1 Introduction

There is a need to dissect and transcend enduring fallacies within the canon for a decolonial practice to emerge. Of course, it could be any canon, beyond African studies. This is necessary for as long as we are dealing with knowledge that is produced by and resides within the academy as we understand it, the Western university, founded on colonial conquest (Ajayi 1996; Grosfoguel 2013: 83; Zeleza 2006). Acknowledging the academy’s colonial roots and by extension its canon, remarkably, there are African studies scholars who still strive for a decolonial practice to emerge out of this very same, otherwise colonial, university. This desire to salvage the hope and promise of the academy in a globalized and increasingly unequal world, on one hand, appears almost delusional. But on the other hand, it reflects a refusal by the human spirit to be defeated. It is at once a resolve to confront concrete material realities of injustice and a commitment to rethink the perennial question about what it means to be truly human.

As a Black woman scholar in the academy and a current member of the senior management team at a university ranked the highest on the African continent, I firmly locate myself in this ongoing struggle for Africa to make meaning of its histories and current realities in dialogue with the world. This, while forging a future where humanity thrives regardless of geopolitical location or racialized individual or collective identities. My hopes for a world and an academy that ceases to be anti-Black, informed partly by African studies in ongoing engagement with realities on the continent and beyond, is the beginning of knowing/unknowing and decoloniality.

I therefore agree with Macamo in chapter 1 of this volume, that African studies should not be approached and understood as “the production of knowledge about Africa but rather as the careful reflection on the conditions under which knowledge is at all possible” (p. 34). It is in attending to the impossibilities of knowing within the constraints of the Western canon’s constitution and description of the continent that new ways of understanding Africa in relation to the rest of the world may emerge.

Although the focus of this chapter is to explore what needs undoing in the canon, particularly within African studies, implicitly there is also concurrent doing, being and becoming – building and creating towards a more humanizing praxis. This underscores that, while there is the necessity and a responsibility to undo aspects of the canon that seek to dehumanize, there is also a commitment to simultaneously create opportunities for more humanizing ways of doing, knowing and being.

A question to be asked, however, is to what extent can unjust practices and assumptions within the canon be exposed and alternative ways of embodying and performing the academy be found, within the constraints of the Western university? This chapter explores this very question, through conceptual lenses that are informed by five enduring fallacies: the assumption that we can think without the body; a belief in the role of the disciplines in saving or uplifting humanity; interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as adequate tools through 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. Macamo also raises the hazards of translation in African studies.

2 Thinking without the Body

A key fallacy that has endured empiricist perspectives in the social sciences, including African studies, is the possibility of thinking without the body. This fallacy rides on the coattails of a long-esteemed goal for the Western-led pursuit of knowledge to yield universally agreed-upon truths. Although René Descartes (1960) is credited with being the father of mind-body dualism, based on his seminal work, Discourse on the Method (1637), and his famous dictum, “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), Jerry Jennings argues that this dualism in fact emerged as a by-product of Descartes’s original goal of establishing what should count as knowledge, which is an epistemological question (Jennings 1985). The problem starts when Descartes posits that there are two distinct entities (the thinking mind and extended matter or body) to be understood separately before one can understand how they interact. This ontological preconception about the mind and the body existing as separate entities laid the basis for the method Descartes adopted in his phenomenological analysis of rational thought.

When examining his own mental state, free from the influence of real-life sensory experience, imposition by established authorities (particularly the Church), faith and human habits of poor thinking, Descartes experienced mental existence as acute self-reflection. He then formulated a set of qualities that necessarily defined mental being or existence as non-bodily, episodic and autonomous from external influence, having different modes and able to recognize itself as engaged in various mental acts. For Jennings, it was the method Descartes adopted that ultimately precluded him from understanding thinking as “a continuum of conscious awareness, ranging from the full clarity of understanding to mental experience that is barely aware of itself” (Jennings 1985: 368). In adopting a strict method that required him to experience mental existence as being fully attentive and self-aware, Descartes contradicted his own observation that real-life experiences and feelings, such as pain, hunger and thirst, reminded him that he (the essence of who he is) did not only reside within the body, as “a pilot in his ship”… but that he was “intimately connected with it [the body], and that the mixture is so blended that something like a single whole is produced” (Descartes 1960: 134–135).

