Sylvia Tamale, an accomplished Ugandan academic and human rights activist, presented “A is for Africa”: Towards the Decolonisation of Knowledge Production at the third annual Devaki Jain lecture series which took place at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK, on the 13th of October 2022.
Below is the transcript of Tamale’s insightful lecture (first published in ‘The Ship’ St Anne’s College magazine), which explores how existing colonial structures in knowledge production cause indigenous ‘non-western’ knowledge bases and histories to be disregarded. Tamale investigates how Eurocentrism takes root in The Formal Education System and The Notion of Time, and propagates in The Theory of “Development”, The Concept of Gender, and The Institution of the Museum. These systems marginalise “different ways of knowing,” states Tamale, “leav[ing] no room for the cross-pollination of ideas.” Tamale asks, “how can we democratise and decolonise the epistemic space? [And] In which ways can we talk back to “epistemological apartheid”?”
The lecture is inspired by her latest publication, Decolonization and Afro-Feminism, which won the 2022 FTGS Book Prize.
A big warm “Good Evening” to you banange! Banange is Luganda for “my fellows” – a term that I shall return to later in my talk. It is both a great honour and a privilege for me to address you this evening on this auspicious occasion: the third annual Devaki Jain Lecture. For this opportunity I would like to express my sincere gratitude to St. Anne’s College here at the University of Oxford, and in particular to the Principal, Helen King, Jason Fiddaman, Deborah Walker and most of all, the indomitable Dr. Devaki Jain who extended this invitation to me and whom I was so looking forward to meeting here today. Thank you all very much.
Introduction
I could begin tonight’s talk with theories of power, rehashing concepts such as Karl Marx’s ideology or Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony or Michel Foucault’s Regimes of Truth or Aníbal Quijano’s concept of coloniality… but I really don’t want to send you to sleep! Suffice it to say here that Western imperialism present their worldview of reality as the only sensible one, as “common sense” in order to manipulate and exploit “the Other.” And because colonial logics dominate not through physical coercion, but through the widespread acceptance of their ideologies and practices, they are hardly ever questioned.
I vividly remember my wry amusement in elementary school as I stumbled over the strange words that made up the English alphabet: “A is for Apple… I is for Igloo… K is for Kangaroo… M is for Mittens… S is for Snow… V is for violin!” Using such alien symbols for learning phonetics simply defeats the purpose of cognitive learning; if the child has no existing knowledge of the visual symbols and sounds, how do you expect them to correctly name them? Unfortunately, this comical and skewed elementary ABC lesson is reflected in most of the formal learning around the continent where students continue to uncritically consume Eurocentric material.
The world is living one Big Lie! A big lie with many spin-offs. That lie has been successfully spun by imperialist powers over centuries. The lie is that on planet earth, there is one universal correct way of being human. The lie constructs the Western way of thinking, of being and of doing as a one-size-fits-all model, the “default drive” for the entire world. It mandates universal conformity to Western ways of understanding and interpreting the world. This includes in education, governance, development, measuring time, quality of life, and so on. Many scholars have written and spoken about different aspects of this Big Lie. All agree that the Big Lie and its varied spin-offs converge around the creation, normalization and sustenance of capitalist relations of production and profit for the West at the expense of non-Western societies.
But even as I make reference to concepts like the “West”, the “non-West” or even “Africa”, I am keenly aware that these entities are far from being homogeneous. Indeed, there are several enclaves of “non-Wests” within the “West” – e.g., racial minorities, queer communities, post-colonialists, Marxists. And the entity baptized “Africa” by the imperialists is so rich in diversity that the only common denominator that unifies it is the logic behind the Big Lie that stereotypes the continent as incorrigibly primitive, underdeveloped and inflicted with conflicts and gloom.
As is true for all untruths, the “Big Lie” is spread through the power of language and discourse. Through tools such as mass media, education, religion and law, colonialists constructed narratives of the “naturalness” of White supremacy and Black inferiority, male supremacy and female inferiority, heteronormativity, and so on. During the second half of the twentieth century, the imperialists appeared to retreat from Africa with the formal lowering of colonial flags at ceremonial independence parades.
