Professor Extraordinarius: Nkiru Nzegwu challenges the foundations of knowledge

At Binghamton University, Nkiru Nzegwu is a SUNY distinguished professor of Africana studies. In South Africa, you can call her “professor extraordinarius.”

This summer, she received a three-year appointment to the professor extraordinarius position in the School of Transdisciplinary Research and Graduate Studies at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Think of it as UNISA’s equivalent to the title of distinguished professor in the State University of New York system, Nzegwu explained.

In May 2019, she was invited by UNISA’s principal and vice-chancellor to give the second keynote lecture for UNISA’s African Intellectual Project, engage with various colleges within the university and meet with UNISA Council members and senior management.

Her university-wide lecture, “’The Proper African Woman’: Omumu, Disassembling Subordination & Reasserting Endogenous Power,” centered on African philosophy. That keynote talk and the series of other lectures she gave at UNISA’s colleges addressed the complex existential and philosophical concerns of decolonizing knowledge, dismantling structures of racism in academia, uprooting the Apartheid ideology of white supremacy, and integrating African history and concepts into scholarship.

Being invited to speak abroad isn’t unusual for Nzegwu. Over the years, she founded several journals including the Journal on African Philosophy, as well as the Africa Knowledge Project, an internet initiative that publishes and distributes peer-reviewed journals and databases.

“I am on the road a lot of the time. I receive invitations to give keynote lectures, and to participate in workshops that define new areas of academic interest,” she explained. “It’s the trajectory of my work; it’s disruptive of the conceptual assumptions in the field of knowledge.”

She is not on the road this summer, due to the pandemic; previously scheduled talks in Germany and Washington, D.C., were postponed. Instead, she is currently working on several books.

Whose knowledge matters?

UNISA is the largest university of its type on the African continent and among the largest in the world, with more than 400,000 students from 130 countries. Headquartered in Pretoria, it has seven regional centers, various colleges and institutes, as well as a distance education program.

During Nzegwu’s two-week stay, she gave lectures to faculty at UNISA’s colleges of law, human sciences, education, engineering, economics and management, accounting, agriculture and business leadership, as well as the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, the Gender Institute and the Women’s Forum. While in South Africa, she also participated in interviews with a radio station and professional groups.

A philosopher by training, Nzegwu’s work centers on epistemology, the study of knowledge itself. The questions it asks challenge our assumptions and lay bare the hidden cultural judgments at the core of academic inquiry: Whose definition of “knowledge” have we followed? Whose voices matter and whose are ignored, or considered inferior?

By seeing these hidden structures, we become aware of them — and can choose to structure our knowledge differently, including different voices and cultural concepts in the equation.

Western values and social norms, she pointed out, are usually considered universal, but they’re not. Rather, they are products of a particular culture with particular values, and are all too often used to stigmatize other societies with different values.

If you look at its origins, South Africa’s university system was founded on white supremacy and a white value system. And while Apartheid officially ended decades ago, the underpinnings of that ideology still exist — an ideology that says the Black South Africans who attend class there don’t have a history or knowledge that matters.

Consider, for example, one of the topics she addressed in South Africa: the law. The field itself tends to limit study to statutes and cases, rather than the assumptions behind the law and the way laws are structured to support a particular social order. You can see that in American laws as well as they pertain to the treatment of African Americans, she said. Before the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, the U.S. Constitution — a blueprint that embodies the nation’s social vision — had a definite racial construct in mind for the words “We the People.” It is still struggling to transcend that vision, she said.

“Philosophers oftentimes invest a lot of emotion in the words of people from the past and they take their eye off the current and the living,” she said. “I keep my eye on the current and the living.”