Introduction

For many decades, Africa has been a central figure in scholarly discussions in various disciplines. We can map out different trends in the study of Africa, including the euphoria that came with the post-independent Africa in the 1960s, the neoliberal structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the 1980s that resulted in austerity-oriented reforms in higher education, the Africa-as-the-hopeless-continent trend in the early 2000s spearheaded by the popular article by The Economist and the current Africa-rising narrative. All these trends, which intersect with various global crises, have contributed to the growing interest in studying and teaching about this rather complex continent (Mamdani, 1993; Rutazibwa, 2018; Wallerstein, 1983; Zeleza, 1997). It is also notable that the notion and practice of decolonization in Africa have meant different things during these multiple eras. One can further point to the emergence of African Studies centers, academic associations, and journals that have privileged the production and dissemination of knowledge about the continent (Allman, 2019; Branch, 2018; Grosz-Ngaté, 2020).

Decades ago, some theorists established the link between economic/political imperialism and epistemic issues (see Ake, 1982; Mazrui, 1992; Mbembe, 2001). This is important in recognizing that knowledge is both political and social power, and whoever maintains control over the dissemination of such knowledge determines the narratives that are shared about the subjects (or countries) of study (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2012). In other words, the hegemony of the west in the broader global political economy mirrors the hegemony over knowledge production. As Branch (2018) notes, for instance, the powerful institutional structures that underpin knowledge production point to how we can examine the role of the twenty-first-century African Studies centers in Europe and elsewhere as part of the decolonization agenda or not. In fact, recent research has pointed to how initiatives to transform elite institutions where white privilege resides continue to center these same institutions as the ultimate echelon of knowledge (Coetzee, 2022). This implies that not all actions that are supposedly associated with the decolonial turn are truly serving the purpose of decolonization (Moosavi, 2020, 2023).

While many universities in postcolonial Africa have proclaimed intentions around the decolonization of higher education on the continent, the reality points to several challenges in Africanizing the curricula, pedagogical structures, and epistemologies (Andrews & Okpanachi, 2012; Assié-Lumumba, 2016, 2017; Mbembe, 2016; Nyamnjoh, 2019; Zeleza & Olukoshi, 2004). This explains how complex the work of decolonization is—especially as it entails both resistance to and intentional undoing (i.e., dismantling and unlearning) of hegemonic discourses, practices, institutions, and structures (see Kessi et al., 2020). Yet, it is a project that must be undertaken as part of efforts to unpack the manufacturing of Africa in the curricula of African Studies and other cognate disciplines, its empirical uptake in research as a subject of study, and the subsequent reproduction of certain ‘truths’ about the continent.

A discussion of critical pedagogy is inherently political, and so is the notion of decolonization itself (Sondarjee & Andrews, 2023; Tuck & Yang, 2012). This volume assembles the critical perspectives of scholars engaged in African Studies and other cognate disciplines (e.g., International Studies, Sociology, and Development Studies) who are located in African academic institutions and those located in North America. This cross-geographical specification is instructive since things that are said and written about Africa have historically excluded people whose daily lives and work intersect with such characterizations of the continent. It is also important to recognize how one’s positionality as an ‘outsider’ or ‘insider’ contributes to one’s approach to teaching and researching Africa. The goal is that, by assembling these varying insider–outsider and home-diaspora perspectives, the volume can contribute to a re-imagination and possible decentering of the Eurocentric pedagogical and research practices that inform entrenched narratives about Africa and African agency.

It is no doubt that Africa’s decolonial knowledge production project remains important, especially given the persistent epistemic injustice that has been foreshadowed by the continent’s deep colonial heritage (Crawford et al., 2021; Fanon, 1961 [2004]; Mbembe, 2021; Mudimbe, 1988; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, 2020, 2021; wa Thiong’o, 1992). Scholars like Walter Mignolo believe the decolonial agenda is possible “within academia through courses, seminars, workshops, mentoring students and working with colleagues who have the same conviction” (2013: 137). By focusing specifically on the perspectives of scholars with similar decolonial convictions, this book contributes to the movement in ways that help us as a collective to both challenge persistent oppressive structures and imagine possible futures where Black agency is neither marginalized nor stereotyped. The rest of this introductory chapter interrogates aspects of the scholarly debates on decolonization and the decolonial project within the context of knowledge creation and dissemination to help situate the respective contributions to the volume.

What’s at Stake in Re-Storying African (Studies) Pedagogies?

The reason being that the colonized intellectual has thrown himself headlong into western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating their new family environment once their psyche has formed a minimum core of reassurance, the colonized intellectual will endeavour to make European culture his own. Not content with knowing Rabelais or Diderot, Shakespeare or Edgar Allen Poe, he will stretch his mind until he identified with them completely. (Fanon, 1961 [2004]: 156)

The above observations by Frantz Fanon strike a nerve because many of us who have contributed to this volume operate within a western or westernized system although we may not readily admit to being completely absorbed by the culture. The role and positionality of the colonized intellectual is crucial to understanding both the possibilities and challenges of re-storying. Fanon could not have been more direct in pointing out what would be involved in getting African intellectuals to begin operating outside the colonial frame—a system they have been adopted into. For the two of us who had education in places like Ghana, South Africa, and Canada, we are somehow implicated in the western culture critique despite our best efforts to resist. What becomes necessary, then, is a detangling of our pedagogies from the status quo in ways that allow us to go beyond the single story of Africa and Africans (Adichie, 2009). In fact, Mbembe (2001: 241) has shown that “the order of truth in which Africa is situated is not unequivocal … Its reality includes several propositions that are, in one place, opposed or congruent, and, in another, parallel and perpendicular.” Instead of the pervasive nature of single stories that surround the study of Africa, Mbembe’s complex understanding of the continent and its peoples should inform a re-storying that is not unidirectional.

