Convenor: Henry Brefo henry.brefo@kcl.ac.uk
Decolonial interventions across multiple disciplines (history, anthropology, politics, literature) demand the dismantling of colonial legacies in education and advocate the inclusion of indigenous knowledge systems and traditions within curricula. While this critique has been empowering, its reliance on binary oppositions between “colonial” and “indigenous” risks flattening Africa’s complex educational histories into a singular narrative of domination. Historical evidence suggests more layered realities: Western curricula were not always wholly imposed or strategically assembled for the purposes of alien rule, but were also negotiated, contested, and appropriated. Much of the scholarship on education in Africa has neglected the complex and contingent process of knowledge transfer—from teacher trainers to teachers to students—focusing instead on policy, institutions, and official ideology. This emphasis often obscures the local pedagogical contexts that shaped educational practice and were, in turn, reshaped by it. We do not suggest that colonization did not have a devasting impact on local epistemic traditions and knowledge systems. Rather the stream will explore the extent to which discourses and practices of decolonisation remain entangled in colonial cognitive frameworks and grammars of rule even as they seek to dismantle them. This stream will probe the contradictions, complexities, and possibilities of decolonizing the mind (Ngugi 1986). It will also include a roundtable on Elisa Prosperetti’s new book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in 20th Century West Africa. The proposed stream speaks to the core theme of ASAUK 2026: Narrative, Power and the Making of African World and also provides an opportunity to rethink the dynamic relationship between the politics of decolonization and regimes of knowledge beyond deterministic frameworks of epistemic emancipation.
We invite papers on education, anticolonialism, and decolonization in Africa (1940s–1960s), which speak either directly or indirectly to the following questions: How did decolonization discourses reproduce or challenge colonial categories? What insights does African educational history offer for epistemic justice, curriculum reform, and decolonial thought? How did teachers, students, and institutions shape pedagogy? And do current calls to decolonize education risk reinscribing colonial logics?
Stream format
The stream will involve thematically linked panels, with each consisting of a minimum of three papers. In addition, it will include a roundtable on An Anticolonial Development.
