interest in Black education culminated in the collapse of Bantu education. The demise of Bantu education is partly responsible for Blacks associating mother-tongue education, on which it was based, with mediocrity and failure. Opposition to forced Afrikaan's medium of instruction in Black schools 100 culminated in the now-famous Soweto Uprising of 1976 in which the apartheid police massacred protesting school children. Jensen (2012) suggests that one of the most distinctive features of the anti-apartheid resistance since the 1960s was the prominent role of students and student organizations at schools and universities (304). Many of the political leaders in government, for example, rose to prominence through their student activism after the 1970s. Jensen (2012) points out that students were well organized and connected to major political movements inside and outside of South Africa (303). Jensen (2012) strongly acknowledges that the emergence of a new and democratic government in 1994 threw students’ focus, organization, and mission into considerable disarray. Jensen (2012) points out, for example, the focus of student organizations, especially in historically Black institutions, shifted from protests against the illegitimate government to demands for unrestricted access to higher education, expanded financial aid to needy students, and relief from personal debt to the institutions (304). This combination of politics, legislation, and performance measures enforced on institutions a stronger managerial responsibility towards student organizations (305). Soule (2001) posits that it is not particularly surprising that students participated in the anti-apartheid movement (856). The humanitarian goals of the movement attracted widespread support. In South Africa, what is of interest as it relates to Black student's movements, is the emergence and diffusion of a new protest tactic. The shantytown, like sit-ins in the American South, showcased African students engaging in the well-established repertoire of student protests, petitions, demonstrations, and rallies, but Soule (2001) suggests they also developed a new protest tactic that spread rapidly to campuses all over the country (856). Campus activities were under siege as many locales adopted this tactic because of both its perceived effectiveness 101 at encouraging colleges and universities to divest and its resonance with the living conditions of many Black South Africans (856). For the campus divestment movement, 1985-86 was the year of the shanties, makeshift structures disrupting the campus landscape of tidy quadrangles and plazas, symbolizing the viciousness of apartheid and the oppression of South African Black people (Vellela 1988; Weiner 1986). Soule (2001) posits that experimentation with new protest tactics or the revitalization of tactics used in an earlier period is not peculiar to the student divestment movement. Soule (2001) suggests that this tendency has been noted in numerous scholarly works (Snow & Benford, 1992; Soule and Tarrow 1991; Zolserg 1972). But Soule (2001) points to the limitation of approach, noting that the limitation and diffusion of innovative protest tactics have received less scholarly attention due to the tendency of scholars to treat social movement organizations as distinct entities, ignoring the connections or symbiotic relationships between them ( 860). Recently many scholars, Soule (2012) informs us have challenged the notion that social movements organizations are bounded entities and have noted that challenging groups not only influenced their direct target but also influence other social movements originations both in other movements and other countries (McAdam &Rucht 1993; Meyer, 1994). When we discuss the history of universities' post-colonial rule in South Africa, we must consider the conditions of that space at that time. 102 Section 3 The Swatow Uprising and The Impact on Education and Experiences of Black South Africans The South African Black Consciousness Movement picked up in 1969 when African students walked out of the National Union of South African Students, which was multiracial but white-dominated, and founded the South African Students Organization (SASO). The SASO was an explicitly non-white organization open to students classified as African, Indian, or Colored under Apartheid Law. It was to unify non-white students and provide a voice for their grievances, but the SASO spearheaded a movement that reached far beyond students. Three years later, in 1972, the leaders of this Black Consciousness Movement formed the Black People’s Convention (BPC) to reach out to and galvanize adults and non-students. C.R.D. Halisi (1999) notes that colonialism and segregation had created a sense of dual citizenship; with the result that ordinary people felt little if any, moral attachment to the legal order while they continued to respect the norms of traditional society. (2) In South Africa, as in the U.S., racial stratification influenced the gestation of the working class. Among Black South Africans race is mediated, to some extent, by ethnicity. In contrast, among African Americans, enslaved people of diverse ethnic backgrounds were forced into a single racial identity. Halisi (1999) notes that in both societies, free and forced labor coexisted, primarily defined by the relation of race and rights. (3) Segregation made racial identity central to the struggle for democratic citizenship and institutional development. In a very fundamental sense, the liberation struggle required Black activists to confront nascent questions of citizenship and national identity. Halisi notes that the decade before the Soweto Rebellion of June 16, 1976, was one of political renewal culminating in the intellectual and artistic ferment associated with the BCM. (7) Among Black South Africans, like African Americans, there was a popular, deeply entrenched tradition of Black political thought 103 characterized by great vitality, gravity, and urgency. The BCM was central to the revitalization of internal protest in the 1970s. (8) During the latter part of the 1960s, Black consciousness intellectuals extended the term Black to include “Indians and so-called Colored” South Africans. Loosely speaking, the BCM aimed to unify and uplift non-white populations, but this meant excluding a previous ally, liberal anti-apartheid whites. As Steve Biko, the most prominent Black Consciousness leader, explained, when militant nationalists said that white people did not belong in South Africa, they meant that “we wanted to remove [the white man] from our table, strip the table of all trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then ask him to join us on our terms if he liked.” The exact connections between the Black Consciousness Movement and the Soweto Student Uprising are debated in various circles, but for the Apartheid régime, the influences were clear enough. In the aftermath of Soweto, the Black People’s Convention and several other Black Consciousness movements were banned, and their leadership was arrested, many after being beaten and tortured, including Steve Biko who died in police custody. Mafeje (1978) notes that the student revolt that flared up in Soweto in June 1976 was a clear indication of the extent of mass resistance to oppression and exploitation under apartheid. Yet the revolt posed several important questions for a revolutionary strategy in South Africa, especially in terms of its implications for an alliance of workers and students and its relationship with the liberation movements. Although sympathy and admiration for the students prevailed among the Black population in general, for the first two weeks very little progress had been made in forging links between the students and the workers. Instead of dismissing their elders as being 'irrelevant', they started a serious dialogue with their parents at home and their worker brothers and sisters in the streets. Amidst extreme violence by the police, the struggle was 104 entering a new phase. During this time pamphlets in the name of the ANC (African National Congress) appeared in Soweto, calling for a three-day strike. The Soweto general strike of 23-25 August 1976 was an unqualified success, despite massive police patrols and intimidation of student picketers with gunfire and anti-strike leaflets. It was noted that the highest rate of absentees was among the manual workers. Employers panicked and called upon the Government to do something about the situation. Mafeje (1978) notes that the three movements that have been associated with the Soweto uprising are the South African Student Movement (SASM), composed mainly of secondary school pupils; the South African Student Organization (SASO), consisting basically of college students; and the Black People's Convention (PBC) an offshoot of the latter. SASO was the driving spirit behind the formation of the other two organizations. This gave the movement greater cohesiveness that would be suggested by the different labels by which they were known. Mafeje notes that it is striking that SASO and its sister organizations are the first Black student movements in South Africa not to be allied with any of the national movements. On the other hand, Soweto is a huge urban conglomerate, with thousands of students thrown together and not subject to the observations and disruptions of the boarding-master. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, Black students in the urban areas are mostly of working-class background. Mafeje suggests that the Soweto uprising was more activist and less intellectualist than previous ones (Cape Province Students Union, South African Students Union, etc.). The degrading of African education under the system of Bantu Education had brought about a great deal of cynicism among the youth. Mafeje advocates that the relationship between ideology and consciousness is not as obvious as is often assumed. After the Soweto events and the manifest identification of targets for political attack, it would be hard to accuse the student 105 militants of lack of consciousness or awareness of what is at stake. The Black Consciousness Movement, of which SASM, SASO, and BPC are a part, furnishes the best example of what Mafeje had in mind. Like the Black Power Movement in the United States, the South African movement created great resonance in the hearts of the fraught Black masses and engendered a new sense of agency which not only defied constabularies’ bullets but also surpassed the false racial divisions among people of color in South Africa. For the first time in South African history Colored general masses declared their Blackness and in the style of Soweto denounced Colored Representative Councils and associated bodies. Mafeje argues that ideologically and analytically, the response must be an emphatic 'NO'. 'Black Consciousness' is a prolix nationalist ideology. Mafeje argues that nationalist movements can be viewed as broadminded insofar as they are anti-colonialist and anti-racist, as they do not see this in the context of class struggle and socialist transformation; they are limited. Brushing aside the known cleavage between white and Black workers, in South Africa owing to the system of migratory labor and labor compounds, there has always been concealed tension between migrants and the city-dwellers. The urban youth from Langa assumed that they could dictate to the migrant workers, who in effect constituted two-thirds of the total population of Langa and were the clear majority of the labor force. Soweto is a historical event of great significance. It threw into relief several issues that had preoccupied many South African activists in exile, irrespective of political affiliations. Whatever militancy they reported among the people was not entirely convincing until the Natal strikes in 1973 and then the drama of Soweto in 1976. Both manifestations exposed beyond doubt the isolation of what the Soweto students call the 'expatriate movements' from the home 106 base. It is well-known that the schoolchildren's march in Soweto on the 16th June 1976 was an outcome of a continual protest to required instruction in Afrikaans. Section 4 The History and Significance of the Kara Heritage Institute and its Importance to South African Education The lynchpin of this chapter is provided in this section that is rooted in this section the final 45-minute interview I had with the CEO of the Kara Heritage Institute on June 24th, 2019 in Pretoria, South Africa. Karaism is the spiritual philosophy of light, Karaism, also known as Sabaism. Karaism is the ancient theology of Africa that dates back to the beginning of recorded history. It was the foundation of ancient African religion and philosophy and its influence permeates African traditions and cultural history to this day. The name ‘Kara’ means sun or light, and thus the spiritual philosophy of light that defines the ancient spiritual beliefs of Africa became known as Karaism. Dr. Mathole Kherofo Motshekga is the founder of the Kara Heritage Institute, which promotes the study of African history and culture, and an advocate of the Supreme Court of South Africa. He is also the founder of Kara Development Ministries, which preach Karaism, the religion of light, as of old. Dr. Motshekga was born in 1949 in Bolobedu, home of South Africa’s fabled Rain Queens. He is a legal adviser to Mudjadji Royal Council, the National Coalition of