By separating the knower and their judgement from an understanding of reality, Eurocentric epistemology allows for the production of lies as objective knowledge. To drive this point home, Hira uses the concept of “discovery” as an example. This notion is strongly embedded in the narrative of science and Western civilization as the triumph of humanity, even though what “explorers” from Europe called discovery had a counternarrative for indigenous people, who called it “occupation” (Hira, 2020; Trouillot, 1995). The question we then need to ask is whether lived experience is indeed antithetical to the idea of the academy or the university. Is it really all experience or is it some people’s experience?

The idea of a university lies in the creation and formulation of “a form of expertise that often asks us to abandon other ways of knowing, sensing, and expressing information” (Kessi, Marks and Ramugondo 2020: 272). Yet, the lie of discovery and the projection of scientific knowledge as “inherently and necessarily rational, objective, and universal” (Kessi et al. 2020: 274) perpetuates imperial interests. A starting point in exemplifying the inevitability and generative advance of thinking through the body lies in how marginalization often breeds activism. It is precisely because knowers are social beings and knowing is an interdependent process (Dotson 2014) that epistemic oppression becomes intolerable and is sometimes challenged. We see this in how faculty and students who understand Blackness and are rooted in an African and Afrodiasporic experience see, think and act in the world, and begin to embody the idea of African studies and a decolonial orientation to the politics of location, representation and praxis. This begins to reflect an emerging body of thought rooted in ontology through struggle (see Maldonaldo-Torres and Radebe in chapter 13 of this volume).

Black faculty and students sympathetic to the cause of marginalized populations, which they often come from themselves, however, are in a precarious position within the academy. On one hand they aspire to be part of the educated elite, while on the other they are acutely aware that the Western university is deeply and intimately intertwined with the anti-Black racist system that needs to be dismantled before the university can be of true service to all humanity.

Marchais, Bazuzi and Lameke (2020), and Madsen and Adriansen (2021), for instance, show how intractable hierarchies of racism and Americo-European centrism in research and “capacity building” are in reinforcing exclusionary practices. Ssentongo (2020) illustrates how faculty promotion policies can prejudice Africa-based publication initiatives and choices, and instead incentivize publishing in the West, thus limiting local access to knowledge marketplaces and shrinking the space for epistemic pluralism. Inspired by the #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement, which was launched at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in March 2015, RMF Oxford sparked debates at universities across the United Kingdom, highlighting colonial iconography and exposing the complex interconnectedness between British colonial history, racial injustice and the role of elite universities in the globalized modern world (Chigudu 2020).

Conversely, Adonis and Silinda (2021) observed that critics of the RMF student activists at UCT often framed them as anti-intellectual, and in so doing, perhaps unwittingly, deployed the narrative of Black bodies being “incapable of identifying, reflecting, articulating and actively fighting against social injustices” (Adonis and Silinda 2021: 82). This fits the usual racist trope of “Black bodies” lacking rational thought and agency and is in contrast with Antonio Gramsci and Edward Said’s insistence that intellectualism, rather than being a function of cognitive processes alone, is in fact an expression of intellectual thought, often in persistent dialogue with a commitment towards equality and justice as material goals for society (Gramsci 1999; Said 1994). This is congruent with Platzky Miller’s (2021) theory of thinking through rupture, in which he draws on Frantz Fanon’s meditations on the Algerian anticolonial revolution (1954–1962), as a paradigmatic rupture, extending this analysis to the RMF and #FeesMustFall (FMF) student-worker movements, and the primavera secundarista (student uprising) in Brazil, also in 2015.

