‘Conversational Decoloniality’: Re-Imagining Viable Guidelines for African Decolonial Agenda

Abstract

This article identifies the agenda of decoloniality as a call to seek solutions to Africa’s problems from within herself (Africa). This call has its hold in colonial and post-independent attempts by African Nationalists, writers, freedom fighters and philosophers to defend Africa’s cultural heritages, even against its underestimation by scholars of other climes of the world. It further argues that, though justice done to this quest would afford Africa to regain her existential humanism in a global setting, the defence of African cultural heritages has not yielded much-desired efforts due largely to methodological error. This article observed that African scholars often, in the attempt to free their intellectual outputs from European ethnocentric postulations, overbears the indigenous idea in the decolonial projects. This error is noted to be a consequence of the tendency to deify African worldviews and thought processes. Employing the conversational method of philosophising Chimakonam (2015, 2017a, 2017b, and 2018), this article attempts to interrogate the agenda for decolonisation and re-Africanisation. It argues for the idea of conversational decolonisation. This article concludes that a conversational decolonised process would, among other things, be appropriate for a scholarly response to colonial denigrations and underestimations of African cultures and traditions. It would also be a framework for achieving African self-definition in the modern world without compromising African identity.