Traditional Leaders, and the National House of Traditional Leaders of South Africa. He is a former premier of Gauteng, and chair and deputy chair of the African National Executive Committee and serves on several other committees and task teams. He is currently a member of Parliament and Chief Whip of the ANC’s parliamentary caucus. Dr. Motshekga holds a B Juris (Unisa); LLB (Unisa); LLM (Harvard), and LLD (Unisa), and is an honorary professor of political science at the University of Pretoria. He has also been a visiting scholar in the African Studies Center at 107 Harvard University; a visiting lecturer in law at the University of Freiburg; and a research fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany. The history and significance of the Kara Heritage Institute and its relevance to the South African educational experience for people of African descent are very intimately connected. As discussed in the above section the Soweto conflicts and many other anti-apartheid movements feed off each other and indeed were connected. This section has created an opportunity to capture that relationship via a conversation with the CEO of the Kara Heritage Institutes and his brief explanation of the origin of the Kara Heritage Institute. It is appropriate to start this discussion with an example of the philosophical ideology of the Kara Heritage Institute which reads as follows; “The Kara Heritage Institute is committed to leveraging the knowledge and ethos of our heritage to grow sustainable and empowered communities who have the freedom to shape their destiny with their own hands”. It is for this noble purpose that the Kara Heritage Institute was originally established in 1982 by Professor Mathole Motshekga. From the words of Dr. Motshekga (June 24, 2019) the Kara Heritage Institute was created due to several variables that ultimately mandated a response that gave way to space and movement that is Kara. As it relates to the apartheid regime, Dr. Motshhekga was an outlaw on the run for much of his professional career; he was also wanted for his participation in grassroots anti-apartheid movements. Yes, as a young man he was a part of the student struggles. Young Motshekga found work as an administrator on college campuses in the early 1970s. Young Motshekga pursued a law degree and he also worked as a clerk. As a young attorney, Dr. Motshekga represented Black students that were charged or arrested during the anti-apartheid protest. It should be noted that Dr. Motshekga practiced law in Pretoria but could not be physically present in courtrooms in Pretoria at the time he was a young lawyer. 108 In the early 1980s, Dr. Motshekga received a scholarship to study African history in Germany at the University of Freiburg. Upon his arrival in Germany, he enrolled in African studies courses as well as Egyptology. During this juncture in his life, he found that there were many African students he could relate to in that space and time. This created an opportunity for cross-communication with other African minds from the continent and the diaspora. During these conversations, Dr. Motshekga was able to discuss with other people of African descent their perspectives on the political arrangement of Africans around the world. Dr. Motshekga recalled a lot of free time or time in exile that was used to read materials on African heritage. There was a moment in the conversation when Dr. Motshekge paused to think about the role of Cheikh Anta Diop and his impact on Dr. Motshekga's educational trajectory. Diop’s scholarship provided information and contributed to modern debates in Africana studies departments and programs. Dr. Motshekga revealed that in attendance with himself at the University of Freiburg in Germany were other Senegalese students who exposed more of Diop to him. Dr. Motshekga has a great infinity for African history because he strongly believes that by way of culture African agency can be established and fostered among its people. After some time in Europe studying, Dr. Motshekga received a Fulbright scholarship from 1980 to 1981 and went to study at Harvard Law School. It was at Harvard when Dr. Motshekga had the opportunity to work with other faculty in the area of Egyptology. After graduating from Harvard, Dr. Motshekga went to work at the African Studies Center at Harvard University for 2 years. The origin or should I say conceptual framework for the Kara Heritage Institute was laid down in Germany in the early 1980s by Dr. Motshekga, Gilbert Mavenga, and Mr. Sabam from Togo. This first inception of the Kara Heritage Institute started with these men 109 as a series of informal discussions and regular meetings. As time evolved, they would eventually register as a school and apply for an NGO (non-government organization). Dr. Motshekga found that there were a lot of African students extremely interested in their indigenous culture. These gatherings allowed space for Dr. Motshekga to engage in teaching other Africans outside of South Africa about the politics of apartheid and African heritage. After a few years in Europe, Dr. Motshekga went back to teach at the University of South Africa as a senior lecturer. During this time Dr. Motshekga was contacted by a former student who was in Zimbabwe working for the ANC (African National Congress). After contacting his formal student, Dr. Motshekga headed to the capital city of Zimbabwe called Harara to work on behalf of the ANC. During this time, Dr. Motshekga in his free time when not doing political work for the ANC was able to research the history of Great Zimbabwe. When explaining this information to me, at one point during the interview, Dr. Motshekga stopped to remark on the structural similarities to the architectural approach to the great walled kingdom of Zimbabwe and the temples and pyramids to the north around the great lakes and up the Nile valley. The time in Zimbabwe for Dr. Motshekga was very informative, as in conjunction with his political activities Dr. Motshekga was able to receive a key Black Zimbabwean history. In 1995 back in South Africa, with the fall of the apartheid regime came the first physical location in which Kara Heritage became formalized in the township of Mamelodi, which is located in Tshwane. With this new inception, post-apartheid came new opportunities to install a new African agency for Black people. Dr. Motshekga also notes that during travels throughout Africa he always made it a point to engage in a conscious conversation with other African people about their history and culture. 110 The Kara Heritage Institute has now attained the position of South Africa’s leading heritage organization. Since 2013 it has offered a substantial resource and education center in Pretoria’s historic district. At its philosophical and pedagogical center, Kara has seven main objectives;1) To recover and promote Africa’s heritage and its indigenous knowledge systems; 2) To harness Africa’s indigenous resources for the moral, social, and economic development of disadvantaged and marginalized communities; 3) To promote Pan Africanism and the African cultural renaissance; 4) To overcome the legacies of our colonial past and rebuild cultural self- esteem and self-reliance in African society; 5) To challenge the scourges of racism, abuse, bigotry, and xenophobia; 6) To mainstream the African alongside the Asian and European streams of history and cultural heritage; 7) To equip South Africans and Africans with the necessary skills to harness their heritage and indigenous knowledge systems for development5. The above statement and discussions have highlighted the intimate relationship between the oppressive nature of the apartheid regime and the emersion of Kara. The self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education is a very important discussion to have when one seeks a greater understanding between the experiences of education liberation in the Black South African struggles. In the context of the growing movement to Africanize the South African university, my inquiry into African American and African Studies research study in Africa surveys pleas for the usage of African centered education to reinvigorate the production of knowledge in Africa for the importance of the people in Africa. The motto for the institute is “self-knowledge shall set you free”. 5 Motshekga, Mathole, and B. Iuris. "Traditional and Local Governance in a Democratic South Africa–a non- governmental perspective." 4th National Annual Local Government Conference on Traditional Leadership and Local Governance in a Democratic South Africa. Quo Vadis. 2007. 111 CHAPTER FIVE: FINDINGS: KARA’S AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION MODEL: AFRICAN SPIRITUALITY, UBUNTU, AND CULTURAL RESPONSIBILITY Generated Findings As discussed previously in this research study there have been nine major themes that have emerged from the collected data as it relates to the literature and African Centered Education. The deductive approach allowed us to place data points in the appropriate category as it related to the generated scholarship and lived experiences of people of African descent. The nine major themes are as follows; (1) Kara Heritage Institute implementation of programs for South African spiritual transformation; (2) Kara development and legitimization of African stores of knowledge; (3) Kara supports cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness; (4) Kara Institute positively exploits and scaffolds productive community and cultural practices; (5) The Kara Heritage Institute extends and builds upon African indigenous language (i.e., the language of the indigenous African people); (6) The Kara Heritage Institute promotes the vision of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers; (7) The Kara Heritage Institute promotes positive social relationships; (8) The Kara Heritage Institute imparts a worldview that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self-determination of others; (9) The Kara Heritage Institute reinforces community ties and idealizes (the concept of) service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world. These themes helped me understand how to appropriately value and interpret the collected data gathered from the field and literature. The first generated theme that strongly corresponded to all four data sources was in category I: Enlightenment Transformation with African Spiritualty and Heritage. This involved 112 the Kara Heritage Institute's ability to implement programs for South African Spiritual Transformation. This generated theme is essential to understanding the unique approach with which Black South Africans practice African Centered Education (ACE). This theme was in 4 out of 4 data points. Theme (1) was generated in the second round of coding and was the ninth theme discovered when coding for the original eight aims of African Centered Pedagogy. Indeed, the theme was present in the semi-structured interviews. Just about everyone interviewed spoke to or acknowledged some aspect of spirituality as a component to the educational foundation and future trajectory. For example, concerning the approach to pedagogy and practice in South Africa, Adult Student #1, stated that; “Yes, we do. As you know, the Kara Heritage Institute aims at helping people reach self- enlightenment. So, it is our responsibility that after we reach this self-enlightenment we should go and enlighten others that they will remember who they are because self- knowledge will bring what is in them out.” (R6AD#2) Also, Adult Student #2 stated that; “Our culture. How we must go there and teach others to know about how they can be African. We understand how we can treat one another and then we're learning about how important history is from the past. We learn how we can teach others about our heritage and the past and how we can empower the young ones who will be part of the future. Dr. Motshekga has already inspired us, now we can learn to teach our spirituality as well.” (R1AD#2) Adult Student #2 also noted that; “I like coming to school here because it is like every time, I arrive here I feel uplifted spiritually and emotionally”. (R6AD#2) 113 My first interview with Dr. Mathole Motshekga the C.E.O. of the Kara Heritage Institute yielded a comment that spoke to the role of spirituality and education concerning pedagogy and practice; Dr. Motshekga indicated: “Because every human being must know themselves, they must know who they are and where they come from, why they are here, and what they must do. When you tell African children that they are the descendants of Adam and Noah and have no evidence inside or out of Africa that is problematic when we have evidence of our own history like pyramids and obelisks. We have inscriptions that explain who Isis is, who is Ptah, and who is Osiris. Africa has a rich history and documented evidence of our history. So, both Judaism and Christianity are corruptions of ancient African spiritual systems.” (R3IC) Makgatho Mestheko the Kara Heritage program coordinator also spoke to spirituality as a tool for cultural alignment. She stated, “Yes, there used to be a church upstairs, but the church moved which is quite good because it made room. Because we have our own development ministry that we would like to implement soon. We have the Solar Chapel, which is about connecting ritual with the stars and the sun and all that.” (R8M) In the summer of 2019 