For RMF, thinking through rupture starts with disrupting the silence around everyday shared experiences of exclusion and marginalization. Silencing marginalized voices is one of the most effective mechanisms of killing liberatory thought. Auma, Otieno and Piesche (2020) illustrate how marginalization in the academy operates through exclusion and erasure, even in academic programmes and scholarly activities purported to centre Blackness and African scholarship. As a group of activist scholars who organized themselves in 2015, under the banner “Present_Tense Scholars Network: Black Perspectives and Studies Germany”, at the University of Bremen, they had to confront attempts to inaugurate Black studies without the participation of Black scholars. This was soon followed by another group of activist scholars, of Somali heritage, who initiated the #CadaanStudies debate in response to the launching of the Somaliland Journal of African Studies by a group of predominantly European academics.

Even though the struggles of Black academics often converge, the implication of thinking through the body is that as they become relatively secure in their jobs, some are gradually co-opted by the system and begin to abandon the struggle. It is therefore not surprising that student activists have been key agents of political and social change, with conscientized faculty often playing mostly facilitatory or supportive roles.

Thinking through the body, inevitably, brings with it its own trappings. There is a long-standing critique of tokenism in how African studies departments are constituted, and in who is centred in the canon, particularly in the diaspora (Pailey 2016). In this regard, Auma et al. (2020) seek not only to excavate how Black studies and African studies are impacted by the exclusion and marginalization of African people and Black thought but also explore Black and African scholars’ own entrapment and complicity as complex and layered realities. These trappings explain the slow change in university institutional culture, held back as it is by privileged stakeholders.

Whereas history has seen a cyclic pattern of student-led uprisings, the current era has seen these protests take on a decidedly feminist turn, challenging anti-Black racism and cis-heteronormative patriarchy, with Black women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community and students with disabilities constantly refusing erasure. Okech (2020), for example, argues for feminist pedagogic practices and epistemic communities, which are fluid and activism-oriented, and sees these as a “critical lifeline for surviving and thinking through power relations between knowers and the ecosystem that shapes the construction of knowledge” (Okech 2020: 314).

By drawing from their own everyday experiences, activist scholars dismantle the fallacy that it is possible to theorize meaningfully without the body. In giving themselves permission to speak back to power within the academy, exposing hierarchies that are sustained through white supremacy, cis-heteronormativity and the centring of Eurocentric thought, they begin to lift the proverbial veil from the human face that otherwise projects itself to the world as rationality personified, capable of attaining universal truths. However, in centring their struggles as part of reimagining the academy, activist scholars also reveal that thinking through the body has its own shortcomings. What may appear palatable and ideologically congruent in the world that Black faculty imagines may not necessarily be sufficient for Black students and marginalized communities.

This, then, calls for an intergenerational approach to thinking through the body, allowing for knowers who are differently positioned and located within the academy and beyond to continuously share their reflections as they navigate through unequal power relations and shape the construction of knowledge. Positionality, or situatedness, thus, does not have implications for Blackness only. It applies broadly along the lines that Jennings (1985) and Hira (2020) espouse, challenging the mind-body dichotomy and its ability to produce universal truths. Macamo’s Xitsua idiom (see chapter 1), translated to mean that since the grandson burned his belly and his grandmother burned her back the two cannot carry each other, applies here too. Eurocentric epistemology must learn to co-exist with other epistemologies, and vice versa. But to what extent is the Western university really concerned about generating knowledge that serves humanity in all its diversity?

3 Disciplines: A Real or False Promise for Humanity?

Many are attracted to the academy for its promise to serve humanity, with corporate branding for most universities highlighting their ability to deploy their best minds to help resolve societies’ intractable problems. As an interdisciplinary field, African studies offers hope that the people of Africa and the African diaspora will have their histories, cultures and politics fairly represented through scholarship and their humanity restored. These efforts can be seen, for instance, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s intensive academic efforts to reconstruct African-American history and identity,¹ which continue in other parts of the world where they include the establishment of gender-focused and feminist-led institutes that advance scholarship in and of Africa. These efforts to centre Africa and its various feminist-oriented disciplinary articulations are often accompanied by student activism that demands that relevant departments and curricula be established. Black faculty at the forefront of these developments often face resistance, in the form of denied financial support or deliberate administrative suffocation. Therefore, should the struggles for Africa to have its stories told and its people seen and heard come as a surprise?

