Disobediently African: naming the world & other stories part 1

Self definition is a problem that confronts the best of us (us being African philosophers hihi).  Who am I? What do I do? (Ukpokolo, 2023).
Hi, my name is Mumbi and you may know me from my posts about African notions of time and other epistemic inquiries. But, I want to take it back a little bit to establish and ground where exactly my interest in African epistemic inquiry comes from as an African wanting to understand not just the world around me, but myself in relation to the world around me. Whose knowledge influences my thinking and how does that affect how I project myself onto the world or vice versa? And most importantly, who named the world around me?

Here, I’m of course thinking about, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1986) ‘cultural bomb’ and Fanon (1952; 1963) who said that the epistemic aspect of colonization took away the colonized’s ability to name the world, so we end up seeing and knowing ourselves through someone else’s gaze and knowledge. Ipadeola (2023) calls this existential epistemology, denying agency to the oppressed group and making them view and define their existence through the lens provided by their oppressors. She writes,
“colonization imposed some existential ideals upon Africans, which have continued to affect how many contemporary Africans perceive and define themselves, their continent, and other Africans too”.
The interesting part to me is not the content of knowledge, but what even counts as legitimate knowledge? And who are the gatekeepers?
Gayatri Spivak (1988) called this epistemic violence, denying marginalized groups the ability to contribute to knowledge. Spivak famously asked, Can the Subaltern Speak? And the answer we know leans more towards no. Or even if the Subaltern does speak, our voices are often appropriated and marginalized.

Now, I know, you’re probably asking, okay Mumbi, but what can one do? Well, one can choose to be disobedient. I’m borrowing here from Walter Mignolo’s (2009) epistemic disobedience, choosing to think outside the colonial frame. One can make inquiries, consciously asking why is something the way it is? And who does it benefit? For example the language we speak, our relationship with time, our consumer habits, the food we eat, etc.  I must say here that whoever said ‘ignorance is bliss’ knew what they were saying, because I won’t lie, it is such an arduous task to always question, but even more heartbreaking sometimes to bear the weight of the answers. I guess it’s like a curse of being a thinker, if you are really genuine in the pursuit of knowledge.
I have a MA in African Studies, but much of what I learnt inside the classroom was how to unlearn, which is an important process in its own right. But then I graduated my Masters having unlearnt so much of what I thought I knew, and now this is where the real education begins. In Kiswahili we say ‘asiyefunzwa na mamaye hufunzwa na ulimwengu’, so this is my journey kufunzwa na ulimwengu. Find a Kiswahili speaker in your life who can translate for you, hihi.
I will end this here but I hope you come back for more on this series! I will be posting these as blog posts here, also as shorter videos on Instagram and Tiktok.

See you in the next one? I’m going to talk about Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa.

Kwa heri kwa sasa!

Mumbi, April 2026.

References

Ukpokolo, I. E. (2023). The Meaning of African Philosophy. In Handbook of African Philosophy. Springer. Pg. 3.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind. Heinemann.

Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1952).

Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. (Farrington, C. Trans,). Grove Weidenfeld.

Ipadeola, A. P. (2023). An African Feminist Interrogation of Existential Epistemology: Women as the “Other of the Other”in (Post)Colonial Africa. In Handbook of African Philosophy. Springer. Pg. 413.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press. 

Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181