To ‘train’ or to ‘educate’ for doctoral work? – that is the question: A review of Doctoral Training and Higher Education in Africa

Abstract

Doctoral Training and Higher Education in Africa is both timely and essential for a transforming and decolonising higher education. A combination of an ageing professoriate and a growing number of younger, newer and less experienced academics entering academia in Africa 1 make this book even more critical. Its deliberateness in offering varying insights on doctoral training from across Africa enables the reader access to unique discourses and practices that guide doctoral support in ways that other similar publications on the subject have not. The timeliness of the book also lies in its contribution to the role higher education needs to play in economic development. Africa is a context in which, more than before, higher education can be said to be increasingly becoming one of the hopes for ensuring economic development, innovation and the necessary socio-political advancement for society at large. 2 Doctoral work is certainly critical in the context of such imperatives, for it is through it that an informed knowledge base equipped to tackle local and global challenges could be found. The book is also critical as a political project. As some will rightly argue, disguised in neo-liberal discourses such as globalisation and/or internationalisation, former colonisers seem to have managed to control, and in some sense shape, higher education on the African continent. 3 Calls for Africans to take back knowledge domains, redefine and locate them within the local have been deafening. 4 In some respects, this book represents a response to such calls. Focusing on what it calls doctoral training, the book engages with the subject matter in ways that fit distinctly African needs and contexts, thereby revitalising African higher education. One of the aspects that seems to have received cursory attention in the book, despite the attention it has attracted in the recent past, is the need to continue to deconstruct what it means to generate knowledge in a transforming and decolonialising higher education context. 5 More specifically, given the subject of the book, it would have benefitted a reader to be exposed to an extended discussion on the possible implications for doctoral supervision of a candidate whose work needs to be locally responsive, while globally relevant. There is urgency for