Paper short abstract:

This contribution argues why knowledge production about Africa should not take place outside Africa, which pitfalls lie in supposedly positive approaches to the decolonization of African Studies and which circumstances make the deconstruction of Eurocentric concepts in African Studies so difficult.

Paper long abstract:

There is an epistemological dilemma in the production of knowledge about Africa. Even though the ‘decolonisation’ of academia is one of the most significant scholarly efforts in African studies in the 21st century, we can still see how colonial hegemony is implemented in teaching, research, publication, and thus in any manifestation of knowledge. How can it be that despite various interventions of great scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1986), Zeleza (2006), Comaroff & Comaroff (2012), Mbembe (2015), Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018), in favor of a change in the academic mindset have not yet succeeded?

By drawing on my own experiences as a German Africanist scholar, I intend to show what makes the epistemological transformation process in knowledge production about Africa so difficult. I will illustrate that the dilemma of African Studies is part of fundamental epistemological conflicts: different economies and cultures of knowledge production (Zeleza 2006), the stubborn encapsulation of individual disciplines and their theoretical and methodological foundations from each other, the foolish notion in contemporary academia that ‘only once it’s in a journal, it's real knowledge’, and the obstacles of the provincialization of Europe in the global knowledge apparatus.

I will explain why knowledge production about Africa should not take place outside Africa. In addition, I will investigate supposedly positive approaches to decolonization by pitfalls, in order to finally clarify what makes it so difficult to deconstruct Eurocentric concepts and the associated change in academic thinking and practice.