Trailer: Decolonizing Education

Decolonizing Education: 'In My Own Tongue'

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:11:00 GMT

In 1890, colonized communities in Zimbabwe sang a song called Chemutengure —

a simple tune about an ox-cart, coded with resistance to a new order arriving on their

land. More than a century later, a Zimbabwean storyteller sat down to write his doctoral

thesis about that song. And he made a decision that would make academic history:

he wrote it entirely in Shona. Not translated into Shona. Not summarised in Shona.

Written in Shona — from the first page to the last — at a South African university, in a system

built almost entirely around English.

In this episode, the story of Dr Ignatius Mabasa.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:14:23 GMT

The word decolonize gets used a lot. But what does it actually mean — in the

classroom, in the curriculum, in the lives of African students?

Decolonizing Education is a new limited series from the African Studies Department

at Penn State University, bringing together first-person testimonies, interviews, and

honest conversations about knowledge, power, and belonging.

Subscribe now.

The conversation starts here.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:43:44 GMT

A child walks into a classroom fluent in the language of their grandmother's stories.

By the time they walk out, they've learned that their language doesn't belong on the

page. That the words for love, for grief, for justice that they grew up with aren't the

words that count.

This happens across the continent, in numerous languages, but it's strikingly the

same story — in Harare, in Lagos, in Kampala, in Lomé.

In this episode, what does it cost — and what does it make possible — to be

educated in a colonial language?