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Epistemic Sovereignty: Decolonizing African Knowledge Systems and Institutions
Paperback
AnthropologyGeneral Political Science
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 6 2026
Pages: 746
Weight: 2.16
Height: 1.49 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Epistemic Sovereignty examines one of the enduring intellectual consequences of colonialism: the influence of colonial histories on how African societies understand knowledge, authority, progress, and their own capacity to interpret and transform reality. The book argues that the question of liberation extends beyond political and economic institutions into the intellectual structures through which societies educate, research, remember, interpret, and imagine their futures.
The book develops this argument through the Seven Walls of the Colonial Fortress, examining the interconnected ways in which colonial legacies have shaped African knowledge systems.
- The Epistemological Wall explores the privileging of particular Western traditions of knowledge and the marginalisation of African philosophies, cosmologies, and intellectual traditions within formal systems of knowledge.
- The Methodological Wall examines the hierarchy established around recognised methods of inquiry, particularly the preference for written, formal, and quantitative approaches over oral traditions, observation, lived experience, practical knowledge, and communal processes of learning.
- The Linguistic Wall considers how the dominance of colonial languages within education and scholarship can distance learners and researchers from concepts, histories, philosophies, and forms of meaning embedded in African languages.
- The Temporal Wall investigates the idea of a universal developmental trajectory against which African societies are frequently assessed, and how such conceptions of time, modernity, and progress influence the interpretation of Africa's past, present, and future.
- The Institutional Wall examines the role of universities, research institutions, curricula, publishing systems, assessment structures, and other knowledge institutions in determining which questions are investigated, which sources are recognised, and whose knowledge receives intellectual authority.
- The Economic Wall explores the growing influence of economic measures of value on knowledge production, while considering forms of African knowledge whose significance extends beyond markets, productivity, and commercial utility into ecological, cultural, ethical, communal, and social domains.
- The Psychological Wall examines the internal consequences of prolonged intellectual hierarchy, including the ways in which educational and social environments can influence confidence, aspiration, self-perception, and assumptions about where legitimate knowledge and viable solutions originate.
Across these seven dimensions, the book moves from diagnosis toward the question of transformation. It considers how African education, research, language, institutions, and intellectual practice might develop greater capacity to engage global knowledge while also drawing deliberately upon African histories, experiences, intellectual traditions, and contemporary realities.
The central concern is therefore not the rejection of knowledge from elsewhere, but the development of a more intellectually balanced relationship with knowledge-one in which African societies can critically examine inherited frameworks, formulate their own questions, preserve and develop their intellectual traditions, and contribute meaningfully to global scholarship.
Ultimately, Epistemic Sovereignty presents the renewal of African knowledge systems as an important dimension of educational and social transformation. It invites educators, researchers, policymakers, students, and intellectuals to reconsider the foundations from which Africa understands itself and to explore how greater intellectual agency can contribute to more self-directed and contextually grounded African futures.
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