In her 2018 presidential address at the 61st Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA), which is arguably the largest professional organization for scholars who research and teach about Africa, Professor Jean Allman did not hold back in calling out the Association’s first presidential address by Professor Melville J. Herskovits in 1958 (Allman, 2019). The Herskovits address set the tone for African Studies in North America (if not the rest of the western world) by entrenching white privilege and reforming the field along a more positivist American format of scholarship and knowledge production, partly captured in the following remarks: “… because we are from a country that has no territorial commitments in Africa, we come easily by a certain physical and psychological distance from the problems we study …” (qtd. in Allman, 2019: 8). African Studies in the west has historically been informed by white superiority, American-style scientific objectivity and neutrality—a series of institutional standards which seem to justify the exclusion of non-white scholars, and especially those whose perspectives do not measure up to the American metric of quality or rigor. Allman (2019) obviously presents us with a problematic history of the field, explaining how decisions made by Herskovits facilitated the development of an ‘Africanist enterprise’ that excluded Black scholars and privileged White scholars. Thanks to the expressions of resistance at the 1968 annual meeting in Los Angeles and afterward that led to the realization that the Association was not serving the needs of Black people, ASA leadership and membership today are obviously more diverse than the 1960s (Allman, 2019). Yet, this diversity has not resulted in the systemic overhaul needed to centralize the contributions and perspectives of African scholars.

The Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall Movements in South Africa underscore the continued contribution of Africa to decolonization scholarship and the decolonial project globally (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021). What transpired in South Africa has resonance with other higher education campaigns in the UK like Rhodes Must Fall Oxford and Why Is My Curricula So White, which challenge the persistence of Eurocentrism within knowledge production and the blatant absence of diversity among the professoriate as well as on reading lists and general course content (Andrews, 2022; Coetzee, 2022; Nyamnjoh, 2022; Swartz et al., 2020). These campaigns contribute to placing Allman’s ASA presidential address into a broader perspective, which underscores why her predecessor also chose to focus her 2019 presidential address on the themes of knowledge and power, epistemic decolonization, and African self-determination (Grosz-Ngaté, 2020). Despite the buzz that such discussions have received in recent years, however, the issue of epistemic imperialism prevails as noted above. This volume, therefore, seeks to further reveal its influence on African Studies and highlight the necessity of countering such a hegemonic system.

Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire’s (1972), seminal book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is quite instructive in understanding what is at stake in a re-storying that has direct decolonial ramifications. Freire (1972) differentiates pedagogical design into ‘bank deposit education’ and ‘problem posing education.’ The former sees students as passive individuals entrusted with storing information deposits entrusted to them whereas the latter sees students as having the freedom to think, imagine and create. Similarly, bank deposit education pathologizes the oppressed as marginal to the healthy society, whereas problem posing education speaks of the oppressed as having the agency to reflect on their oppression and, by so doing, maintains the capacities necessary for transforming the system that facilitates such oppression.

These two perspectives on pedagogical design by Freire (1972) bring the African Studies issue into perspective especially within the context of constructing a field of study that goes beyond the western gaze—one that represents people as not being simply oppressed and poor but as people with an imaginable future. It is rather interesting how ideas shared about half a century ago still resonate with the current times and with earlier works such as The Wretched of the Earth in which Fanon (1961 [2004]) reveals crucial weapons for the Black revolution. Here, Fanon (1961 [2004]) shows how the colonial struggles for power were created and maintained by the use or threat of violence which disrupted Indigenous ways of knowing and doing and positioned the African continent as a ‘lesser power’ heavily dependent on the colonizer for its ‘progress.’ As argued, “it is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subjects. The colonist derives validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system” (Fanon, 1961 [2004]: 2, emphasis in original). It is this fabrication of the wretched colonized subject, often manifesting in stereotypes about the ‘dark’ and ‘hopeless’ continent, that distorts the capacity of Africa and Africans to be involved in knowledge creation.

The understanding of fabricated subjects connects with Mbembe’s (2001: 237) description of the colonial relationship: “It works to preserve, in each time and circumstance, the possibility of telling oneself stories, of saying one thing and doing the opposite—in short, of constantly blurring the distinction between truth and falsehood.” Wa Thiong’o (1992) shows how decolonization needs to begin with a transformed mindset. He sees imperialism’s main weapon to be one of a cultural bomb which has the effect “to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle … and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland” (wa Thiong’o, 1992: 3). Despite the complexity proposed by Mbembe (2001), wa Thiong’o shows that with such a mindset the oppressed cannot imagine the possibility of breaking away from actual enslavement or even the fabrication of non-existence. Regardless of the tumultuous movements that have historically informed the decolonial project, some scholars are a bit more optimistic about the opportunity the current momentum presents:

In Africa the stakes are high, but this is a fecund moment of opportunity. As the Global North experiences increasing economic and political instability (conditions that have long defined life in the Global South), the formerly colonised have the potential to rise to prominence as decolonising locus of enunciation – one informed by its own concepts, methods, categories, assumptions, and theories. (Swartz et al., 2020: 182)

The above remarks capture an important assertion of African agency given that existing scholarship has persistently marginalized African voices even on issues that are intricately connected to the daily lives of Africans. In other words, what once characterized ‘the evolving role of the African scholar in African Studies’ in the 1980s (see Wallerstein, 1983) still has not materialized four decades later into a substantive expression of agency, neither within the context of those individuals running the field of study nor those whose perspectives are valued as legitimate knowledge. We build on the theoretic foundations of reclaiming agency from its denigration by Eurocentric epistemological traditions. Firstly, as the basis of a decolonial theory, its objective is to reconfigure the logical connection between the implications of rigorously contextual African voices and the imperative of a commitment to an emancipatory discourse connected to the lived experiences of African peoples. Secondly, at the practical level, we provocatively explore the most pertinent approach to an agency-affirming decolonial discourse that centers what Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) describes in Black Orpheus as ‘Africanity,’ expressed in African ways of being, knowing, and doing borne of struggle (see also Sartre & MacCombie, 1964).

