Challenging Epistemic Hierarchies: Lessons from Africans and Afro-Diasporic Intellectuals

In a world where colonial legacies have left their mark, the issue of African agency and knowledge production is still pressing and contentious. Too often, African agency is reduced to geopolitical alignment or institutional competence. Afro-diasporic and African thinkers, however, provide alternative perspectives. Their input encourages us to reconsider what it means for Africa to take action, make decisions, and envision itself according to its own rules. A deeper, more radical understanding of agency that takes into consideration the politics of knowledge creation, the long-lasting effects of colonialism, and the historical voices that have long resisted domination from the edges is frequently lacking.

This article argues that knowledge of African and Afro-diasporic viewpoints is necessary to rebuild African perceptions of themselves. The political and intellectual boundaries set by Eurocentric worldviews are contested by intellectuals such as Sylvia Wynter, Walter Rodney, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire. They provide frameworks that place African histories, bodies, languages, and futures at the centre of global politics, not as an afterthought but as its cornerstone.

By embracing Africans and Afro-Diasporic intellectuals, we may examine agency as the ability to create and envision alternative worlds rather than just acting within preexisting ones. This article challenges colonial logics, regains epistemic sovereignty, and broadens the scope of what African agency may imply today by highlighting the pressing need to link Africa's current struggles with the larger intellectual and political legacies. 

Reframing Africa: Who defines action, power, and knowledge?

Despite Africa's growing presence on the international scene, certain viewpoints continue to limit the continent to antiquated ideas and a state of subservience that lacks the political capacity to make its own decisions. In contrast, writers like William Brown stress the significance of discussing the African continent as an agent in international politics: 

“Rather than asking how external actors such as aid donors and great powers old and new have affected a marginalised, victimised and almost politically inert ‘Africa’, a focus on African agency turns this on its head and asks instead how far and in what ways African states and other actors have been able to act on and in the international system.”^[1]

During the independence time, African leaders, intellectuals, and movements carried out alternative imaginaries that challenged the colonial ordering of knowledge, being, and power. These historical events remind us that the right to construct alternative realities has been at the heart of the struggle for African sovereignty. The idea of Pan-African unity supported by Kwame Nkrumah represented a departure from colonial fragmentation and constituted an act of epistemic creation and resistance rather than just political attempts.

Historically, African nations have participated in international forums to defend their objectives. The Asian-African Conference in 1955 (known as the Bandung Conference, in Indonesia) “was a historical gathering because it was the first time that representatives of hundreds of millions of people from the Third World came together to discuss the enormous social process known as decolonization and assess its implications.”^[2] The Bandung Conference was a significant moment in the battle against colonialism within the bipolar system, shaping the South-South solidarity.

At present, we witness the participation of African and diasporic voices in global discussions, as demonstrated by the United Nations (UN) Permanent Forum on People of African Descent in April of this year. It was feasible to exert pressure on the world to begin reorganising the international system through the collaborations between the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission^[3], among other actors.^[4] A further example is the involvement of the Global South in G20 presidencies, where South Africa is leading this year, and the African Union's second year of membership as a permanent member. South Africa's challenge is to leave a legacy of confirming multilateralism and practical solutions to global issues, as the United States will be the next G20 president.^[5] 

The African Union (AU) and the Africa Group at the UN have taken use of this opportunity for activism to fight Africa's exclusion from global power politics and negotiation outcomes^[6]. Accordingly, “Common positions have become the main means by which Africa has given meaning to its actorness and activism in multilateral negotiations that have become increasingly ever more complex”^[7]. Afro-diaspora and African intellectuals have deconstructed facets of Eurocentrism to ground “common positions” on multilateralism. In doing so, intellectuals dismantle the notion of hierarchy, which elevates Eurocentric ideas and policies while demeaning other actors.

How to counter epistemic hierarchy? 

Independence and the imperatives of nation-building did not put an end to epistemic resistance to hegemonic Eurocentrism and neoliberalism.Instead, Africans and Afro-diasporic intellectuals have been criticizing the foundations of colonial legacy that were implanted in post-independent states. This is not to argue that there were no intellectuals who articulated ideals similar to Eurocentric concepts of modernization and linear growth. 

