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Questions of decoloniality and the limits of decolonization have become increasingly central to African scholars.  Since the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town pushed issues of incomplete decolonization into the center of academic and political discourse, scholars have been grappling with the manifold ways in which Africa – like the rest of the postcolonial world – continues to struggle with the legacies of colonial rule.  Formal political independence did not alone ensure full political independence, to say nothing of liberation of the economy, the academy, or culture. Furthermore, many postcolonial states – and even states which had never been formally colonized – adopted wholesale the institutions, prejudices, and modes of domination of their colonizers.  In May 2024, the Program on African Social Research, CAS and MISR convened a workshop with emerging scholars from across the African continent to discuss these issues.   While Latin American and South Asian scholars have been at the forefront of the global decoloniality debates, in this workshop African scholars such as Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni were key referent points for a wide-spanning intergenerational conversation among scholars from across the continent.  

 

We invited participation covering a broad thematic scope, from proposals framing decolonization in relation to ongoing political shifts and contestations in Africa and the global south, to issues related to social and public policies that bear implications for working people and marginalized populations. We were also keen to contextualise decolonization in the midst of a rapidly changing global political and economic architecture, as well as related cultural shifts. Questions of identity, gender, ethnicity and race are relevant here, especially in consideration of the extent to which decolonization as a methodological/conceptual lens can shed light on the nature of identitarian politics today.

 

Intergenerational debates on decolonization featured prominently in our discussions, as did basic epistemological questions which remain the focus of decolonial debates, such as asking where it is that knowledge comes from and the connections between identity and knowledge. Equally relevant are inquiries into the relationship between geography and knowledge, technology and knowledge, as well as the place of experience and biography in knowledge production and the relationship between knowledge and ideology. As well, contemporary politics of knowledge production and the implications of these politics for research remain dominant themes of decolonial inquiry. Our discussions also considered the developmental questions that relate to the (im)possibility of thinking of development in organic and endogenous ways where sovereignty – of states, of nature, of people – is as threatened and unstable as it is today.

 

The workshop encouraged wide ranging reflections on the theoretical and political possibilities and pitfalls in current debates on decolonization and decoloniality in ways that put them into dialogue with the actual histories of emancipatory anti-colonial and postcolonial endeavors. Through a range of disciplinary perspectives, specific historical conjunctures, movements, and visions of futures were considered as the grounds from which to theorize current articulations of decolonial and postcolonial futures. Revisiting these historical experiences illuminated the centrality of needing to understand the way political pasts remain indispensable to imagining political futures – especially those which seek to prioritize new imaginaries of the universal in economic, political and cultural terms, and in new forms of global solidarity.

 

Several key themes emerged from the contributions to the workshop which are collected in this special issue of African Social Research. One set of papers focused on the pathways of decolonization itself, and the limits of political independence for genuine liberation. Moussa Ba argues that the way in which “Guinea-Conakry gained independence from colonial rule has shaped its nation-building process, leading to particular challenges in consolidating a cohesive national identity and effective developmental trajectory.” Ba describes Ahmed Sekou Toure as “a political visionary…[who] sought to free himself from colonialism by developing an anti-imperialism sentiment aimed at ending any attempts to continue the colonial model.”  But his abrupt break with France proved insufficient, as his “aggressive struggle against imperialism led him into failure in enhancing national consciousness” and a descent into repressive autocratic governance.  Faniry Ranaivo Rahamefy sees Madagascar’s path as another “miscarriage of decolonization” in which “the political decolonisation achieved at the time of independence did not bring about actual independence and failed to put an end to coloniality, which can be construed as the perpetuation of colonialism beyond the end of colonisation.” She interprets Madagascar’s 2021 national cultural policy “as a decolonial attempt to reconstruct and reinforce Malagasy cultural identity, which had been thwarted by colonialism.” Eugenia Ama Breba Anderson examines Kwame Nkrumah’s use of radio in post-colonial Ghana, showing how he used traditional practices of Sankofa in his “dawn broadcasts” to build national identity and develop decolonial uses of a colonial technology.