However, they had utilised seven and a half decades of colonial rule to firmly entrench The Lie through the globalisation of Western values, norms and knowledge, all in the name of “civilising” the “dark continent.” During this time, they systematically put in place structures and mechanisms that sustained their domination even after losing a physical presence in post-independent colonies. Today, the colonial machinery has successfully woven a totalising ideology that penetrates all aspects of African lives.Through knowledge production and dissemination, this machinery exercises powerful and insidious forms of hegemonic power, hence sustaining the world economic order. When Africa was colonised, the organic growth of its sociopolitical processes were disrupted and/or destroyed, leading to the successful capture of the minds of its people through restructuring their knowledge systems and erasing and/or devaluing their history, culture, expressions and ways of being. The era of digital revolution launched in the late 1980s has given the imperialists even more power to reshape the world in more profound ways than had ever been imagined.
This evening I’m going to focus on some of the ways that the Big Lie is constructed and sustained, focusing on its implications for Africa. I will highlight some of the mechanisms and technologies of power through which “universal” norms are constructed and spread across the continent, and also talk about the politics of knowledge and the autocratisation of global knowledge production and knowledge acquisition. How can we democratise and decolonize the epistemic space? In which ways can we talk back to “epistemological apartheid”?
Following this introduction, I focus on five social structures to briefly elaborate on the mechanisms through which colonial norms and beliefs become embedded in hegemonic ordering: (i) the formal education system; (ii) the notion of “time”; (iii) the theory of “development”; (iv) the concept of “gender”; and (v) the institution of the museum. My paramount concern is to demonstrate how Africa has been caught in the vortex of Euro- American globalised knowledge production and dissemination since colonisation in the nineteenth century. Some of the insidious ways that the empire sustains its dominance in Africa through knowledge production will be highlighted as I also discuss ways that we can undo such hegemonic power.
The Formal Education System
In secondary school, my history teacher taught me all the fine details of the French Revolution, but neither the Haitian or the Algerian revolutions was covered in the syllabus. He also explained the Jewish holocaust at the hands of Hitler’s Nazis, but said nothing about the German genocide of the Herero and Nama people in Namibia that foreshadowed Nazi ideology. The geography teacher exposed me to knowledge about the main islands that make up New York City but not those of Lagos. Timbuktu was referred to in a disparaging and patronising fashion, as I was forced to cram the ten commandments of the European “civilising” God while simultaneously drumming into my impressionable young mind that the spiritual world of my people was evil witchcraft and paganism. I could go on and on…
At Makerere University—modelled on the best high-learning institutions of Europe—I detested the professors who stood at the lectern and talked down to us. They separated and privileged theory over practice, thinking over feeling, science over the arts, masculinity over femininity; they distorted, minimised and Othered indigenous knowledges and experiences; and they dismissed our voices as students. To be inquisitive and contrarian was not only frowned upon, it was penalised.
My experiences at school taught me several lessons, positive and otherwise. First of all, Africa needs to stop viewing the educator as the “know-it-all” teacher but, to use Paulo Freire’s description, as a “dialogical co-investigator” who learns with the learners. The main role of the educator should be to re-orient the perspectives of students, hone their critical thinking skills and dismantle the reproduction of dominant ideologies. Freire emphasised the use of praxis whereby teachers and students collectively engage in critical analyses of oppressive systems that dehumanise and marginalise.
Remembering that the classroom and lecture room are at the centre of Western thinking, it is important to supplement such methods through a re-turn to African educational pedagogies such as story-telling, socio-dramatic plays, folksong, parables and poetry. Moreover, in most of Africa, academic subjects, particularly in higher education, are taught through the medium of a colonial language. What Africa needs is an education that takes indigenous knowledge bases seriously and is context-embedded as well as empowering. Fanon fully understood that those who control language, control reality, which is why Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe implored Africans to “re-story” their realities in “vernacular” traditions.
