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News - Date: 05 October 2007
The University of Venda (Univen) hosted the annual Southern African Folklore Society Regional Conference and Annual General Meeting last week.
The four-day function took place at Mambedi Lodge, near Levubu. The conference attracted delegates from as far as Botswana and Uganda.
When welcoming guests, the registrar of the University of Venda, Mr Khuliso Nemadzivhanani, said Univen was proud to host such a high-calibre regional conference. He applauded the delegates for putting everything aside to take part in the conference and the annual general meeting. He further encouraged them to participate fully in the deliberations, so that the resolutions can be used to build the society.
The director and chairperson of the Centre for African Renaissance Studies at UNISA, Prof Shadrack BO Gutto, officially opened the conference. He said the intellectuals who want to work for the building of a new Africa must first take into account that the bulk of African knowledge has been falsified or distorted by history. He added that it is now difficult to create new knowledge because the people’s minds are occupied by the distorted knowledge.
"It is important to know that mathematics, science and architecture originated in Africa. Those who wrote the history borrowed our knowledge and ended up westernizing our history. We have to know that it is not necessarily true that all good things originated from Europe. We also have a lot of good things that we have invented here but they are not written anywhere."
Gutto said it is disturbing to learn that history refers to the Europeans as God’s chosen people. "This makes Africans feel inferior and it destroys our self-image. We were all created in the image of God and there is no one more important than the other. We only have to connect Africa with Africans to build a new Africa. We also have the right to claim the fair share of the wealth we made in this country. There is also a need to reorganize how people are taught at universities because they are only educating people, not problem solvers. The graduates must be able to move from one job to another. We must make use of the elders as references. They do not have educational certificates but they are custodians of African culture and knowledge."
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