Tando, the lead instructor of education at Kara declared, “I think in America there’s this sense of Black lives matters; here Black lives are the majority. So, we don’t really celebrate it, but it is something that is enshrined in us when growing up. So, the African centered religion and African centered culture must be grounded in education; it is very important so that you have to know where you come from in order to know where you are going.” (R8T) 114 Also, Tando stated that; “it is the only institution that I know that is centered on African Studies and religion and spirituality. So, the organization most of the time lets us focus on determining people's self-worth as you see if you have read the books that Dr. Motshekga has written. They are all about Karaism and then self-knowledge and self, basically know thyself. So, we try as much as possible to encourage our learners that where you come from does not determine where you are going. It should be an encouragement for you to know yourself. I am African, a descendant of this group. So, we try as much as we can to motivate them mostly not to adopt the Western culture and leave their African Heritage.” (R10T) The collected Documents & Artifacts also captured this unique generated theme rooted in spiritual transformation. Document 1.2, a booklet produced by the Kara Heritage Institute, states, “What is the past, present, and future of the people of Africa. The indigenous African peoples have a rich ancient history and cultural heritage which is at risk of being lost in the tide of contemporary global influence. By reigniting awareness of our proud heritage and reawakening our consciousness of the values that lie at the heart of the original spirituality of Africa, we can revive the dignity and equality of all Africans and indeed of all humanity.” (pg.1 ph.1) The text in document 1.2 speaks to Kara’s philosophic approach to spiritual transformation. The fourth paragraph states, “To harness Africa’s indigenous resources for the moral, social, and economic development of disadvantaged and marginalized communities. Kara seeks to equip South 115 Africans with the necessary skills to harness their heritage and indigenous knowledge systems for development.” (pg.1 ph.4) The text in document 2.1 strongly correlates with document 1.2 stating that, “Kara seeks to show that Africa has a primal philosophy which explains the origins of the ultimate principles of being called God and gods. Kara seeks to show that the human personality is both human and divine.” (pg.4 ph.6) The text in document 3.1 says that; “Karaism is a spiritual philosophy of light. It gives expression to the indigenous African religion which embodies the relationship between God, and humanity. From time immemorial Karaism has been fundamental to African self-knowledge, national consciousness, and pride.” (pg.4 ph.1) The spiritual transformation theme is strongly present in the text on cultural artifacts produced by the Kara Heritage Institute, document 4.1 states; “Our icon, Nelson Mandela taught us that South Africa requires a Reconstruction and Development Program, (RDP) of the soul.” Mandela defined the (RDP) of the soul as spiritual transformation. Thus, the spiritual transformation came to be identified with moral regeneration instead of a prerequisite for meaning full moral regeneration. (pg.4 ph.1) In the next paragraph located on the same page the text states, “In a society, bedeviled by poverty, and spiritual and intellectual underdevelopment, moral regeneration programs alone cannot and will not successfully combat the social ills facing society. Spiritual salvation or redemption through martial arts and African yoga is one of the means for the emancipation of the human soul from the pigsty of materiality and for assisting it to lead a virtuous life. Moral regeneration must be the product of spiritual transformation.” (pg.5 ph. 6&5) 116 The text in document 8.1 highlights the connection to the African renaissance and spiritual transformation. It states that African leaders have long recognized and acknowledged that any sustainable development of Africa and its people would have to include both spiritual and material aspects. This was the very reason why the African Union adopted the charter for the African Cultural Renaissance (pg.7 ph.3). The text in document 8.2 states that, “The primary goal of Karaism is to revive and restore African spirituality, and particularly to teach that: The human personality is a spiritual and material being. Individuals must minister to their spiritual as well as material needs. Individuals must be developed holistically, that is their spiritual as well as material aspects. Individuals must live in harmony with the community, the environment, nature, and God. They must worship God, and honor gods and ancestors.” (pg.8 ph. 1). The Captioned Photographs also generated codes for Kara’s implementation of programs for South African spiritual transformation, for example, photo and caption #1, which states, “African circle of Solar worship”; the photo is an image of a circular amphitheater located in the center of the Institute compound. The text in photo and caption #13 states that; “spiritual transformation space”; which is an image of the Solar Chapel located on the grounds of the Kara Heritage Institute. In the summer of 2017, my field notes and observations captured a conversation that the speaker expressed; “It’s essential because ahh, the cultural space should give effect to the spiritual worldview and cultural space that informs people’s existence. In other words, it must provide a foundation for what people are, it has to do with identity” (field notes & observations June 24, 2017). The next theme - legitimization of African stores of knowledge - was overwhelmingly located in 4 out of 4 data sources collected. This theme is unique as an African American 117 practice in a South African context. The legitimization of African stores of knowledge was specifically the connection to a critical cultural pedagogy rooted in the pursuit of consciousness of freedom. The interviews, the documents, and artifacts yielded the most references that contributed to the identification of the second generated theme. African stores of knowledge in South Africa tend to be centered on heritage restoration, for example, Adult Student #1 stated that; “Heritage practice is about rekindling the principles of Africa, this being your ubuntu’s, your Harambee's; you know, all of those principles that we grew up with as African people, but they intended to be lost somewhere within our development as a people. So here it is. The Heritage Institute aims at rekindling that awareness of who we are and where we come from and what we do.” (R2AD#1). Adult Student #1 stated that, “Heritage resources are the objects and some of the ideas and thoughts that were given to us by our preceding fathers so, they’re not all physical, they’re also principle ones that govern us, morality, and whatnot.” (R8AD#1) Theme two, heritage restoration, was located and correlated in category I; enlightenment transformation with African spirituality and heritage. Adult Student #1 postulates that, “I think more traveling in terms of international traveling, you know because we are really awesome. We need to get to experience with some of the things we learned and go to see some of these things like your Timbuktu Africa's University, you know. The collection of knowledge in Cairo. That would have taken it to a whole new experience just beyond a new level altogether.” (R17AD#1) Adult Student #1 also stated that; “you know, we are taught so much about what we can't do as Black people, but we are never taught about what we can do. So, finding out about 118 people like Marcus Garvey who started a shipping line. It's the reading about your Martin Luther King who mobilized The Liberation movement, about Thomas Sankara, you know, Patrice Lumumba.” (R18AD#1) The second generated theme was also captured in the semi-structured interview of Adult Student #2 who postulated that, “I love this institution because I didn't know that places like Kara existed. I didn't know that there was a place like this. I didn't know that there was a movement that was uplifting us. Especially young ones. I thought that I’m going to learn from a good mother and that be that. And my grandmother and grandfather. I need to, as hard and as much as possible for me to understand how I come to exist in this world. Kara like told me a lot about my existence. Kara told me that I was the first person to exist on earth.” (R7AD#2) Both interviews with Dr. Mathole Motshekga the C.E.O. of Kara Heritage Institute yielded contributions to the affirmation of the role and relationship of transformation and the legitimacy of African stores of knowledge. Dr. Motshekga stated that, “This school is different because we do not accept the paradigm which traces African history to descendants of Adam; we believe that African people begin in the heart of Africa and migrated to the north, south, east, and west, parts of the continent. Which give rise to Ethiopia and Egypt or Kemet. We are rooted in the Kemetic knowledge systems developed by our African ancestors.” (R2IC) Dr. Motshekga also stated in the initial interview that; “Because we need a place where we can all be on the same page and not let other people define our Blackness. One of the biggest issues is that we are divided by other people's definitions of us. This is a place where people can get to know who they are by using our documents and not someone 119 else’s interpretation. They can see their own documents. What information do we have that tells us who we are outside of the European interpretation? And we will find that we African people are one. We have to understand who we are. If we look at the work of Diop it will show you that the people of West Africa come from the great lakes and the Ethiopians and the Egyptians came from that same area; the people in South Africa say that they came from the great lakes.” (R7IC) In the closing interview with Dr. Motshekga in June 2019, he added to his commentary highlighting theme 2 postulating that, “I want to see a situation where African history in particular and the history of humanity, in general, is rewritten. And put Africa at the center because the humiliation that African people are suffering throughout the world is because of this false history of the world. I think that if Kara could contribute to correcting that falsehood, I think one would have achieved what one set out to do.” (R24IIC) The Documents & Artifacts collected also generated text that spoke to the second generated theme. The text on document 2.1 states that, “the redemption or salvation of Africa and her people lies in the recovery of the African heritage and indigenous knowledge systems which were outlawed, suppressed, and substituted by foreign ideologies and religions.” (pg.4 ph.1) The text in document 2.1 also states that, “Consequently, African minds are not able to interpret the universe independently from foreign ideologies and religions and have been involved in ideological and religious wars which retard the development of the continent and its people.” (pg.4 ph.3) The text in the next paragraph on the same page postulates that, 120 “The African stream of history and culture is not only in the Kemetic literature, but it is also embedded in nature itself. Indigenous African peoples traced back their history to the heavens and recorded it through the names of mountains, rivers, natural and cultural sites.” (pg.4 ph.10) The Captioned Photographs also contributed to theme 2. The text on the photo and caption #10 states; scenes from ancient Egypt in Pretoria, South Africa, which is an image of the Egyptian gods located on the white wall surrounding the Institute grounds. Photo and captions #3 states, “Cheikh Anta Diop on the wall at Kara Heritage Institute; which is an image of Diop located on the outside white wall on the northside of the Institution’s grounds. Theme 2; the legitimization of African stores of knowledge is captured in the photo and captions #8 which states; “Egyptian art on Solar Chapel”; which is an image of the right outside of the Solar Chapel located in the courtyard of the Institution’s compound. In the summer of June 26th, 2017 field notes and observations highlight theme 2 present in a community event. The field notes state that; “The second speaker noted that the book series was a Pan African effort to contribute to the history of African Freedom Fighters present as a collective Pan African movement. It’s important to the role of education in the life of the youth.” Also, the speaker stated that; “It is important to create cultural foundations in educational spaces that target people of African descent.” (field notes & observations June 2017). The 3rd generated theme and final theme of Category I, was in 3 out of 4 data sources. the 3rd generated theme is Kara’s support of cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness. The 3rd theme speaks to the role of consciousness and enlightenment transformation. For example, in an interview with Adult Student #1, the interviewee claimed that; 121 “yah, we do learn about Community. We do learn the kind of mentality that the community has. How to change it with our heritage this includes knowing our history.” (R6AD#1) Adult Student #2 also spoke to the 3rd generated theme