Dr. Ramadimetja Mogale, in her presentation during the launch of Thabo Mbeki Foundation she addressed her internal conflict as an African woman who left the continent with hope of gaining knowledge at large North American university said: “I am faced with the dilemma of acquiring knowledge of Western origins as part of a doctoral program in nursing even though I possess unique knowledge.
I am interrogating the ontological and epistemological stances regarding nursing practices in Africa as my professional identity vis-à-vis my African heritage. I delibate on the development of nursing knowledge which helped me to re-(membered) about my African ways of knowing and learning despite beings deemed unscientific.”
In her presentation she answered the following questions: “Is my African knowledge considered as knowledge by the West’, “can I reflect out loud (Crus, 2008) about African knowledge? And ‘Why do Africans keep audibly silent about the knowledge they have?” And she made a conclusion statement: “As African scholars and researchers, we must not turn ourselves into the model researchers and scholars described and prescribed by the West.
This will take us backward in the era where we were pariahs in our land of birth. We can succeed if we confront our fears and doubts that polite methods which the African scholars and researcher are using have little effect. We can succeed if we don’t adopt a policy of yielding to oppression in our research and scholarship. Therefore no congregation other than this one will free our children, their children and their children’s children from oppressed scholarship and educations practices.”
