ABSTRACT

The imperative of reinvention of Africa and creation of Africanity arises from a colonial historical context of a people who have experienced an existential quandary of being exiled from their ancestors, culture, language, history, knowledge, and even from themselves. Reinvention commences as a decolonial re-membering process in response to centuries of dismemberment and dehumanization. In this context, identity formation and intellectual formation become inextricably intertwined paradoxically just like power and knowledge in the Focauldian thinking. Thus the struggles for epistemic freedom are invariably a search for African identity.