{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02320783909231563, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0041258380608561115, 'mean_word_length': 5.006191950464396, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Re-membering my ways of knowing and learning while ‘learning otherwise’

ABSTRACT This article addresses the writer's internal conflict as an African woman who left the great continent in the hope of gaining knowledge at a large North-American university. The writer is faced with the dilemma of acquiring knowledge of Western origins as part of a doctoral programme in nursing, which rarely and scantly acknowledges that the writer, too, possesses unique knowledge. This dilemma has made the writer wonder about the ontological and epistemological stances regarding nursing practice in Africa, which forms the writer's professional identity, in the context of an African heritage. This is a deliberation on the development of nursing knowledge which has guided the writer's re-(membering) of African ways of knowing and learning, despite it being deemed ‘unscientific’. The presentation answers four questions: 1. Can the writer reflect out loud (Cruz 2008) about African knowledge in the context of Western academia? 2. Why do Africans keep audibly silent about the knowledge they have? 3. Is the writer's African knowledge considered knowledge by the West? 4. Is Western knowledge relevant to the writer, as an African, or is it relevant for her nursing practice? As an African scholar and researcher, the writer strongly believes we must not turn ourselves into the model researchers and scholars described and prescribed by the West. This will take us backward to the era where we were made pariahs in the land of our birth. We can succeed if we confront our fears and doubts that the polite methods which African scholars and researchers use have little effect. We can succeed if we do not 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 educational practices.