KARACHI - Habib University’s third Postcolonial Higher Education Conference highlights the specific historical and educational challenges of the postcolonial world, under the theme, ‘The Inheritance of Injustice’. 

This year conference includes top global academics from South Asia, Africa, the US and UK, including the economist Dr Mwangiwa Githinji from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, whose keynote speech addressed the question of a just postcolonial development.  Professor Githinji explored the ways in which “inherited economic, social, language and ecological structures transmitted colonial injustice into the present.” He further highlighted how the transmission of injustice and the structure of the economy led to the “failure to improve the well-being of the vast majority of the population.” He continued to say that today, “Development still is understood in a deficit model based on dualities with the aim to move countries to be more alike the ‘modern’ and ‘industrialized’ world” and called for “development as constantly expanding along multiple vectors that requires radical inclusion”.

Education systems also need to break out of their post-colonial inheritance to indigenizing systems in which “language is a library of ideas that allows us to create our own histories.”