When it comes to research, those that dominate the knowledge production industry have also developed standards and criteria for what qualifies as legitimate knowledge globally. The blueprints for constructing “truths” are straight-jacketed into conventional standards that serve the status quo. Thus, in order to make any scientific (social or natural) knowledge claims, your research must follow certain rules and the results have to be published in a specified written format.
Traditionally, in Africa, theory was constructed through oral stories; in fact, practice, theory and knowledge-building were all integrated. In other words, life’s meanings were explained through fables, myths and spirituality. Kenyan Nobel-prize winner, Wangari Maathai, was fond of telling the story of how, as a child, she used to collect firewood for her mother. The mother forbade her from collecting wood from the so-called strangler fig tree as it was the “tree of God” that was never to be cut, burnt or used. In fact, her people worshiped under this tree. Decades later, as an accomplished environmentalist, Maathai realised that the sacred tree was preserved because it protected the highland soils from erosion and mudslides; its strong, deep roots chiseled rocks to make underground springs that provided subterranean water for the villagers. When the colonial missionaries and administrators arrived in Kenya, they ordered most of these trees to be cut down for their representation of “pagan” gods.
This story depicts the epistemic relationship between Indigenous people and nature, manifested through their spirituality and taboos. Wangaari’s people who had never been inside a Western-type classroom understood climate change better than today’s so-called experts. The story-driven theoretical framework was more impactful than the alienating anthropogenic global-warming explanations being touted today. Stories do not have complicated jargon and opaque expressions and easily resonate with the masses. Yet such counter-stories are viewed by the powers-that-be as “unscientific” and therefore flaky. This marginalisation of different ways of knowing leaves no room for the cross-pollination of ideas. Theoretically-nuanced stories have always been popular with feminist researchers even as they are frowned upon and vilified by anonymous peer reviewers and mainstream publishers and all those critics that Carolyn Nordstrom aptly refers to as “the judges of epistemology”. We must heed calls from scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith to “recenter” Indigenous ways of knowing and to decolonise methodologies derived from oral traditions.
As the epicenter of colonial indoctrination, the African university itself needs to be reinvented as a subversive anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist and non-elitist space. The decolonised/decolonial university in Africa should valorise the knowledge of indigenous artisans, traditional medicine practitioners, agriculturalists, ecologists, griots, musicians and other local experts outside the “ivory tower” of Eurocentric academia. The physical and conceptual walls that separate the university from local populations should be pulled down and the institutional doors flung open for “the community,” remodelling it to the basic needs of Africa. A “horizontal cross-pollination” of ideas between indigenous knowledges and the relevant Western praxis would resonate better with Africans than the vertical domain of neoliberal modernity currently recycled in most African universities.
It is important for Africans to collaborate with critical thinkers located in the global North as well as expand and strengthen South-South relations in its commitment to decolonise and liberate the continent. But such collaborations should be based on mutual respect and shared interest. It is quite common for Western-based scholars to treat their African colleagues, as “glorified informants”. In such transnational intellectual division of labour, the latter are assigned the empirical tasks while the former designate themselves as the theory builders.
By forging and promoting alternative ways of thinking, Africa shall by-pass the barriers of the intellectual gate-keepers and flatten hierarchies. Forging synergy between diverse philosophies and a cross-pollination of various geo-cultural perspectives, a dialogue between disciplines, must be part of the counter-hegemonic global movement. Finally, on education, the academic publishing industry in Africa is too small, insular and conservative, largely stuck in the colonial ways of doing things. The international bigwigs in academic publishing such as Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley have corporatised knowledge production by taking over African academic journals and totally commodifying knowledge. Neocolonial practices that lock up knowledge, such as copyright and other intellectual property rights should be replaced with “open access” practices. No individual can claim to be the exclusive producer of knowledge. We all build on existing knowledge and/or restate old arguments. Open access literature is key for a continent with limited resources and other challenges that result from colonial legacies.