The Western university has always preoccupied itself with the classification and hierarchization of knowledge, from the inception of the idea of the university in Europe, anchored on theology, medicine, law and the arts, starting with the University of Bologna in the eleventh century and throughout its expansion and secularization into the mid- to late nineteenth century.² By the time African studies entered the scene in the 1920s and into the 1960s (Martin 2011; Van der Merwe 1979; Coquery-Vidrovitch 2006),³ academic disciplines had already found a way to organize themselves within the Western university, in ways that satisfied various internal specialized interests and expertise yet were poised to serve corporations and the state in relative terms. The classification and hierarchization of knowledge, however, does not stop at the level of disciplines but extends to human beings. Michel Foucault, in his seminal work, Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1995), observed that in their ability to characterize, classify and specialize, disciplines distribute and hierarchize along a scale and around a norm “individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate” (Foucault 1995: 223). Foucault thus argues that academic disciplines serve to sustain the mechanisms of societal control. Key questions that emerge in this regard are: Societal control on whose behalf, by whom and to what end? To address these questions, one needs to dispel the myth that disciplines are grounded on the ideal of humanity for all.

In a world where human rights are celebrated, with countless academic disciplines purporting to advocate for them, what might explain the failure to see them realized for all? To dissect the fallacy that disciplines can save or uplift all of humanity, we must track how humanism came about in the first place. A historical mapping of the founding of academic disciplines reveals that the racist civilizing project, kicked off by The Enlightenment and Humanism, was based on the false premise that being human is a given for all (Kronenberg 2018; Wynter 2003).

Humanism emerged in western Europe during the seventeenth century, was declared the Age of Reason and developed during the eighteenth century. It is often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment or, simply, “The Enlightenment”. This was a period of great intellectual and philosophical development marked by a proliferation of ideas centred on the value of human happiness, freedom and progress, secularization and democracy, and the pursuit of knowledge based on rationality (Outram 2006; Zafirovski 2010). The publication of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method is often viewed as the beginning of The Enlightenment. Ironically, this period followed two centuries during which white Christian settlers led the European expansion, spearheaded in part by Christopher Columbus in 1492, who erroneously landed in the Americas, believing it was India. The colonization of the Americas ran parallel with the Atlantic captive human trade between Africa and the Americas, starting in the 1480s, when the Portuguese began shipping captured Africans to the Cape Verde and Madeira islands as enslaved labourers on the sugar plantations. Following Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France and Belgium also controlled parts of the Atlantic captive human trade, spanning three centuries (sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth). This effectively coincided with the emergence and growth of Humanism during The Enlightenment.

Whereas the colonization and land grab of the Americas was largely driven by the civilizing project centred on Christianizing “the Indians”, whose refusal would lead to them being murdered, the Atlantic captive human trade was primarily driven by Europe, Britain and North America building their economies; laying the foundation for their position as global superpowers today. The religious racism that found expression through “Convert, or I kill you”, for the Indians mirrored the colour racism that helped justify the capture of Africans to serve the Empire. This colour racism became the predecessor of the eugenics movement, which advanced scientific or biological racism – the pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism and racial inferiority or superiority. Coined during the 1800s by Francis Galton, the term “eugenics”, deriving from Greek for “good birth”, inspired a movement throughout the Progressive Era (towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century) that coincided with the founding of many disciplines within the academy.

If it is indeed the case that the Western university and its disciplines exist primarily to promote societal control and serve colonial interests, to what extent, then, can disciplines in African studies advance Africa’s humanity? To respond to this question, first we must contend with the power that universities, by their nature, hold. The authority to bestow qualifications makes the academy uniquely powerful. The ivory tower is indeed the place where knowledge can be edited or excluded entirely (Kessi et al. 2020). The university is ordained with the power to legitimize or delegitimize knowledge, with senior bureaucrats and administrators managing resources in ways that determine which knowledge thrives or dies. It is within these disciplines that academics serve as gatekeepers, determining what shall be taught, or excluded.

