Beyond Extraversion and Research Extractivism: Schools and Decolonial Confrontations in an African Context [The History/Context and Intervention]

• In Event: Decoloniality in Afrikan Education

Proposal

[Proposal presents Year3 of a multi-year project first presented in 2022 to highlight educational crises/tension between an African community and its local Catholic parish on developing two competing secondary schools. Presentation on Year2 was withdrawn from the CIES 2023 conference in protest of an internal administrative position] CIES is historically entangled in the colonial capitalist exploration, extraction, and expropriation of natural resources and labor through extractivist research that supports political, economic, and cultural processes that continuously reconstitute schooling for deracination, epistemicide, and extraversion. CIES is also a site of resistance and a professional home-in-exile for many scholars (myself included) who are not only aware of their identities as members of the same indigenous communities whose epistemic cultures are trampled but not vanquished by extractivism and extraversion but, crucially, recognize that while “we’ve joined the table…we’re still on the menu” (Bilge, 2020, p. 317). This paradoxical posture of CIES, with its complex of competing considerations, constitutes the anchor for this project, which seeks to unsettle decolonial discourse in its contextual praxes by disrupting a structure through which logic of extractivism defines and confers value.

Now in its third year, this multi-year project attempts to invert (and subvert) extractivism by tapping decolonial resources and strategies among CIES conference participants to primarily benefit unique educational needs in a specific African context. The project requires of me an inversion of colonial gaze and, thus, my locus of enunciation—a more-than-performative shift from being, foremost, a US-based westernized academic to primarily a member and representative of an African community (Enugu Ezike) whose confrontations with multiple colonizing forces unravel, often superficially, as educational and social crises of inequity. This third year, which extends explorations (in Year 2) of various domestic and foreign historical forces at work in the educational and social crises (“the history and context”) as products of educational tensions that bear visible/tangible imprints both on my identities as a person/scholar and on CIES as an organization. It also reports on phase one of a series of curricular, structural, and political interventions starting in fall 2023.

Conceptual Framework
The paradox and tensions noted above about the complicity of the academe (and CIES) in the colonial matrix of power and knowledge (Quijano, 2000) and the prospect of undoing that matrix are familiar tropes in western decolonial thought. Indeed, even before postcolonial writings (see e.g., Carnoy, 1974; Altbach & Kelly, 1980), anti-colonial thinkers, including Freire (1970), already outlined the link between schooling and imperialist oppression, between the “fundamentally narrative character” of the teacher–student relationship and Europe’s necrophilic magisterial comportment to the rest of the world (p. 71). So had Césaire, Fanon, Rodney, Mazrui, and many others whose radical interventions sought to undrape the necropolitics (see Mbembe [2003]) of colonial epistemic hierarchies and its decadent universalism (see also de Souza, 2020 and Gordon, 2020, 2006).

But the stakes of decolonial politics are not contained by the discourse of/on decoloniality that is characterized by familiar scholarly disquisitions that make room for “all” voices, including those of critics, so long as they are tamed to the epistemic dicta of the colonial matrix. The stakes are more potent in the political footprints that center praxis and social transformation on the dual project of dismantling the architecture of that matrix (including its recent neoliberal bent) and of supporting those who have long refused to cower to it. This sensitivity to extend beyond discoruse to praxis builds on two senses of extraversion: “intellectual extraversion” that links knowledge production and transaction (Hountondji, 1996) to “economic extraversion”, which Samir Amin (1968) formulates as destabilizing transformations of previously stable and thriving economies such that they lose their self-sustaining vitality to forces of global extractive interventionism. That sensitivity is cogent for any meaningful engagement with the power of protest.

Data
The primary purpose of this project—and presentation—is to mobilize decolonial resources to contribute productively towards unfolding resolutions to local tensions surrounding the creation of two competing (public community and Catholic religious) high schools in a small community that can hardly support one. To enable full participant engagement and building on Year-1 (on “the problem”) and Year-2 (“the history and context”), both reviewed during the presentation, Year-3 (a) reflects further on colonial archival and oral sources (collected in spring and summer 2022) on various domestic and colonial (both Christian European and Islamic) forces that condition the educational and social crises in focus, with additional demographic and relevant public safety data that link these historical forces to current political, religious, and cultural tensions in today’s southeastern Nigeria, and (b) qualitative reports on ongoing consultations with power brokers on said local tensions sparked by this school competition.

Results
Since the primary purpose of this project is to invert the logic of extractivism and extraversion (rather than generate knowledge for a western audience), the use of CIES conference to solicit actionable insights from participants, informed by their own confrontations with coloniality, can be understood as an outcome. Yet, the presentation will share emerging ideas about competing Eurocentric dual narratives (one civic and the other religious) about the link between schooling and imaginations of development as progress on one hand and growing demand among the youth to understand their ancestral (religious and cultural) past on the other.

Significance
Beyond reversing structures of scholarly benefit (i.e., generating decolonial insights at CIES to inform productive educational processes in an African context), and in modeling inversion/subversion of scholarly extractivism by CIES members, this project can inform ways in which the mobilization of schooling in local contestations of coloniality enriches our understanding of the possibilities of decoloniality as a political project, not merely a discourse. Year 3 fieldwork is part of a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship that recruits local university interests in decolonial praxis beyond the immediate context with the goal of nurturing intellectual habit among African scholars of engaging radically with local social processes not hewn to foreign pressures and the demands of coloniality.

Authors

• Desmond I Odugu, Lake Forest College

• Noel Diyoke, University of Nigeria, Nsukka