The Notion of Time
Most Africans have a difficult relationship with time as conceptualized by the West. In fact, the issue of the average African not “respecting” time is so notorious that the phenomenon is officially known as “African time”. It connotes an overly-relaxed attitude at best—but usually implies tardiness, delinquency and incivility. We are made to feel shame towards our relationship with time, constantly being reminded that “time is money.” In his article, entitled, “The Tyranny of Time,” Iranian writer, Joe Zadeh exposes clocks and the modern concept of time as mathematical constructs that have “been shaped over centuries by science and also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism.” Several scholars have analysed time theories, including Marx, Emile Durkheim and Barbara Adams. The standardisation of time in the late nineteenth century forced the world into a common dating framework that perceives a separated past, present and future. Indeed, key to the processes of universalisation was the reconstruction of the concepts of space and time. The homogenisation and valorisation of temporalities serves concise socio-political and economic goals. Time is a formidable “scientific” tool at the disposal of Western capitalism to facilitate the processes of exploitation. Scientific discourse makes us believe that time is a neutral unit, but it’s actually extremely political with significant implications for our revolutions as Africans and as feminists.
Time boggles the mind but, typical of imperialism’s attempts to control everything, it created the clock, which is frequently adjusted and altered to fit socio-political purposes. The best examples of time as a construct are the phenomena of leap-day additions every four years or the daylight savings of time, whereby the hour hand is manually advanced on the clock during summer to allow darkness fall at a later time.
Yes, the generic clock may be a practical tool for scheduling lectures like this one, but we must be alive to its historical social ordering of power relations in capitalist structures. Our anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal struggles are currently wrapped up in coloniality. We are using the empire’s tools and paradigms to dismantle the empire. We hold this false sense of “arrivalism” when we mimic the ways of the empire, including the concept of time. We adopt World Bank-endorsed development programs with meaningless end-years tagged on them, such as the African Union Agenda 2063—that so-called master blueprint that’s supposed to move the continent towards structural transformation. Of course, such time-bound estimates will crumble in the face of the reality of the impotence of a disunited, balkanised continent caught up in the web of neoliberalglobalisation.
Capitalism has turned most of us into robotic followers of abstract clock time. Our patterns of feeding, sleeping, resting, being “productive” – are all counted against time. Time has been commodified and the clock is the capitalists’ main tool for facilitating and regulating commercial relationships around the world. Gareth Dale describes such global synchronisation of human purpose as slicing and pricing time for the benefit of capitalism. As a resource, capitalist logic views time as something that can be saved and/or wasted, factoring it as a measure of “efficiency.” Hence, the capitalist enhances profit by saving time; basically disciplining labour and segregating it from other human experiences.
Non-Western cultures had different ways of viewing time which rhymed much more with nature. For example, all conceptualisations of “African time” were (and in many ways still are) very different from the calibrations of the clock which add up to seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, periods and eras. These Western ontological and epistemological frameworks of time are linear and progressive whereas African understandings do not follow such rigid, chronological measurements. They are circular, multi-dimensional, and constantly moving moreover in a multi-layered space.
Even today, the clock’s tick-tocking is meaningless to most non-Europeans who conceive of time not as abstract chronological periods but rather, in more concrete terms as events and seasons happening in an interconnected world that has no beginning and no end. Time for Africans is not linear but follows a spiral which, to echo Achille Mbembe, is an entanglement of interlocking presents, pasts and futures, “each age bearing, altering and maintaining the previous ones.” The empire frowned upon such contextual, elastic conceptions of time and mocked them as irrational and uncivilised and yet to them we must return.