An agency-affirming decolonial discourse approach thus begins with transparency about one’s own insider–outsider position and draws on the idea of resisting the immanent cultural hegemony cemented in colonial thinking by asking socio-ontological questions about agency and positionality. Sartre’s (1948) praxis of agency allows for a legitimate application of the postulations to the current struggle for an authentic postcolonial African scholarship. Our formulation, therefore, seeks to step beyond the geopolitical critique of the western power matrix as a predominant theme and directs focus onto the dilemmas besetting contemporary African Studies on the continent and elsewhere.

What’s in a Word? Coloniality and Epistemicide

Epistemic hegemony or imperialism is the outcome of entrenched epistemic racism that defines which knowledge contributions to a particular subject matter are deemed relevant, and it manifests in different fields of study that intersect with African Studies such as International Relations, Sociology, and Development Studies (Khalema, 2022; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Odoom & Andrews, 2017; Rutazibwa, 2018; Shilliam, 2010, 2020; Tieku, 2021). This provincialization of knowledge and its sites of (re)production potentially explains why some of the ‘key’ scholars of African Studies (i.e., notable ‘Africanists’) have historically tended to be majority white men and a few women (see Allman, 2019). But this is not surprising given the enormous funding opportunities that exist in western universities for studies on Africa—research that often does not result in the co-creation of knowledge with scholars and organizations based in Africa (see Asiamah et al., 2021; Assié-Lumumba, 2017; Khalema, 2018; Mohammed, 2021).

An understanding of coloniality especially within the context of knowledge production and pedagogy may be characterized by what Andrews and Odoom (2021) discuss as the orthodoxies surrounding the propagation of monocultures, which are captured by Santos (2004) as the five logics that underscore the (re)production of non-existence. In no particular order, the logic of linearity sees the world in linear terms where core countries or superpowers come before the others (i.e., small powers) by measure of their supposed superiority in economic, political, military, or other sense.

Second, the logic of the universal and the global sees the world as more compressed than different. Therefore, anything that does not seem to capture this universalized understanding of the world is disregarded into non-existence. Third, the logic of capitalist productivity and efficiency is reinforced by neoliberalism and the practices associated with it. This logic privileges hyper-productivity and the grind culture (e.g., publish-or-perish mentality) without stopping to question the unequal nature of processes that inform knowledge production and dissemination. Fourth, there is also the logic of knowledge itself which tends to be focused on the disputed binary between science and tradition where the west has the former and the rest of the world have the latter. Finally, the logic of categorization that breaks down a much diverse world into units such as ‘first and third,’ ‘developed and underdeveloped,’ ‘high income and low income’ among other (often derogatory) descriptors that for instance make people associate ‘third world’ with dirty and inferior.

With the goal of underscoring the (re)production of non-existence or the ‘zone of non-being’ (Fanon, 1961 [2004]), these five logics or monocultures combined uphold a certain hegemonic rationality that sees the ‘other’ as “the residual, the inferior, the local and the non-productive” (Santos, 2004: 239). Coloniality, therefore, represents the continuities of colonialism and subjugation expressed in political, social, and economic forms operating at different scales. As argued by Quijano (2007: 171), race is fundamental to the coloniality of power because it served as the key criteria for the classification of the colonized and colonizers which, “under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior.” This classification revealed a hierarchical structure for knowledge production, which are already well summarized in the five monocultures above. To overcome this coloniality, scholars like Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) have insisted on the need for a de-Europeanization which enables the emergence of decolonial consciousness. According to him, the process of de-Europeanizing also implies ‘deprovincializing Africa’—“an intellectual and academic process of centering Africa as a legitimate historical unit of analysis and epistemic site from which to interpret the world while at the same time globalizing knowledge from Africa” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018: 4).

Santos (2014: 92) characterizes epistemicide as follows: “the murder of language … unequal exchanges among cultures have always implied the death of the knowledge of the subordinated culture, hence the death of the social groups that possessed it.” Santos (2014: 189) goes on to further argue that “social injustice is based on cognitive injustice,” which manifests both as the unequal distribution of scientific knowledge and the potential of such knowledge to truly transform the ‘real world’ of social groups outside of the west. As noted by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015: 15), “genealogically speaking, coloniality is founded on theft of history. Theft of history for Africa translated into theft of its future.” Epistemic freedom is, therefore, “that essential prerequisite for political, cultural, economic and other freedoms” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018: 4).

Despite the coloniality of power that underpins epistemicide as captured by Santos (2014), Kumalo (2020) argues that claims of epistemicide and linguicide within the context of South Africa in particular are misplaced. Focusing on the Black Archive, Kumalo (2020: 20) highlights how “language allows us access into knowledge that existed historically and remained irrespective of colonial imposition.” The point is that what is thought to have been killed is only a result of the deliberate forgetfulness that hides the existence of Black/Indigenous epistemic traditions. Certainly, African academics must learn from their history and lived experiences (see Tieku, 2021). The postcolonial situation is something more complex and further concerns what Africans themselves have done or not done about their colonial past. This means that power and knowledge are inextricably intertwined; hence, control of the domain of knowledge creation/recreation and cultivation of knowledge should be overseen by political institutions which are considered as key sites of knowledge production. Political institutions occupy a significant and powerful position in society to guide and administer the creation of knowledge vital to human emancipation and development. Yet the effects of colonialism that undermine the knowledge of the ‘Other’ continue to be reflected in social structural settings of Africa’s developmental agenda, notably in the institutions of higher learning (Mthembu, 2020). Due to the knowledge-power nexus, we can agree with Santos (2014: 207) that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice.” In other words, the monoculture of scientific knowledge that informs western epistemology, colonial economies, and neoliberal rationality needs to give way to more pluriversal forms of knowledge and doing (see also Mbembe, 2021; Mignolo, 2007).

