A Decolonial Curriculum Is Everything: An Afrocentric Approach

Introduction

Frantz Fanon’s perspective is instrumental to the understanding of the curriculum as a tool that divides the coloniser from the colonised in the colonial/Eurocentric/anti-black world. Fanon’s lived experience is testament to this division that influenced his life and thoughts about the existence of the indigenous people that he refers to as the colonised or natives in his writings. Indigenous people and their indigenous knowledge systems are the most researched and written about in the world, yet they are still the most misrepresented. This is why Afrocentricity is a suitable paradigm to decolonize the curriculum in relation Fanon’s thought. Afrocentricity is a paradigm that positions the Africana subject as the center of hers or his world, it allows the agency and ability to think form an African-centered perspective (Asante 2007; Owusu-Ansah & Mji, 2013). In this regard, Fanon’s thought is relevant to the understanding of this epistemic division as something that materialized deliberately for the structure of the “empire” (Hardt & Negri 2000) that was intended to restructure the world to the image of the European logic. The knowledge systems and way of living for colonised people was the fundamental base of creating what transpired to be the curriculum of the empire, with research approaches that are being deployed in academia today. Most research approaches that are being used in the curriculum are based on research and methodologies that were developed and used towards the contribution of positioning black people as objects intended to be owned, used and studied. Under these research approaches, the colonised people’s existence and their way of life was studied and used to create disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, sociology and research methodologies that were used to justify indigenous people as inferior. While other academic disciplines such as science, art and archaeology as well as biology and history were used as a weapon to justify dehumanisation of indigenous people, and the classification of their knowledge systems as primitive and barbaric.

This epistemic division created and justified the existence of what is commonly known as the Global South in which Africa as the victim of colonisation is located under, as the primitive side of knowledge. Fanon understood the language of the centre and periphery that demonstrated these divisions that made the periphery a no man’s land, as the “zone of nonbeing” (Fanon [1952] 2008, p.2). The zone of none being is a place without knowledge, a place without history, without spirituality and most importantly a place without humans. As history tells us about what resulted to Africa being named a dark continent, a name that embodies a perception of many fathers of European knowledge such as Hegel. This perception is based on the history of the conquest of Africa that positioned Africa only as a cradle of slaves and black bodies as created by God only for the benefit of European pleasures and development. Narratives of history and of the conquest depicts to us how colonial research and methodologies were supported by the European fathers of knowledge. Fanon takes a different position from the European fathers of knowledge to say that the colonised life is life in the zone of nonbeing, there are beings and there is a different humanity. This chapter takes Fanon’s position of thinking beyond the curriculum of the empire by adopting an Afrocentric approach.