African Intellectuals and Decolonization

International Journal of Teaching, Learning and Education

African political thought is fundamentally rooted in African heritage and culture. It is a frontal assault against the imperial powers of Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Union of South Africa, which denied the diverse African peoples of their right to self-government. Thus, the political concepts of African leaders at various times and places were intended to be last attacks against the denial of the basic human rights of the people. At the period, political thinking centred on two major threats to African states and the continent: colonialism and racism. In African Political Thought, the notion of Decolonization is best investigated and analysed in the context of its processes. Any attention that was paid to the African past highlighted the savage character of intergroup interactions. As colonial education was influenced by the need to explain the ills of colonialism, African history was filled with European discoveries of Africa. In order to rectify this a...

The Thinker, 2022

T his paper probes the impact of colonial designs in the fabrication of native subjectivities, which eventuated in toxic political identities that would later undermine the post-colonial nationalist project. African history was shaped by three discursive periods: pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. The colonisation period deformed, distorted and adulterated Africa's pre-colonial cultural landscape-its sense of selfhood. African nationalism was a response to this ontologically debilitated condition of African personhood resulting from the violence of self-serving European colonial modernity, which created a structured subjugation of the African 'other.' African colonial elites at once defined and epitomised various forms of African nationalism against European incursion. However, these African modernisers failed to grasp the historicity of such enduringly baneful identity politics, and were thereby often themselves cast into the vortex of social contradictions reflective of this history. Mamdani made this observation when he stated that in kick-starting the nation-building project after independence, post-colonial elites turned their backs on the history of colonialism and thus on their own history. Instead, they modelled their political imagination on the modern European state, the result being the nationalist dream was imposed on the reality of colonially imposed fragmentation, leading to new rounds of nation-building by ethnic cleansing. Consequently, African nationalism has invariably spread across large swathes of postcolonial Africa as it degenerated into odious ethnonationalism and chauvinism. Only through a deeper historical understanding of these colonial processes of African political identification can an we begin to understand how this once glorious African nationalism regressed into a dystopian one. This article draws on history to dissect this legacy of subjective forms of African self-understanding.

Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference: The Othering of the Other, 2020

Through the vehicle of Nicolas Sarkozy’s so-called “Dakar Address,” we will analyze the West’s persisting lack of insight into the need for Western decolonization. We will attempt to identify the dangers that come from this refusal, such as the continued adherence to colonial patterns, the enduring self-understanding as being superior compared to Africa, and the persisting unwillingness to accept colonial guilt. Decolonization must be understood as a two-fold business. Decolonization means overcoming endured and perpetrated violence. It is not only important that the colonially oppressed regain strength, it is equally important that the perpetrators of colonial violence understand their excess of violence and work on rendering its return impossible. We explain how Western thinking remains dangerous and untrustworthy if it rejects its own decolonization. Finally, we will draw attention to a fundamental pattern of Western thought that clashes with the fundamental values of the West: contempt. In a final step, we suggest how this contempt can be overcome through desuperiorization and the establishment of elative ethics.

2011

Cultural relativism denotes the suspension of personal and moral or value judgements about other peoples and their ways. This is very essential for a successful and objective study of the past. It also enhances successful living in the modern, multi-cultural or racial world. It teaches that before forming an opinion, one should critically examine and understand the situation. It does not emphasise any requirement of embracing the beliefs or value systems of foreigners or giving up one's own values. Contrarily, it preaches the granting of respect to a society, people, or country, trying to see their world and behaviour from their own perspectives, rather than simply rejecting all viewpoints but one's own. European scholars who attempted to reconstruct the past of Africa did not take into consideration the tenets of the historical profession and wrote about Africa from their point of view. The result was that a whole lot of wrong impressions were created about Africa and its peoples. This study, using the multidisciplinary approach, examines some of the wrong impressions Eurocentric scholars have created about Africa and Africans.

1991

African Voices of the Global Past: 1500 to the Present, ed. by Trevor R. Getz, 2014

Scholarly analyses on the historicity of Africa and its contributions in global affairs have, over the centuries, generated a lot of debate. Two dominant canonical paradigms in this continuing discourse on the African imaginary can be delineated as follows. The first strand inscribed in the works of Eurocentrists such as Hegel, insist that Africa is fundamentally a place that "…has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, forever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night" (Hegel 1830). The metaphors of "childhood" and pervasive "darkness" enunciated by Hegel in the early 19 th century would subsequently metamorphous into the imperial project of the "Whiteman's burden" and "civilizing mission" into the "heart of darkness." It is within this fragment of western philosophical teleology of progress, that we can grasp the horrendous violence that was unleashed against non-western societies, like Africa, in the form of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and related forms of denial of humanity and subjection. That Hegel himself recognized that Africa "is the land of gold" is pertinent, as the entanglement of the continent into the circuits of global coloniality has revolved around the pillage of its human and material resources. The second related canonical representation of the African subject asserts that the continent and its postcolonial states constitute domains of marginality, institutional failure, criminality, rising anarchy, piracy, and brutalization of the human body that threaten not only the continent and its people, but also "civil order" and the international community (Reno

Kaduna Journal of Humanities -A Publication of the Department of History, Kaduna State University, Nigeria, 2019

Poverty, corruption, bad leadership and violence among others have been identified as threats to the existence of the African race but none of these internal pathologies is more threatening than the Eurocentric construction of African history. While history gives a sense of belongingness, identity, belief and the historical processes needed to facilitate the productive capacity in a society as postulated by Karl Marx, African history has been maligned, denied, downplayed and to say the least, barbarically constructed through the machinations and neo-imperialistic grip of the world systems by the West, thereby weakening Africa’s indigenous knowledge and productive systems capable of facilitating its developmental aspirations. With little or no appreciable results recorded in Africa’s quest to deconstruct the western construction of its history, the deliberate denial of, and the barbaric construction of the African history by the West has negatively resulted in loss of faith in the historical uniqueness and productive capacity of Africa by the African people. This paper however concludes that the constant denigration and downplaying of African history by the West poses a greater threat to the continued existence of the African race than Africa’s domestic issues, and that unless conscious efforts are made to deconstruct the constructed African history by the West amongst its people, Africa’s development agenda may never see the light of the day. Keywords: Africa, African History, Constructed African History, Deconstructing the Eurocentric Construction of African History, Africa’s Development