1 Introduction

In his book Arrow of God (1964), the eminent African novelist, Chinua Achebe, drew from rich Igbo proverbs to define the world as being “like a Mask dancing” (or masquerade), and explained that “if you want to see it well you do not stand in one place” (Achebe 1964: 46). This definition was adapted by Francis B. Nyamnjoh, to define Africa and Africans in relation to the world: “Africa and being African are like a mask dancing. If you want to see them well, you do not stand in one place” (Nyamnjoh 2021: 2). If Africa, as a site of knowledge production and study, is constantly moving, swirling and shifting its form, we need to engage with it in an open, responsive and dynamic manner, taking multiple relations and articulations into account.

This position was poignantly stated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009), when she warned against “the dangers of a single story” and rejected the stereotypical image of Africa that emanated from a narrow focus on an African essence or metaphysics and colonial racial misrepresentations of Africa. Her caution also allows for a critical questioning of locality as a singular site of knowledge formation. It rejects a universality that hides embedded particularities. If we want to know anything, we need to step out of the comfort zones of taken-for-granted positionalities – be they essentialist or universalist. This process calls for a careful engagement with the situatedness of knowledges and knowers (Haraway 1988), thereby not fixing them but rather accounting for the specific historical, material and epistemic entanglements that have formed and continue to shape their interrelations.

Indeed, the field of African studies is traversed by deep-cutting relations of power and violence – epistemic and otherwise. To account for these means to pay attention to coloniality as a mode of being and thought (Wynter 2003; Quijano 2000; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013a, 2013b). And yet, there is more to say about knowledges in and of Africa than describing a hegemonic colonial matrix, as recent discussions about the status of “Southern theory” have pointed out (Connell 2007; Cooper and Morrell 2014; Diagne and Amselle 2020).

In this volume, we depart from the space of friction and multiplicity that marks the dynamics of knowing and unknowing in our contemporary world. Calling into question the asymmetrical global economy of knowledge and its uneven division of academic and intellectual labour, we explore what a decolonial horizon could entail for African studies at the crossroads. We deploy the topical, resurgent and insurgent framework of decolonization/decoloniality as an epistemic catalytic force, which allows us to reconsider basic epistemological questions while at the same time challenging us to reorganize our own ways of knowledge production and rethink our research ethics. Our understanding of decolonizing and decoloniality is relational and reflexive, rejecting all fundamentalist frameworks that would suggest a return to a pristine, prior and homogenous subject (Hall 1990; Povinelli 2011).

The urgent need to translate the principles of decolonial thought into a (new) programme of research becomes evident in this volume. We tackle the radical exercise of un_disciplining African studies through the making and unmaking of knowledges, that is, in methodological, empirical, theoretical and institutional terms. We ask about the multiple configurations of knowledge and being that are at stake in discussions about “epistemic freedom” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018) and decolonization in African studies. Dancing with and around the notion of Africa as our matter of epistemic concern (with a nod to Latour 2004), we also seek to reflect on African studies as a dynamic intellectual and academic field with multiple and contesting historical, discursive and ideological positions and various genealogies of knowledge.

We note that at the centre of African studies there is an inextricable convergence of existential, historical and epistemic questions, some perennial and others emergent. As a starting point, we take Countee Cullen’s question “What is Africa to me?”, from his 1925 Harlem Renaissance poem, “African Heritage”. This soul-searching question has deep epistemological implications for diverse ways of knowing and unknowing Africa. Cullen’s poem responds to the violent displacement and dispossession of transatlantic chattel slavery, the disrupted memory of place and kin and the brutal dehumanization of racial hierarchization. He suggests a mode of diasporic identification and relatedness that places Africa at the centre of the self. Here, and in the various facets of political and intellectual Pan Africanism(s), diasporic connectedness and African identities emerge through a shared core (essence) and lore (knowledge). Projects like the Encyclopedia Africana, which was initiated by W.E.B. Du Bois when he took residence in independent Ghana, sought to translate this programmatic call into a solid knowledge foundation that ought to serve as a source of self-awareness, emancipation and empowerment.¹

These objectives have been shared by a number of African thinkers and intellectual movements on the continent, from négritude to the African Renaissance. They mark a notion of heritage that is foundational to the present: a precious seed that lies buried in the past and needs to be dug up, protected and preserved in order to grow into the future – just like the Adinkra symbol, sankofa. The sankofa bird holds the past in its beak but is a living and moving creature that is not confined to the temporality of antiquity. Even though its head is turned to the past for orientation, its feet point forward – towards a possible future. This is not a linear temporality but a circular and dialectical one that also holds the promise of a sense of reconnection and continuity (for further discussion of the sankofa symbol and its significance in Ghanaian historiography, see chapter 5 by Cassandra Mark-Thiesen in this volume). In a similar vein, the movement that is evoked in Léopold Sédar Senghor’s (1964: 259) metaphoric African dance (“Je sens l’Autre, je danse l’Autre, donc je suis”) suggests a natural rhythm and existential form of “being African” that is connected to a circular temporality of return and to a fundamental relatedness with others.

However, the rhythm of the masquerade is not always regular or harmonious – the mask may break out and scare the audience. The movement that accompanies it may not lead to a better (or even comprehensive) overview, as suggested by Achebe and Njamnjoh, but it may rather be a flight. Likewise, the dance may not hold just one memory – or even one of a glorious or useful past, for that matter. It may also be an expression of layered experiences of violence and trauma and a negotiation of power and resistance, as Nicolas Argenti has shown in his ethnographic study of the Oku masquerades in the Cameroonian grassland (Argenti 2005). Translated into the question “What is Africa to me?”, this facet of the dance leads to a different understanding of the past in the present, namely one that is profoundly marked by the violent rupture of enslavement and colonialism.