Decolonization and Decoloniality, or How Not to (Mis)use the D-word

The decolonization movement in higher education in Africa is clearly not new, as there has been a rich history of social activism that has sought to confront white supremacy and colonialism—for instance, the work of the Négritude movement spearheaded by African diaspora students such as Aimé Césaire, Leon Damas, Paulette Nardal, and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Pimblott, 2020; see also Falola, 2001; Mkandawire, 2005). This history recognizes the connection between institutional racism and its connection to the broader legacies of slavery and colonialism, which have had direct ramifications for the continent’s positionality and epistemic contributions. One thing that unites the resurgent and insurgent decolonization struggles is the broader issue of rehumanizing people who have been dehumanized, which reveals the intertwined nature of the struggle for epistemic freedom with other struggles (see various contributions in Shilliam, 2010; also, Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021; Sondarjee & Andrews, 2023).

Garwe et al. (2021) note that despite being recognized as the cradle of humankind with a proven record of creativity and innovation as historically evidenced by its great empires and kingdoms, Africa remains positioned as an underdeveloped region contributing only about two percent to global knowledge production. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015) attributes this marginality to what he characterizes as the ‘theft of history,’ which leads to the questioning of Africa’s contribution to human civilization. Motsaathebe (2020) also critiques the dismal failure of African governments to change historical injustices and the colonial structures, which has implications for how African politics can play a role in the rethinking that would serve as fundamental tool to decolonize the western pedagogy deeply embedded in African higher education (Heleta, 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020). As argued by Swartz et al. (2020: 175), “decolonising the canon therefore reminds us to consider everything we study from new perspectives. It draws attention to how often the only worldview made accessible to students is male, white, and European.” Thus, epistemic decolonization is seen as a way out of the current Eurocentric pedagogy and the colonial continuities pervasive in Africa’s higher education and the study of the continent (Alcoff, 2017; Assié-Lumumba, 2016; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Posholi, 2020; Santos, 2014).

Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020: 37) posits that “decolonization/decoloniality is about connections and convergences… [it] does not authorize a simplistic conflation of human intellectual/academic productions and ideological ones.” He further argues that this characteristic, for instance, points to how decoloniality and postcoloniality converge in terms of their critiques of modernity and yet diverge in terms of their intellectual genealogy that can be traced to thinkers like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o among many others who originate from locations where people experience the negative ramifications of modernity. This intellectual genealogy (and its connection to the genealogy of centuries of colonialism) is crucial to understanding the context of decolonization in Africa. The following words by Fanon are instructive:

Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation. Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be the first.’ Decolonization is verification of this. At a descriptive level, therefore, any decolonization is a success. (Fanon, 1961 [2004]: 2, our emphasis added)

Fanon’s argument seems to suggest that any endeavor contributing to different causes that challenge the colonial situation, or the imperialism of today’s world, is a good contribution. It is, however, important to note that the decolonization that Fanon refers to in the remarks above is more deeply politically rooted than the surface-level decolonization buzzword that has become prominent in recent times, especially within the context of higher education. Let us note take for granted that important movements like #RhodesMustFall continue to challenge the colonial situation (Coetzee, 2022; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021). However, many people that use the D-word to capture all equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) efforts are not specifically addressing the systemic and structural nature of the problem at stake (Sondarjee & Andrews, 2023). This means that while we are all interested decolonization or at least love to use the word, it is useful to heed the wisdom expressed brilliantly in Tuck and Yang’s (2012) popular article titled “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” According to these scholars, the casual usage of terminologies such as ‘decolonize our schools,’ ‘decolonize methods,’ or ‘decolonize student thinking’ often provide little context about the immediacy of settler colonialism—thereby domesticating and metaphorizing decolonization by making it a substitutable term for all other things that need to be done to improve our societies and schools. The essence of their critique may be captured as follows: “When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future” (Tuck & Yang, 2012: 3).

Although we agree with Tuck and Yang (2012) about the overuse or misuse of decolonization, this book’s focus on epistemic or pedagogical decolonization is one that seeks to disrupt or at least question whiteness and reimagine colonial imaginaries of the world as part of the process of revitalizing a pluriverse of perspectives and epistemic traditions emerging from places and people that are historically dehumanized and marginalized. Furthermore, although Tuck and Yang (2012) show that decolonization does not have a synonym, the decolonial turn in our academic disciplines and perhaps society in general has resulted in a plethora of D-words that sometimes get used synonymously without proper context. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2021) provides a useful summary of these words that is worth rehashing here (see Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 The ten D-words of the decolonial turn
Full size table

The D-words appear almost synonymous but a deeper reading of Table 1.1 should show that the decolonial movement even with respect to the question of epistemic (in)justice alone is vast and multi-dimensional, and “at the center of decolonisation are inextricably intertwined ethical, methodological, epistemological and political dimensions” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021: 883). In other words, and despite the current hype around decolonization, we cannot simply jump on the ‘decolonial bandwagon’ without understanding the foundations, goals, and even dangers of such endeavors (Moosavi, 2020). Despite this important caution, Ndlovu-Gatsheni reminds us in the Foreword to this volume that we should not allow critiques of decolonization to make us forget the effort, sacrifices, and struggles it took earlier pioneers “to push decolonization into its present status of a planetary consciousness,” some of whom were detained in prison during their fight for decolonization (e.g., Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Angela Davis).

