The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education (UNESCO, 1994) reaffirmed the fundamental right to education of everyone as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948). It renewed the pledge of the World Conference on EFA (Jomtien, 1990) to safeguard the rights of all irrespective of individual differences. Consequently, the world shifted in paradigm from exclusive to Inclusive Education. Civil rights movements as expressed in various international human rights instruments including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) and the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2006) propels the global impetus for Inclusive Education (De Boer & Simpson, 2009; Majoko, 2017). Inclusive Education champions the human rights and social justice agenda (Eldar, Talmor & Wolf-Zukerman, 2010; Majoko, 2016; Phasha, 2016; Symes & Humphrey, 2010, 2016). Access, participation, acceptance and success of all learners including those with autism in ordinary education underpin Inclusive Education. Worldwide, inclusion in education is the best option of service delivery in education (Humphrey & Lewis, 2008; Leach & Duffy, 2009; McGillicuddy & O’Donnell, 2013). Inclusive Education is a catalyst for elimination of societal discriminatory attitudes towards persons with disabilities including autism.

Although Inclusive Education is popularly perceived as a western philosophy, it is embedded in Afrocentricity. According to Phasha (2016), Inclusive Education is not a foreign phenomenon in Africa because of the embedded-ness of its practices and ideals in the lives of Africans. The alignment of the principles and values of Inclusive Education with the principles and values of African theories reveals that it is not an exclusively western fundamental pedagogical innovation of aspiration and contention of the century (Phasha, 2016). Terms such as “primitive, backward, archaic, outdated, pagan and/or barbaric” (Ocholla, 2007:239) were employed to keep other ways of knowing at the margins because the European epistemology had hegemony over African epistemology (Phasha, 2016; Van Wyk, 2014). An Afrocentric perspective of Inclusive Education is entrenched in theories originated in the African continent including Ubuntu, Africanisation and Indigenous Knowledge instead of imported from elsewhere, as is the case with Eurocentric theories (Anderson, 2012; Sotuku & Duku, 2014).