Looking back to launch forward: a self-reflexive approach to decolonising science education and communication in Africa

Abstract

The imbalance in the global scientific landscape resulting from the enduring legacy of colonialism in the south and the hegemony of scientific paradigms originating in the north is immense. Our paper makes a case for employing traditional knowledge systems and paradigms as tools for redressing this imbalance in African societies. To achieve this goal, the paper argues, scholars and science communicators must actively pursue a radical, “power-literate” agenda of scientific decolonisation on the continent. Central to this mission is the need for scholars to be equipped with a keen sense of the past — including an understanding of what worked for knowledge production and perpetuation in pre-colonial African societies — without which science education and communication in those societies will remain untethered from the realities of the present and their visions for the future. Concurrently, attention must be given to nurturing home-grown paradigms and platforms for research in higher education that are rigorous yet unencumbered by the age-long tendency to refract African experiences through northern lenses.

Response to: “Looking back to launch forward: a self-reflexive approach to decolonising science education and communication in Africa”. Decoloniality opens up new epistemic vistas for science communication

“…Yet, as Sesan and Ibiyemi [2023] observe, inclusion is at risk of becoming a performative, box-ticking exercise which fails to acknowledge the history and politics of how entire knowledge-systems became erased or disqualified from a seat at the table. For this reason, Liboiron [2021] is at pains to emphasise that aspirations for equity or inclusion are far from sufficient to decolonize geoscience.…”

“…For Sesan and Ibiyemi [2023], decolonizing science education and science communication in Africa opens up a critical opportunity to return knowledge to its roots in functionality. In pre-colonial times, knowledge was created and disseminated through the everyday activities of living.…”