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A second set of contributors locate the urge to decoloniality in opposition movements against what they see as internal colonialism which replicates the modes and methods of colonial domination.  Urgessa D. Gutu examines the decolonial discourses offered by Oroma youth movements in Ethiopia. He argues that studies of coloniality must not overlook “internal conquests and subjugations within African states such as Ethiopia that escaped direct European colonial occupation but itself was ‘invented’ on the logic of European colonial structure.” The youth movements documented in his paper developed a language of decoloniality which generates tremendous power despite the absence of a formal colonial antagonist.  Kenechukwu Nwachukwu similarly argues that the pro-Biafran movement in Nigeria represented a struggle against internal colonialism following the thirty month war which ended a push for seccession. She uses feminist historiography to “decolonize discourse around pro-Biafran separatism by moving it from an automatic ethno-materialist lens to an epistemological one… rais[ing] questions about state ideology through educational reforms from colonial times through independence.” Again, decoloniality offers a route towards resistance against ongoing domination: “pro-Biafranism can be understood as an ideology critical of statist knowledge structures… and shift from narrow colonial lenses which entrench ethnicity as the one-size-fits-all approach to understanding political problems in Nigeria... into decolonial ones that address the place of knowledge-making in Nigeria’s complex political landscape.”

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A third line of inquiry in the collection builds upon Nwachukwu and Rahamefy’s focus on knowledge production in a broader African context to focus more directly on the academy. Conrad John Masabo builds upon recent critical literature on the archive associated with Derrida, Fanon, and Mbembe to examine “one source of knowledge production – the archive – by elucidating how archives acquire power and the politics that are involved in knowledge production using the archive.”  He uses four African thinkers of decoloniality - on four prominent African advocates of decolonization, namely Ngūgĩ wa Thiong’o, Kwasi Wiredu, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò – to situate the debate over the archive within broader discourses on decoloniality. Wambua Muindi develops a close reading of the late-career autobiographies of Ngugi wa Thiong to recover narratives of colonial violence and their enduring effects in Kenya. This approach allows us to “read tableaus of decolonial thought in cultural productions and inscriptions of individuals straddling both theory and literature.” Drawing on Ndhlovu-Gatsheni’s notion of ‘coloniality as being’, Muindi reads “Ngugi’s memoirs as they embody the collective colonial experience through his subjectivity.”  Lyn J.-V. Kouadio focuses the decolonial gaze on the academy, centering the distinctive challenges of Afro-Francophone Scholars in an Anglo-American Academic World. She argues that the decoloniality debate has overly privileged the British experience, while neglecting the double challenge of scholars from the Francophone world.

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A related fourth line of inquiry in the collection focuses on cultural production beyond the memoirists and novelists discussed by Masabo and Muindi.  Stephanie Wanga turns to cinema to examine the decolonial aspirations of Third Cinema filmmakers in Tanzania. What united this movement, she argued, was that “Third Cinema turned on its head all the hallmarks of the colonial condition: humiliation via aesthetics made way for an unceasing struggle for dignity via aesthetics, the elitist made way for the popular, the rigid made way for the progressive, the closed made way for the open, market practices made way for decidedly socialist ones.” Finally, Mi Medrado uses the fashion industry to demonstrate the potentials and the challenges for postcoloniality in the African context, while relating the evolution of explicitly decolonial ezines as sites of the decolonization of knowledge and discourse around fashion.

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A fifth set of essays in the collection push to expand discourses on decoloniality to new sectors and domains, reclaiming indigenous institutions against the pervasive legacies of colonialism.  Birungi Robert argues for adopting decolonial approaches to the environment and climate change. He argues that “the environmentally marginalized Indigenous community of Bunyoro has employed the clan system of totemism to culturally resist environmental destruction over time.”  In his reading, a close look at these Indigenous practices allows us to “contextualize this cultural, moral and ethical response to environmental destruction within the broader framework of decoloniality.” Seun Bamidele similarly seeks to reclaim customary law in order to decolonize Nigerian legal systems. He argues that “the dichotomy between colonial-era laws and customary legal practices has marginalized indigenous systems, perpetuating inequalities and hindering justice for many Nigerians. By reclaiming customary law, Nigeria can move towards a more inclusive legal system that accommodates diverse cultural perspectives and enhances social cohesion.”  

 

Finally, Abdulla Moaswes examines the burning contemporary of challenge of Palestine through the lens of postcoloniality. His provocative essay critically engages South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice through the lens of its own history and activities on the African continent. Taking up the intellectual challenge offered by postcolonial and indigenous scholars, he argues that the nation-state’s origins in ethnic cleansing and colonialism renders it incapable of delivering on the promise of decolonizing Palestine or delivering justice to any national liberation struggle. 

 

The wide ranging debates in this collection offer a window into complex, intersecting and contentious discussions unfolding across the African academy and throughout the postcolonial Global South.  We look forward to continuing those conversations.