This Black radical tradition and aesthetics of flight situates the realm of knowledge in sharp opposition to any extractivist, functionalist or foundational epistemology. The metaphor of moving around the mask and the meshwork of relations that it evokes not only unsettles the certainty of being (as defined through nationalist projects). It also allows us to open up to forms of knowledge beyond the descriptive. It leaves room for opaqueness, errantry, serendipity and failure. In his Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant (1995) links this epistemic form to a mode of decolonization that builds on lived relations. Not being but becoming – and becoming together – marks the possible point of departure.

In a recent collection of essays on decolonization, Out of the Dark Night, Achille Mbembe (2021) has also argued against what he calls “the night of identity”, where Africanness emerges as a prior form of being and thinking. Against the sharp divisions of identitarian politics, he poses the human as a planetary being who will overcome the burden of race and racism not by turning the brutalizing and dehumanizing figure of “le nègre” on its head (as Senghor attempted to do) but by radically leaving it behind (Mbembe 2017). This planetary subjectivity stands in opposition to the character of “Universal Man/Man II” that Sylvia Wynter (2003) has criticized so profoundly in her analysis of the limited humanism of the Enlightenment, which conceptualized “the human” through the radical exclusion, exploitation and extermination of non-European Others. Wynter has opposed this typology with “being human as a practice”, once again prioritizing relations (including historically situated ones) over fixed positionalities. In a similar vein (though with sole reference to male thinkers like Frantz Fanon), Mbembe argues for an entangled and multiple understanding of African subjectivities.

Mbembe’s planetary orientation is a claim for the universal without its homogenizing tendencies. However, as Suleymane Bashir Diagne has pointed out in his exchange with Jean-Loup Amselle, In Search of Africa(s) (2020), the universal is not a fact; if anything, it can be only an aspiration. Whereas Amselle rejects any reference to an “African” sense of self and claims “the universal” as an unmarked and neutral vantage point, Diagne acknowledges the existence of Africa as a specific historical formation and position (Diagne and Amselle 2020). In African studies more broadly, this discussion around the universal versus the particular is still ongoing. However, if we think through multiplicity, the pluriverse (Escobar 2018, 2020) might be a more fitting concept because it acknowledges and addresses the planetary scope while allowing for multiple forms of knowledge and being.

Clearly, the mask is not a singular cultural artifact, but the product of multiple exchanges, inventions and reinventions (Mudimbe 1988; Mazrui 2005). Likewise, the dance and the masquerade cannot exist in isolation; they fade and lose significance without the active engagement of the participants. Therefore, as scholars concerned with rethinking and reconfiguring the field of African studies, we are aware that, in studying Africa, there is always creation and recreation of the matters of concern. But, as we have outlined above, there are different pathways to take and different understandings of what this engagement may look like. Our commitment to movement and multiplicity implies that we critically engage with the different genealogies that have shaped the dynamics of power and knowledge in the field of African studies. Thus, in the following sections, we first briefly discuss the problem of doing and undoing the canon as part of the politics of knowledge. A second focus is on institutions, since it is here that African studies take shape and are potentially reconfigured. Finally, we outline briefly what our understanding of “thinking as moving” could imply for future pathways in African studies.

2 Un-doing the Canon

Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense. Canon debate, whatever the terrain, nature, and range (of criticism, of history, of history of knowledge, of the definition of language, the universality of aesthetic principles, sociology of art, the humanistic imagination), is the clash of cultures. And all of the interests are vested.

MORRISON 1989: 8

In her essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”, about the African-American presence in American literature, Toni Morrison (1989) addresses the profoundly political character of knowledge. She notes that the claim to the universal is often articulated from the unmarked vantage point of whiteness (Morrison 1993), a vantage point that denies its own conditions of formation and its situatedness within a web of relations that go far beyond the bourgeois white subject. Individual books are classics for Morrison – in the sense that “a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say” (Calvino 1986). But the canon, or the repertoire of works to be considered a “must read” for a whole (universally imagined) collective – be it a nation or a discipline – is problematic, because it is infused with power and bound to the history of empire.

Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has analysed the centre–periphery logics that have shaped canon formation in the field of history and in the social sciences more broadly. His call to provincialize Europe is an appeal to rethink the ways in which the history of modernity is told. Chakrabarty also challenges the vantage point from which to conceptualize the postcolonial subject. In other words, decolonizing must simultaneously entail “provincializing” and “deprovincializing” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). Against a developmentalist and diffusionist teleology of modernity that takes Europe as a standard and defines the rest of the world as “lagging (behind)”, Chakrabarty advocates for a more careful analysis of regional dynamics and articulations of modernity.

This critical approach also demands a closer look at the political and material entanglements that have shaped the development of modern sciences, and at the very standards of scientific and academic authority on which knowledge production (and canon formation) are based. Decolonial studies have therefore paid close attention to “the darker side of modernity” (Mignolo 2011) and the “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom” (Wynter 2003), calling for a new reflection on what it means to be human. Similarly, science and technology studies have unpacked the many ways in which (scientific) knowledge, material world and political (colonial) order are linked (see, for example, Haraway 1989; Latour 1993) and how they could be otherwise (Escobar 2007; Law 1990). Although these debates are often kept apart, we are convinced that they can and should be brought together in fruitful conversation (see, for example, the chapters by Christine Hanke and Eleanor Schaumann in this volume).

