Aspectre is haunting the South African academy, the spectre of knowledge decolonisation. Academics and university students are calling for decolonisation, but what they call brilliant is not new, and what they call new is not brilliant. As early as the nineteenth century, the South African poet William Wellington Gqoba grappled with the impact of Western education on black people; in the early twentieth century, Benedict Wallet Vilakazi and Herbert Isaac Ernest Dhlomo were debating the role of language and modernity in South Africa. Equally, the works of Cheikh Anta Diop on sources of knowledge and social history, Kenneth Onwuka Dike on African historiography and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on language and decolonising the mind point to a longer genealogy of outstanding work on decolonisation discourse and a critique of Eurocentrism. In South Africa, mainstream social scientists in the 1980s and 1990s were talking about reform, while in the 2000s they were talking about transformation – but throughout the 1990s and 2000s, other voices, alternative to the mainstream, were talking about the Africanisation and the indigenisation of knowledge.

These ideas – reform, transformation, Africanisation, indigenisation – continue to this day, but the idea of decolonisation has gained more traction than any of them. All the same, the inability to transcend the call and to get into the actual business of decolonising means that the call itself has taken on a life of its own. It is what I call the politics of suspension; talking about decolonisation for so long without engaging in the actual process means that the term loses its content and becomes irrelevant. It is also what I call epistemic posturing, for talking about the need to engage in knowledge decolonisation is not itself the act of decolonising knowledge – nor does it constitute a rupture with old knowledge systems. Eurocentrism has long been an object of critical analysis by African scholars, so to speak of Eurocentrism and coloniality in the social sciences is at this point merely to state the obvious.

In this book, when talking about knowledge and epistemological decolonisation, I refer to tapping into the African knowledge archive. I use the term in a narrow sense to refer to engaging with the works of African scholars and in a broad sense include taking seriously what Jimi Adesina calls the ‘ontological discourses and narratives’ of African people.