Decolonizing, thus, “means interrogating why we read some texts but not others, and truly confronting the knowledge they represent and the knowledge they elide” (Kessi et al. 2020: 272). Furthermore, decolonizing calls on us to reassess what we mean by academic freedom and institutional autonomy, and includes reconfiguring academic accountability and authority, such that academic freedom derives from mutuality and rigorous plurality, leading to epistemic justice and freedom not only for faculty but also those they teach and the communities whose lives intersect with what is constructed as knowledge. This orientation to knowledge production acknowledges the fact that “normal” ways of doing business within the academy “have often been extractive and inequitable, serving and perpetuating previous systems of hierarchy and power” (Kessi et al. 2020: 273).

Acknowledging that the colonial legacy on which academic disciplines are built also implicates African studies, Kessi et al. (2020) point specifically to the origins of area studies as the foundation for disciplines such as anthropology and history, and their complicity in perpetuating dehumanizing practices and the erasure of African agency. Auma et al. (2020) extend this argument by highlighting the roots and general characteristics of early German African studies from 1914 onwards, describing the self-serving nature through which “missionary workers, Africanist explorers, anthropologists, ethnologists, doctors, military personnel and investors liaised to either facilitate or benefit from knowledge of/on the African continent” (Auma et al. 2020: 340).

This colonial heritage continues to contaminate African studies. Disciplines within the Western university often create faculty and students who are devotees of scientific paradigms borrowed from the Empire, rendered unable to question what is sold to them as academic authority. This, even in the face of demonstrable failure and contradictions when these colonial academic templates are applied to contexts with their own unique histories and complexities. Crucially, because of the disciplining function of the Western canon, academics and their students often find themselves serving the Empire, sometimes unwittingly so. Within this context, it takes great effort to find one’s voice as an academic or student, to challenge accepted dogma and to begin to advocate for meaningful change.

Rasool and Harms-Smith in this regard describe how faculty and students of social work at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, embarked on a project of decolonizing their department and curricula, directly after the RMF and FMF protests. Through this process, social work, a discipline and profession avowedly established to serve the most marginalized in society, found itself under scrutiny regarding its ultimate purpose. Patently clear to the authors was the fact that social work education in South Africa continues to struggle “with its roots in the project of European colonial expansion and ‘White’ nationalism in Apartheid South Africa” (Rasool and Harms-Smith 2021: 58). A crucial aspect of this was that the very formalization of social work as an educational programme was a result of the 1932 report of the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry into the Poor White Problem, which helped entrench white Afrikaner-Nationalist dominance. Furthermore, social workers who were products of this educational programme often found themselves becoming useful instruments of oppression in the hands of colonial and apartheid authorities, complicit in racist policy implantation and discriminatory welfare services.

Tellingly, the autoethnographic piece by Rasool and Harms-Smith, reflecting on initial attempts to decolonize social work, reveals that these efforts could not generate sufficiently deep, consistent and meaningful change. Their limitations reflect a failure to connect attempts to decolonize disciplines with the relevant activism that is informed by how marginalized communities often respond to injustice in the real world. Reading about social work in South Africa before and after democratic South Africa, without encountering Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1950s and the first Black social worker to hold such a position in one of the world’s largest hospitals, for instance, perhaps betrays what the authors themselves describe as the role that positionality, centred on racialized identities and relative proximity to power, plays in perpetuating asymmetrical power relationships and coloniality. Here, decolonial efforts, only within disciplines and without attending to what those disciplines are seeking to address in society, end up being about coloniality reinscribing itself (Ramugondo 2018).