Within this context, epistemic decolonization, which is the main aspect of decolonization this book is primarily interested in, requires a shift in epistemology that accounts for and centers African history, culture, and context in our understanding of both the continent and the world at large. Dani Nabudere (2011), for instance, in his book Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness: An Epistemology posits that the idea of ‘Afrikology’ as an Africa-focused epistemology which is informed by the need for a redefinition of their world to advance both their self-understanding and an understanding of the world around them (see also Dastile, 2013; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). Kumalo (2020: 25) promotes the idea of the Black Archive as a way of attaining ‘epistemic restitution’ or epistemic justice by resurrecting it as part of the archives of the philosophy of history. He insists that decolonizing the curricula should start with decolonizing literature and the discipline of philosophy itself. He posits that “resurrecting the Black Archive concerns thinking about/through and theorising the Fact of Blackness/Indigeneity, which continued even as Blackness/Indigeneity was denied access to institutions of higher learning” (Kumalo, 2020: 31).

Other scholars have also pointed to the need to consider the African anticolonial archive as a vibrant body of work that provides a new way of thinking about the present (El-Malik & Kamola, 2017). Resurrecting the Black Archive can be seen as a useful way of tackling what Mudimbe (1988) refers to as the ‘colonial library,’ including a body of dominant texts and associated discourses and epistemological orders that construct Africa as inferior. The persistence of this colonial library presents a challenge to the project of decolonizing the curricula and decentering the coloniality that places Africa in a position of servitude and otherness (see Matthews, 2018; Wai, 2015). El-Malik and Kamola (2017) describe the colonial library as the ‘colonial archive’ that has repeatedly been elevated as foundational to knowledge and history; it is, therefore, apt to imagine the ‘anticolonial archive’ as serving as a possible alternative—even as a representation of both the successes and failures of African anticolonial thought.

Quijano (2007: 170) shows that coloniality remains “the most general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed.” Decoloniality as a direct response to coloniality, therefore, frees this dominant order from the universal rationality that imposes ‘modern’ paradigms of knowledge on people. It also involves new ways of intercultural communication as “part of the process of social liberation” from the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2007; see also Mignolo, 2007) as it “insists on Africa’s ontological sovereignty and constructs its epistemological boundaries in broad pan-African geographic strokes” (Ochonu, 2020: 514). In the words of Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020: 40), “decoloniality gestures toward the construction of the pluriverse as another possible world” which, for instance, can manifest by bringing suppressed or marginalized knowledge into the academy and as part of a general understanding of human life and existence.

Mbembe (2016) also notes that the decolonization process should result in a ‘pluriversity’ instead of a ‘university,’ which would represent a drastic break away from the neoliberal rationality and the monolingualism that informs the existing system. Pluriversity, therefore, captures an openness to diverse epistemic traditions. He asserts that decolonizing the university implies a reformation that results in “a less provincial and more open critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism—a task that involves the radical refounding of our ways of thinking and a transcendence of our disciplinary divisions” (Mbembe, 2016: 37). The issue remains whether such a reformation is possible, or such a university could be envisioned.

Nativist Decolonization as a Caution?

At this juncture, one may ask the following question: Can epistemic decolonization occur without romanticizing, essentializing, or even universalizing what may be considered as ‘African,’ ‘Black,’ or ‘Indigenous’? Scholars argue that this ambiguity surrounding what sort of decolonization is possible or meaningful could result in ‘nativist decolonization’ or a certain form of nationalist exceptionalism that becomes a version of White supremacy or the very same colonial imaginary that epistemic decolonization is attempting to eradicate. Moosavi (2020: 347) considers nativist decolonization as “glorifying Southern scholarship or scholars just because they are from the Global South” or seeing intellectual decolonization as a way to promote the more populist political agenda of Third World Nationalism. Nativist decolonization can be dangerous because it leads to ‘Southerncentrism’ and a general distrust of Northern scholarship mainly because it hails from the North, which could result in useful scholarship being sidelined and less useful ones being valorized (Moosavi, 2020). The point here is that any sort of exaggerated romanticization of Southern scholarship or scholars could lead to a dangerous simplification of the much complex project of intellectual decolonization.

Since the destruction of knowledge (i.e., epistemicide) “involves the destruction of the social practices and the disqualification of the social agents that operate according to such knowledges” (Santos, 2014: 153), it remains unclear how epistemic decolonization can be attained without a deliberate overhaul of existing structures that flip things into the hands of social agents who have historically been ignored or only included as subjects of study, not actors in their own rights. In a paper ominously titled Africanity as an Open Question, Diagne (2010) draws attention to the fact that the discussion on the conceptualization of Africa, that is, the debate on Africa as an invention, a historical imaginary ‘other’ of European history, is not some recent postmodern deconstruction of the notion of Africanity. It is, in essence, a reclaiming of what was lost by those who were dispossessed.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020: 6), for instance, characterizes ‘deimperialization’ as “the abandonment of Europe.” But, like decolonization, he sees this as involving a “revolutionary transformation of the very immanent logics of Euromodernity, including colonialism, emancipation, and depatriachilization, and development” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020: 6). What this means is that abandoning Europe is not necessarily a romanticization of Africa but rather a deliberate act of revolutionizing the way people think about themselves vis-à-vis the rest of the world and how they deal with past atrocities/injustices as part of the process of imagining a future of possibilities. As argued by Kumalo (2020: 31) accessing the Black Archive, for instance, “empowers us to develop curricula that are locally responsive and globally relevant.” Le Grange (2016: 6) also notes that decolonizing the curricula does not necessarily imply “destroying western knowledge but in decentring it or perhaps deterritorialising it.” These insights suggest that a decolonial orientation should not result in what may be characterized as nativist decolonization, which could potentially further marginalize the histories and knowledge systems the process of epistemic decolonization is meant to resurrect. The following remarks by Prah (2017) is quoted in Swartz et al. (2020) nicely capture this sentiment:

