Africa taught the world about decolonisation, so why have we gone quiet about it?
Ntibinyane Ntibinyane | Monday June 16, 2025 11:39
“You know,” she said, “this whole language of decolonisation that is now so loud [in Canadian institutions] began with African scholars.” She’s right.
Long before decolonisation became a buzzword in Western universities and policy circles, it was the fire in African scholarship, literature, and politics. Our writers, Ngũgĩ, Chinua Achebe, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Ousmane Sembène, were not just theorising liberation. They were living it, fighting for it, writing it into existence. In the 1960s and 70s, the cry for decolonisation echoed through Africa’s lecture halls, publishing houses, and liberation movements.
And yet today, one cannot help but notice the irony: while Canadian, Australian and New Zealand universities race to “decolonise” and “indigenise” their curricula and Latin American thinkers push for “epistemic justice,” the language of decolonisation has largely fallen silent in much of Africa, except, perhaps, in the quiet and often aloof corners of academia.
When working on this article, I skimmed through recent public discourse in Africa, newsrooms, policy debates, party manifestos, government plans and policies, and found barely a whisper of decolonisation outside academic settings.
The question is: where did the fire go? Where did the urgency, the boldness, the uncompromising demand for epistemic and political freedom disappear to?
To be honest, in most African countries today, decolonisation is no longer central to the national conversation. Our ministries of education rarely invoke it. Our healthcare systems are modelled entirely on Eurocentric models. Our legal systems still echo British and French colonial codes.
Our public institutions function as if colonialism never ended. Our intellectual sovereignty remains outsourced. And despite rhetorical nods to “African solutions,” international donors and foreign agencies continue to shape our priorities, policies, and knowledge systems.
Of course, as I said, the language is still there in dissertations and academic conferences. But decolonisation has not been mainstreamed into daily life, policymaking, or professional training in fields like media, law, education, or medicine.
Meanwhile, scholars such as Bagele Chilisa and Linda Tuhiwai Smith have powerfully argued that decolonisation must go beyond rhetoric and fundamentally transform how knowledge is produced, validated, and disseminated.
For Smith, decolonisation is about reclaiming Indigenous ways of knowing and living, not merely critiquing the Western canon. Similarly, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have warned in their landmark essay Decolonisation is Not a Metaphor that the term must not be reduced to a vague gesture or a feel-good slogan, it demands material, structural change.
This is precisely what Africa once taught the world, and what we must now urgently return to.
What decolonisation is not
Part of the challenge is that decolonisation is often misunderstood. In some circles, it is caricatured as a call to abandon modern medicine, technology, or formal education. Others mock it as nostalgia for the past, as if it means dressing in traditional attire and renouncing all things Western.
At times, decolonisation is also frequently reduced to symbolism, to the toppling of statues, the renaming of buildings, or institutional land acknowledgments. While these gestures may have cultural and political significance, they are not in themselves acts of decolonisation.
But Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o made it clear in Decolonising the Mind that decolonisation is, above all, a process of reclaiming the self and it is about freeing the imagination from colonial domination and restoring the dignity of African languages, cultures, and ways of knowing.
In other words, it is not about rejecting the modern world but about entering it on our own terms.
Decolonisation is not regression; it is reimagination.
Why it must be centred again
To decolonise, therefore, is not simply to remember the past and past injustices. It is to act on the present and shape the future. That work is not yet done.
Achille Mbembe (drawing from Édouard Glissant) wrote that Africa must move from a politics of identity to a politics of relation. But how can such a politics emerge if the systems that structure our lives are still rooted in colonial logics of hierarchy, extraction, and surveillance? Whether it’s the overreliance on Western foreign aid or the uncritical use of European curricula in our schools, we are still entangled in colonial modes of thinking and governance.
What’s needed is a shift, that is, decolonisation must be centred again in the African context, not as a trend, but as a guiding principle for all sectors: education, healthcare, media, governance, and economic policy.
Beyond decolonisation: Centring African indigeneity
It’s not just about removing colonial legacies; it’s also about reclaiming Indigenous sovereignties. As African nations, we must ask: What do we know that the West has not known? What wisdom lies in our languages and in our communal structures?
African indigeneity has long been a source of strength and innovation, yet it has often been dismissed as folklore rather than recognised as legitimate epistemology. John Henrik Clarke insisted that African history and knowledge systems must be reclaimed and taught by Africans themselves, and indeed not through colonial filters, but through ancestral memory, oral tradition, and lived reality.
He argued that 'history is not everything, but it is the starting point,' and without control over one's historical and intellectual narrative, true liberation is impossible.
In the same spirit, the Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni calls for going beyond decolonisation into “epistemic freedom,” where Indigenous knowledges are not merely included but centred as systems in their own right.
To centre African indigeneity is to affirm that oral traditions are as legitimate as peer-reviewed journals. It is to recognize that knowledge held by a Zulu chief, or an Luo elder or Malian elder is not anecdotal but ancestral. It is to build universities that do not merely teach Africa, but teach from Africa. Universities like the historic Sankore of Timbuktun (in Mali), which once stood as a beacon of Indigenous African scholarship long before colonial contact. It is to revive and reimagine such institutions, where African knowledge is not peripheral, but foundational.
Where do we begin?
This is not a call to romanticise the pre-colonial era. It is a call to engage the present with a decolonial consciousness. Poka Laenui, a Native Hawaiian scholar, outlines five stages of decolonisation, rediscovery, mourning, dreaming, commitment, and action, reminding us that true liberation requires both reflection and reconstruction. Indeed, we must begin this by rethinking how we train teachers, design public policies, conduct research, and fund institutions.
It means rewriting curricula in our schools to reflect African history and ideas beyond colonial timelines. It means questioning why African languages are still treated as “vernacular” rather than intellectual languages. It means resisting the idea that Western models are neutral, universal, or superior.
It also means building institutions that are truly sovereign, academically, intellectually, and financially.
As Walter Mignolo reminds us, coloniality did not end with the flag ceremonies of independence, where the Union Jack and Le drapeau tricolore were lowered and replaced by new national flags. It persists through knowledge, power, and being. To decolonise is to disrupt those continuities.
Let us not forget
We, Africans, once led the world in decolonial thought and practice. We gave the world the vocabulary, the theories, the blueprints for liberation. But somewhere along the line, we lost the momentum, perhaps exhausted by structural adjustment programs, the commodification of education, and the fatigue of postcolonial survival.
But the silence must end.
Decolonisation is not finished. And Africa cannot afford to be a spectator while others now carry the torch, we once held high. It is time to pick it up again, not only to speak of liberation but to live it, structure it, fund it, teach it, and centre it in every sphere of life.
*Ntibinyane Ntibinyane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. He has worked as a journalist and editor in Botswana and South Africa and writes on decolonisation, investigative reporting, and African media systems.