Intellectual imperialism and decolonisation in African studies

Abstract

The concepts of the cognitive empire, coloniality of knowledge, the Africanist enterprise, and decolonial turns provide effective means of unmasking resilient and invisible intellectual imperialism in African studies. A close analysis of the major turns in African studies, ranging from the overarching Black radical turn to the African nationalist, Afro-Marxist political economy, postcolonial, gender/feminist and current resurgent decolonial interventions, reveals the complexities of tasks of decolonising knowledge in Africa. A hegemonic and well-funded Africanist enterprise in the service of the cognitive empire underpinned by uneven intellectual division of labour, intellectual extraversion, and academic dependence as leitmotifs of global political economy of knowledge impinges on African studies in various ways. This is why a resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the twenty-first century is continuing with the agenda of decrypting the coloniality of power and unmasking epicolonial dynamics within the field of African studies.

Keywords:

• African studies
• coloniality of knowledge
• cognitive empire
• intellectual imperialism
• decolonial turns

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors of this special issue for their comments and encouragement, which enabled me to substantially improve this paper from its initial draft. But I take responsibility for all the views expressed in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The first and second generation of African intellectuals were produced in Europe and North America.

2 Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality in: carribeanstudiesassociation.org/docs/Maldonado-Torres_Outline_Ten_Theses-10.25.16.pdf (accessed 7 February 2023).

3 This does not mean that the gender/feminist question only emerged in African studies in the 1990s, but the edited volume lodged it into the centre of Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), a leading pan-African research institute.

4 Cheikh Anta Diop was no stranger to criticism because even his PhD thesis, which advanced an Afrocentric understanding and interpretation of the Egyptian civilisation, was initially rejected in France, but he never gave up on his thesis of proving that the Egyptian civilisation was an African civilisation and that the Greek civilisation borrowed a lot from it.

5 It was not only Zeleza who was actively productive among leading scholars of CODESRIA. Mamdani’s work on late colonialism has been well received around the world. Samir Amin, who led in the establishment of CODESRIA, was very prolific, as were many others.

6 See Pailey (2016, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant number EXC 2052/1-390713894).

Notes on contributors

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor/Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa and Vice-Dean of Research in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He is Professor Extraordinary at the Centre of Gender and African Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa, Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Leadership and Transformation at the University of South Africa, and Honorary Professor in the School of Education (Education and Development Studies) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. His latest major publications include Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (Routledge, 2018); Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over A New Leaf (Routledge, 2020); Marxism and Decolonization in the Twenty-First Century: Living Theories and True Ideas (Routledge 2022), co-edited with Morgan Ndlovu; and Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South (CODESRIA Books, forthcoming).