stating; “What I would like to improve on is like working with each new student that comes here to really take the time to understand the idea of knowledge of self. I always told myself that I’m a different kind of Black person, I'm the only one whose values are African culture, morals, and rituals. And respect to all the views, but I come to understand each, and every person’s respect is rooted in one’s culture.” (R8AD#2) Dr. Motshekga also spoke to the value of cultural continuity. In the first interview conducted in 2016, he stated, “Because we are saying, Humanity originated in the belly of Africa. We have documents of that fact, and so, Africans in their literature and their manuscripts, they can account for the time when there was nothingness.” (R4IC). Tando also spoke to the 3rd generated theme noting that, “Like on a daily basis, like if a student is from a different location you try to explain to him how a Fortune 500 company works, for him it would be more complex or difficult to understand immediately. What if you tell him how his local shop works? They see the local shop every day. It’s where he buys food every day. And then when you equate the example to such a business and they can see, ok if my teacher saying that the sole proprietary organization, then I can see, ok. There's only one owner, how it works. So, you unpack it in a community reference so you can speak about the community in which they live.” (R7T) 122 The Documents & Artifacts highlighted the role and relationship of cultural conciseness. The text on document 1, states; “self-knowledge shall set you free.” (cover page) The text on document 1.2 states; “By reigniting awareness of our proud heritage and reawakening our consciousness of the values that lie at the heart of the original spirituality of Africa, we can revive the dignity and equality of all Africans and indeed of all humankind.” (pg.1 ph.1) Also located on document 1.2 states; “The Kara Heritage Institute is committed to leveraging the knowledge and ethos of our heritage to grow sustainable and empowered communities who have the freedom to shape their destiny with their own hands.” (pg.1 ph.3) The text on document 2.1 states; “Kara aims to preserve the ancient memory of the evolution of the macro-cosmos and micro-cosmos.” (pg.4 ph.1) Another document that provides a text in line with the 3rd generated theme is located in document 5.1, stating that; “On a continent where rain has always been the lifeblood of human existence, the people of Africa have since the beginning of time paid homage to the divine source of rain. African people regard rain as a gift from God and the Gods. Thus, the figure of the Rain Goddess and the power of the Rain Queens are a significant part of our cultural heritage.” (pg.4 ph.1) On June 26, 2017, field notes and observations noted that a speaker stated that, “South Africa must embrace the role of culture in education and speak out against discrimination.” (field notes and observations on June 26, 2017). There were no photos and captions present in this generated theme as illustrated in Table 3. Category II, cultural responsibility to one’s self and community housed the next theme. The 4th generated theme is Kara’s ability to positively exploit and scaffold productive community and cultural practices. This 4th generated theme was present in 4 out of 4 data sources. For example, Adult Student #1 stated, 123 “Uhum, I enjoy learning about the African Patriots, some of Africa's greatest minds, you know, not only Africa's greatest minds but Black people in general, you know, your icons that are painted on the walls, your Kwame Nkrumah, your Haile Selassie, your Patrice Lumumba, you know your great African minds, your Thomas Sankara, you know, all of those who, your Marcus Gary, some of them are not even from Africa, but then if they were originally from Africa, so we enjoy learning about that.” (R11AD#1) Adult student #1 also noted that; “What enhances my ability to learn, the facilitator, first, he's quite good at what he does, but then what inspires me most about leaning is the possibilities that it opens. You know, it really opens avenues of the Black mind we never thought were existing, you know, it shows us what we are capable of. So, I'm more thrilled about the content and the quality of work we see.” (R12AD#1) Adult Student #2 also spoke to the 4th generated theme stating, “It makes me feel great about being an African. I want to see more of the countries in Africa. But I want to spend most of my life in this country as well as I want to travel around the world. But this is one of the most beautiful countries. I love that I live here.” (R9AD#2). The 4th generated theme was also present in the first interview with Dr. Motshekga who said, “Because every human being must know themselves, they must know who they are and where they come from why they are here and what they must do.” (R3IC) Dr. Motshekga also stated that, “We have to understand who we are. If we look at the work of Diop it will show you that the people of West Africa come from the great lakes and the Ethiopian and the Egyptians 124 came from that same area the people in South Africa say that they came from the great lakes”. (R7IC) < this is repeated from earlier > In my final interview with Dr. Motshekga in (2019), he spoke of the importance of positively exploiting and scaffolding community and culture stating, “I want to see a situation where African history in particular and history of humanity, in general, is rewritten. And put Africa at the center because the humiliation that African people are suffering throughout the world is because of this false history of the world. I think that if Kara could contribute to correcting that falsehood. I think one would have achieved what one set out to do”. (R24IIC) < this is also repeated form earlier > Mestheko, the program coordinator for the Kara Heritage Institute stated that; “Land that was taken. That was taken illegally taken by the Afrikaners. During the apartheid regime. So, we try to get them back to the original owners.” (R15M) Mestheko also noted that; “people actually appreciate themselves more once they come into knowing how we are connected to the rest of the continent as well as we do not live in isolation.” (R19M) The 4th generated theme was also captured in the interview with Tando, the head educational facilitator who stated, “Most definitely like where I begin at Kara as a skills development facilitator, in that we had a class that we were teaching with a group of 15 learners. So, most of them are from Joburg in and around Joburg, so it's important that when you're teaching them something project-related or business orientated it is important that you take examples from what they see.” (R7T) The Documents & Artifacts also captured the 4th generated theme. The text on document 2 states, “Preserving the African Heritage for Psychological Emancipation.” (cover page) The 125 text on document 2.1 states that; “the redemption or salvation of Africa and her people lies in the recovery of the African heritage and indigenous knowledge systems which were outlawed, suppressed and substituted by foreign ideologies and religions”. (pg.4 ph. 1) The text on document 5.1 states; “On a continent where rain has always been the lifeblood of human existence, the people of Africa have since the beginning of time paid homage to the divine source of rain. African people regard rain as a gift from God and the Gods. Thus, the figure of the Rain Goddess and the power of the Rain Queens are a significant part of our cultural heritage”. (pg.4 ph.1) The text on document 8.1 states; “However, the people of South Africa are determined to build a better Africa and a better world. We could succeed if we could only overcome the challenges listed above. The time has come to overcome these vices and fulfill the prophecy of African redemption or regeneration embodied most recently in the African Renaissance and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development NEPAD”. (pg.7 ph.3) < this entire paragraph is repeated from earlier > The Captioned Photographs also highlighted the 4th generated theme. The caption on photo #11 states; “Inside African Solar Chapel,” the photo is an image of the inside of the Solar Chapel. The captioned text for photo #15 states; “Zulu food (iqukwane) hut at Kara Heritage Institute. The photo is an image of the iqukwane, which is a traditional food hut in the isiZulu culture. The captioned text on photo #2 states; “Rural African in the modern city,” the photo is an image of the Institute courtyard and the urban skyline background of Pretoria, South Africa. The captioned text on photo 7# states; “Solar Monograms on the Solar Chapel,” this photo is an image of ten monograms located at the entrance of the Solar Chapel in the courtyard of the Institute. The observations and field notes on June 26th, 2017 states that; “The program was titled “African Freedom Fighters,” learning African History. It is a series of books for children and 126 young adults. This collective series looks at 11 African leaders who [navigated] the respective countries to life post-independence of their respective.” (field notes & observations 26th, 2017). The next generated theme in Category II was Kara’s ability to extend and build upon African indigenous language. The 5th generated theme was captured in 3 out of 4 data sources. The 5th generated speaks to the unique role in which South African educators and students utilize local indigenous languages to facilitate learning in African centered education development and practice. The 5th generated theme was captured in multiple interviews, for example, Adult Student #2 stated, “Ahh, it is one of the best things to ever happen to me in my life. Like they're trying to show us that we need to do to be one strong Nation. And for us to do to be able to know about our Humanity. Most of the young Blacks do not know about their Human Side. We go beyond English in everything that we do here. You can enjoy your home language at this place when you are receiving instruction. We do talk about this stuff for hours that basically you can't get at school. Stories they will never tell you about.” (R5AD#2) In the second interview with Dr. Motshekga said that; “Yes, now where we can communicate with the whole of Africa. But also, there is a problem with the intolerance of the Muslims. If you take Cameroon, the English-speaking South conflicts with the French-speaking areas and you can only solve that problem by introducing a neutral language. We must introduce Swahili in Cameroon and in the north, which is Arabic. But North Africans are members of the African Union and the AU uses Swahili as its official language of the AU.” (R27IIC) 127 Dr. Motshekga also stated, “We can have a pan-African language, which is Swahili can go everywhere. But also, you know in Karaism when we do the research, we find that this guy condemned the Egyptians for being Sun worshippers but if you read the Bible this means that the history of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia is intimately connected internally and even in terms of oral history. The Bantu language can unfold hieroglyphics of Kemet, the Bantu languages, those languages which are rich with multisyllabic words. Those syllabic words, (Ra, Ba, Ma, Ta, Ka) still exist.” (R28IIC) Tando also spoke to the 5th generated theme stating that, “Yeah, most definitely if you look at schools around Joburg or your central more modernized cities. You have different groups like your Venda, your Pedi, Sutho, to your Zulu. So in the schools the languages that are recognized in the province of Limpopo or Gauteng, they are like if a school is in Soweto they're going to learn English as their first language and then the second language would be one of the 11 official languages cause the groups are mixed. The goods are means, it could be Zulu, could be Sutho depending on the type of classes they’re in, like if a Zulu student wants to do Zulu then that particular student has to do Zulu and English. Yeah, it's to cover the bases.” (R3T) Tando stated; “I think it gives them confidence because the difference being in that their homes their parents don't know English that well, so we can’t say that English is our first language. We don't know English that well, you know, it gives them the confidence to communicate certain information that they don't understand in English, I guess. For instance, if a teacher is teaching them something in geography then that particular teacher if he's familiar with the multilingual culture of the African people, then he might explain 128 it in their own culture or cultural references so they can understand and interpret it.” (R4T) Tando also mentioned that; “We teach in a manner so that they can embrace their uniqueness. Remember, most kids are not academically inclined as others in the class. So, you have one group one set off in a class. Even if I might give an example in a class of 50. It might have five different sets of three different sets of 5 people in a group within that group. You might find that two people are more academically inclined or as you guys say that the GPA score is up is well above average. Some are below average; those who are below average, what we do then is we teach them in different languages in English and Zulu and their own home language. It makes them understand the content