The Advocacy for Africanity as Justice Against Epistemicide

Abstract

ABSTRACTWith continued calls for the Africanisation of the University curricula in South Africa, it has become urgent that the subject of Africanity be placed centrally in this discourse. This suggests that we engage the colonial and apartheid baggage that essentially contributed to African epistemicide. One of the objectives of colonialism was the goal of conquering Africa and relegating her people to the status of being sub-humans. In doing that, it needed to present Africa and her people as “dark” and “backward” respectively. Thus, African Weltanschauungen were dismissed and her peoples deemed to have no culture and no conception of god. Yet, the names of the gods of the African peoples were deliberately translated to refer to the god of western Christianity and this confused the Africans. Western Christian theology no doubt played a pivotal role in ensuring that the goal of total and comprehensive conquest by Western colonialism would be attained. This article argues that any attempt at countering the extent of African epistemicide must be accompanied by a degree of deliberate political will, and must reckon with the fact that the university in Africa, thus far, is but a transmission belt of Western epistemologies, which reaffirm the myth that European existence is qualitatively superior to any other forms of being-human-in-the-world.