Regarding the idea of a canon in African studies and its relationship with conceptions of standard, authority and meritocracy, we are reminded that any reflection on its possible content and form must also include a critical analysis of the knowledge base from which we determine what is important or, indeed, of universal appeal, a task that is taken up by Elisio Macamo and Elelwani Ramugondo in this volume.

Given all these critical assessments, the question arises whether and how the canon should be replaced, expanded, abandoned or dismantled. This question resonates with recent discussions in African studies and adjacent fields. Over the past years, we have seen an increasing number of articles, editorials and think pieces emerge that address pertinent questions, like “How African is the African Studies Review?” (Lawrance 2019), “What We Can Do to Keep Africa at the Heart of our Research” (Nolte 2019) or “[How to] Decolonize the African Studies Centre” (Branch 2018). Following the South African #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student movements, which gained global traction and put the content and framework of (higher) education to the test, some of these (mainstream) reflections appear as a belated response to a wake-up call, suddenly realizing the significance of positionality, representation and power linked to whiteness (see Susan Arndt in this volume for another aspect of white hegemony, namely language and terminology).

Jean Allman’s (2019) presidential lecture at the African Studies Association, “#HerskovitsMustFall? A Meditation on Whiteness, African Studies, and the Unfinished Business of 1968”, makes explicit reference to the problem of scholarly and political gatekeeping that is linked so closely to canon formation, citation practices and institutional politics. However, as Allman realizes in her contribution, this is a problem that has accompanied the very formation of the field of African studies since World War Two. It has also been problematized by African and Black scholars for a long time (Clarke 1979; Ake 1979; Laurer and Anyidoho 2012; Pailey 2016; Blakey 2020) – and it has affected the very idea of “area studies” more broadly (Huat et al. 2019; Schramm 2008).

Where does this leave us in relation to the canon? First, it is clear that we need to address the problem of power/knowledge in relation to infrastructures and institutions (see Part II of this book) – because this is where knowledge gets (re-)produced and disseminated, where scholarly and other networks are formed, where collaborations are sought out and where the challenges of decolonial thinking and moving are put to practical test.

Second, we acknowledge that there is no such thing as a singular canon in any field. In other words, the notion of the canon is a projection, a gesture of power. There are always twists and turns and sideways shifts that keep a debate alive and moving. This must not lead to conformity or the simple replacement of one body of knowledge, one narrative or one curriculum with another. As recent debates that have sprung up in response to the widespread call for decolonizing the curriculum in anthropology and other fields show, there are many ways to approach what appears as an established corpus of “classical” texts – neither through hagiographic reverence nor iconoclastic condemnation (Da Col et al. 2017; Handler et al. 2016). A critical engagement means to reflect on a text’s multiple points of reference, to examine the problems on which it casts its light and the shadows and silences that may be generated by its presence. It means to unsettle what might have been taken for granted. This is an exercise that Anthony Okeregbe and Muyiwa Falaiye undertake in this volume, engaging with the work of Henry Odera Oruka (1991) and his concept of philosophical sagacity.

Third, and finally, we need to be aware of the limitations of any discussion about a disciplinary canon if we want to consider knowledges and epistemic practices more broadly. Largely limited to the institutional space of the university, the question about the canon runs the danger of reproducing the very elitism that we seek to overcome in our critical endeavour. As various chapters in this volume demonstrate, we urgently need to pay attention to knowledge practices outside the university – not in an extractivist sense, as the raw material for academic theorizations, but as theoretical contributions in their own right. This may concern community-based activism and combative teaching, as discussed by Zandi Radebe and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, as much as the contemplations of the female elders interviewed by Anthony Okeregbe and Muyiwa Falaiye or the unique conceptualization of age that comes to the fore in the letters written by indigenous Cameroonians to the British administration, as discussed by Eric Anchimbe. Clearly, un_doing the canon is a multifaceted task. In profound ways, it is linked to institutions and their transformation.

3 Institutional Challenges and Transformations

As a field of study, “African studies” is closely tied to institutions that shape knowledge production and exchange in this intellectual terrain. Universities, African studies associations, African studies centres, funding bodies, publishers, journals, regulatory agencies and many others play distinct and overlapping roles in framing debates on the direction of African studies. Within associations of African studies, the interrelated and overlapping issues of membership, representation and participation (power), epistemic perspective and ideological orientation (politics) and commitment to liberation and justice (relevance) have emerged. Some of these debates have led to a sharp critique of the established “Africanist enterprise” of knowledge production (see Martin and West 2012), whereas others have simply sought to widen the scope of knowledge production in a more “inclusive” manner. Currently, a number of conflicts and struggles revolve around the uneven intellectual/academic divisions of labour within the modern knowledge economy in which African studies is located and imbricated. The issues range from exclusionary networks of journals and publishers, limited and restrictive funding policies and the ongoing privileging of (Western) “theory” over (African) “empirical data”, to matters of partnerships, collaborations and the co-production of knowledge (Hountondji 1990; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Seesemann and Vogt-William 2022).

