Paper short abstract:

This paper advocates historical perspective in deliberations on imagination as rebellion against scholarship exclusivity. It recognizes (extra-)academic and multimodal sources in the analysis of strategies in the linguistic realization of imaginations in favor of inclusivity in African Studies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper advocates historical perspective in reflecting on current and imagined practices for an inclusive academia. Among the numerous colonial legacies in postcolonial societies are teaching, learning, and generally scientific methods. Drawing from Orientalism (Said 1978) and The Coloniality of Power (Quijano 2000; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013), the standardization and institutionalization of western thought patterns as academic disciplines, methods and publishing houses thrives across colonial and postcolonial/neocolonial phases. Accordingly, this paper is a postcolonial pragmatic (Anchimbe and Janney, 2010) analysis of 'Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense' by the Nigerian activist and music legend, Fela Kuti (1986) and excerpts from British colonial assessment records on precolonial education methods of the members of some Cameroonian communities (1916 – 1961), the former as historical but surviving linguistic realization of imagined campus indecorum. Campus indecorum is an oxymoron curled from the concept of campus decorum (Otung, 2021). While decorum is implicitly embedded in the conceptualization of campus in the later phrase, indecorum plays a contradictory role in the former. However, this literary technique captures the academia, its etiquettes, as well as the rebelliousness of ‘students’, a metaphor for the excluded adapted from the data. Analysis targets Fela’s conceptualizations of teacher as an epistemic gate-keeper. It also highlights Fela’s musical invitation to join his song as a clarion call to the excluded category to resume the resistance against exclusive scholarly etiquettes. By illustrating this suitable historical example and by providing recommendations for campus indecorum, this paper seeks to contributes to the reflections on inclusivity in African Studies.