ABSTRACT
Colonialism was marked not only by pillaging, epistemicide, and the imposition of Western ideological paradigms. At the heart of colonialism was the imposition of the idea of visibility and invisibility. Visibility is used here as the understanding/perception of worldviews or states of being that are recognisable and acceptable. Visibility was limited to the epistemes that were unique to the colonisers, and invisibility, understood as the opposite of visibility, was imposed on Africans as a result of the biased gaze of colonialism towards the local epistemes. There exist within postcolonial African societies systemic structures of marginalisation, exclusion, and oppression. Monuments and the visibility and invisibility discourse that they epitomise are endemic to the decolonial agenda that is necessary for the emancipatory discourse in Africa. This chapter seeks to address monuments within the preview of visibility and invisibility. I also engage in the kind of transcendence that monuments evoke in space. For a true realisation of visibility, I argue that colonial transcendence has to be challenged. I propose that this has to be done not only by the destruction of monuments but also by an ideological reimagination of African visibility that was and perhaps still continues to be eroded by the Western gaze.
