ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, “Teaching African Language for Historical Consciousness: Recovering Group Memory and Identity,” Joyce King and Hassimi Maïga illustrate powerful ways they use Songhoy-senni (language) concepts and history to permit African ancestry students and community members to experience connections to their heritage and engage all students in learning that the meanings of words and concepts are shaped by the cultural contexts from which they come. To illustrate this example of the African episteme, Chapter 3 presents several classroom encounters in which Maïga recalls ways that he retrieved particular meanings of his home language, Songhoy-senni, and King re-members using this language and culture to recover heritage knowledge. Their stories illuminate ways the standard curriculum disrupts historical consciousness and how teaching Songhoy-senni and Songhoy culture can heal this rupture. They demonstrate how folktales and African proverbs can restore humanity and wellness to the diasporic Black community by reconnecting with enduring transatlantic connections. Rather than merely an academic exercise, this chapter recounts the authors’ stories of personal and shared struggle to recognize and affirm the cultural continuity that exists between Africa and its Diaspora, and resist threats to African people’s existence—in particular the nihilating erasure of epistemic curriculum violence.