The decolonisation of knowledge and education does not and should not mean the facile rejection of western-derived epistemologies and their modes of construction. It means stripping western specificities from our modes of knowledge construction and the production of knowledge to suit and speak to our cultural/linguistic particularities. It means in short societal relevance. (qtd. in Swartz et al., 2020: 175)

The main contention with the argument raised above is that the redefinition of the world that is expressed in Nabudere’s (2011) ‘Afrikology’ as an Africa-focused epistemology, for instance, might not be feasible if western-derived epistemologies are not entirely rejected. This leaves us with an interesting chicken-and-egg problem that defies easy diagnosis, which borders on some of the arguments raised by Moosavi (2020). Like Prah’s (2017) is quoted in Swartz et al. (2020) argument above, the following remarks further highlight the caution with which nativist forms of decolonization should be treated: “Nativist education for decolonization must go beyond black against white, Europe against Africa or Britain against Zimbabwe but must interrogate all forms of hegemonic tendencies” (Hwami, 2016: 33). There will hardly be a decidedly clear verdict on this debate but a key implication we can point to is that the decolonial agenda should create spaces for multiple knowledges that co-exist to affirm the agency and epistemic justice of those who have historically been written off and/or colonized in different forms.

Moosavi’s (2023) recent self-reflexive piece highlights how best efforts toward decolonizing a course, for instance, may inadvertently be sustaining exclusion while claiming to be inclusive, maintaining the status quo while claiming to be radical, or even reinscribing western-centrism while claiming to decolonize the western canons that underpin our disciplines. This evidence shows that pedagogical or academic decolonization is much harder than we often imagine. He, therefore, calls for ‘decolonial reflexivity,’ which should cause decolonial scholars “to introspectively locate the inadequacies, limitations, and contradictions within our own efforts at academic decolonisation, particularly in relation to the potential for us to inadvertently perpetuate coloniality rather than dismantle it” (Moosavi, 2023: 139). The need for this reflexivity also suggests to us that we must maintain some level of modesty or what Sondarjee and Andrews (2023) characterize as the ‘epistemic humility’ needed when associating our actions and practices with the wide variety of the D-words noted above, especially given the very political nature of what it would entail to say we are truly doing any of those things.

Overview of Chapters

The scholarly contributions in this volume are premised on the original goal of contributing to a re-imagination and possible decentering of the Eurocentric pedagogical and research practices that inform entrenched narratives about Africa and African agency. While some chapters take a broad approach and reflect on alternative pedagogies, Black agency, and the (im)possibilities of decolonial interventions, other chapters zoom in and illustrate the complexity animating an authentic decolonial intervention. Collectively, the chapters illuminate the particularity of African scholarship, the unique contextual challenges of interrogating the entrenched modes of curricula and pedagogies, research hegemony and practice that defines teaching about Africa, and possibilities of engaging with a non-essentialist decoloniality to redress and contest dominant modes of thinking and practice that have historically excluded African ways of doing and knowing, lived experiences, voices, attitudes, and positionalities. This volume, therefore, provides grounded conceptualizations about the academic project of producing African knowledge that is authentic and emancipatory to encapsulate the dynamic, ingenious ways in which African intellectuals on the continent and in the diaspora animate agency while navigating hostile and/or toxic neocolonial academic spaces.

The contribution by Zainab Olaitan and Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba (Chapter 2) tackles the issue of Africa’s agency in the production of knowledge by arguing that the prevailing approach meant to establish Africa as a contributor of knowledge has been primarily reactionary rather than pragmatic. What this implies is that epistemic violence or epistemicide becomes sustained through the process of seeking validation and approval from the same system that denies the authenticity or validity of the knowledge produced from the continent. Also, a reactionary approach undermines the rich history of African Indigenous knowledge systems that have prevailed despite the role played by slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism in silencing such knowledge systems. The chapter begins by providing a historical understanding that contextualizes the silencing of African contributions to knowledge production, followed by an examination of the coloniality of knowledge itself. It then examines the resistance school—involving University of Ibadan School of History, Ahmadu Bello University School of History, Makerere University—that emerged on the continent to indigenize knowledge production. While key thinkers in these schools contributed to rejecting western ways of knowledge primarily through critique and resistance, these efforts have fallen short of going beyond the reactionary approach to effectively consolidate Indigenous African knowledge production and dissemination. The chapter, therefore, ends with some insights on how to overcome this existing challenge (i.e., embracing Indigenous knowledge systems) as a way to re-center Africa in knowledge production. This connects with existing calls to rejuvenate the Black anticolonial archive and Afrocentric epistemology (see Assié-Lumumba, 2016, 2017; El-Malik & Kamola, 2017; Kumalo, 2020; Nabudere, 2011; Tieku, 2021).

In Chapter 3, Ayandele and Oriola expand on the complexity of the global system of knowledge production by touching on the how, what, and why we must promote freedom of knowledge production on Africa. The chapter exposes the dilemma between academic freedom and the study of Africa within the dichotomy of the insider–outsider perspective vis-à-vis the impact of western pedagogies on research methodologies and the study of Africa. Drawing on sociocultural theories, the authors argue that scholarship about Africa must explicitly account for power dynamics that continue to reinforce the global North–South divide in the publishing regimes about Africa. In their analysis, Ayandele and Oriola address questions about voice, representation, agency with a particular emphasis on teaching, research, and knowledge production about the continent. The chapter poignantly advocates for reinvestment in local knowledge production that addresses African developmental challenges. To succeed in doing this, the authors point to the need for innovation and strategic actions geared toward nurturing academic collaborations, partnerships, and coalitions.

