ABSTRACT
Over five centuries, the epistemic violence of Eurocentrism has decimated the knowledges of those subjugated through Anglo-European conquest and colonisation. The inextricable links between the extermination of knowledges and the ways of life giving rise to them have moved scholars to use the term, “epistemicide”, to capture the magnitude of this phenomenon. This chapter argues that the knowledge hegemony of White, Western, European supremacist ideas and pseudo-sciences has contributed to the planetary condition of crisis and to the profound global “knowledge deficit” that is undermining our capacities to resolve them.
The chapter presents three brief critical cartographies. The first maps the development of the modern/colonial architecture of Eurocentrism and role of Western scholarship in the Anglo-European colonial project, particularly in relation to Africa. The second reviews the ongoing epistemicide reproduced in contemporary South African universities. The third charts the projects of Africanisation in which knowledge politics intertwine with anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and independence movements, creating the ground for #RhodesMustFall movement. The chapter closes with some reflections on the idea of knowledge justice as a matter of global justice, and its implications for the contexts of Irish university education as gleaned through the African scholarship.
