It gives us pleasure to present this issue. We are cognisant of the fact that the history of this journal dates to the time of the old Inkanyiso Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. Previously, the focus of the journal then looked intently at all facets and directions of the humanities and social sciences. In a way, a potpourri of some kind. This was then followed by a review of the journal with clear recommendations that the journal should have a sharp focus and intentionally state its objectives. From there, we embarked on a series of consultations to attend to all recommendations from the review panel. The engagements led to a focussed journal on the niche of African thought. It should be mentioned that this was deliberate and intentional to privilege the African archive and illuminating thought patterns. This resonates well with its name Inkanyiso (meaning illumination in IsiZulu). We are very much pleased that the journal now looks has been reshaped in terms of its focus and perspectives. It now has space for debates and discussions on decoloniality, decolonisation, indigenisation, epistemic justice and transformation in the space of knowledge production and engagement. Africa becomes the context and place of engagement for all researchers and scholars working around African thought. The journal acknowledges that currently, formal, detached, certificate-based research and educational models, systems, policies, practices and structures have failed global Africa. The top of the pyramid tertiary educational systems inherited from the cosmopolitan European models, like every other aspect of European ontological models, have been fashioned as adversarial competitors for scarce resources in a Darwinian public funding world, where education is never a priority for the general publics, given the politics of neo-liberal democratic cycles of leadership elitism, broken tenure shorn in destructive in-fighting and built on rampant disinheritance of majority poor (Bewaji 2012). The current research and educational paradigms, at the epitome of which valiantly sits the imposed imported research elitism, is a system sustained by self-replicating Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), which, according to Freire, pathologises the humanity of Africans. Many Africanist scholars have lamented the many ways in which global Africa has been and continues to be a victim of multifaceted European and Arabian atrocities (Mazrui 1978; wa Thiong’o 1981, 1987; Ramose 2002; Taiwo 2010, 2019; Masoga & Kaya 2011; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012; Bewaji 2012; Mashau 2018; Mbemmbe 2015; Shokane & Masoga 2019). The role of research in the process of near complete emasculation of global Africa has been apprehended, and calls have been strident for what has been articulated as the urgency of decolonisation, de-Europeanisation, de-Westernisation, Africanisation, dehegemonisation, indigenisation and even domestication of research in global Africa. It has featured in the extraordinary scholarship of Claude Ake (1979), Archie Mafeje (1978), Dan Nabudere (1980), among others, agitating for pan-Africanism and global African economic empowerment. What has not been common is a well-orchestrated programme of activities addressed at mitigating and overcoming the challenges, to transform the research spaces, systems and processes, to integrate into the research tradition indigenous realities, knowledge, spiritualities, identities, humanities, mythologies and experiences of Africans in any way and manner that truly reflects and equips the educated African youth and future leaders in directions shifting the focus and decisions from detached subordination of society to an externalist dependency (Ramose 2003; Masoga & Kaya 2011; Shokane & Masoga 2019).
It is curious that African intelligentsia have been overly trusting of externally generated ideas even when African communities had superior ones more suited to the domestic communities of existence. A close examination of the current globalised poverty afflicting Africa must reveal that given the borrowed ontologies, bogus mythologies, inadequate epistemologies, normless values, manipulated conceptual framings or frameworks and weak methodologies, the results are not only predictable in decadent applications and usages parading as universal verities of alternative orientations and liberalisms but an abnegation of responsibility for knowledge production and reproduction to machines and Artificial Intelligence (AI), making human beings ultimately vulnerable and destined for anthropocide and collective omnicide. Global Africa, as the cradle of human civilisation, has a responsibility to rescue humanity from this avoidable self-inflicted calamity of unimaginable proportions, which only leads in the path of the predictable continent-wide damnation that will eventually culminate in the disastrous slippery slope of collective global African humanity’s ontological suicide. This journal aims to tackle all of these challenges. We hope that you will enjoy, benefit and become part of the Inkanyiso journal of African Thought to contribute to a clear, feasible and critical intellectual engagement.
References
Ake, C., 1979, Social science as imperialism, Ibadan University Press edition, The Theory of Political Development, Ibadan.
Bewaji, J.A., 2012, Narratives of struggle: The philosophy and politics of development, Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC.
Freire, P., 1969, Pedagogy of the oppressed, transl. M.B. Ramos, 30th Anniversary edn., Continuum, 2000. The Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, NY.
Mafeje, A., 1978, Science, ideology and development: Three essays on development theory, Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala.
Mashau, T.D., 2018, ‘Unshackling the chains of coloniality: Reimagining decoloniality, Africanisation and Reformation for a non-racial South Africa’, HTS Teleogiese Studies/Theological Studies 74(3), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v74i3.4920
Masoga, M.A. & Kaya, H., 2011, ‘Building on the indigenous: An appropriate paradigm for sustainable development’, in G. Walmsley (ed.), Africa in African philosophy and the future of Africa, pp. 154–169, The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Washington, DC.
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Mbembe, A., 2015, On the postcolony, Wits University Press, Johannesburg.
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Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2012, ‘Fiftieth anniversary of decolonisation in Africa: A moment of celebration or critical reflection?’, Third World Quarterly 33(1), 71–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2012.627236
Ramose, M.B., 2002, ‘The philosophy of Ubuntu as a philosophy’, in P.H. Coetzee & A.P.J. Roux (eds.), Philosophy from Africa: A text with readings, pp. 230–237, Oxford University Press, Cape Town.
Ramose, M.B., 2003, ‘I doubt, therefore African philosophy exists’, South African Journal of Philosophy 22(3), 113–127. https://doi.org/10.4314/sajpem.v22i2.31364
Shokane, A.L. & Masoga, M.A., 2019, ‘Social work as protest: Conversations with selected first black social work women in South Africa’, Critical and Radical Social Work 7(3), 435–445. https://doi.org/10.1332/204986019X15695497335752
Taiwo, O., 2010, How Colonialism preempted modernity in Africa, vol. xii, 352 pp., Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN.
Taiwo, O., 2019, ‘Rethinking the decolonization trope in philosophy’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 57(S1), 135–159. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12344
Wa Thiong’o, N., 1981, Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature, East African Educational Publishers, Nairobi.
Wa Thiong’o, N., 1987, Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature, J. Currey, London.
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