Decolonized and Afrocentric Education: For Centering African Women in Remembering, Re

The pan-African struggle for decolonization, both in the continent and the diaspora against European slavery and colonialism, was an expression of an African Renaissance (rebirth, reclamation). Colonialism and colonization dismembered Africans through land dispossession and forcible relocation into slavery. Both the physical and cultural dismemberment were entrenched and sustained through Eurocentric education, which sought to displace Africans’ cultural memory, replacing it with European cultural memory. Decolonization struggles were an expression of an African Renaissance because they sought to “regain” and “restore” not only physical, but also cultural freedom. While decolonization struggles succeeded, to an extent, to free Africans from colonialists’ naked physical brutality, colonialism continued beyond Africa’s artificial independence. The reduction of African women, once the recipients of veneration in African culture, into objects of denigration by European colonialism, continued to be the case beyond “independence” because African males, not only inherited political power, but also oppressive cultural attitudes from their colonial masters. This exercise argues that for the African Renaissance project to succeed, a decolonized and Afrocentric education, which would enable Africans to rediscover traditional African education, which regarded human dignity—both women’s and men’s, especially women’s—as an inalienable right, is a prerequisite. The reclamation of a human dignity-affirming education is an act of “remembering,” “re-membering”—an African Renaissance