Auma et al. (2020) also note how colonial knowledge producers in West German African studies genealogies, such as Carl Meinhof, August Klingenheben, Johannes Lukas and Ernst Dammann, have been reframed as unproblematic historic figures, “despite their violent legacies as members of the Nazi Party whose attempts to bend their scholarship to fit their racist views, or whose status as intellectual benefactors or beneficiaries of colonialism (or as both) have not been adequately refuted” (Auma et al. 2020: 338). On one hand, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, with her long track record of activism, remains invisibilized within a profession that purportedly existed to serve the marginalized; on the other hand, problematic colonial figures are reinvented as benevolent historical actors through African studies.

Sungusia, Lund and Ngaga (2020) extend these decolonizing debates beyond the usual landscape of humanities and social sciences. They explain how Tanzania’s premier agricultural university, Sokoine University of Agriculture, has perpetuated scientific forestry principles that originate in eighteenth-century central Europe, despite their demonstrated inadequacies when applied in settings with complex socioecologies. These principles systematically undermine local community agency and Indigenous knowledge systems and suppress students’ sense of curiosity and capacity for critical thinking.

These authors then offer as an example the Maasai, a transboundary and pastoral people who have lived for centuries in the Great Rift Valley that straddles Kenya and Tanzania, and who continue to depend on traditional knowledge for survival. Through them they illustrate how using strategies beyond legal instruments can be effective in addressing problems associated with foreign misappropriation. These strategies include putting pressure on foreign companies to conduct themselves ethically, awareness campaigns centred on moral arguments for redress, and insisting on fair and just licensing agreements. This ability by the Maasai to circumvent state-sponsored systems of redress, to reassert their claims to community ownership of their traditional knowledge, may reflect the long history of exclusion and oppression they have suffered under the Kenyan authorities. It exemplifies how Indigenous communities, when organized as a collective, are capable of fighting for their rights, sometimes without having to rely on the academy or disciplinary tools that operate in society.

Exposing further the limitation of disciplinary tools, particularly legal instruments, in protecting the rights of marginalized populations, including Indigenous communities, Mathew (2021) examined how intellectual property regimes bear the stamp of Eurocentric, patriarchal and capitalist systems. She then presents a manifesto, which aims to liberate knowledge from these oppressive histories and hierarchical structures, locating it instead in the public domain, and inviting those within dominant structures or who enjoy proximity to levers of power to “affirm alternative mediations of intellectual value rooted in feminist and decolonial theories of community, commons and exchange, rather than legalistic and capitalist property regimes that favour corporations and hyperindividualism” (Mathew 2021: 115).

4 The Promise and Limitation of Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity

An extension of the fallacy that disciplines can uplift humanity is that interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity on their own, without attending to what they are responding to, are adequate tools with which to decolonize the academy. Interdisciplinarity involves drawing insights and perspectives from more than one conventional discipline to explore social phenomena (Miller 2017). It emerged as a response to the fragmentation and compartmentalization of knowledge into an ever-increasing number of disciplines that sometimes overlap, tied to the notion of progress and development but ineffective in addressing the problems of society as a whole (Miller 2017; Ramadier 2004).

Interdisciplinarity may be understood as a continuum, starting with multidisciplinarity at one end, which may or may not extend to cross-disciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity at the opposite end. Multidisciplinary approaches involve several conventional disciplines that work in parallel towards tackling a common theme or problem. Cross-disciplinarity reflects some attempt by conventional disciplines to interact, allowing for some knowledge transfer that enables, to varying degrees, the integration and synthesis of concepts and methods. Transdisciplinarity seeks to transcend the often-limited conceptual lenses and frameworks offered by current disciplines, allowing for new articulations and theorizing possibilities. The promise of interdisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity, thus, lies in the possibility to transcend conventional disciplines, concepts, methods and conceptual frameworks in tackling societal problems. Gordon (2014) has described transdisciplinarity as a hopeful move towards addressing disciplinary decadence. However, he has also warned that without bringing reality into sharp focus, it too will remain susceptible to decadence.

