Teaching Emancipatory Postcolonial Knowledge

Abstract

This article discusses the experience of an up-coming African University lecturer engaged in teaching “emancipatory postcolonial knowledge” to young African minds for over 8 years. The young Africans that the lecturer has interacted with are in the age range of 19 to 31, they are fairly distributed between both genders, and are all university undergraduates taking the courses: Sociology of Decolonization and Contemporary African Social Thought. In addition to firsthand interaction in and out of classroom between the lecturer and the students, the article, among others, relies on course evaluation data obtained from course evaluation questionnaires given to the students at the end of the courses. The article notes a significant difference in the preference of course topics, among others, by gender among the students—a difference which qualitative data show to derive from the implications for gender equality that knowledge of such topics has for the students. The article thus concludes that the designing and teaching of social science courses in Africa generally will be more beneficial for African decolonization and contemporary civilization, as well as meaningful and exciting for the students thereby awakening their latent abilities, if knowledge that inspires thinking in postcolonial and gender equality terms is built in at every level as a matter of principle.