It is important to note that the relationship between capital, labour and time is a gendered one; the long hours spent engaged in caring work by women in the so-called “private” sphere remain wage-less and under-valued. Hence, the law is deployed to push time spent in the care economy out of the production boundary. But we know that it is the unwaged domestic and reproductive work performed by women that makes it possible for capitalists to profitably appropriate labour time in the “public” realm. Africa needs to consciously bend time and space to match its ancient history with the present and the future. Africa’s ways of being and doing have never been time-bound but have always enjoyed boundless and timeless spiritual connections between all humans, and between humans and nature. Those ways are informed by the wisdom whose strength of spirit is drawn not from the human body but from the cosmic order. Africa should resist the imperialist forceful severance from nature and the supernatural. It must continue to be one with ecology’s enduring time. In short, Africa should beat its revolutionary drums to African time!
Next, we consider the imperialist conception of socio-economic development as time-
bound, linear and measurable.
The Theory of “Development”
Like other neoliberal concepts such as “democracy” and “human rights,” Western hegemonic ideology firmly holds the blueprint of universal “development” that would supposedly lead all nations to attain economic progress, modernity and civilised status.
Modernist development, as conceptualised in the global capitalist political economy, references an increment in economic output; economic progress is measured through gross domestic product (GDP), which is the value of all goods and services consumed. Students of economics learn that unhindered markets are ideal for economic growth and social welfare; it is all about investment growth and maximisation of market share and profits. The state must retreat from its fundamental role of sustaining the economy. Such neoliberal economic theories valorise the market, while simultaneously commodifying social relations, human bodies and minds. The 2007/08 global economic crisis was indicative of the economic, social and environmental limits of neoliberal development policies.
This hegemonic paradigm of neoclassical liberal economics has been mastered by most African national bank governors who have trained in Western universities to reproduce such paradigms. As a collective, they have successfully executed the imperialist agenda of firmly inserting Africa into the global capitalist economic system and deepening the continent’s dependency and indebtedness. Multilateral capitalist institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, development agencies and transnational corporations are at hand to ensure Africa’s total compliance with the “rules of the game” of finance capital. Indeed, the WB and IMF have been instrumental in universalising these paradigms and integrating the world economy through globalisation. But can true and substantive development ever be achieved in Africa under the bourgeois neoliberal democratic dispensation? Is “free trade” really free for Africans under the neoliberal capitalist structure? Is social and economic justice possible in a heteropatriarchal-capitalist world system?
Since capital under neoliberal conditions is accumulated at the expense of exploiting natural resources and labour from the least “developed” regions of the world, there have been attempts to counter the logics of neoliberalism and modernisation. The World Social Forum, for example, emerged as a counter-movement to the World Economic Forum. Regrettably, the WSF failed to unite the global South in these efforts as its agenda was more focused on de-Westernisation than decoloniality. It simply sought to shift the politico-economic centre of gravity from the Bretton Woods system to the BRICS alliance. The neocolonial knowledge systems informing the political economy of international trade would remain intact. This is quite different from say, the Latin American notion of vivir bien, (good life), which challenges neoliberal paradigms of development. Bolivia, has started to implement the concept of vivir bien with a series of transformational processes to replace global development discourses. However, the country needs to address several contradictions if vivir bien is to succeed. For example, without radically transforming its underlying political economy, the post-neoliberal era will remain discursive. Hence, it is crucial to dismantle capitalist/colonial relations of production, including markets, extractive practices, export of natural resources and dependence on finance capital. This points to the monumental challenge that the Global South faces in effectively shaking off the well-entrenched capitalist production relations and the colonial matrix.
Vivir bien, which is derived from communitarian indigenous knowledge systems of Latin America, bears a striking resemblance to the African notion of Ubuntu. Bolivia’s National Development Plan defines it as an encounter between indigenous peoples and communities that respects cultural diversity and identity. It means ‘to live well among ourselves’; it is about communitarian coexistence… without asymmetries of power; ‘you cannot live well, if others do not’. It is about belonging to a community and beingprotected by it, as well as about living in harmony with nature and sustainably enjoying its bounty.
Similar to vivir bien, the African philosophy of Ubuntu gives more weight to the wellbeing of the group than the individual. The Ubuntu ethos of communitarianism and solidarity—usually expressed in the popular maxim, “I am because we are”—can be translated as the politics of the common good, also reflected in the notion of vivir bien. Ubuntu values unity in diversity and holds a lot of promise for human dignity, humaneness and compassion. It is the same spirit with which I referred to you, the audience, as banange.