better. They grasp the content easier when you explain things from English to their language so that they can understand. Okay, if he's speaking something in English, then this is what it means in my own language and it did better, it better enriches their vocabulary because they can now interpret that in that English language which makes them increase their own confidence. Yeah.” (R6T) Tando cited that; “And it definitely, even if you can hear it in the dialectic, most of the time when you hear people talk it's like this third language that is formed with the mixture of different languages and extent and phrases and all those things, like for instance when you're great. How is it? Sharp. A sharp. Be grand. It's a mixture. I wouldn't say exactly that phrase belongs to one or another. It's a mixture. I might know Zulu to a certain extent, when my Zulu cuts out then I'll jump into the nearest thing that person can understand, you know, so that's what I'm saying or there is a created mixture of that specific bilingual language.” (R9T) 129 The Documents &Artifacts also captured the relationship between language and cultural heritage. The text in document 9.2 states; “The Hamites or Khemites originated in the area of the African Great Lakes, known as Punt (or Bantu) or Tantura (Greek: Taneter, the Land of the Gods). The root of these names is Ntu, which is also the root of Ubuntu.” (pg.8 ph.5) The text on document 9.3 states; “The African sage, Khem or Thoth-Hermes, taught that, in the beginning, there was nothingness (Nahas). The one has been called or been known as the self-begotten God (Mutangakugara or Mutangiwakakugara or Umrevelinqani.” (pg.9 ph.1) Field notes and observations consistently note the use of indigenous language for general communication and interactions at the Kara Heritage Institute for a total of four years of empirical data collection. There were no captioned photographs present in this generated theme as illustrated in Table 3. The 6th generated theme; Kara’s ability to promote the vision of individuals and communities as producers rather than as simply consumers was present in 4 out of 4 data sources. The 6th generated theme was the last generated theme of Category II cultural responsibility to one’s self and community. Adult student #1 stated; “The African principles are, for example, that one that says it takes a village to raise a child. The second principle is to express yourself with confidence in being comfortable in your own skin. I mean self- knowledge.” (R5AD#1) Adult Student #1 also mentioned; “We learn about the mentality of our community. We learn about Heritage resources, the kind of heritage resources we had before colonialism.” (R7AD#1). Adult Student #2 stated; “I have learned that it is my responsibility to go out in the community and inspire others to learn about our heritage and history. I have a responsibility to let my community know that we can work for ourselves and be creative.” (R4AD#2). 130 Organic production as a foundation for ACE was a point made by Dr. Motshekga. He stated, “Yes, but you see also this structure of the space came to me in my sleep, you see, so all I had to do was follow my dream.” (R6IC) Makgatho the program coordinator stated, “Here at Kara, I am in charge of running the Community Law Center, which is one of the arms of the Kara Heritage Institute. Yeah, and I'm going to name them briefly. It's the Kara Chapel. There's the Kara school, there are the Kara stalls and the community center that I just mentioned and lastly.” (R1M) The Documents & Artifacts also captured the importance of promoting individuals and communities as producers rather than simply consumers. The text on document 1.2 states; “Kara’s mission is to recover and promote Africa’s heritage and its indigenous knowledge systems. To equip South Africans and Africans with the necessary skills to harness their heritage and indigenous knowledge systems for development.” (pg.1 ph.4) The text on document 2.1 states; “The Kemetic Philosophy; Africa is not only the cradle of humanity but also produced the most ancient literature in the world. This literature deals with the origins of the universe and humanity, time, and religions. This literature makes it possible for Africans to define themselves and establish their relationship with God and nature.” (pg.4 ph.10) The text on document 9.1 states; “Today, the world’s people are facing a moral crisis, simply because they lack self- knowledge. Almost all of us have forgotten who we are, where we come from, and where we are going from here.” (pg.7 ph.1) The Captioned Photos also captured the essence of the 6th generated theme. Photo #12 caption states; “South African cultural icons on the white wall at Kara Heritage Institute.” The photo is an image of South African icon Steve Biko and Dr. Motshekga the C.E.O. of the Kara 131 Heritage Institute, located on the north wall in the rear of the compound. Field notes and observations on June 26th, 2017 captured a presentation at Kara in which a speaker mentioned; “The legacy we want to leave behind is that of grooming African youth and children to take up the battle left behind by those African pioneers.” (Field notes & Observations June 26th, 2017) Category III, the practice of ubuntu, was the last generated category by the data sources. There were three themes generated under this category. The 7th generated theme is Kara’s ability to promote positive social relationships. This theme was in 3 out of 4 data sources. The interviews highlighted the relationship between positive social relationships and African Centered Education. Adult Student #1 stated, “Why as I said before they have the opportunity to learn about the all-time greats, the people whom we meet during the events that we host sometimes phenomenal stuff, you know, get to meet people from different countries. Different settings, world views, mindsets. So, it's just an exciting experience to be part of.” (R15AD#1) Adult Student #1 also mentioned that; “Their events and programs that they do it, Kara. For example, they just launched the Kara Young Pioneers, training South African youth in self-knowledge.” (R22AD#1) Adult Student #2 stated; “What I learn about my community is that we are one of the strongest species in the world.” (R3AD#2) Adult Student #2 also mentioned that; “I love this institution because I didn't know that places like Kara existed. I didn't know that there was a place like this. I didn't know that there was a movement that was uplifting us.” (R7AD#2) The program coordinator Mestheko stated; “People actually appreciate themselves more once they come into knowing how we are connected to the rest of the continent as well as we do 132 not live in isolation.” (R19M). Tando the lead educator noted that; “We teach in a manner so that they can embrace their uniqueness” (R6T). The Documents & Artifacts also highlighted the association between social relationships and (ACE) at the Kara Heritage Institute. The text in document 1.2 states; “Kara seeks to overcome the legacies of our colonial past and rebuild a culture of self-esteem and self-reliance in African society. Kara seeks to equip South Africans and Africans with the necessary skills to harness their heritage and indigenous knowledge systems for development.” (pg.1 ph.4) The text in document 8.2 states; “The primary goal of Karaism is to revive and restore African spirituality, and particularly to teach that humanity is one. Also, individuals must realize their potential by developing their minds or intellects through education.” (pg.8 ph.1) Field notes and observations dated June 26th, 2017 noted that; the C.E.O. of the institute is going around greeting the guests and looks to be having an engaging conversation with each person he interacts with. (field notes & observations) The Captioned Photos did not have the 7th generated theme. The 8th generated theme was Kara’s ability to impart a worldview that idealizes a positive, self-sufficient future for one’s people, without denying the self-worth and right to self- determination to others. The 8th generated theme was in Category III and it was in 3 out of 4 data sources. Adult Student #1 stated that, “As you know, the Kara Heritage Institute aims at helping people reach self- enlightenment. So, it is our responsibility that after we reach this self-enlightenment, we should go and enlighten others that they will remember whom they are, self-knowledge bringing what is in them out.” (R9AD#1) Adult Student #2 mentioned that; “The current education that we are receiving now, we don't learn about our contributions to the past; we have been detached from history.” (R2AD#2) 133 Dr. Motshekga stated, “Now it has been established beyond a reasonable doubt that Africa is the cradle of humanity and the cradle of civilization, the history of the world and the history of the African continent, in particular, has been falsified. So, I want to see a situation where African history in particular and history of humanity, in general, is rewritten.” (R24IIC) Tando the lead Educator at the Kara Heritage Institute stated; “So, at an early age in terms of our Primary School, this is taught in us or okay, you're African, you’re unique but that doesn't make you inferior. It makes you superior. So those different aspects we can learn from each other's cultures.” (R8T) Tando also stated; “If you know that you are African, you can accomplish a lot because you can know okay, these things like not being born into white speaking people languages, it is ok, we can make mistakes.” (R10T) The Documents & Artifacts also captured the 8th generated theme. The text in document 2.1 states; “Consequently, African minds are not able to interpret the universe independently from foreign ideologies and religions and have been involved in ideological and religious wars which retard the development of the continent and its people.” (pg.4 ph.3) The text in document 8.2 states; “One of the primary goals of Kara is to teach that individuals must live in harmony with the community, the environment, nature, and God.” (pg.8 ph.1) Field notes and Observations on June 28th, 2017 captured a conversation in which one individual stated, “So the Kara Institute seeks to groom the African youth and children to follow in the footsteps of those giants who were Africa’s young pioneers”. (field notes &observations June 26th, 2017) < I think these previous two quotes may be repeated from earlier in the chapter > The Captioned Photos did not capture the 8th generated theme. 134 The 9th and final generated theme of Category III was Kara’s ability to reinforce community ties and idealize service to one’s family community, nation, race, and world. This theme was captured in 4 out of 4 data sources. Adult Student #1 stated that, “Yes. They do. It's quite fun here. From a facilitator to the kind of knowledge that we get. We get to learn through a diverse range. Not only from people from South Africa but also from Africa and other countries we learn about your Patrice Lumumba's your Kwame Nkrumah and others.” (R10AD#1) Adult Student #2 stated; “I have learned that it is my responsibility to go out in the community and inspire others to learn about our heritage and history. I have a responsibility to let my community know that we can work for ourselves and be creative.” (R4AD#2) Adult Student #2 also stated; “This place was built to restore culture as Africans. Culture is the foundation.” (R10AD#2) Dr. Motshekga stated, “Because we need a place where we can all be on the same page and not let other people define our Blackness. One of the biggest issues is that we are divided by other people's definitions of us.” (R7IC) Tando, the lead educator at Kara stated, “Then when you get to the university now you are, you're more independent. You must learn, or okay, if I'm a Venda person what does a Zulu do? What can I learn from a Zulu person? What can I learn from a Petite person? So, we end up with this multi-linguist 135 multilingual system that is spoken in town. So, if you are familiar with our cities and town, there's a uniqueness in our language that we speak to together.” (R8T) The Documents & Artifacts also captured the 9th generated theme in the last category. The text on document 1.2 states; “Our Mission; The Kara Heritage Institute is committed to leveraging the knowledge and ethos of our heritage to grow sustainable and empowered communities who have the freedom to shape their destiny with their own hands.” (pg.1 ph.3) The text on document 1.2 also mentions that; “Kara seeks to promote Pan Africanism and the African cultural renaissance.” (pg.1 ph.4) The text on document 4, states; “Self-knowledge shall set you free.” (cover page). The Captioned Photos also captured the 9th generated theme. Photo #14 caption states; “West Africa cultural icons,” which is an image of Kwame Nkrumah and Diop on the white wall of the Kara Heritage Institute. Photo #5 caption states; “Garvey in South Africa,” which is an image of Marcus Garvey located in the south wall in the front of the Kara Heritage Institute. Photo #6 caption states; “Martin Luther King in South Africa,” which is an image of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. located on the white wall on the northside of the institute compound. Photo #4 caption states; “Frederick Douglass on the white wall of the Kara Heritage Institute,” which is an image of Frederick Douglass located on the northside of the compound. Photo #9 caption states; “Pan African Queens and Kings,” which is an image of four royal African personalities, two women and two men from different parts of the African continent. The 9th generated theme was also captured in field notes and observations. On June 26th, 2017 at a social event located at the Kara Heritage Institute field notes highlighted that; the program was titled African Freedom Fighters, Learning African history. It is a series of books for children and young adults. One of the guest speakers noted that the books were a Pan African 136 effort to contribute to the documented history of African freedom fighters as a collective Pan African movement. (field notes & observations June 26th, 2017) The findings seem rich and can lead to some powerful discussions that can begin to heal and create space for those silenced voices and expressions. People of African descent are hyper- aware of their lack of space and cultural expression. The next section will provide the reader with an unpacked, in-depth, contextualized analysis of the provided findings. The next section highlights the findings in relation to the initial research questions. Healing starts with recognition so hopefully; this data set can begin to engage in such a divine process. Knowledge is power. 