Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies

Abstract

Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within decolonial thought, including decolonial geographies and the disunities between the subfields of black geographies and African geographies. To challenge some of these dynamics, we introduce the concept of defiant scholarship in Africa, a form of scholarship that seeks to work against and outside of dominant grammars and prevailing registers and which draws from a powerful and extensive intellectual tradition across the African continent. Working from Walter Rodney's ‘guerrilla intellectuals’ and drawing on Walter Mignolo's ‘epistemic disobedience’, defiant scholarship cultivates those ways of thinking and those practices that are external to, in opposition to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge. We ask what it means for our scholarship to be disobedient to colonial and capitalist epistemes, and, in so doing, we sketch the contours of an African geographies subdiscipline that is anti‐racist, decolonial, and in active conversation with black geographies. The result of our engagement is a call for a reinvigoration of African geographies as we currently know and practice them.

Defiance through many means: The urbanities of African universities. A commentary on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies’.

“…Daley and Murrey (2022) in this critical intervention, reiterate the importance of African intellectual production as not only a long occluded register and a long‐standing missed opportunity, but as acts of defiance. While certain radical political economy threads of African scholarship could in some quarters be seen as crowding out a more heterogenous actual canon, defiance here is not only in response to the positionality of African thought in a global arena but also in terms of what constitutes legitimate institutions and practices of knowledge formation and conveyance.…”

Navigating the landscape of defiant scholarship in and beyond Africa: On archives, bridges and dangers. A commentary on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies’.

“…It should not be implied that there have been no impulses from geographers on the continent, as one might read into Daley and Murrey's (2022) intervention. For instance, the eminent Ghanaian geographer Jacob Songsore (2011) has contributed substantially to our understanding of the colonial space economy of Ghana, offering a situated take on ‘uneven development’.…”

“…However, the story is more complex, as Daley and Murrey poke at, but never explore in detail. Building on Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake, they rightly acknowledge that the ‘dominant education model in Africa is informed by desires to have an elite that subscribes to ideologies of capitalism’ and the existence of ‘ever flexible but also sedimented forms of coloniality’ (Daley & Murrey, 2022: 167). As they also note, radical intellectual reorientations have often been sabotaged by conservative forces on the continent, and, one should add, sometimes even by progressive and anti‐imperial regimes (Hirji, 2014).…”

Intellectuals at the Hill: Scattered pieces of defiant African scholarship. A commentary on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies’.

“…It pushed me to revisit Issa Shivji's essays and talks (1969–1993) about intellectuals at the Hill. As Daley and Murrey note (Daley & Murrey, 2022: 162), Walter Rodney's journey through colonial education systems landed him on the Hill where he stayed between 1966 to 1974 with a specific project of participating in intellectual ideological struggles concerning African history and development strategies. The struggles and the intellectual agitation of the Hill gave birth to Dar es Salaam's school of thought, which challenged colonial legacies in research and education.…”

“…The Hill intellectuals were part of Rodney's description of ‘guerrilla intellectuals’, the term that was used to capture politicization of knowledge within an empire (see Daley & Murrey, 2022: 159). The same is termed ‘educated barbarians’, the brainchildren of the capitalist social order and its educational outlook that reinforces narrowness (Shivji, 1993: 3).…”