In this volume, we address these institutional matters in various ways: by paying attention to more recent experiments in institutional collaboration against many odds (see Greven and Naumann) or through the close documentation and analysis of African autonomous institutional spaces, such as the Ghana Historical Society and its journal Ghana Notes and Queries (see Mark-Thiesen) or the Institute of African Studies, also located in independent Ghana (see the chapter by Adjei, Ntewusu and Ampofo). The latter chapters, especially, show how some of the hopes and visions of political independence led to the founding of independent academic institutions that often combined a cultural nationalist focus with a more pan-African outlook. These institutions were and continue to be vibrant spaces of intellectual exchange and education. As in the case of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), which was launched in October 2013 in Accra, Ghana, they were also foundational for more recent initiatives that continue to challenge the hegemony of the Western academy as the privileged location of knowledge production and critical debate.²

But the existing hierarchy of knowledges in and between institutions of higher learning is not the only challenge that faces contemporary African studies. On a more general level, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2017) has identified three major problems that confront the university as a longstanding model institution of thinking, teaching, learning and researching. The first is the hegemonic crisis, which arises from the university having lost its previous monopoly of being the key site of knowledge production. A critique of this hegemony and its close links to Eurocentric epistemology is evident in contemporary politics of knowledge. At the same time, the current conjuncture is characterized by multiple sites of knowledge generation, some of these enabled by the Internet and online platforms. It is within this context that the possibilities of digital African studies emerge (see the chapter by Greven and Naumann for an analysis of the practical challenges – and limitations – of digitization). What Santos designates as the hegemonic crisis is compounded by the difficulties that universities have in reconciling their traditional mission, in which the institution was home for only a few select and elite groups, with the current demands for it to be accessible to many more people with different backgrounds, interests and conception of knowledges.

The second problem is the legitimacy crisis that troubles many universities, especially in Europe and North America but also in South Africa and elsewhere. This crisis concerns the university’s long complicities in racism, enslavement, colonialism, patriarchy, sexism, capitalism and apartheid and their reverberations in the present. Consequently, across the contemporary world, universities have been pushed to repurpose themselves, redefine their missions and reclaim legitimacy. At the same time, while engaging with decolonial, feminist and indigenous critiques, universities are under pressure from within a global context of neoliberal coloniality where knowledge and education have been commodified. Consequently, demands for the decolonization of knowledge have become intertwined with demands for the “decorporatization” and “depatriarchization” of universities (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2021; Tamale 2020).

The Ugandan feminist scholar, Sylvia Tamale (2020: 9), has posed some difficult questions about how to transcend the “poisoned gaze of the Western reader”, how to cultivate “critical consciousness to counter racist patriarchal power”, how to reflect on intersections of “racism, colonization, capitalism, sexism and heterosexism” for the purposes of enhancing a deeper understanding of contemporary challenges, and how to “navigate” Euromodernity “without losing ‘Africanness’”. These issues continue to haunt the academy, and not only in the West. As Catherine Kiprop highlights in this book, African women’s journeys and experiences in academia are often particularly difficult, in that they experience intersectional forms of marginalization and exclusion. What emerges poignantly from Kiprop’s intervention are gendered power relations and toxic institutional cultures in African institutions of higher education.

As a result of the “continuities in discontinuities” of inequalities and power asymmetries within modern institutions, the resurgent and insurgent decolonization of the twenty-first century has taken us back to basic epistemological and existential issues. Taken together, the chapters in this volume by Edwin Adjei, Samuel Ntewusu and Akosua Adomako Ampofo (Institute of African Studies in Ghana), Cassandra Mark-Thiesen (Legon School of History and Historical Society of Ghana), Catherine Kiprop (the question of gender, patriarchy and sexism in African universities) and Katharina Greven and Lena Naumann (Ulli Beier’s photographic estate in Germany and Nigeria) address various aspects of institutions and transformation. These nuanced interventions and critiques take us to the third crisis identified by Santos (2017), which is the university’s institutional crisis. The existence of the university as an ivory tower is heavily challenged as demands grow for universities to embed themselves in society.

At the centre of this demand are issues of education as a public good and the thirst for relevant knowledge. The question of the relevance of knowledge and education, in Africa and other places that experienced colonialism, is not reducible to utilitarianism. It is an existential issue for people who suffer imposed alienation – from the self, history, culture, language and knowledge. Seeking relevance becomes part of the painstaking process of transcending the experiences of dehumanization and dismemberment (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 2009; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018). The establishment of centres of African studies within universities in Africa has not resolved the hegemonic, legitimacy and institutional cultural crises. This is partly because these centres have suffered enclavement and reduction into “townships” (isolated entities) within the “city” (university). Alternative spaces outside the university, such as the Sowetan BlackHouse Kollective, introduced in the chapter by Zandi Radebe and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (this volume), are important correctives in this state of crisis. How these initiatives and other research endeavours address thinking as movement is elaborated in the next section.

4 Thinking as Moving: Future Knowledges

Conceptually, thinking as moving and its gesturing into future knowledges demands what Julian Go (2016: 1) proposed as the reconciliation of “social theory” (institutionalized as social science) and “postcolonial thought” (institutionalized as a humanist project); Go also saw decoloniality as a force of transcendence of analytical bifurcations (see Gandhi 2006 on imperial binarism). This movement transcends the “putative Eurocentric parochialism, theoretical stagnation, and seeming irrelevance of our neo-imperialist present” (Go 2016: XI). It is also about a shift from the nationalist and nativist articulations of African studies, with their cultural relativism and essentialist orientations. At the centre of thinking as moving is imagination: “to imagine different types of knowledge, new ways of seeing and perceiving, and alternative conceptual forms and tools for better understanding the world around us” (Go 2016: 17). What is also important here is the decolonial imperative of cultivating “a strategic second sight” that takes into account the realities of Africa as part of the world and the world as part of Africa (see Maher 2022 on the concept of second sight drawn from W.E.B. Du Bois).

