Decolonising knowledge production on Africa: why it's still necessary and what can be done

Crawford, G, Mai-Bornu, Z and Landström, K ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7681-0857, 2021. Decolonising knowledge production on Africa: why it's still necessary and what can be done. Journal of the British Academy, 9 (s1), pp. 21-46. ISSN 2052-7217

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Abstract

Contemporary debates on decolonising knowledge production, inclusive of research on Africa, are crucial and challenge researchers to reflect on the legacies of colonial power relations that continue to permeate the production of knowledge about the continent, its peoples, and societies. Yet these are not new debates. Sixty years ago, Ghana’s first president and pan-Africanist leader, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, highlighted the importance of Africa-centred knowledge. Similarly, in the 1980s, Claude Ake advocated for endogenous knowledge production on Africa. But progress has been slow at best, indicated by the enduring predominance of non-African writers on African issues within leading scholarly journals. Thus, we examine why decolonisation of knowledge production remains so necessary and what can be done within the context of scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. These questions are addressed at two levels, one more practical and one more reflective . At both levels, issues of power inequalities and injustice are critical. At the practical level, the asymmetrical power relations between scholars in the Global North and South are highlighted. At a deeper level, the critiques of contemporary African authors are outlined, all contesting the ongoing coloniality and epistemic injustices that affect knowledge production on Africa, and calling for a more fundamental reorientation of ontological, epistemological, and methodological approaches in order to decolonise knowledge production.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of the British Academy
Creators:	Crawford, G., Mai-Bornu, Z. and Landström, K.
Publisher:	British Academy
Date:	2021
Volume:	9
Number:	s1
ISSN:	2052-7217
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.5871/jba/009s1.021 DOI 1726262 Other
Rights:	© The author(s) 2021. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	09 Feb 2023 16:48
Last Modified:	09 Feb 2023 16:48
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/48234

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