Hence, Africa can learn from the Latin American experience and revert to its Indigenous ways of “being” and “becoming” human; to stop obsessing with material improvement and really understand that you cannot have a good life if people around you are not living well. In addition to ideological and epistemic transformation, Africa should also learn from the mistakes of Bolivia’s economic transformational efforts. It is clear that neoliberal strategies such as structural adjustment programmes, national poverty reduction policies, wealth creation programmes and so on will only sink Africa deeper into underdevelopment. A successful decolonial link from colonial development/modernising models would only be achieved through a Pan-African led radical movement focused on uprooting the epistemic and material conditions of capitalist inequalities. In this respect, particular attention needs to be paid to the situation of women.
The Concept of Gender
The cultural systems that order African understandings of gender are so fundamentally alien to Western ways of thinking that they appear irrational. While colonial paradigms of gender are firmly founded on polarised dualisms of man/woman, African indigenous understandings of the same were more pluralistic, elastic and accommodating. Rigid gender dualisms create “blind spots” and stereotypes that result in social inequalities and injustices. For instance, intersex, transgender and other non-conforming individuals who do not fit into the neat sex markers of “male” and “female” end up being erased from state policies and subjected to multiple types of stigma and discrimination. Scholars of history and gender have challenged colonial gender tropes, revealing many examples from African societies where the organisation of gender was not necessarily arranged along heterosexual or patriarchal lines. In her classic book, Male Daughters, Female Husbands, Ifi Amadiume explains that “bio-logical” sex did not always correspond to ideological gender in the Igbo Nnobi community in south-eastern Nigeria. In most African cosmologies, the dead transcend into the spirit world and live on among the living as “living ancestors.” Ancestors may use any living body, regardless of sex, as conduits to exercise their agency through “possession.” This is why the equivalents of Western secular notions of transgenderism and homosexuality were not unthinkable in African ontological/epistemic framings. The ancestral power of the sangomas of South Africa and their full-fledged “transgender” statuses are but one example of this.
Although patriarchy existed prior to the colonial invasions of Africa, its inner workings were quite different from those of Victorian era patriarchy, which was heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions and philosophically defined by Cartesian dualisms. The relative flexibility of Indigenous gender systems made it possible for women to perform male roles in terms of power and authority over others. And because roles were not rigidly masculinised or feminised, no stigma was attached to breaking gender rules. Examples abound that exhibited such gender bending across the continent.
When colonialists arrived on the continent, they proceeded to impose their own conceptualisations of gender onto African communities to fit into the imperatives of capitalist production and reproduction. Indeed, gender and the related concepts of sexuality and gender identity are intractably linked with and pivotal to the capitalist accumulation process. Where there had been a fusion between the public and the private social spheres, colonialism proceeded to re-structure spaces, clearly separating the market (and the legal-political structure that props it up) from the domestic home. The dualisms are further entrenched in the corresponding binary characterisations of the gendered spaces as productive/unproductive, waged/unwaged, self-interest/altruism.
The foundational colonial construction of men as productive breadwinners and women as unproductive caretakers further creates a gender hierarchy that subordinates women. It did not resonate with most African societies where many women routinely engaged in trade, commerce, agriculture and control of property prior to the interventions of the colonialists. With the colonial restructuring of gender relations, women’s undervalued and unremunerated labour in homes, farms and communities worked to subsidise capital by enabling it to cut the costs of maintaining wage earners, hence enhancing its profit margin.
Feminist political economists, including Devaki Jain, have long challenged the opposition between production and reproduction or market and non-market labourwithin neoclassical economics, which resulted in gender hierarchies. However, most of these arguments remained contained within the unchallenged framing of the gender binaries of heterosexual men and women. In fact, it is the queer renderings of postmodernist feminism that disrupted colonial gender binaries in ways that closely echoed the values that have long existed within many non-Western indigenous knowledge systems.