The reality, though, is that there is repetition and a movement of ideas and perspectives in African studies, which reflects the complexities of the epistemic challenges. The question is whether these movements really amount to paradigmatic and epistemic shifts in the discipline. Reference can be made here to shifts from colonial scholarship to African nationalist and Black radical scholarship; shifts from African nationalist thought to embrace Marxist and political economy perspectives; and shifts from Afro-radical Marxism to postcolonial thought and its critique of metanarratives. The feminist and gender studies interventions in African studies are delivering a movement of thinking and ideas, from androcentrism to a scholarship that embraces feminist theorizing, gender analysis and intersectionality perspectives (Mama 2007). Perhaps what we need to address is, if indeed African scholarship is characterized by a movement in thinking, albeit mediated by repetitions, how does repetition become part of thinking as moving in African studies and what are the crucial issues, questions and perspectives that are repeated?

At the same time, the ongoing critique of African studies transcends issues of institutional politics and representational matters. It touches on complex existential and epistemic issues of what it means to know Africa, who should be heard, what the content of what is being said is, and how we know what we know about Africa and its multiple entanglements with global and planetary matters of concern.

These authors are explicit in their decolonial outlook, which they link to the epistemic principles of pluriversality, transdisciplinarity and unlearning, inspired by the Ecuadorian indigenous Amawtay Wasi (“House of Learning”). Mignolo in particular has popularized the notion of undisciplining as a way to overcome the classificatory politics of defining an “object of study” as standing outside the scope of the knowedgeable expert. Arguing against the hierarchical understanding of (scientific) knowledge as an authoritative truth-claim that is detached from experience, positionality and mutual learning, Mignolo and other decolonial authors have made strong assertions towards a new understanding of knowledges as a collaborative, relational endeavour. As some of our contributions show, this goal demands careful listening (see the chapters by Njovane and Hlengwa, and by Kiprop), methodological innovation (Ramugondo, Schaumann) and the preparedness to give up control (Greven and Naumann). Methods of unknowing and unlearning (in order to know differently) also demand the critical examination of well-established knowledge practices and their historical genealogies in disciplinary fields outside of African studies (see the chapters by Hanke and Schaumann, but also by Arndt). In this volume, we hope to contribute to new pathways in research that remains conscious of its standpoint and critical potential but is also open to revisions, new connections and worlding practices. With studying Africa conceived in terms of a dancing masquerade that cannot be viewed from any stationary vantage point, it becomes necessary to take into account repetitions within movements and constantly shift positions to comprehend their multiple sides. At the centre of this are the complex habits of knowing/unknowing amenable to understanding a moving subject of study.

5 Chapter Overview

The chapters we have collected in this volume have emerged from our engagements in the institutional framework of the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies” at the University of Bayreuth, more specifically in the Research Section Knowledges.³ They represent the beginning of a conversation, not its final outcome. As laid out in this introduction, we have organized our book in three parts. Part I deals with the question of the canon; Part II tackles the politics of institutions; and Part III explores some of the empirical prospects of thinking as moving.

In Part I: Un_Doing the Canon, we seek to engage with the question of the canon in historical and epistemological ways. What are the genealogies of knowledge that we should build on for a decolonial practice to emerge? What needs undoing and what is the basis for our critical practice? How do we situate ourselves in relation to knowledge production in African studies? How do we know – and how can we unknow – well-established forms of research, comparison and theorizing?

In chapter 1, “African Studies, or How to Make the Canon Apocryphal”, Elísio Macamo offers a critical reflection on African studies and the matter of the canon, not so much in terms of marking a disciplinary field but rather as a methodological reflection on the social sciences more generally. Drawing on a fictive conversation with Immanuel Kant, he unpacks a hidden story behind the European Enlightenment, its universalist claims and the idea of a Western canon. Macamo claims that the challenge of undoing the canon consists in recovering the critical edge of the social sciences. In his exposition, it is not enough to come up with an alternative or “Africanized” body of knowledge; the challenge is to bring into existence something that was not there before. In other words, African studies should not be understood simply as producing knowledge about Africa, but rather as the careful reflection on the conditions under which knowledge is at all possible. Through the concept of the biblical Apocrypha, a body of texts that once formed part of the canon but is now excluded, Macamo draws attention to what is dubious about our ways of knowing so that we can be in a position to know better, or at any rate, to know what we cannot know now because of what we know.

Whereas Macamo’s chapter starts from the field of African studies to reflect more generally on questions of epistemology, critique and the limits of knowing (and ultimately unknowing), Elelwani Ramugondo approaches the question of the canon from a different angle. In chapter 2, “Dissecting and Transcending Enduring Fallacies”, she identifies a number of problems in the field of African studies that make it difficult for a decolonial practice to emerge. While the assumption that we can think without the body is a key fallacy, which has endured empiricist perspectives in African studies and beyond, there are many others. Some of these include: a belief in the role of the disciplines in saving or uplifting humanity; interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as adequate tools with which to decolonize the academy; colonial languages as indispensable instruments in knowledge generation; and, conversely, that simply inserting indigenous languages within the canon is sufficient to bring about decolonization. This chapter explores what needs undoing in the African studies canon as a basis for ongoing decolonial practice. Among other things, Ramugondo raises the question of language as a problem of institutional and epistemic hierarchies and exclusions, thereby drawing attention to the double bind that characterizes the dominance of colonial languages (English in particular) in African studies, which at the same time restricts and enables. The very fact that all our contributions are in English confirms that there is no easy way out of this conundrum.

