Stream conveners: Tendai Mangena, T.Mangena@leeds.ac.uk (School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds) and Gibson Ncube, gncube@sun.ac.za (Department of Modern Foreign Languages, Stellenbosch University)

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Jeremiah Arowosegbe (2016) in his article entitled ‘African Scholars, African Studies and Knowledge Production on Africa’ notes that the ‘task of working Africa’s destiny out of its inherited Eurocentric mode of cognition … remains an incomplete project’. Arowosegbe concludes by offering direction in terms of how the decolonial task in scholarship and knowledge production can be completed. This stream on ‘Alternative ways of knowing (in) Africa’ heeds Arowosegbe’s call that, in decolonising or Africanizing knowledge production in and on Africa, scholars should be ‘sensitive to some of the changes taking place across the continent’.

We invite panels and papers that consider Africa’s ‘lived realities’ and the new ways of knowing that these realities engender. We are especially interested in panels and papers that go beyond engaging epistemic loss and various attempts to recover-typical in decolonial struggles-to recentre nonhegemonic African epistemologies. Such a decolonial project recentres previously marginalized African epistemologies while simultaneously addressing the epistemic injustice that ‘privileged Western knowledges at the expense of non-Western systems’ (Tamale 2020). In privileging African knowledges, many scholars have focused on hegemonic forms of African epistemologies and in the same vein marginalising other and different forms. Against this background, this stream focuses on the voices of the excluded constituencies in decolonial struggles in Africa, not just in the past but also particularly in the present. The stream offers an important platform to discuss the persistence of the logic of colonialism in hegemonic practices in postcolonial Africa.