137 CHAPTER SIX: DISCUSSION: THE CULTURAL RELEVANCE OF AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION IN AFRICA Section I Chapter V will provide a contextualized discussion about the findings and the relationship of the findings to the research questions. An African Centered Education is more than just a bunch of tactics and approaches, it is a philosophical attitude to healing and enlightenment. It's culturally relevant or what Ladson Billings (1995) calls “culturally appropriate,” “culturally congruent,” “culturally compatible,” and “culturally responsive.” She maintains that of the four, “culturally responsive” “appears to refer to a more dynamic or synergistic relationship between home/community culture and school culture” (467), while the others “seem to connote accommodation of student culture into the mainstream culture”. (467) Irvine (1990) created the term “cultural synchronization” to refer to the cultural connection that must be present between the teacher and African American students for maximum academic achievement. Ladson Billings’ (1995) notion of “culturally relevant” pedagogy adds a socially conscious, critical element to the scope of what defines culturally relevant instruction in the classroom. It is also the primary alternative framework in terms of representing constructivist, theoretical models that pursue academic excellence while promoting critical awareness in the classroom and society. To recap, let us look at the original research questions. The first question was how have African Americans influenced continental Black Africans development of culturally relevant pedagogies rooted in African culture? African American influence on culturally relevant pedagogy and education on the continent of Africa, South Africa to be specific can be found frequently both consciously and unconsciously. In the 138 case of the Kara Heritage Institute, the data demonstrated the American influence rooted in ancient Egypt as one of the classical African civilizations in which to develop cultural, educational realignment models to cultivate an appreciation and cultural recollection of achievement and accomplishment. At the end of the day, people of African descent look to their cultural base to make sense of the world around them. The conceptual framework of ‘Deep Structural Roots’ of culture as it relates to people of African descent was implacable by providing a deductive framework that helped unpack a grounded examination of meaning extracted from the data. The nine generated themes under three categories helped to provide a data set that can be correlated and compared to existing literature and scholarship. By African, I mean a ‘composite African,’ not a specific discrete African ethnicity. Asante (1991) notes that C.T. Keto took up this conversation in his book Afrocentricity and History by postulating that; “African American thinkers were among the first to feel the need to create the concept “composite” African and in so doing reference the whole of the African continent which included historically, ancient Kemet.” (Keto, 1991). In the words of Dr. Asante; the anteriority of the classical African civilization must be entertained by any Africalogical inquiry, merely because without that perspective interpretations would hang in the air, detached, and isolated. The data reveals that the Kara Heritage Institute consistently aims to implement programs for spiritual transformation rooted in the legitimization of African stores of knowledge. This epistemological posture strongly connects with the African American models which highlight the fact that; African Centered Education should legitimize African stores of knowledge while simultaneously positively exploiting and scaffolding productive community and cultural practices. This notion is profound because it was demonstrated across multiple sources of data. The validity provided by the triangulation 139 suggested that the Black South Africans, like African Americans, strongly invest in classical Kemet as an epistemological and axiological perspective. Category I; Enlightenment Transformation with African spirituality and heritage captured three generated themes that were present in 95% of the sources of data. This meant that spiritual alignment was seen as fundamental to the pedagogical construction of African Centered Education in the South African context. The South African model of ACE indeed has the ‘eight aims’ present in the American model developed by Lee (1992), Lomotey, Kofi; Shujaa, Mwalimu J. (1991). By way of content analysis and critical Africana theory, a ‘ninth aim’ was developed that is unique to South Africa, which is; Kara Heritage Institute’s implementation of African spiritual transformation. The spiritual transformation was observed in all four sources of data. Which meant that it was an essential practice and cornerstone to the South African model of ACE. African Centered Education views learning as a process of identity development, like cognitive development, and development of consciousness, and not just a matter of acquiring skilled competence and scholastic ability (Murrell, 1992. 82). In the practice perspective of ACE, Murrell postulates that; “good teaching is measured by “good practice” that is, in turn, determined by demonstrable achievement of the students (82). The Kara Heritage Institute had ‘good practice’ at the root of their epistemological approach. The South African model practiced at Kara in line with the American model, creates a dynamic where both teachers and learners have learning trajectories and improve abilities when the teacher can see the interdependencies of their trajectory. So, as it relates to trajectory and practice, activities that are done on a consistent, routine basis, something that has some recursiveness in everyday procedures or the daily interacting of people engaged in a purposeful 140 enterprise in learning achievement. The idea of practice provides cultural situatedness or centeredness to knowledge production. Section II The second overall question posed in this dissertation was how might structural pedagogy be operationalized to be used as a valuable pedagogy for African Centered and culturally relevant education? Structural pedagogy can be utilized to enhance learning outcomes by incorporating the nine generated themes presented in earlier chapters collected from the data sources. Category III; the practice of ubuntu strongly captured the Kara Heritage Institute’s ability to operationalize structural pedagogy in Africana aesthetics and practice. Structural pedagogy was staunchly correlated to Kara’s proficiency to reinforce community ties and idealize the concept of service to one’s family, community, nation, race, and the world. This generated theme was present in all four data sources which means it is an essential aspect of South Africa’s and the Kara Heritage Institute’s model of ACE. For example, the white wall located on the perimeter of the Kara Heritage Institute has colored images of African personalities from around the world and different periods. The white wall is also a structural pedological symbolic historical artifact. In ancient Kemet, Memphis was the name given later in life to the capital. It began as Inbw-hdj, or “white walls”; the city of Memphis was the royal residence and capital of Egypt during the early dynastic period and the old kingdom and remained thereafter one of the most populous and renowned places of Kemet. Conceivably, the most apt name for Memphis was Ankh-tawy, “that which binds the two lands”. In this historical context, the ‘white wall’ at the Kara Heritage Institute has taken the historical aesthetics and character of the past and utilized it to enhance the consciousness of a contemporary educational space. As the ‘white wall’ of 141 Memphis was that which binds the two lands or ideas. Today the wall serves the same symbolic and axiological function it did five thousand years ago. The ‘white wall’ simultaneously promotes positive social relationships and a Pan-African spirit from Africa by way of the African Diaspora. Another example of the operationalization of Structural Pedagogy at the Kara Heritage Institute was the presence of a Solar Chapel and traditional iQukwane (food hut). African Centered Education (ACE) is not independent of Black culture, history, and intellectual traditions. In the case of the Kara Heritage Institute and its African renaissance agenda, structural pedagogy is essential to Kara’s epistemology and this fosters the architecture and Africana aesthetics to infiltrate the curriculum and philosophical outlook. Thus, the structure of Kara reinforces the African Centered Education philosophy and ideology rooted in ubuntu. The operationalization of Structural Pedagogy at the Kara Heritage Institute in South Africa is an essential aspect of the rebirth of the educational system in the post-Apartheid era. The operationalization of Structural pedagogy as an Africana aesthetic is as old as the African theory of learning and practice itself. From the building of the pyramids to the studying of the cosmos the external space of the ‘classroom’ is forever evolving. From the solar system to the geographical locations on earth, the trees and the forest, rivers, and streams, a learner and a teacher must be in tune with one’s external environment and the impact that the environment has on one’s beingness. Section III The third research question is how has structural pedagogy been used in practice in South Africa at the Kara Heritage Institute? Structural pedagogy has been utilized in three main aspects: reflection, inspiration, and inclusion. When it comes to reflection the Kara Heritage 142 Institute reflects the essence of Afrocentricity. There are two aspects of Afrocentricity, the theory and the practice. Kara’s reflection of African heritage is embedded in aesthetics and architecture which is fundamental to Kara’s epistemology. The images captured in Documents and Artifacts are primary examples of Kara’s epistemological investment in architecture and Africana aesthetics. The structural pedagogy was really important to the students and the faculty at Kara. They all in one way or another made a statement about how the structural aesthetics and physical configuration of the Kara Heritage Institute contributed to their overall attitude concerning learning and teaching. The students noted that the physical structure and Africana aesthetics of the Kara Heritage Institute inspired people to reach self-enlightenment. Indeed, the South African model of (ACE) is rooted in spirituality that informs one’s beingness. The architectural aesthetics of the Kara Heritage Institute, not only reflects the classical images and notions of Africa and the African Diaspora but it allows people to ask the question, of what happened to those people? What happened to those grand characters that reflect greatness to the African identity? The Kara Heritage Institute captures the essence of reflection in inspiration and consciousness. I can recall my holiday on a study abroad visit the Kara Heritage Institute when on a tour of the Institute’s grounds in the rear of the main building looking at the ‘white wall’ with a group of students and Mestheko the Institut’s project coordinator; a stranger that was walking by asked about the images on the wall and requested a book or other information about the historic characters displayed on the ‘white wall’. Reflection was present in all the archives and documents the Kara Heritage Institute provided to the public and its student population. Meaning that most people intimately expressed that the structure of the Kara Heritage Institute was one of the most beautiful buildings in all of Pretoria, South Africa. The building 143 inspired students and community members to explore and reflect on what the Africana aesthetics and structural pedagogy meant to their reality and lived experiences. Structural pedagogy was also utilized to promote inspiration. Inspiration was also an essential aspect of the practice and theory of the Kara Heritage Institute’s epistemological