Kessi et al. (2020) describe African studies as transdisciplinary knowledge production that focuses on Africa or Africans. However, they also observe that the scholarly community in this discipline is often entrapped and entangled in systems of oppression. Partly, this has to do with the extent to which the colonial roots of the Western canon remain entwined with African studies. This entrapment and entanglement, as well as Eurocentric knowledge’s inability to engage with reality as is (Hira 2020; Gordon 2014), is where the limitation of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity begins. A pertinent question to ask as well is this: Exactly what reality is African studies as transdisciplinary scholarship responding to? Kessi, Marks and Ramugondo (2021) engage with this teleological question, arguing for the advancement of humanity and all life as the ultimate purpose. But what does this actually mean?

The answer to this question lies in the power to name and theorize reality as experienced and processed by the body. Here, the fall of the first fallacy – the possibility of thinking without the body – becomes relevant again. For Kessi et al. (2020), naming and theorizing around what is witnessed, in advancing humanity, involves identifying epicoloniality as a multisited, multidimensional, hierarchized superstructure, parts of which are mutually reinforcing and adaptive. It also entails diagnosing the racist and sexist core that lies at the centre and sets the tone for unequal relations of power that play out in all social systems and formal institutions. Similar observations have been made by Ramon Grosfoguel in his analysis of racism as essentially systemic (Grosfoguel 2016).

Similarly, Adonis and Silinda (2021) identify race as pivotal in continuing to shape social life in contemporary South Africa. They use critical race theory to interrogate why transformation in South Africa’s higher education sector remains elusive – this, in the face of what may be regarded as modest expectations that followed the fall of the apartheid government and the establishment of a newly democratically elected government in 1994. These authors examine how South Africa’s historically white universities, in particular, conceal racism, normalize institutional whiteness – often hidden behind claims of neutrality, colour-blindness and meritocracy – and help to perpetuate social inequalities. It is in this context that even I, in my role as a member of the senior management team at a premier historically white university in Africa, can face disciplinary action for calling out institutional racism. Auma et al. point to similar realities for Africans and Black scholars in the diaspora, which “reflect the tense and demoralizing ongoing struggles around knowledge production and distribution, influence, control and unequal power relations” (Auma et al. 2020: 332).

To name and theorize reality as witnessed by a diversity of bodies, particularly those who have historically faced exclusion within disciplines, is ultimately about the possibility of developing counternarratives to the dominant colonial gaze. This, at the very least, allows for an expansion of what it means to be truly human, beyond the master code of symbolic life/death that arose out of successive narrow descriptive statements in medieval Latin-Christian Europe; statements whose foundation is theocentric and continue to find expression through the rational human/irrational animal dichotomy, as well as biocentric (racial) and natural scarcity (economic) modes (Wynter 2003). This would help to fulfil the promise of interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity in advancing all life.

The next and possibly last question to ask is: Can African studies centre Africa and Africans without attending to language?

5 Colonial Gifts of Twisted Tongues and Scrambled Thoughts

“The problem with repressive regimes is that they like to starve the imagination. They don’t want you to think or imagine the possibilities of a different future.” These words are by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his conversation with Rohit Inani (Inani 2018), having observed that modern colonialism always involves the imposition of the language of the colonizer onto the colonized. Ngũgĩ described this as a war zone, noting that “the acquisition of the language of the colonizer was based on the death of the languages of the colonized”. The language of the colonizer is glorified just as the language of the colonized is demonized. Similar observations were made by Raphael Lemkin during Hitler’s occupation of Europe – that forbidding people in occupied territories from using their own languages was a key part of the technique of cultural genocide (Lemkin 1944). Ngũgĩ, in his interview with Steve Paulson, further noted that in Africa the language of the colonizer becomes the language of power, “the language of intelligence, of education, of intellectual exploration”, whereas African languages remain “good for speaking, but not good for ideas, not good for politics” (Paulson 2021).

