Decolonisation as epistemic justice: Falola’s critique of Western knowledge hierarchies and systemic exclusion
Original framing: “Why I write on decolonisation, By Toyin Falola” — bing news
Decolonisation is not a 20th-century invention but a centuries-old struggle against epistemic violence, from the burning of the Library of Alexandria to the suppression of African and Indigenous sciences. Falola’s framing echoes earlier anti-colonial thinkers like Cheikh Anta Diop, who linked linguistic and knowledge decolonisation to political liberation. This dimension scores 0.9, given the deep historical roots of the critique.
Falola’s op-ed exposes decolonisation as a struggle over who defines knowledge, not just who holds power—a critique that resonates with global movements from #RhodesMustFall to Indigenous land back initiatives.
The systemic insight is that epistemic colonialism is not an artifact of the past but an ongoing project, where Western academia and media reproduce exclusion under the guise of objectivity. Indigenous epistemologies, from Yoruba Ifá to Māori mātauranga, offer not just alternatives but necessary correctives to a crisis of knowledge that fuels climate denial, economic inequality, and cultural erasure. The trickster’s role is played by institutions themselves, which perform decolonisation while maintaining colonial structures, as seen in the proliferation of ‘decolonial’ workshops that charge marginalised scholars for access to their own knowledge. True progress requires dismantling these hierarchies through audits, land-back initiatives, and pluriversal knowledge networks, where the future of knowledge is not a monologue but a dialogue across cultures and centuries.