Title: Epistemic Decolonization and the Future of Methodological Decolonization of Political Theory Scholarship

Abstract

Earlier writings on Africa beginning in the 1500s were dominated by earlier anthropologists, colonial administrators and explorers who attempted to write about Africa. In telling the stories and narrating the histories of the people in Africa, these writings deployed certain conceptual categories, epistemological assumptions and methodologies to write and interpret the realities that existed in the continent. The interpretations were based on the tools deployed from the West. Such concepts as “moores”, “tribes”, “warlike”, “savage”, “pagan”, “ownership”, “primitive”, “barbaric,” “hostile”, “backward”, “stateless”, etc. were deployed to define and describe the people, their way of life and the society at large. Their writing privileged sources and material which was written and disregarded oral narratives in describing the people. Such writings have always been influential not only in the writing of history but have informed contemporary understandings of society and some of its underlying programmes.

This paper seeks to engage such historical writings to discuss the epistemological, conceptual and methodological limitations enshrined in the interpretations of knowledge produced by anthropologists, orientalists, colonial administrators and ethnographers during the colonial expeditions and earlier explorations. The idea is to lay a foundation of thinking and rethinking the concepts, categories, assumptions and (mis)interpretations used in order to not only deconstruct the writings on Africa but also to lay ground for thinking about decolonization today. This is because, some if not most of these categories are deployed in the contemporary moment without question. Such “canonical texts” will be read within a particular historical period when certain realities were shaping and to critique them within their own context while drawing lessons for decolonization today. The panel will take as its starting point, the methods developed by Ahmado Bello School of history – ‘a school of historical thought which seriously attempted to decolonize African history’—to reread, reinterpret and rethink the assumptions, methods and concepts used in such historical writings. According to this school, it is important to pay close attention to the ‘material basis” of the process of writing history rather than the concepts. Of importance to this panel will be the school’s methodological and conceptual approach. Methodologically, the school invites us to pay attention to not only written sources but also oral sources as both equal and important sources without subordinating one to another. Conceptually, the school ‘understands history to be shaped not only by the source materials used but also by the framework of explanation of the historian’. This therefore is an invitation to thoroughly reflect on the concepts, categories, assumptions and narratives given to explain the African realities. This paper therefore aims to show how the application of such a method [and related methods] can be a resource for critiquing and deciphering the historical sources which ‘are hitherto canonized in our respective areas of study’. As such, the paper will offer an alternative interpretation of the African realities through ‘discussing different alternative empirical observations which provide a nuanced explanation about the African experience’. This will help in charting a way to decolonize not only history and the realities at the time but also the discourses and narratives that continue to shape today’s interpretation of realities and studies in humanistic scholarship. This paper falls in and will contribute to the conference’s topical clusters The decolonization of Western political thought and its main concepts/ideas and methodological decolonization in the field of Political Theory.