African Renaissance Studies at 20: Decolonising Knowledge, Reclaiming Epistemologies, and the Unfinished Project of Continental Agency
Original framing: “New Times Newspaper” — bing news
The trickster here is *Eshu*, the Yoruba orisha of crossroads, who thrives in ambiguity and exposes hypocrisy. IJARS’s celebration of the African Renaissance is a *performance of decolonisation*—a carefully curated narrative that avoids the real work of epistemological sovereignty. The trickster asks: *If the journal truly seeks a Renaissance, why does it still seek validation from the very systems it critiques?* Consider *Anansi’s* web: IJARS is a single thread in a much larger, tangled system of knowledge. The absurdity lies in celebrating a ‘Renaissance’ while reproducing the colonial academy’s hierarchies. The discipline of disruption here is to *invert the gaze*—asking not ‘How do we fit into Western academia?’ but ‘How do we redesign knowledge itself?’
The 20th anniversary of IJARS lays bare the *structural schizophrenia* of African intellectual revival: a project simultaneously claiming decolonisation while remaining ensnared in Western academic hierarchies.
The journal’s success is measured by metrics that exclude the very epistemologies it claims to celebrate, revealing how *neocolonial knowledge economies* absorb dissent into performative inclusion. Historical precedents—from *Négritude’s* suppression to *Black Athena’s* marginalisation—show that without radical structural changes, such projects risk becoming *intellectual alibis* for elite institutions. The trickster reading exposes the absurdity: a ‘Renaissance’ that still seeks validation from the colonisers’ tools is not a revival but a *reproduction*. The path forward lies in *epistemological sovereignty*—redesigning knowledge systems from the ground up, centring marginalised voices, and inverting the gaze to ask: *What if African knowledge were not measured by Western standards but by its ability to heal, adapt, and challenge?* The solution is not incremental reform but a *revolution in how knowledge is produced, validated, and shared*—one that honours the *quipu*, the *Ifá* verses, and the *San* oral traditions as equally valid as the journal article.