Conclusion
I have argued that decolonizing tertiary education in a manner that accords with pursuing the future as a cultural fact would work to remedy the moral wrong of preventing people from charting their own futures, and indicated how an index can be fashioned to achieve that goal. The ethical force of defining the ends of one’s future, and owning the ability to construct such ends, inheres in the belief that such agency is a ‘fundamental human right of decisional representation’ (Wiredu 1996: 180). Affording persons and societies such a right should be considered intrinsically morally desirable. However, a question arises in urging such agency: which futures should students of African tertiary institutions be interested in promoting? Is it their own futures or those of their societies? Students and graduates of tertiary institutions have personal projects and ambitions which, as indicated earlier, provide reasons for their pursuit of university education. It is reasonable to suppose, moreover, that the opportunities they expect education to provide for them to pursue such life projects may be radically different, or even at cross-purposes, with opportunities making for desirable futurity for a cultural group – the object of my interpretation of Apparudai’s idea of the future as a cultural fact. Might it not be unfair to expect people to work exclusively toward this cultural goal if this latter goal does not naturally coalesce with opportunities for their individual futures? Such an expectation would, surely, subvert their right of decisional representation which my inclinations in this chapter consider as indispensable means to a morally valuable end. Therefore, the question of what a fair expectation of beneficiaries of conceptual decolonization education would be remains to be answered.
My claim that conceptual decolonization is capable of remedying existing moral wrongs of colonization asserts more than the right of decisional representation being an expedient resource for a personal end. The moral solution that I advocate enjoins individuals to take responsibility for constructing desirable futures for their societies. Here, the emphasis tilts less on an individual’s right to choose exclusively for her self-interest, and more on activating her moral agency to fulfil her obligation to contribute to her community’s progress. My position accepts that morally worthy individual ends may coincide with, and be realized at the cost of, community goals. But when such a conflict occurs, commitment to the future as a cultural fact prescribes that an individual’s advancement be consonant with the good of the social future. To be sure, this position does not require decolonial education to lead its beneficiaries to choose communal futures that are detrimental to their personal projects. Decolonized education for a future as a cultural fact can be elastic enough to avoid making individual ends cogs in the wheel of some immutable historical process that impairs personal goals.
1 ‘African socialism’, espoused by Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere etc., in the early days of political independence, has been perceived by several scholars as having tilted in this direction of social goals subverting individual ones.Theoretically, therefore, the enactment of the decolonization index emphasizes the kind of agency promoted in Gyekye’s moderate communitarian political framework. This admits individual goals as essential elements of socially transformative processes, subject to the goal-chasers observing the minimum ethical threshold of not exploiting the communal pool of goods for the sake of realizing their individual projects. Particularly, the enactment process must take cognizance of Gyekye’s notion of ‘the common good’, defined as ‘the social conditions that will enable each individual to function satisfactorily in a human society’ (Gyekye 1997: 64), and its prohibition of social processes and ends that cultivate a ‘cramped and shackled self-responding robotically to the ways and demands of the communal structure’(Gyekye 1997: 55–6). Thus, in Gyekye’s framework, morally worthy action toward the future as a cultural fact is that performed by an individual conscience imbued with communal ideals. On this view, motivation for contributing to building a common future stems from a personal sense of responsibility rather than a historical imperative.
Without doubt, an essential component of a mindset geared toward constructing the future as a cultural fact, and one capable of competing in global academic culture, must be confidence in highlighting what one’s society’s intellectual legacy can contribute to global culture. Hence a decolonized curriculum, conducted in the manner and for the purposes I have outlined, can contribute valuable additions to human thought and practice. Beneficiaries of such curricula, confident in how polished knowledge and values from their cultural histories can offer a viable guide to policy for national and international governance, are likely to contribute theoretical directions that do not mimic but attract the admiration of global scholarship.