The contributions of Africans and Afro-diasporic intellectuals  can be summarized in between these two imperatives: criticizing Eurocentricity and seeking modernity. Yet, they aimed to revitalize genuine African agency. In this piece, we look at how intellectuals contended with the fundamental notion of hierarchy in order to articulate African agency . We highlight three aspects in which Africans and Afro-diasporic intellectuals deconstructed Eurocentric notions: endogenous epistemic freedom, gender identity, and alternative/radical political imagination.

a) Endogenous Epistemic Freedom 

[t]he central over-representation, which enables the interests, reality, and well-being of the empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated to those of the now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of Man.^[8] 

Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican intellectual, explicates in this quotation a fundamental notion in the Eurocentric knowledge system: hierarchy by “inventing Man”. This Man is a white rational male who is anchored in the secular Westphalian state and pursues modernity. The Eurocentric knowledge and practices “over-represent” this Man’s capabilities, lifestyle, and superiority over other races as well as women. In a hierarchical sense, “the mythology of the Black Other of sub-Saharan Africans (and their Diaspora descendants)”^[9]  legitimised colonialism.

The Eurocentric knowledge system consolidated this hierarchy in colonized African and Latin American countries through the education system. European colonizers employed formal schools and higher education as part of their acculturation tools. As a result, worldviews about our connections with nature or other humans became Eurocentric and oriented toward modernity. In response, we can see the rise of some notions such as African socialism, African modernity, and Arab Asala (authenticity), all of which aim to integrate non-material power such as tradition, culture or local language, but without compensating for hierarchy and the purpose of catching up with ex-colonial powers. In other words, such notions are like reinventing an African Man which imports an ingrained hierarchy. 

Still, Africans and Afro-diasporic intellectuals have been critical of the ideals and conditions that African people go through. For example, Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji contended the defence of tradition as a means of combating Eurocentrism. He demonstrates “the word "traditional" would incline the reader to perceive this kind of knowledge as something fixed, immutable and reluctant to change over the centuries”^[10]. African tradition, on the other hand, is dynamic; so, he employed “the word "endogenous" to dwell on the origin of a cultural product or value that comes from, or at least is perceived by people as coming from inside their own society, as opposed to imported or "exogenous" products or values.”^[11] Hountondji contextualised African knowledge in relation to other sources of knowledge. He argued that “there is no absolute origin at all, and the concept of endogeneity itself should therefore be relativised”^[12]. The contributions of African and Afro-diasporic intellectuals give significant critical insights into Eurocentrism while articulating African knowledge. 

b) Feminism and sexual hierarchy 

[T]he real mistake of women was to let the memoir, the collective, the history, space of producing history - to let it in the hands of men (Fatema Mernissi).^[13]

The notion of hierarchy not only serves to justify colonialism, but it also shapes society relationships. Sylvia Wynter found that the “descriptive statement” of rationality, productivity, and secularity favours males while “stigmatizing portrayal of women as intellectually inferior”.^[14] This hierarchy has also become entrenched in places where Islam is the main religion and culture, such as North African countries. 

The Moroccan sociologist Fatema Mernissi, in her above quote, illustrated the legacy of sexual hierarchy. She argued that Eurocentricity imposed their understanding of women, their societal role, and relations with men through imagined paintings of women's 'harem' that showed women as imprisoned for men for sex or enslaving, which means women in Islamic culture do not have the capacity to think, strategize, or retaliate; however, Islamic paintings, i.e., miniature art, depict women not as sexual objects but painted on top of horses, implying they were visible and had social roles in public spaces.^[15] Mernissi's intellectual contribution provides us with an alternative understanding of Islamic knowledge that is not driven by a belief in female inferiority.

In the same vein, the Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues in her significant book The Invention of Women  that colonizers created a sexual hierarchy as a mirror of their legacy.^[16] She disclosed how Eurocentric ideals depowered Yoruba women throughout colonial policies. She explained that before colonialism, women's identity in Yoruba was not determined by “anasex”; rather, societal rules defined women's roles, hence there were women as rulers, farmers, and traders. Even within misogyny, women's identity varied according to societal norms and relationships.