Colonial languages thus become indispensable instruments in knowledge generation, unless sufficiently challenged. For much of the world, the colonized see progress in speaking, writing and being published in English or French, yet these languages continue to sustain the colonial umbilical cord to Africa. The political elite in the former colonies often entrench the hold former colonizers continue to have on the colonized. Mathew (2021) noted how, in India, English was used by the Brahmin class to sustain their supremacy and monopoly over education and scientific inquiry, to the exclusion of the majority population, made up of the Dalits, Indigenous and other caste groups. In doing this, the Brahmins fulfilled Thomas Babington Macaulay’s wish to “do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 1835).

Macaulay’s template for colonization through language has been used successfully in many parts of the African continent. Adonis and Silinda (2021) describe how, in South Africa’s institutions of higher education, it is often the case that Black students still prefer English as the language of instruction rather than Afrikaans.⁴ Tellingly, for their part, conservative Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans continue to insist on Afrikaans-supporting language policies at historically white Afrikaans universities, demonstrating their understanding of the ethnonationalist significance that lies in a language.

Language is important for imagination, but it is also an important tool for meaningful interpretation. Marchais, Bazuzi and Lemeke, citing Sartori, show how empirical and even participatory methods conducted in a foreign language “provide erroneous empirical validation to concepts that have limited validity, thereby generating ‘conceptual misinformation’” (Marchais et al. 2020: 387). Problems with interpretation are not limited to research but extend to teaching and learning. Sungusia et al. (2020) noted that students of scientific forestry in Tanzania often admitted to rote learning, with the expectation that meaningful learning for understanding would come later. Seeking to capture this unsatisfactory experience of learning, these students came up with a new term in Kiswahili, simbi, which refers to reviewing past examination papers to simply pass the test and graduate. For teachers, teaching to the test became the norm.

It turns out, as well, that simply inserting indigenous languages within the canon is insufficient to bring about decolonization. Marchais et al. (2020) found that translating concepts and expressions based on Eurocentric ontologies exacerbated conceptual misinformation. What then is to be done when meaning is lost in translation as part of the colonial gaze, or when minds and bodies colonized by language produce twisted tongues and scrambled thoughts?

Doing art thus becomes self-work – at once a duty to remember and an “active engagement with tradition and ritual in daily life” (Salley 2021: 30). Here, perhaps, rests the possibility for colonized bodies and minds to transcend twisted tongues and scrambled thoughts, where words and everyday language come with limitations. Here rests the promise of knowledge that emanates from labour, spirit, tradition and ritual that invokes ancestors. For Salley, “I am not really in control anymore” could “imply a rupture, an utterance, a disruption to coherent understanding, perhaps it is even an ethical whisper or call to arms” (Salley 2021: 38).

6 Conclusion

This chapter explores what needs undoing in the African studies canon as a basis for ongoing decolonial practice. Central to this exploration is dissecting and transcending fallacies within the canon around rational thought, disciplinarity and language. Although the fallacy that we can think without the body can easily be dismantled, thinking through the body, inevitably, brings its own trappings. This, then, calls for an intergenerational approach, allowing for knowers who are differently positioned and located within the academy and beyond to continuously share their reflections as they navigate through unequal power relations and shape the construction of knowledge.

The false promise of disciplines in saving humanity, being a function of their entrapment in the colonial project, in turn urges those within them to unlearn and resist the urge to perpetuate coloniality, while at the same time curating new ways of seeing, theorizing and knowing that challenge the accepted dogma. This requires that knowledge be liberated from its oppressive histories and hierarchical structures, locating it instead in the public domain and inviting those within dominant structures or who enjoy proximity to levers of power to affirm alternative mediations of intellectual value. Without attending to systemic anti-Black racism, interdisciplinarity, or even transdisciplinarity, only belie the academy’s ability to centre Africa and Africans, including those in the diaspora. Centring Africa and Africans without the continent’s indigenous languages, in turn, will continue to shrink the possibilities of imagination. In the meantime, while tongues remain twisted and thoughts scrambled in the colonial grip of English and French, what may hold some promise is art as self-work, demonstrated through labour, spirit, tradition and ritual that invokes ancestors.