approach. For example, the Kara Heritage Institute’s theory of knowledge is grounded in Karaism which is an ancient paradigm developed in the Nile Valley of Africa. This epistemological posture is important because it connects South Africa’s model of (ACE) to that of the African Americans, specifically the Black Power movement and the rise of Afrocentricity. Kara reflects and projects the words of Chancellor Williams when he states that; “all Africa is the native homeland of the Blacks.” (33) The Kara Heritage Institute reflects the notion that Black Africans were among the very earliest builders of great civilizations on this planet, which also included the development of writing, sciences, engineering, medicine, architecture, religion, and fine arts. The late great Dr. Cheikh Ante Diop (1923-1986) explained, “We also understand better now why the Egyptian term designating royalty etymologically means; (the man) ‘who comes from the South = who belongs to the South = who is of the South = the King of Egypt.” (81) Even W.E.B. Du Bois postulated that; “the Egyptians, however, regarded themselves as African. The Greeks looked upon Kemet as part of Africa not only geographically but culturally, and every facet of history and anthropology proves that the Egyptians were an African people varying no more from other African people then groups like the Scandinavians vary from other Europeans or groups like the Japanese from other Asians.” (18). Asante notes that Du Bois prepared the world for Afrocentricity, the protector of an idea who did not fully recognize its power but who would have shouted to see it come (21). Afrocentricity was the most logical end of his brilliant growth pattern. Du Bois understood the 144 indivisibility of the work; it was an African concept of the interconnectedness of all things (22). The Kara Heritage Institute’s inspiration is in seven aspects of Afrocentricity; history, mythos, creative motif, ethos, social organizations, political organizations, and economic organizations. The Reflection of Structural Pedagogy at the Kara Heritage Institute provides the foundation for the symbiotic relationship to inspiration. When it comes to inspiration the structural pedagogy and the Africana aesthetics motivate students and visitors to the Institute to be inspired to promote and support cultural continuity while promoting critical consciousness while simultaneously legitimizing African stores of knowledge. The Kara Heritage Institute inspires students to explore the past. Theophile Obanga postulated; “A study of ancient Egypt sheds light on contemporary Black African tradition. Conversely, today’s living Black American societies, though historically affected by foreign spiritual, ideological, moral, and other values, still retain quite a few archaic lifestyles directly traceable to the ancient Egyptian and Nubian civilizations of the Nile Valley.” (225). The structural pedagogy of the Kara Heritage Institute stimulates students and the community to become one with the history of Africa while recognizing the value of a productive future. Kara’s Africana aesthetics is rooted in the spiritual essence of the African world view. The ontological position of Kara’s ideological position in education affirms the African understanding of the nature of reality. The third and last aspect of structural pedagogy demonstrated by the Kara Heritage Institute and yielded from the data is inclusion. Inclusion is demonstrated in Kara’s ability to reinforce community ties and idealize service to one’s family and community. It is also reinforced in responsibility to extend and build upon the indigenous languages of South Africa, the African Diaspora, and the Nile Valley civilization. The Kara Heritage Institute is a space that 145 speaks to the inclusion and the lived experiences of the ‘composite African’. Asante (1992) notes that the ‘composite African’ is not a specific discrete African ethnicity, which would rather mean African American, Yorba, Igbo, Zulu, Shona, Ndebele, etc. C. T. Keto (1991) notes that the ‘composite African’ includes a reference to the whole of the African continent which included, historically, ancient Kemet (5). The structural pedagogy exhibited in the architecture and aesthetics at the Kara Heritage Institute aims to include and sustain the idea of the ‘composite African’. Kara takes the position to reinforce community ties while idealizing service to one’s family, community, race, and world. The ‘White Wall’ at Kara Heritage Institute and countless other documents and artifacts reveal this truth. By way of images of Pan-African icons, Kara illustrates its commitment to inclusion and bolstering community ties amongst people of African descent in times, spaces, and places. Inclusion is indeed a major function of structural pedagogy and epistemological reasoning in curriculum development in Pretoria, South Africa. The concluding research question for this dissertation is how does African Centered pedagogy compare in terms of formulation and impact in the US and South Africa? When it comes to impact and correlation of formation, America and South Africa have very similar overlap in several areas of theory and practice. The two (ACE) models have overlap in correlation and relationship rooted in epistemology illustrated by way of; 1) practice as it relates to behavior; 2) agency as it relates to self-esteem; 3) cultural competence as it relates to cultural consciousness. The South African model diverges from the US model of ACE in the function of spiritual transformation as it relates to education and aesthetics. The South African version incorporates spiritual philosophy in its epistemological foundation. For example, the Solar Chapel, and the practice of Karaism, are all manifestations of the practice of sacred science 146 rooted in spiritual enlightenment. The American is rooted in psychological consciousness that may or may not include a rooted spiritual component. Like the American model, the South African model draws its fundamental concepts from ancient Egyptian ideology and makes it applicable to African Centered Education in the present. Kara’s school mission, pedagogical content, and curricular content speaks to placing the lived experiences, histories, and traditions of African heritage peoples at the center of educational analyses. Kara also has implemented what they call the Young Pioneers program, whereby trained African centered young adults develop political and educational tactics and facilitate African centered programs for other youth and young adults in South Africa and the continent. The Young Pioneers program is just another example of how African youth look to engage in the self-conscious act of creating and sustaining culturally relevant education. When it comes to education African people all around the world recognize the value of education and understanding the difference between being educated and being schooled. In both America and South Africa progressive minds called for a culturally relevant pedagogy that created and enhanced a progressive African posture in the wake of apartheid, Jim-Crow, and the Black Power movement. Leonardo (2002) notes that as whiteness becomes globalized, white domination begins to transcend national boundaries (32). Without suggesting the end of nations or their decreased significance for racial theory, multinational whiteness has developed into a formidable global force in its attempt to control and transform into its image almost every nook and cranny of the earth (32). DuBois (1989) noted that American Africans attempting to escape white racism will fail to find a place on earth untouched by the long arms of European colonization (2). Thus, the task and idiosyncrasy were not to flee America or any colonial system or institutional landscape, but rather to change and contest it. 147 Leonardo (2002) postulates that even scholars like Victor, Clarke, Hine, and DuBois have reminded us that whites have stood on someone else’s ground for centuries (33). A pedagogical critique of whiteness must transcend its national articulations and link knowledge of whiteness to global processes of neo-colonial structures whereby separate white nations share common histories of exploitation over white and other non-white peoples. Leonardo (2002) suggests that this is an important educational lesson because students learn that the white diaspora has, to a large extent, created a global condition after its flawed image, a condition that whites are generally ill-equipped to acknowledge or understand (33). Equally, white and students of color understand that a multinational critique of whiteness transcends limitations found in discourses that deal with race exclusively at the national level. Thus, the need for a corrective and healing approach to education. These historic examples are the warrant for the Africanizing of education for both African Americans and South Africans to speak to a greater Pan-African movement and rich discourses between Africa and the Black populations of the Diaspora. Asante (2007) notes that the African community, male and female, continues to be marginalized in the context of culture and economics, just as the African continent continues to be marginalized globally (37). Woodson’s classic book Miss-Education of the Negro revealed the fundamental problems with the education of the African person in America. The human rights and liberal discourse have become central to both the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa and the country’s post-apartheid transformation. Thomas (2008) posits that the current neoliberal economic policy framework constrains policy choices and, in some instances, restricts fair adjudication of rights by the courts (1). The revival of nations of Africa renaissance and indigenous ethnophilosophies and epistemologies, notably Ubuntu, which shares the primacy of human dignity of a rights discourse, offers new perspectives. 148 According to South African M.W Makgoba (1998), Afrocentric education is a processor vehicle for defining, interpreting, promoting, and transmitting African thought, philosophy, identity, and culture. It encompasses an African mindset that permits all sections of African society as they are influenced by an Africanized education apparatus. For many African American children, our educational system is not merely ineffective, it is all too often openly hostile and detrimental. People of African descent have been established all across the world employing early migrations of successive populations of homo sapiens and later by way of the slave trade and self-posed migrations. To some extent, some of the powerful cultural legacies of continental Africa remain in populations in the African diaspora. In Triple Quandary, A. Wade Boykin (1986) provides a summary of West African ethos as Spirituality, Harmony, Movement, Verve/Energy, Affect, Communalism, Expressive Individualism, Oral Tradition, and Social Time Perspective. Boykin’s set of characteristics can be used as a basic “litmus test” of African- centeredness (Foundations of African-centered Education© 2011 Lathardus Goggins II, Ed.D. / Afrocentric.Info). My previous graduate study and work experience have made me aware of the overwhelming connection between Afrocentric pedagogy and the history from which that pedagogy is grounded (Obenga, 1976, Diop, 1976, Smitherman, 2001). People of African descent in the United States and South Africa can only be understood when both the African cultural and Western hemispheric political realities are taken into account together. Of all the problems confronting the African American and Black South African community today, none is more critical to the future than those related to the education of African children which continues to be in a state of emergency in school districts across the nation and abroad. Paulo Freire (1970) in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed contended the normal routine and methods of schooling imposed on the Brazilian peasants, such as grading and control 149 by the teacher, led to passivity and subservience to authority. The pedagogy exemplified by Freire did not help Brazilians become fully human. A tremendous amount of literature has been produced on education based on, research, observation, opinion polls, interviews, and analysis; yet, the standard education system continues to fail many African American children (Billings, 1995; Dragnea, 2008; Ginwright, 2004; Grant, 2008; Hilliard, 1995; Murrell, 2002; Zimmer, 2008). It remains without knowledge of self; liberation cannot be realized. Schools must make a fundamental shift in their focus from the supposed deficiencies of the African child and the alleged inadequacies of African family life to the barriers that stand in the way of academic success posed by the outdated, outmoded Eurocentric system of education and the ineffective methodologies of the instructional process that do not meet the learning needs of children of African descent (METT, 2002). Positionality/Reflexivity I (Clarence) am an African man born in the United States of America, Stockton, California to be exact. I was born into a family where pride and cultural values were stressed. Education was always stressed by my mother who went all the way to the 9th grade, but I believe is one of the smartest people on the planet. My experience with education for the first part of my life was very