In this article the author relates the crisis of African universities to their idiosyncratic birth during the colonial period. The African universities were, to a large extent, conceptualized according to the Western template and its inherent epistemology This Western university originates from a local knowledge system that gained a hegemonic position culminating in the colonial period. The author argues for another conceptualization of African universities, based on a diversity of knowledge systems, and refers to processes of (re-)appropriation as seen in the domain of African Independent Churches.