An Afrocentric Exploration of the Nexus Between Sebola's Politricks of Scholarship and [South] Africa's Politics of the Doctoral Project

This article engages with Mokoko Piet Sebola's article titled "Peer review, scholarship and editors of scientific publications: The death of scientific knowledge in Africa". In this article, which uses the Doctoral Project in South Africa as a test case, I employ Afrocentricity as a theoretical and contextual lens to tease out deficient scholarly assertions in Sebola's article, which constitute fundamental contradictions inherent in South Africa's academic landscape. In this regard, the central objective of this article is to explore the relationship between Sebola's politricks of scholarship and [South] Africa's politics of the Doctoral Project. At the centre of the thesis of this article, which is based on qualitative materials, I argue that while Sebola's article is valuable to a limited extent, it masks his contribution (directly, complicitly, individually and collectively) to the quasi-death of serious scientific knowledge in Africa, particularly in South Africa.