Hence, the continent needs to rid itself of the colonial dualistic gender framework which serves the heterosexist socio-economic order of capitalism. Africa must reclaim the multi-gender and fluid sexuality frameworks that exist in many of its traditional cultures and rediscover its paradigms that relocate its people back to their cultural centres, with a more egalitarian gender ideology. The relatively accommodating spectrum of diverse gender and sexuality identities is founded on the Ubuntu ethos of solidarity and interconnectedness. The non-binary gender constructions that reside at the roots of many African cultures are more sympathetic to gender inclusivity and hold greater promise for gender justice.
The final exemplar of a colonial knowledge-production site that I discuss this evening is the institution of the museum.
The Institution of the Museum
Museums are not often viewed as colonial relics that actively work to shape knowledge. The African spiritual masks, bronze sculptures, glazed bowls, carved ornamented stools, complex works of art, dyed leather slippers and other intricate objects on display in Western museums usually do not invoke feelings of an ancient civilisation that goes back centuries. Rather, the objects are often curated in a way that conveys images of exotic relics of the inferior “native” Other. They open the gazing eyes to differences built upon tragic hierarchies. Not only are museums storehouses of objects, but of knowledge—knowledge that’s classified to construct specific rationalities.
Museums have historically been a powerful socio-political tool for shaping worldviews. Different forms of museums (particularly archeology, natural history and science) have served as pseudo-scientific projects of reinforcing racial and gender hierarchies and justifying imperialism. Ethnographic museums of the 19th century were particularly used as repositories of living exhibitions of “primitive” Africans for the free gaze that captivated the inquisitive European public. The museum represented the visual appeal of racialised/gendered ideologies, confirming the pandered “truths” of the “savages” from the “dark continent.” A good example is the 1814 public display in the mobile pop- up museum on the streets of London and Paris, of the naked Khoi-San woman from South Africa, Sara Baartman. By so doing, Europe construed her female body not simply as biologically different from the male body, but also as dimorphically different from the White female body and sexually less desirable—the personification of racialised gender par excellence. When she died the following year, Baartman’s pickled sexual organs remained on exhibition in jars at the Paris Museum of Man until 1974.
The exoticised and strategic display of unfamiliar specimen and artefacts, when juxtaposed with normative European objects does wonders in Othering Africans and shaping the chilling imaginaries of the gazing European patrons. However, museological discourse is not limited to the displayed objects, but is further constructed through publications. Many of the big museums own publishing houses that publish regular journals, organise “cultural heritage” symposia and so forth. For example, in 1963, the British Museum published Races of Man, to complement its display of “the negroid” and his “close affinity to the stone age Grimaldi remains.” School teachers take their students for museum tours as part of their history lessons. Images of artefacts found in museums are also reproduced in textbooks and webpages. In other words, museums play an effective and affective role of developing Western identities and constructing knowledge about the Other – those deviating from the Western norm.
Michel Foucault characterised the museum as an enlightenment institution that serves capitalism and imperialism through a careful ordering of knowledge within an institutionally-monitored space. Hence, we see the museum as an epistemic and methodological tool for shaping knowledge and understanding difference. The association between museums, anthropology and archeology (and later on eugenics) in constructing a history (read “story”) of the savage African and reaffirming racist ideologies has been well documented. Museum labels that freeze, decontextualise and fragment a people and their culture, displaying African civilisations as “immobilised remnants of redundant pasts” facilitate the development of White supremacist ideas. Indeed, the macabre pocketing of assassinated Patrice Lumumba’s gold tooth by a Belgian soldier falls squarely into the realm of such dominant thinking.