Answering the question, to what extent is the permanence of whiteness and epistemic exclusion or hegemony sustained in African Studies through institutionalized centers/programs of African Studies in North America and Europe, Andrews and Patrick’s contribution (Chapter 4) engages with African Studies as a taught discipline and highlights the role of academic racism in pedagogy. The evidence presented in the chapter paints a stark picture of the dearth of Black agency in a field whose subject matter focuses on Black histories, experiences, and futures. The contribution specifically shows that the presence of whiteness across majority of the African Studies programs they examined as part of their pilot study—which manifests in who is teaching courses on Africa, who is included on course syllabi, who supervises students studying Africa, and who makes key decisions on African Studies curricula—is a function of powerful institutionalized hierarchies that have historically hindered the inclusion of others. This evidence resonates with points raised by Branch (2018), Allman (2019), Grosz-Ngaté (2020), and Sondarjee (Chapter 8 in this volume) among others (see also Odoom & Andrews, 2017). Andrews and Patrick note that representational diversity cannot be equated with decolonization but it is an important step in dismantling the prevailing whiteness and Eurocentric bias in African Studies pedagogy.

Sally Matthews’ chapter (Chapter 5) centers the discussion on two fundamental questions of inquiry: (a) Is it possible to escape the colonial library and or Eurocentrism on knowledge production on Africa? How do we dismantle that? (b) Is replacing western scholars with African scholars a solution to decolonizing knowledge production on Africa? These questions underpin the danger of nativist decolonization, as discussed by Moosavi (2020) and also highlighted here in this chapter (Andrews & Khalema) and Chapter 7 (Zavale). Drawing on Mudimbe’s (1994) concept of the colonial library, Matthews reflects on the way scholars of African Studies can encourage African students to engage with and reconfigure scholarly representations of Africa. In a very detailed manner, Mathews argues for the recognition of the tenacity of the colonial library as an opportunity to disrupt existing forms of knowledge production about Africa.

Drawing upon the song, Monsters You Made, by the popular Nigerian Afrobeat artist Burna Boy, Savo Heleta and Sakhile Phiri in Chapter 6 engage in a deep dive to unpack the coloniality and Eurocentric hegemony in African education and pedagogy. With a focus on the pitfalls and promises of epistemic decolonization, they highlight the intersectional legacies of colonialism, especially how colonial racism, white supremacy, and racial capitalist exploitation are intricately linked to the ongoing dehumanization of Africans through coloniality and neocolonialism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). In particular, they examine how this reality (i.e., the making of ‘monsters’ through post-independence neglect, repression, and subjugation) has undermined the ability of African educational systems, institutions, and scholars to develop and valorize education and knowledge relevant for Africa and Africans. They do so by also pointing to the lack of willingness on the part of post-independence elites to break away from the colonial structure and systems to carve out a clear pathway for epistemic decolonization. This is also explained in Chapter 2 by Olaitan and Oloruntoba as yielding to the same structures we are attempting to dismantle or at least using established Eurocentric systems as the basis or metric to measure our own intellectual contributions. A central message from this chapter is that epistemic decolonization—involving decolonizing the mind and knowledge production—cannot occur in isolation of material decolonization and this undertaking requires the breaking down of political, geopolitical, and economic structures and systems that enable and preserve coloniality and neocolonialism.

Nelson Casimiro Zavale’s contribution (Chapter 7) focuses on knowledge production but turns attention to conventional western-rooted approaches of measuring knowledge readiness and performance, including knowledge index, index of knowledge societies, global knowledge index, and global innovation index. Zavale argues that these metrics reveal persistent inequalities between developed and developing countries, a monolithic western-based view of science or knowledge, and geopolitical inequalities in the global system of knowledge production—all of which explain why sub-Saharan Africa is lagging in efforts to build a meaningful knowledge-based economy or society. Like Olaitan and Oloruntoba in Chapter 2, Zavale insists that pluralism of knowledge production as well as valorization of other (Indigenous) knowledges, through the lens of epistemic or cognitive justice (Santos, 2014), will contribute to the democratization and possible decolonization of African pedagogies. As we note in this chapter, Zavale also raises the caution of nativist decolonization (Moosavi, 2020), which involves an exaggerated romanticization of African scholarship to the point where it fails to be subjected to intellectual rigor. This implies not thinking of African knowledge systems as given but subjecting them to critical enquiry.

Presenting a rich exposé that challenges coloniality of knowledge and epistemic racism in the discipline of international relations (IR) as previous scholars have done (Andrews, 2022; Shilliam, 2010, 2020; Tieku, 2021), Maïka Sondarjee in Chapter 8 reflects on the role of the undergraduate course syllabi in perpetuating epistemic inequalities in the curriculum—a focus which is an in-depth extension of the pilot study of African Studies programs undertaken by Andrew and Patrick in Chapter 4. Sondarjee brilliantly explores the how and what educators minted in the postcolonial feminist paradigm ought to ‘provincialize’ western knowledge in IR, which is a field that is undoubtedly connected to Africa in terms of serving as a prominent subject matter. She argues that listening to student’s critique of sanitized western curriculum and its masculine gaze of IR has mobilized her to be intentional about infusing critical pedagogies and epistemologies. For Sondarjee, decoloniality demands that we not only study how and what we teach in our institutions to expose our colonial legacies and biases but, also, we should always study relations of power and processes of marginalization.