Another manifestation of hierarchy exists among women themselves. Oyěwùmí defined “Sisterarchy” as patriarchal norms that distinguish Western women from other races of women.^[17] Similarly, Afro-American intellectual, bell hooks, challenges the hierarchy in feminist movements' "sisterhood". Maybe women's struggles over decades have deconstructed some of the supremacy of “the invented Man” over women; yet, the superiority of white, rational, and modernised women over other races has influenced feminist discourse. hooks' contribution highlights the necessity of intersectionality, albeit she used the term “inter-relatedness” to indicate that not all women's suffering and demands are the same. She explains, “[b]lack women with no institutionalised "other" that we may discriminate against, exploit, or oppress often have a lived experience that directly challenges the prevailing classist, sexist, racist social structure and its concomitant ideology.”^[18] 

c) Political Imagination and Radical Praxis

[i]n breadth  pan-Africanism covered a wider agenda – concerned not only with political economy, but also with African culture, aesthetics, poetry and philosophy” (emphasis from the source (Mazrui).^[19]

Resisting colonialism and ongoing epistemic domination has generated many political imaginations across the continent. Pan-Africanism is one of these envisioned futures and a category of African agency, as Brown explained.^[20] In the above quotation, the Kenyan intellectual Ali Mazrui underlined that economic imperatives cannot be the exclusive focus of African unity; non-material factors are equally important. In the same vein of restoring authentic culture to counter Eurocentric policies and reimagine Africa, intellectuals from North African countries recalled Islamic values to transform political conditions after independence. For instance, Malek Bennabi, an Algerian philosopher, argued that deterioration of self-morality and cognitive perception led to disconnecting society from its culture and history; it then became “colonizable” before physical colonial powers invaded countries^[21]. Bennabi envisaged a “renaissance” on the Arabic concept of Hadara 'civilisation', which was founded on humans, soil, and time. Humans carry morality, culture and creativity, which reflect their dynamism and collective interactions; soil reflects surrounding resources; and time refers to the optimal use of time for the purpose of society, not as a linear time.^[22]

Though Bennabi lived at the same time and place as Frantz Fanon, his political alternative based on Islamic civilisation was not as radical as Fanon’s analysis^[23] or as Walter Rodney's political vision for Africa. In Rodney’s seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa^[24], the Guyanese intellectual depicted African civilisations (e.g., Nuba, Abyssinia, Kongo, Benin, etc.) and how colonialism structurally destroyed and disrupted their evolutions. As a result, Rodney radically urged for resisting neocolonialism and centering class struggle for African development. He explained his revolutionary imagination, “[t]he notions of revolution and class consciousness must be borne in mind when it comes to examining the situation of the modern worker and peasant classes in Africa. However, for the greater part of Africa’s history, the existing classes have been incompletely crystallised, and the changes have been gradual rather than revolutionary”.^[25] 

How can we instrumentalise these intellectual perceptions and concepts nowadays?

A Eurocentric narrative's attempt to erase history only serves to highlight the numerous ways that the African continent has been operating in pursuit of different agendas. Since “no one colonizes innocently”, as Aimé Césaire^[26] stated it, the instrumentalisation of the previous concepts invalidates assertions that Africans were primitive and that Africa had no history. This promotes the decolonization of knowledge from within by looking at its own knowledge production. We see these intellectual perceptions and concepts discussed in the previous section in the practical realm, as evidenced by the Pan-African Congresses, the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the founding of the African Union in 2002, and the pursuit of African and diasporic responses to African issues such as development and employment.

These institutional formations express African agency, namely at the official level among other nation states. However, this level of representation is still driven by modernity, with no fundamental refusal to hierarchy in global policies. People's activism, on the other hand, demonstrates a persistent resistance to all types of hierarchy. Ideas and arguments of African and Afro-diasporic intellectuals revive resistance to lived hierarchy and inequity. Therefore, we witness people's uprisings and social movements such as Black Lives Matter, End SARS, Rhodes Must Fall, the Kenyan protest against the Finance Bill, and global protests against Israeli genocide in Palestine. All of these uprisings sustain African agency as a meaningful/rooted notion and a praxis of people's activism, rather than just a government-issued purpose. 

To sum up, incorporating the perspectives of African and Afro-Diasporic scholars into political strategies, academic initiatives, and cultural discussions is not just a gesture of inclusivity; it is an essential step towards achieving a genuinely decolonial goal. For a long time, these intellectuals have provided contextualised perspectives on global justice, liberation, and power. Their concepts and perspectives show the way towards more equitable and diverse kinds of agency while challenging Eurocentric frameworks. Rethinking African political agency today means putting these viewpoints front and centre, not as supporting elements but as essential instruments for rethinking how politics and knowledge creation will develop globally in the future.
 

Camila Andrade is a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) and a research fellow at the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC), University of Johannesburg. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camila-sandrade/ 

Abeer Abazeed is a research fellow at the Institute for Pan African Thought and Conversation (IPATC), University of Johannesburg, and assistant professor of Political Science, Cairo University. LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/abeer-abazeed-عبير-ربيع-39043640

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