Chapter 3 by Susan Arndt, “Knowledge Matters: Racism and Its Wording as a Tool for Reconfiguring African Studies”, throws light on yet another issue in relation to our use of language – namely, the ongoing and sticky legacy of racist terms in everyday speech and public discourse. How can we speak about and address the toxicity of racist words without reproducing their destructive power? The author approaches “race” as an ideological construct born out of greed and brutality and spelled out by racism as backed up by white supremacy’s power. In constructing this ideology, racism has built simple narratives that have relied on modes of generalizing the “Other” as nature beyond culture and being (fully) human. This narrative is pillared by racist terminology that rests on two possible sources: either terms from biology or pre-modern times in Europe were transferred onto new societal contexts, or new terms were coined to transport the idea of colonized people representing “nature” and thus inferior to whiteness, alias “culture”. African studies had a major role in shaping racism, pillaring white gazes on and narrations about Africa and inventing and implementing racist terms. Arndt’s chapter revisits the history of colonialism and racism as platforms for racist terminology in the German language. She criticizes African studies, for being at the forefront of implementing racist concepts and terminologies that still haunt us today and yet remaining largely reluctant to take responsibility for subverting white supremacy and undoing racist epistemologies and respective terminologies.

No canon exists by and of itself; it is bound to institutions, including the university, as the main playing field in which “the canon” is established, debated, reshaped and potentially undone. Indeed, the question of knowledge production is closely linked to institutional cultures and the politics of knowledge they represent. In many ways, African studies has been shaped by forms of racist, patriarchal, sexist and classist exclusions that are increasingly called into question and thus have come to trouble such institutions as universities, professional associations, funding bodies and even governments. In Part 2: Institutional Challenges and Transformations, we pay closer attention to the ways in which conceptual debates around social inclusion, epistemic freedom and decolonial thought are mirrored and impact on institutional spaces and disciplinary settings within African studies and beyond. What are the concrete experiences of critical interventions and institutional transformations in different academic spaces? What frictions emerge, what new horizons open up? None of these questions is new, even though they seem to reappear with new vigour and rekindled energy in the current moment.

As shown in chapter 4 by Edwin Adjei, Samuel Ntewusu and Akosua Adomako Ampofo, “The Ongoing Tune of the African Genius: Past, Present and Future”, ideas that emerged from the hopeful moment of independence have continued to shape institutional politics and epistemological and curricular orientations in African studies centres like the Institute of African Studies, Legon, Ghana. Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, saw the need for the establishment of such an institute that would prioritize Africans telling their own stories from an African-centred perspective and evaluate the place of Africa in global affairs. African scholars were charged to do exactly that in Nkrumah’s famous speech on “The African Genius”, delivered at the opening of the Institute of African Studies, in which he exhorted them to perform in-depth, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research into all aspects of African history, arts, culture and technologies, including Africa’s diaspora. The outcome of such research was to be the foundation for the regeneration of Africa and African people through knowledge production, dissemination and preservation.

In their chapter, Adjei, Ntewusu and Ampofo focus on the institutional and intellectual journey of the Institute of African Studies from 1962 onwards, culminating in its role in the establishment of the pan-African African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), in 2013. Their chapter concludes with a vision of the Institute of African Studies and the ASAA in today’s global intellectual and political economy.

Indeed, Ghana remained one of the intellectual hubs for the field of African studies on the African continent. A major site that shaped conversations about African historiography was the Historical Society of Ghana and its journal Ghana Notes and Queries, which is the focus of chapter 5 by Cassandra Mark-Thiesen, “Written in Water: The Legon School of History and the Publication of the Past”. Focusing on the history and memory of the Historical Society, this chapter explores the project of an Africa-based African studies and its search for philosophical and historical principles that would not only explain but also reinforce societal change. It highlights the society’s self-understanding of possessing futurity in the 1960s and 1970s and the moment of commemorating 50 years of political independence in 2007. Moreover, it explores this sense of creating possibility by moving forward, via the society’s print publications. By means of a review of Ghana Notes and Queries and another of the society’s publications, the chapter pays particular attention to possibilities related to the coproduction of historical knowledge and teaching.

Whereas the chapters by Adjei, Ntewusu and Ampofo and Mark-Thiesen trace the development of alternative institutions and research agendas from the time of independence to the present moment, chapter 6, by Catherine Kiprop, takes a different turn. In her analysis of “Gender, Feminism and Politics of Knowledge Production: An Interrogation of Institutional Cultures of Africa’s Institutions of Higher Learning”, she critically discusses the many overlapping problems that female African scholars endure in academia. African women’s narratives about their journeys in academia demonstrate how the power and politics of knowledge are intrinsically linked to gender. The organizational and institutional cultures in African institutions of higher learning, like those of Western-style universities in general, were established to meet the needs of male faculty and students. Gender inequalities in universities have an impact on the production of knowledge in these institutions. While addressing gender issues in education, the role of feminist thinking in shaping the theory of equality and equity cannot be ignored. This chapter discusses the institutional and intellectual challenges that female academics in African universities have encountered, examines feminism as part of the intellectual discourse and explores the imperatives necessary to move the discourse on gender in African scholarly communities beyond the normative policy rhetoric to tackle the gendered configurations of academic institutions.

