Moments Of Dislocation: Reflections on the Colonial Vestiges Embedded in African Higher Education

Abstract

Africans have exhibited tremendous resilience, coping abilities, and strategies to survive in multiple spaces globally despite the tensions and challenges associated with the Euro-colonial enterprise. However, the charge to liberate the African mind remains unabated and requires the unpacking of the complexities of the colonial schema, to advance African agency. The colonial is alive and a lack of scrutiny frustrates an understanding of its nuances and the guises in which it manifests, causing the colonised to perpetuate its plans in ignorance. The article presents selected areas where Africans have been de-centred in consciousness. Termed “moments of dislocation,” these areas are historical, linguistic, inferiorisation of the African being, and journey to the West. Although these themes may not be exhaustive, they offer a path to instigate or sustain conversations about the insidious effects of the colonial, and potentially inculcated into discourses and praxis towards mental liberation. Identifying these disorders contributes to the comprehension of coloniality of knowledge, schooling, power, and being. Through critical African education, these concepts would receive unremitting scrutiny for African agency.