productive and boring simultaneously. I remember that at home I was taught about Black people around the world and at school, they never if ever talked about ancient African civilizations or the great contributions of Black people to the Americas and the world. I had a good memory of what I was told in those early years of my education say, 1st to about 12th grade. Wow, you say, that was my whole primary and high school experience that lacked a culturally relevant approach to my educational development, which I would like to add took away from my ultimate desire to learn and perform well in school. Don’t get me wrong I was 150 not, not smart I was just not interested in the material outside of arithmetic, reading, and writing proficiently. When I (Clarence) finally got my hands-on books and classes in college that exposed me to the long history of African peoples all over the globe from ancient times to the current I knew then that I had found something for which my heart had been yearning. Africana Studies saved me and my passion for learning and exploring the heights of African contributions to humanity. Therefore, I strongly feel that culture is a strong foundation for students of color in predominately white institutions. I chose to utilize African-centered theorists due to their applications to culturally relevant issues and their recognition of relationships between Black people’s education and schooling in the historical pre-and post-colonial context. Educational institutions have carried out a variety of the task since the time of their genesis. The role educational institutions have carried out through time has always been shaped by the continual socio-political and economic dynamics among nation-states, social groups, and academic oligarchy (Clark, 1983). So, with varying degrees, I am both an insider and an outsider. I am an insider because of my race-ethnicity and cultural background. I am an outsider due to my position as a researcher that seeks to collect data. These things don’t bother me because my job as a product of the Black community is to create solution-orientated research studies that add to the progression of Africana Studies scholarship and applied study. Creswell (2013) explains, “in qualitative research, the inquirer reflects about how their role in the study and their background, culture, and experiences hold for shaping their interpretations, such as the themes they advance and the meaning they ascribe to the data.” (235) 151 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION Within this study, I have determined that culture is a key aspect of mental liberation for people of African descent who suffer from mental Maafa. By way of the ‘composite African’ as discussed in chapter five, we can scaffold a new future that holistically accounts for African heritage practices entrenched in educational models. Having the freedom to express and maintain one’s culture allows students/communities of African descent the ability to enhance their educational experiences. Along the same lines, the data yielded, that the culture of students of African descent should be highlighted and grounded in the educational curriculum for multicultural pluralism and equity. Incorporating one’s culture within the curriculum acknowledges the historical contributions and diverse perspectives ethical diverse groups provide. The African cultural character is neither monolithic nor static. However, even in its historical and geographic formations whether Yoruba or Zulu, African-Brazilian or African- American there is an ontological foundation that remains constant (Asante, 1988; Diop, 1978; Karenga, 1990; Mbiti, 1970; Nobles, 1980; Sofola, 1973; Stuckey, 1987; Warfield Coppock, 1990). That constant is well represented in the ancient Egyptian concept of Maat. Afrocentricity is a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture trans-continentally and trans-generationally. This means that the quality of location is essential to any analysis that involves African culture and behavior whether literary or economic, whether political or cultural. In this regard, it is the crystallization of a critical perspective on facts (Asante, 1998). Asante argues that it remains important that we hold back any reductive misunderstanding of the nature of human interaction and the creation of reality. What is meant by this notion of being “outside” is that Afrocentricity 152 traces its theoretical heritage to African ideas and African authors. Asante (1998) suggested that either African people will escape the intellectual plantation that has paraded as universal or will be stifled in every attempt to express their sense of culture. Ama Mazama explains that Afrocentricity is not merely a worldview nor even a theory as such, but rather it is a paradigm that results in the reconceptualization of the social and historical reality of African people (Mazama, 2003a). Mazama argues that the horrendous situation of Black people in Africa and the Americas, was not just a political and economic crisis, but a crisis of culture, theory, and philosophy. There is a difference, as Mazama explains, between Africanity and Afrocentricity. Africanity refers to the traditions, customs, and values of African people. She argues that “Afrocentricity, within the academic context, will best be understood as a paradigm.” (Mazama, 2003a, 7) She takes the idea of the cognitive and structural elements of a paradigm and applies them to Afrocentricity. Under the cognitive aspect of a paradigm are three constituents: metaphysical, sociological, and exemplary. However, it is impossible Afrocentrically to conceive of a paradigm that would not have a functional aspect and it is clear that “a paradigm must activate our consciousness to be of any use to us.” (Mazama, 2003a, 8) Mazama makes two general scientific advances in the development of theory: (1) she launches the paradigmatic shift in the discourse on Afrocentricity and shows how it is a revolutionary concept for the African world, and (2) Mazama infuses the older ideas of Afrocentricity with a functional, actionable, practical component that energizes the concept. These two achievements are central to an understanding of the Afrocentric idea. Afrocentricity is revolutionary because it casts ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic 153 processes in the context of Black people as subjects and not as objects, basing all knowledge on the authentic interrogation of location. Location is key, to locate a phenom as peripheral or central to the African experience allows the researcher to begin from an orientation that will have meaning for the ultimate analysis of a situation or condition. The Afrocentric method requires scientists to focus on accurate notations and recording of space and time. The value of etymology, that is, the origin of terms and words is in the proper identification and location of concepts. The Afrocentrist seeks to demonstrate clarity by exposing dislocations, decenteredness. One of the simplest ways of accessing textual clarity is through etymology. The Afrocentrist would look to the question of location, control of the hegemonic global economy, marginalization, and power positions as keys to understand the deliberate, assertive, and imperial underdevelopment of African people. Asante (1990) points out that Africology is not to be confused with political science, history, or sociology but is a discipline grounded in the Afrocentric approach to examining human knowledge from an African-centered perspective. Nor is Africology a reverse hegemonic perspective of examining human phenomena. As well as the approach of understanding African phenomena using alternative research tools of content analysis to measure culture and the retention and survival of culture under the scope of Africology. Thus, this is not a monolithic module for measuring African phenomena, but it is an alternative model. An appropriate paradigm for Africology must also combine self-knowledge and self-realization with social action. Africology must move its boundaries beyond the borders of academia and begin to register a concerted impact on the broader community. Asante's (2017) latest work, Revolutionary Pedagogy, is new research that I look to expand on with two international case studies. This approach will allow the primary researcher to 154 investigate the theoretical framework of Revolutionary pedagogy and its real-time outcomes. Asante's outline for the future of education is very profound. This work is also key and important in exploring what is the future of convergence in the development of new and evolving pedagogical practices. The concept of a Revolutionary pedagogy is the latest concept to hit the academic market. Asante (2017) posits that a Revolutionary pedagogy will require different ways of thinking and maybe even different structural components to the school setting (7). Educators must be bold enough to look at the way children and adults learn and then implement the kind of apparatus that would capture that learning style and interest thus peeking behind the educational veil. Everything that has to do with the school is pedagogy. Asante suggests that the purpose of education for the Revolutionary pedagogies is to prepare students to live in an interconnected global world with personal dignity and respect for all other people as human beings with the same privileges that one seeks for oneself while preserving the earth for those who will come afterward. A South Africa study of African-centered pedagogies continues the work informed by the works of decolonizing African nationalist scholars and practitioners, including Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Steve Biko, and Kwame Nkrumah to name a few whom all have written important discourses that could be characterized as African-centered education. Nonetheless, in a post-nationalist African global era, it is South Africa in the continent that is embarking upon the most exciting African-centered research, particularly through the country’s current Africanizing the curriculum movement and the country’s post- Apartheid Ubuntu education initiatives. Indeed, in 2009, Molefi Asante wrote that it is particularly important that education officials in South Africa raise the fundamental questions of 155 culture, perspective, worldview, and interpretation in the discussion of facts (Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric South African University, 2009). The South African case study is an original contribution to previous studies of African Centered Pedagogy/Education given the nascent emergence of re-Africanizing education processes in the country. My research in South Africa is unique because it is the first case study looking at the effectiveness of African-Centered Education abroad as it relates to Pan Africanis and modes of culturally relevant pedagogy. The Kara Heritage Institute school chair and principal, Dr. Mathole Motshekga follows an ancient Afro-centric philosophical religious ideology called Karaism, the people of light claiming that humanity began somewhere in the Great Lakes region which is a source of African knowledge, culture, and history. My work is unique and looks to add to the fabric of Africana Studies and applied research. The self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education is a very important discussion to have when one seeks a greater understanding between the experiences of education liberation in both the Black American and Black South African struggles. My work looks to highlight how both groups foster Independent Black institutions to develop and sustain liberation movements. In the context of the growing movement to Africanize the South African university, my inquiry in African American and African Studies research study in Africa surveys pleas for the usage of African centered education to reinvigorate the production of knowledge in Africa for the importance of the people in Africa. Affirming what Cheikh Anta Diop argued in the Cultural Unity of Black Africa; Black people have a global connection via worldview and deep structural cultural roots. As opposed to surface cultural behavior, which is subject to external change, deep structural cultural roots stand the test of time. History has revealed that when African people are passionate and focused on the 156 same thing that anything can be accomplished. The self-conscious act of creating culturally relevant education models and sustainable institutions has been a tent pole for the realization of African agency on the continent and the diaspora. South African Blacks have been on the move as well with fostering dynamic African centered models that look to secure the complete liberation of Black South Africa in the post- Apartheid era. The Kara Heritage Institute is an example of a dynamic African centered school that looks to utilize the Africanization of the curriculum, fostering multiple courses for primary and high school students. The Kara Heritage School offers education in African culture and history, life skills and communal life, entrepreneurial development, indigenous knowledge systems, and indigenous cultural heritage. The Kara Heritage Institute Community Development Program educates communities in the likes of indigenous cultural heritage and African tradition while training them in numerous other skills. 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