In Kiprop’s chapter we see the many institutional and personal hurdles that female African scholars have to scale to participate equally in the process of academic knowledge production. Equal opportunity and affirmative action measures are important, but they can do only so much to change institutional cultures. This is a point that is taken up and deepened in chapter 7 by Thando Njovane and Mandy Hlengwa, “Transformation Beyond the Surface: Race, Power and Young Academics After #RhodesMustFall”. Clearly, this movement and the wider student protests around it brought into stark focus long-abiding issues of justice, race, epistemologies and institutional cultures, particularly within historically white universities in South Africa. These issues are closely related to the historical context of a nation in the grip of a desire to create a more just future while also living in the shadow of a traumatic past that is not yet resolved. Higher education institutions constitute at least one of the sites of contestation in that they contain deeply embedded forms of structural and systemic oppression.

More recently, universities have tended to highlight issues of race, gender and curriculum design in their transformation agendas. However, with the impetus of transforming both the student and staff profiles, little to no emphasis has been placed on power, or what Foucault calls “phantom power”, and its reproduction through those racial bodies that may be read as historically oppressed. This chapter analyses the university as a particular type of social body, where the bodies of those who inhabit it are vested with legacies of power that can be reproduced regardless of how those bodies are racialized and gendered. The chapter argues that race and gender alone cannot be taken as the sum total of the transformation agenda, especially because both have the potential to reproduce and uphold the very structures they are supposed to dismantle. The issue becomes less about the kinds of bodies we find within institutional walls and more about how power is distributed and accounted for inside them.

The challenges of institutional transformation concern not only the complex configurations of power and visibility; they also come to the fore in the attempts at doing things otherwise. A concrete example of a proactive change in institutional politics towards serious collaboration is discussed in chapter 8 by Katharina Greven and Lena Naumann, “On Access and Responsibility – Questioning Ulli Beier’s Legacy Through Collaborative Approaches”. The Ulli Beier estate archive came to the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, Germany, in 2012, shortly after Beier passed away in 2011. The estate was added to the existing art collection that the Beiers had brought to Bayreuth in 1981, which is still one of the most extensive collections of African modernism worldwide. The photographic estate, comprising around 40,000 pieces, documents Ulli and Georgina Beier’s image of Africa during the time they lived in Nigeria, and manifests how they perceived their own role within the cultural and political environment of independent Nigeria. At the same time, it is a historical asset of Nigerian and Papua New Guinean (art) history, which was, until recently, not available for viewing by the respective communities nor for anyone outside of Bayreuth. To change this situation became the core of a restitution project, in which both Greven and Naumann were involved as part of the Iwalewahaus staff. Their chapter discusses the change in attitude towards the newly arrived material that eventually led to the estate being moved to the Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding (CBCIU) in Osogbo, Nigeria, in 2020. The authors describe some of the new possibilities for critical intervention that were opened up by the relocation of the materials. They reflect on the collaborative and sensual work that emerged in the process, also adding a critical note on digitization, its conditions, possibilities and limitations.

Movement, circulation and a shift in vantage point are also thematic and methodological issues for empirical research and new epistemic practices. In PART 3: Thinking as Moving: Future Pathways, we are interested in critical reflections on the circulation of knowledges across disciplines and fields, including the interface of academia and activism but also the multiple forms of translation as well as irritation between science, policy and practice. Another dimension of thinking as moving concerns the process of reflexivity as it emerges in relation to research, (institutional) location and audience. What does it mean to say “I am where I think” (Mignolo 1999), and how does thinking as moving unsettle primordialist understandings of knowledge and being? How can we un_know “Africa” through its global embeddedness? This approach necessarily includes a critical historical perspective on the ways in which knowledge, power (and subversion) are connected, thereby addressing hegemonic forms of knowledge and knowledges that emerge outside well-established institutional spaces. Finally, we note that subversive concepts often make us uncomfortable because they are hard to categorize and tame. They are never neat – if we want to smooth them out, they may lose their cutting edge. We take up the challenge to move out of the comfort zone and ask what new knowledges may be generated and born from this space of friction.

This section begins with chapter 9, a contribution by Anthony Okeregbe and Muyiwa Falaiye, who interrogate the gendered dimensions of philosophical sagacity. This important stream in contemporary African philosophy was introduced by the Kenyan philosopher, Henry Odera Oruka. Arguing that the project of reconfiguring African studies must include a critical examination of African intellectual systems, the authors shift our attention to the ways in which our very modes and terms of analysis as well as people’s (and in this case women’s) practices of living and knowing the world are closely entwined. In their chapter “Women Sages in Male Epistemic Spaces: an Analysis of Patriarchal Forces in Female Knowledge Production”, they focus on the modes of relationality that characterize female agency in male epistemic spaces. The chapter identifies and interrogates modalities of relations, such as suppression, acquiescence and control, in the epistemic agency of a body of African women who are considered as sages in their own right.

