African women leaders in universities: Using memory in the establishment of leadership practices

The higher education landscape in South Africa is framed by a multiplicity of tension and contestations and rooted in gender and racial tensions - amongst others. Fundamental to these tensions is how institutional cultures were established to exclude and create bodies that do not belong. African women, in particular, join the university space against this history of exclusion through the analysis of literature and narratives obtained through one-on-one interviews with five African women leaders. This chapter considers how history curates our collective memory and, in so doing, creates mistrust of what is not documented as part of history. In other words, history by Western epistemology places African women as bodies without (pre-existing) knowledge in the idea of the university, which is contradictory to how African epistemology places women as central to the knowledge-making system.