In Chapter 9, Khalema, Masuku and Zakwe expand on Sondarjee’s arguments as well as others in this volume by reflecting on the way post-apartheid institutions in South Africa have neglected the infusion of African-centered praxis in institutional governance and curriculum reform in favor of uncritical preservation of neocolonial practices and processes of engagement. The chapter interrogates the entrenched modes of colonial praxis in implementing ‘transformation’ in neoliberal South African universities. The authors maintain that transformation has morphed into a buzzword in South African universities often enacted as an emancipatory strategy to right the wrongs of the past, yet its implementation has tragically demonstrated a regressive move toward the institutional violence and victimization of the past. The chapter resolves on the intentional questioning of transformation beyond demographic pageantry particularly in relation to decoloniality and pedagogies of practices. The chapter concludes by advocating for an Ubuntu/Botho-focused approach to advance decolonial alternatives where historically marginalized knowledges, voices, and positions are illuminated in the teaching, learning, research, and governance spheres (see also Assié-Lumumba, 2017).

In Lieu of Conclusion: Black Agency, Africanity, and Decolonial Afro-Futures

The volume’s concluding chapter, “ Agency, Africanity, and Some Propositions for Engaged Scholarship” by Nene Ernest Khalema brings it all together and asserts an Afro-futuristic approach to teaching and learning about Africa on the continent and the Global North. This concluding chapter asserts that the challenges to effective decolonial action go well beyond intellectual intransigence. The prospects for a neo-imperialist subversion of the decolonial discourse itself remain possible. One does not need to theorize deeply to notice the anti-Black/African disguised as ‘anti-woke’ onslaught against Africa-centered history in America and elsewhere in the world.

Various chapter contributors to this volume have unpacked the notions of decoloniality, agency, and re-storying African Studies pedagogies from historical, material, and comparative perspectives to reflect upon the learning (and unlearning) of colonial practices and perspectives—further pointing to the need to critically interrogate pedagogies, curriculum, practices, governance, knowledge production, research methodologies, and epistemologies as equally relevant to undoing colonialism and its legacies. Within this context, decoloniality serves as a tool of Africa-centered analysis and it “seeks to retrieve Africa from the margins of global sociopolitical, economic and epistemic formations and inscribe it at the center of such configurations” (Ochonu, 2020: 514). Since the coloniality of power is closely tied to the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of self/being (see Fanon, 1961 [2004]; Grosfoguel, 2007; Mbembe, 2021; Mignolo, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020; Quijano, 2007), a decolonial orientation forces us to reflect on how past and present forms of colonialism continue to shape what a social group knows about themselves, how they matter in this world, and how others see them—whether as mere subjects of dominant structures or as agents with some capacity to change something. Freire (1972: 61) posited that by consciously having dialogue about their lives and the conditions of their oppression, the oppressed should be able to “name their world,” which also helps them to imagine the oppressive system not as one with no exit but rather as something that is only a temporary limitation to be overcome and transformed. In other words, by being able to speak and becoming accepted as speakers, the subaltern gains the agency to imagine a world of new possibilities.

The act of naming one’s world also echoes strategies through which the ‘cultural bomb’ Mbembe (2001) refers to can be tackled as part of the process of decolonizing the mind. It is, therefore, fitting to reiterate that decolonization “is not as simple as removing some content from the curriculum and replacing it with new content—it is about considering multiple perspectives and making space to think carefully about what we value” (Swartz et al., 2020: 175). Although Andrews and Patrick (Chapter 4 in this volume) have emphasized the need to examine representation in course and program content (see also Chapter 8 by Sondarjee), it is crucial to admit that epistemic decolonization in its transformative sense goes beyond that. What this means is that although Mignolo (2013: 137) believes the decolonial agenda is possible “within academia through courses, seminars, ….” Le Grange et al. (2020) point to how quick-fix solutions result in a ‘decolonial-washing’ instead of the revolutionary expectations of decolonization to dismantle structures of power and dominance inhabited in the colonial household. Moosavi (2023: 139) has also warned us to “avoid a self-righteous confidence in our status as enlightened decolonial scholars by being prepared to self-scrutinise our own decolonial efforts.” This warning reverberates Sondarjee and Andrews’ (2023) call for ‘epistemic humility’ even as we encounter or embrace a ‘decolonial turn.’ Indeed, nothing can be taken as given and we must carefully examine all actions that supposedly derive from a decolonial conviction while keeping the fire burning under the feet of oppressive structures and systems.

According to Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020: 6), decolonization needs to result in something new—i.e., “a new world, free from the paradigm of difference which enabled enslavement, colonial exploitation, and racist domination.” It also needs to tackle the coloniality that reinforces racial hierarchies and dehumanizing structures of imperial cultural dominance (Quijano, 2007). Although the possibility of decolonization in higher education—especially its revolutionary political ambition that goes beyond just pedagogy—may be considered as quite far-fetched, if not counterproductive (Moosavi, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2012), scholars have pointed to a decolonized (perhaps ‘Africanist’) curriculum as having the following characteristics: “Such a curriculum built on contextually produced theory will respond to empirical problems of population density, income poverty, unemployment, underemployment, precarious employment, forms of violence, and inequality from the perspective of theories of empire, practices of erasure, histories of dispossession, colonialism, enslavement, and appropriation” (Swartz et al., 2020: 181; see also Bhambra, 2014). This curriculum facilitates a re-storying that ensures that the stories are told from the perspectives of Southern people whose voices have been marginalized and their lived experiences shrouded in stereotypes of misery, poverty, and victimhood. It is also expected to encourage students to take ownership of knowledge creation instead of merely becoming recipients or users of received wisdom.