This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist ... more This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist and Pan-African scholar Dr. Walter Rodney in June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana. On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote, 'in the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism. In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility'. In our contemporary period, colonial hangover, neo-colonial intercessions and marketised interventions in African educational spaces serve to undermine, sometimes deliberately, the importance of critical and emancipatory scholarship. We will consider ongoing and urgent questions of defiant scholarship in creating alternative political imaginaries.
Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to colon... more Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to coloniality and colonisation, this book examines how colonialists socially produced ignorance among colonised indigenous peoples so as to render them docile and manageable. Dismissing colonial descriptions of indigenous people as savages, illiterate, irrational, prelogical, mystical, primitive, barbaric and backward, the book argues that imperialists/colonialists contrived geopolitics of ignorance wherein indigenous regions were forced to become ignorant, hence containable and manageable in the imperial world. Questioning the provenance of modernist epistemologies, the book asks why Eurocentric scholars only contest the provenance of indigenous knowledges, artefacts and scientific collections. Interrogating why empire sponsors the decolonisation of universities/epistemologies in indigenous territories while resisting the repatriation/restitution of indigenous artefacts, the book also wonders why Westerners who still retain indigenous artefacts, skulls and skeletons in their museums, universities and private collections do not consider such artefacts and skulls to be colonising them as well. The book is valuable to scholars and activists in the fields of anthropology, museums and heritage studies, science and technology studies, decoloniality, policymaking, education, politics, sociology and development studies
African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituti... more African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituting disorganised data subject to the supposedly organising gaze of knowledgeable Others. African people are increasingly datafied dehumanised and denied self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-organisation and data sovereignty. Arguing for more attention to questions of data sovereignty, this paper notes that the Internet of Things and Big Data threaten the autonomy, privacy, data and national sovereignty of indigenous Africans. It is contended that decolonial scholars should unpack ethical implications of theorising indigenous people in terms of relational theories that assume absence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Deemed to be indistinct from nonhumans/animals, Africans would be inserted or implanted with remotely controlled intelligent tracking technological devices that mine data from their brains, bodies, homes, cities and so on. Key words: relationality, Big Data, Internet...
HIV risk among teenagers is argued to be entangled with a plethora of other risks so that HIV-rel... more HIV risk among teenagers is argued to be entangled with a plethora of other risks so that HIV-related risk may not be a paramount consideration. Teenage sexuality is a subject fraught with such consideration. This article is an ethnographic rendition of teenage sexuality in action in a South African township.
This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist ... more This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist and Pan-African scholar Dr. Walter Rodney in June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana. On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote, 'in the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism. In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility'. In our contemporary period, colonial hangover, neo-colonial intercessions and marketised interventions in African educational spaces serve to undermine, sometimes deliberately, the importance of critical and emancipatory scholarship. We will consider ongoing and urgent questions of defiant scholarship in creating alternative political imaginaries.
Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to colon... more Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to coloniality and colonisation, this book examines how colonialists socially produced ignorance among colonised indigenous peoples so as to render them docile and manageable. Dismissing colonial descriptions of indigenous people as savages, illiterate, irrational, prelogical, mystical, primitive, barbaric and backward, the book argues that imperialists/colonialists contrived geopolitics of ignorance wherein indigenous regions were forced to become ignorant, hence containable and manageable in the imperial world. Questioning the provenance of modernist epistemologies, the book asks why Eurocentric scholars only contest the provenance of indigenous knowledges, artefacts and scientific collections. Interrogating why empire sponsors the decolonisation of universities/epistemologies in indigenous territories while resisting the repatriation/restitution of indigenous artefacts, the book also wonders why Westerners who still retain indigenous artefacts, skulls and skeletons in their museums, universities and private collections do not consider such artefacts and skulls to be colonising them as well. The book is valuable to scholars and activists in the fields of anthropology, museums and heritage studies, science and technology studies, decoloniality, policymaking, education, politics, sociology and development studies
African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituti... more African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituting disorganised data subject to the supposedly organising gaze of knowledgeable Others. African people are increasingly datafied dehumanised and denied self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-organisation and data sovereignty. Arguing for more attention to questions of data sovereignty, this paper notes that the Internet of Things and Big Data threaten the autonomy, privacy, data and national sovereignty of indigenous Africans. It is contended that decolonial scholars should unpack ethical implications of theorising indigenous people in terms of relational theories that assume absence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Deemed to be indistinct from nonhumans/animals, Africans would be inserted or implanted with remotely controlled intelligent tracking technological devices that mine data from their brains, bodies, homes, cities and so on. Key words: relationality, Big Data, Internet...
HIV risk among teenagers is argued to be entangled with a plethora of other risks so that HIV-rel... more HIV risk among teenagers is argued to be entangled with a plethora of other risks so that HIV-related risk may not be a paramount consideration. Teenage sexuality is a subject fraught with such consideration. This article is an ethnographic rendition of teenage sexuality in action in a South African township.
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