Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s famous phrase ‘decolonising the mind’ is probably one of the most (ab)used urging by an African intellectual. The book that carries that phrase is probably hardly read.
But there is never doubt in the minds of users of this phrase, especially in academic circles or among activists who wish to demonstrate that Africans are still in some kind of (neo)colonial trap, some kind of cognitive dissonance; that the African born and raised during colonialism and even in the state after the end of colonialism carries with her or him strains of some kind of colonial infection - cultural, social, spiritual, economic, political, intellectual etc. This suggestion most affects the African intellectual? Why?
Wavinya Makai examines the tragedy of the African intellectual community held in chains by a colonial system that did not end when the settlers and administrators left, but continues to determine thought and imagination on the continent. In Intellectual Chains: The Psychological War on African Intelligence (Kalahari Publishers and Samara Africa, 2026).
In this clarion call text, Wavinya identifies five problems for the African intellectual at the outset. These problems are the basis for the ‘psychological war on African intelligence,’ and are also at the root of the ongoing economic exploitation of the continent. These problems are the ‘shrank map, the museum with stolen African artifacts, the syllabus, the canon and the African graduate.’ These are the core sources of what we can call ‘cognitive dissonance.’
So, what is the problem with the shrank map? This map issue has recently been resettled, right? Hasn’t the appearance of Africa on the primary reference map been rectified just about two months ago? But why are we discussing the map and Africa? Because the map is a source of power. By representing Africa as if it is a small continent, almost the size of Europe, smaller than say, north and south America, the African child who encounters the map in school, the diplomat who represents her country beyond the continent, the African scholar speaking about territory to a group of other scholars from outside Africa, begin their encounter from a point of ‘smallness.’
They see Africa not as the expansive land, thousands of kilometres between its northern tip and southern tip, composed of hundreds of ethnolinguistic speech communities and culture, old civilisations and political organisations, and today, countries with immense economic potential, but as a small geopolitical cousin to Asia, Europe, China, America etc. Yet, size matters, really.
As for the museum, this is probably one of the most damaging consequences of the colonial and neocolonial projects. African cultures and heritage were first designated primitive, then collected, mostly forcibly, transported to Europe and stored in buildings - museums.
Materials of everyday life - stools, cooking pots, clothes, masks, literary texts etc - which defined the encounters between Africans; which defined their relationships between people; which designated their ancestors, spirits and gods; which preserved their histories etc, because objects of European gaze, producing endless archaeological, historical and anthropological theories about Africans. The museum in Africa is often not different from its European ancestor - a place of dead or frozen artifacts to be gazed at in awe, with speculative discussions of the ‘exotica’ Africa.
The syllabus, whose intellectual and philosophical foundations are derived from elsewhere - Europe and America - is the most dangerous of the damaging colonial intellectual heritage. Wavinya is not the first one to point out this anomaly. She is highlighting a problem that has a long intellectual ancestry.
She is reminding the African intellectual today that unless the syllabus is deliberately undone, in what she calls ‘intellectual counterinsurgency ’, then the African graduate student and the entire continent are doomed. Why? Because the syllabus is based on the assumption that Africans had no knowledge.
Even knowledge of their own world - rivers, mountains, lakes, valleys, animals and plants - was discovered and ‘named’ by some European adventurer. Think that even in the 21st Century, with Pan-Africanism and African renaissance, there is still a country called ‘Central African Republic’ or ‘South Africa.’ There is ‘Lake Victoria.’ Think that African medical practice was and is still called ‘herbal medicine’ - when a significant part of modern factory made medicine derives from plants/herbs; that African doctors were/are called ‘witchdoctors’ - they bewitch, they don’t treat their patients.
That syllabus, which is founded on a significant body of knowledge that originated in Africa and travelled to Europe through Egypt, whose gaze is profoundly outwards/Euro-American, continues to produce African graduates today. These graduates, as Wavinya shows, forged in a classroom whose structure is unrelated to their own lived experience, a classroom where the teacher largely knows only what they have read in books published elsewhere, continuing to quote from tens of what has been called by other scholars, ‘dead white men.’ Young African scholars on the continent - generally before they fly away to Europe or America or Asia - are ignorant of African scholars.
Even graduates of the Humanities and Social Sciences cannot cite Mudimbe, Hountondji, Ogot, Diop, Zeleza, Mkandawire, Mbembe, Mazrui, Cabral, Aidoo etc. They are, instead, mesmerised by the foreign/non-African men (and women) whose names and thoughts continue to make the ‘key readings’ in the syllabi in schools on the continent; the foreign intellectuals that the publishing industry, the library/archive and academic institutions/practices front as the lead thinkers in areas of knowledge, including Africa.
Prof Bethwell Allan Ogot speaks to the Nation at his home in Gem, Siaya County on December 24, 2024.
Photo credit: Alex Odhiambo | Nation Media Group
Those intellectuals form the canon; that body of knowledge that has been collected, synthesised, concretised and retailed to the rest of the world. African scholars, old and young, freely regurgitate and retail the canon and its assumptions. Remember the idea that Africa had no history, did not invent anything of substance, didn’t have a body of knowledge or philosophy or organised religion etc. These ideas were invented by men who occupy high status in the canon.
These men are quoted or even celebrated uncritically by African scholars, who continue to disseminate such ideas as worth remembering and engaging with, even when they have been debunked. The canon, therefore, by determining what is taught, ends up defining policies that influence actions by African governments. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of the foundational arguments about progress is that ‘Africans are undeveloped’, and this needs ‘development aid’, at root, a very racist idea. Who writes African economic policy, for instance? Isn’t it African graduates of local and foreign universities?
Renowned author Ngugi wa Thiong'o during an interview on February 7, 2019.
Photo credit: File | Nation
Probably the most worrying aspect of the ‘psychological war on African intelligence’ is the kind of thinker that Africa is producing today. If the young scholar is still quoting non-local researchers, still theorising their own conditions of life based on theories from outside the continent, though based on local empirical evidence, how can such an individual be sympathetic to their lived realities? Is such a graduate even helpful to her own people?
If the graduate's thoughts are formatted elsewhere, and she is always expecting affirmation from Europe or America or Asia, where she attends ‘learned conferences’ to present her ‘African research ’; where she publishes; where she gets the stamp of her intellectual authority, would such a graduate be ready to challenge racist or prejudicial thinking about her own people or herself?
As Wavinya notes, the graduate will not be a thinker or creator or a problem solver; they will most likely be what Ngugi called a ‘parrot’; someone quite eloquent in the colonial paradigm, rattling off philosophies, theories and formulas from elsewhere to describe local conditions. This is not just a betrayer of his people; this is someone working for others; someone with cognitive dissonance, should we say?