The twenty-first century has witnessed a “new” type of museology that responds to postcolonial criticisms. A few have revised their curatorial practices, rendering them more sensitive to Indigenous representations. Museum administrators have begun returning some of the artefacts that were looted from Africa. However, they do so with calculated resistance and racist patronising coloniality, setting conditions for any repatriation. For example, President Emmanuel Macron of France demanded that Africa must have well-trained conservators and guaranteed security as preconditions for returning the loot. Others, such as those holding the famous Benin bronze objects will only return them as “shared loans” to Nigeria. In 2002, a consortium of eminent museums in Europe and North America signed the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, where they tried to convince themselves that they had a unique and sacrosanct duty to the looted and/or illicitly-acquired artefacts in their possession. The Declaration represents the crisis that these historical institutions face in light of the extant pressures from former colonies to repatriate ill-gotten objects – a seismic paradigmatic shift in the function of Western museums as knowledge producing institutions.
In Lieu of a Conclusion
Until “A is for Apple” changes to the metaphorical “A is for Africa”; until knowledge is dislodged from its colonial roots and rerouted into African communities, excavating the wealth of African histories and experiences, the continent will never step out of the grim trap of neocolonialism. Radical changes of a revolutionary nature need to take place in African academies and knowledge production processes in order to achieve the epistemic rapture with Western hegemonic dominance. The deeply-rooted colonial legacy of epistemic violence towards Africa’s worldviews and its people require a total reorientation of scholarship and knowledge production.
Given that knowledge represents the power of the dominant, decolonizing knowledge production challenges us to completely transcend the colonising boundaries of modernist discourse and think outside the box—freely and creatively—to see outside the common and the obvious. Recently, many activist initiatives have spawned around the continent, e.g., the South African “Fallist” movements, the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan University (MPAU) in Uganda, the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC) at the University of Johannesburg, the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana, the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN) at the University of South Africa, and many more. It is through such processes that Africa can begin to facilitate inter-paradigmatic dialogues between critical Indigenous and Western worldviews and experiences in ways that are ethical, respectful and integrated. Unlearning Eurocentric thinking processes is our main challenge. Africa needs to take seriously its traditional epistemologies that were devalued and eroded by colonialism. Not only must we value theories developed out of formal academies, but also those that emanate from the “unschooled.” Africa should publish for its masses and not for the imperialists or the academic elite. Decolonized knowledge should thus take into account diversities based on gender, socio-economic status, age, sexualities, disability, etc., as well as all intersectional injustices. The continent should also caution itself about the risk of institutionalising decolonial African thought as the new hegemonic power. The so-called specialised “epistemic communities” should not replace indigenous knowledge. Processes of knowledge production must remain organic, constantly renewing themselves.
Finally, the double-edged sword of technology holds opportunities for Africa’s decolonial knowledge production. Technologies such as the internet, for example, present the continent with numerous resources for producing, communicating and disseminating knowledge and information through multimedia formats such as textual, visual, and auditory content. It is crucial for decolonial thinkers of African descent to “discover” each other and connect across the globe. So, a Pan-African bid to fight off the Euro-American hegemony has also taken advantage of the digital revolution. Feminist Africa, the first digital feminist journal on the continent, established in 2002, is a model for many more to bloom.
Let me end by saying that colonialism is not the only story for explaining Africa’s knowledge production challenges. While neocolonialism dominates the narrative of the story, it certainly isn’t the only one. We have seen how colonialism maintained a tight stranglehold on the continent, making it extremely difficult to disentangle itself from neo-colonial control; but beyond that, Africa can potentially open chinks in the neocolonial epistemic armour. Indeed, Africans possess agency to resist and challenge the deeply damaging colonial discourses. Sadly, most leaders are conflicted with their own state power and bourgeois privilege and corrupted into acting as the “comprador” agents of neocolonialism, instead of working to lift their nations from its shackles. Thus, in order to overcome the Berlin-engineered balkanisation of the continent and gain leverage over the hegemonic world order, Africa needs to establish a massive youth-led counter-weight through a Pan-African “ground-up” movement led by a clear decolonial ideology. Youth-led because they have the least to lose and everything to gain by changing “A is for Apple” to “A is for Africa”.
Thank you for Listening to me.
