Decolonised Literature Approach (DLA)

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The approach says if you use colonial literature to try to understand situations, then that is a flawed process. The narrative below by Professor Bagele Chilisa, who writes on indigenous research is very informative.

One of the first research projects I was involved in was on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the education system. I found myself doing research partnered with some people from the UK who were providing the funds. The person who called himself the ‘principal investigator’ came up with a review of literature. This review of literature was about how the pandemic was getting worse because according to the report, the Batswana love sex and so on and so on. It had all the stereotypes you could imagine. I said to him, ‘Oh my god, I’m a part of this research and people are going to read this’. I said, ‘When you are talking about “Botswana”, you are talking about me. All these stereotypes you are citing from the literature, it’s about me, I can’t possibly write about myself in that manner’. In response he said, ‘No, no, no … this is what is in the literature. We are going to cite verbatim from the literature. We cannot ignore the literature’. This was my starting point. I saw how mainstream Western research was describing us in Botswana, how the problem of HIV/AIDS was being portrayed. From that day on, I said to myself, there has to be other ways of doing research! I started thinking hard about how I could be involved in research that would describe people in a manner that they would recognise themselves.

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