The chapter demonstrates how the Orukan framework fails to account for women’s positionality and agency in patriarchal regimes of being and thinking. In their responses to questions that border on fundamental issues of existence, most of the interviewed women did not meet the empirical and normative criteria for philosophical sagacity or didactic sages in the Orukan sense. Although this indicates the dominance of patriarchal regimes in women’s lifeworlds and beliefs, it also signifies the multiple nature of sagacity within patriarchal knowledge production systems. To recognize indigenous African women as philosophical thinkers in their own right might require a different framework from that of philosophical sagacity. Okeregbe and Falaiye reiterate a point that is also made by Ramugondo and others – namely, that it is not enough to simply replace one body of knowledge with another and assume that this will resolve the deep entanglement of coloniality and being. The authors engage with the notion of wisdom as a particular form of epistemic (as well as social and political) authority.

In chapter 10, “Knowledges in Conflict: Conceptualizations of Age in Colonial Letters”, Eric Anchimbe revisits an interesting debate between colonial authorities and indigenous Cameroonians during the colonization of the British Southern Cameroons by Britain (1916–1960). Reading the archive of colonial letters along and against the grain (Stoler 2009), he examines strategies of linguistic subversion and political claim-making through the differing conceptualizations of age. Whereas for the British, being old signified senility and a time to retire, for the Indigenous population it was considered a mark of experience and wisdom, qualifying a person for further administrative authority or power. This difference in understanding of age embodies a conflict of knowledge repertoires and how these fit into the natural order of growing old or ageing. Using letters exchanged between British colonial authorities and Chief Manga Williams of Bimbia, British Southern Cameroons, the chapter asks about the concrete conceptualizations of age adopted in these colonial letters. What repertoires of knowledge were driving their production, rejection and perhaps co-construction? Overall, the chapter concludes that, in spite of the conflicting conceptualizations, both perspectives of age continued to co-exist during and after colonialism but within different spheres of power: the political and the hereditary.

Christine Hanke’s contribution in chapter 11, “Haunted Numbers: the Lingering Legacies of Colonial Statistics and Measurement”, critically examines another form of colonial knowledge production. Her focus of study is not the realm of politics and administration but the interface of nineteenth-century biological and statistical sciences in the nascent discipline of physical anthropology, at the core of which was the production of race. The chapter proposes a critical engagement with the genealogies and legacies of colonial modes of knowledge-making and epistemic violence. Besides the inherent racism that underscored the hierarchical ordering of human difference, the chapter argues that epistemic violence lies in the very scientific practices of mechanical-objective and metric-statistical procedures that the discipline purported. To discuss the coloniality of this knowledge regime with respect to its genealogy and its epistemology, the chapter interweaves two argumentative steps. First, it situates the analyzed practices of knowing in a broader transformation of European knowledge production and its relation to “modernity”, industrialization and colonialism. Second, it undertakes epistemological reflections on the specific approaches of measurement and statistics by focusing on the practices of metric-statistical knowledge production in colonial anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century, to render visible the epistemic violence that lies in this very modality. Arguing from a media-theoretical background, this contribution invites a reflexive critique of this hegemonic, seemingly self-evident mode of knowing, by unpacking the underlying power structures and lasting effects of this colonial epistemic form(ation).

Scientific knowledge was never isolated but in many ways was connected to very practical realms of (colonial) governance, economics and epistemic hierarchies that continue to reverberate in the present. In chapter 12, “‘Lamb Description’ – a Circulation of Knowledge Practices”, Eleanor Schaumann takes us to another site in which a contemporary (agricultural) practice is deeply entangled with colonial modes of knowledge and economic production. Her contribution traces the knowledge practice of “lamb description” in the Namibian Swakara industry, one of the most significant economic sectors in (Southern) Namibia over the past 100 years, which is currently in massive decline. Schaumann considers the different ways in which the Swakara sector mobilizes actors and their relations in a co-constitutive world-making practice. The farmers’ ability to look at and feel a lamb is intrinsically entwined with standardized perception and the terminology, categories and description standards of the Swakara industry. This ability links individual farms to the studbook registry, norms committee and the grading committee. Furthermore, it is positioned within a constantly shifting context, the legacy of apartheid and colonialism and the industry’s current crisis. The chapter engages with the concept of thinking as moving to make sense of the knowledge practices around lamb description in the Swakara industry, and to illustrate how standpoint, the physical position and relations of the subjects and objects of lamb description, and the worlds they enact, are in dynamic flux. These movements offer us ways to destabilize the binaries of academic and practical, aesthetic and economic, scientific and intuitive knowledge, of objectivity and subjectivity. Moreover, they open our reflections on epistemic politics and the multiple movements engendered within it, to include relations with beings as others, in this case, Swakara lambs.

The volume closes with chapter 13, a collaborative piece by Zandi Radebe and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, on the political stakes of decolonial thought and action. In their chapter “Combative Decoloniality and the BlackHouse Paradigm of Knowledge, Creation and Action”, they reflect on their engagements with the Soweto-based community organization, the BlackHouse Kollective (BHK). Against the effects of certain accommodation and commodification of the concept of decoloniality within the limits of the liberal academy, their chapter offers an account of what the Frantz Fanon Foundation has referred to as “combative decoloniality”, which forms the backdrop of what the authors refer to as the BHK paradigm of knowledge, creation and action, which they pursue in their transatlantic collaborations involving South Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. The work of the BHK is grounded in Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and decolonial thought, which it brings together in its educational, direct-action, artistic and theoretical endeavours. The BHK is a post area studies paradigm that is connected, and seriously responds, to the challenges raised by student-led movements that demanded the decolonization of the university, including #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall in South Africa and the Third World Liberation Front in the US.