Day One TOFAC, PRETORIA 2015
The 2015 edition of the Toyin Falola International Conference (TOFAC) started today 2nd July 2015 at the Senate Hall of the University of South Africa. The conference, which draws participants from Africa, the Americas, Europe and Asia, began with an Opening and Welcome address by the Chairman of the TOFAC Board, Professor Ademola Dasylva (represented) and the Chairman of the Conference Organizing Committee, Dr. Siphamandla Zondi. A battery of scholars – Ms Geraldine Frazer-Moleketi, AfDB, Special Envoy on Gender and Professor Babatunde Babawale, the Dean of Student Affairs, University of Lagos and Dr. Ebrima Sall, Executive Secretary, CODESRIA - who spoke extensive and eloquently on the theme of the TOFAC 2015 – African Renaissance and Pan-Africanism: Epistemologies of the South, New Leadership Paradigms and African Futures.
Professor Patricia McFadden, like other speakers sonorously treated audience to a speech, which brought out the inglorious ways through which many African patriots, most especially Patrice Lumumba, Frantz Fanon, etc. were treated, destroyed, and killed in their battle to assert and re-assert Africa's fundamental realities. Ebrima Sall, in his characteristic gentle but pungent delivery, spoke truth to power by challenging some of the popular notions on Pan-Africanism while Babatunde Babawale took participants through the dynamics of leadership and its implications across the African continent.
Common to all the keynote speeches was the emphases on the need for Africans and Africa to rediscover itself and design an alternative future devoid of previous colonial impositions; deploy their productive capabilities in the services of Africa and Africans; and raise leadership to accountability and transparency in order to engender creditable followership; truly develop Africa and stop paying lip services to development; reawaken the African personality in all of us in order to bring something to the table so as not to be part of the menu in the world's dinner table, etc.
Professor Molefi Kete Asante talked eloquently about re-inventing Africa, even in a provocative but true way. He challenged the notion of the "epistemology of the South" as validating Eurocentric epistemology as superior while under-asserting African and Africa's contributions to knowledge. The "epistemology of the South", as he argued, is the production, validation and transmission of Euro-American views and beliefs about knowledge and what constitutes knowledge. This, as he illustrated with many pungent examples, essentially left out Africa. Africa must recognize and the narcissism of the west in knowledge production and that the West cannot remain a standard for Africa, as this, over the years, has introduced intense form of oppression and suppression in world history. In addition to these, Molefi also demanded that Africans and Africa cannot remain under those who define it and its people as problems. He concluded that Africans have to confront the universalism of Euro-American knowledge and replace them with African alternatives. Africans should also delink with Euro-American logic, which view Africans and Africa as problems and assert African voices in knowledge production and dissemination.
Professor Catherine Odora-Hoppers of UNISA, talking on "Grounding the Discourse on Epistemologies, Leadership Paradigms and Citizens in Africa", asserted the importance of situating knowledge production and dissemination within cultural and epistemic realities of Africa. As currently is, African institutions are frozen in their conceptualization of development as largely driven by science and technology; however leaving the thinking being in limbo.
Following the Lunch Break, participants break into 5 panels where a total of 60 academic papers on African Renaissance and Pan-Africanism were presented.
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