CALL FOR PAPERS
“Are We Not Decolonial Yet? Empirical Reflections in Writing and Teaching History in Africa A Book Project of the Global South Epistemologies Research Centre”
To be published by a Renowned UK Publisher in December 2024
Concept Note
Since Africa’s contact with Eurocentric modernism, its epistemological and ontological landscape has witnessed two major turns. First, “the entrapped” colonial turn characterized by the erasure of the continent’s indigenous know-how, the denial of Africa constituting any historical part of the world and the complete silencing of African modes of knowing, social meaning making, imagining, seeing and knowledge production. In their place in the colonial school was the proliferation of contents about the West or at best, European activities in Africa. This is what Escobar (2007) calls Eurocentric epistemologies that assumed the character of objective, scientific, neutral, universal and only truthful knowledges. The effect was that Africans who passed through colonial schools ‘understood their communities far less than those of their ages who had never been to school’ as their education taught them more about Europe and less about their own society (Rodney, 1982). Even after independence, imperial powers, and their agencies have continued to work together to inscribe coloniality across the African continent.