African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure (Aug 2019)
Infusion of indigenous knowledge into the teaching of ecotourism entrepreneurship.
Abstract
The discourse on homegrown knowledge has provoked a debate of larger-than-life proportions across the world over many years since the demise of colonialism. In Africa, especially in the sub-Saharan region, while the purportedly indigenous communities have always found worth in their own local forms of knowledge, the colonial administrations viewed indigenous knowledge as being unempirical, irrational, anti-developmental, and unchristian. The standing and status of indigenous knowledge has been transformed since the1997 Global Knowledge Conference in Toronto, which emphasised the pressing need to learn, preserve, and exchange indigenous knowledge. Student protests have been proliferating across South African universities since 2015 with students calling for free, quality, diverse and transformative decolonised education based on inter alia, indigenous African knowledge systems. This movement is not peculiar to Africa. It has reverberated to other parts of the globe such as New Zealand, England, Scotland, the USA and others, where students demand the removal of ‘dead white men’ from their curricula and call for the incorporation of indigenous and postcolonial thoughts and knowledge bases. This is not to say that best practices in curriculum creation from other parts of the globe should be ignored in entirety, but rather that African knowledge should be afforded its needed space. While the movement was initiated by academics decades ago, the actual transformation has been slow, because the minds of academics and physical spaces were conquered by the myths of superiority of whiteness and defeatist attempts of trying to dismantle the colonisers’ structures using the same tools colonialists used to build the current structures. While the students are not sure what decolonisation of the curricula would entail, they know that they want universities to be relevant spaces of equal opportunities where they do not feel alienated from themselves and what is African in essence. The design used in this study was a cross-sectional case study where an isangoma (traditional healer who uses long-established methods passed down from one healer to another to treat an ailing person suffering from various illnesses, some of which have a psychological basis) conducted a lecture on her trade as an ancestral gift and source of livelihood. This lecture demonstrated that education and indigenous knowledge (IK) can indeed coexist in a modern and technological harmonious lecture room. A group of 118 second year ecotourism students attended the lecture and then completed a questionnaire soliciting their thoughts about the lecture and the infusion of IK into their curriculum. The study found that while the majority of them were skeptical at the beginning, they felt that they learnt a great deal about ubungoma (traditional healing) as a gift from the ancestors and that the lecture had cleared misconceptions and made them proud of their southern African culture.
