EPISTEMIC FREEDOM IN AFRICA, deprovincialization and decolonization

266pp., paperback, Abingdon, 2018

"We, African academics, owe it to our youth, in particular our students, to go beyond the simple denunciation of epistemic coloniality or the demand for epistemic freedom. We need to produce affirmative, positive assertions that lay clear the presence of Africa and Africans in the production of an enlightening and liberating knowledge. By placing education and the African university at the heart of the debate on African futures, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is leading us in this direction." Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Columbia University

"Epistemic Freedom in Africa is truly a breakthrough. Written by an African scholar working in Africa, this book not only offers a devastating critique of Eurocentrism, but it also provides an unsuspected mirror in which much of the social theory produced in the Global North can ‘see’ the extent of its self-inflicted ignorance. Sabelo’s book is a must read both in the Global South and Global North, a very rare achievement." Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Executive Director of the Change Management Unit in the Principal and Vice-Chancellor’s office at the University of South Africa, and Professor of African Political Economy at the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute at the same institution. Previously, he headed the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied Social Policy. His books include Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of decolonization; Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity and The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, justice and the politics of life.