Indigenous anti-colonial knowledge as ‘heritage knowledge’ for promoting Black/African education in diasporic contexts

This paper addresses some serious questions in the discussions around Black/African diasporic education: As African scholars how do we begin to pioneer new analytical systems for understanding our local/Indigenous communities and what are the challenges we are likely to be faced with? What are the intellectual and political merits of developing and promoting our own “home grown Indigenous perspectives steeped in culture-specific paradigms” (Yankah, 2004, p. 26) in the Western academy? This is an opportunity and a challenge in the struggle to save myself/ourselves from becoming “intellectual imposter[s]”, simply good at mimicking dominant theories and knowledges (Nyamnjoh, 2012) in the [Western] academy. We need to replace our ‘cultural estrangement’ with a ‘cultural engagement’ in the pursuit and promotion of African/Black education in Diasporic contexts. For African learners we need develop theoretical prisms or perspectives that are able to account for our lived experiences and our relationality with other learners, prisms rooted in our cultures, histories and heritage. I intervene in the discussion through transgressive pedagogies, by way of Indigenous epistemologies, to seek different ways for educational transformation for all learners. I borrow the ideas of pioneering Black/African scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon as I articulate an ‘Indigenist anti-colonial’ framework for understanding issues of Black/African education for the ‘global good’. I use my long standing work in the Canadian school system to ground issues in the discussion. Nyamnyoh (2012) notes, in writing about the Diasporic encounter, that as those who move and/or are forced to move, we cannot position ourselves simply in relation to those we meet on the journey. We must stake out our own discursive and political positions. We must be true to our authentic selves as African subjects of knowing.