Epistemic Injustice and the African Academia: A Philosophical Appraisal

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to reflect critically on the prevailed epistemic injustice and the passivity of the African higher education. Epistemic injustice is an injustice embedded in knowledge exclusion and silencing; methodical distortion or caricature of one's meanings or contributions; and belittling of one's status are some of its manifestations. Universities are supposed to be institutions where knowledge is produced and disseminated. African universities however have largely been dominated and shaped by the colonial trajectory and organized in accordance with the western model. With remaining epistemologically subservient to the Western hegemony, they played a great deal in perpetuating the existing epistemic injustice. Their history of establishment, as an institute that produces the necessary manpower for the smooth functioning of the colonial enterprise, has still kept defining their essence in another form, i.e., alienation. For their intrinsically alienated underpinning, the type of university that many African countries inherited and developed anew have only used them for being a periphery at the global stage of knowledge generation and extending the deep-rooted epistemic injustice. Overcoming such a challenge, this piece, with the help of analyzing intensive literature and deployment of a discursive reasoning approach, embarks on the idea of decolonization. Fundamental to the notion of decolonization, here is the epistemological decolonization of the continent via its institutions of higher learning and finding a discursive space where the universities assure subjectivity that allows them to harness the local context and respond to the demands thereof. To this effect, Philosophy, and perhaps African philosophy specifically, despite an endless debate of proving its existence, has assumed an indispensable role in empowering Africans through articulating philosophical locus taking into account the context and cultural idiosyncrasies of the African. It is further tasked in broadening the horizons of subjectivity, decolonization, and independence of the continent at large which still remained only at the flag level.