Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools

David Nyaluke, Barbara O’Toole, and Ebun Joseph bring together a heterodox group of concerned scholars who are on fire for social and cognitive justice to explore contemporary problematic education discourse and challenge resilient dominant racist discourse. Africa is their legitimate epistemic site because of its misrepresentations, exposure to stereotypes and even epistemicides. The powerful anthology invites us to rethink not only education discourse but also pedagogy as it pushes for decolonial educational transformation.Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, author of Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (Routledge, July 2018)

Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schoolsadds to the growing literature integrating broader concerns of education, development, equity, and social justice. Contributions in this collection cover a complex array of topics, engaging the reader’s interest in the challenges and possibilities of counter hegemonic knowledge, subversive pedagogy, decolonial education, and the intersections of knowledge, justice, race, and education. The interrogation of global education brings to the fore salient questions about knowledge, representation, and the politics of authentication of postcolonial realities in Africa and the Global South for that matter. Scholars reading this book, no doubt, will come out with more probing questions about the coloniality of global justice education itself, starting to probe additional questions: What are the redemptive qualities of global education? And, what does global justice education mean for the search for new educational futures? The book is a recommended read for all scholars working on global justice education.George J. Sefa Dei, Professor of Social Justice Education & Director, Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies Fellow, Royal Society of Canada

Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools challenges the racial and cultural hierarchies that dominate Western research and education about Africa and Africans. It is a ‘call to arms’ for decolonising the epistemologies and pedagogies that pathologise and subalternise people of African, Black and Brown descent. It takes readers outside the comfort zone of Eurocentrism and Whiteness, and the deficit narrative that has pervaded much of so-called ‘development education’ in particular.

The book is an invaluable resource for educators as it offers a counter-epistemological perspective on the politics of knowledge and pedagogies in White societies about Africa, and people of African descent. It is not only of value to those who do ‘Global Justice Education’, however, it is a tool box for exploring the privileging of discourses, ways of thinking and ways of living that are contingent on violating peoples and the natural world in the name of modernisation, growth, and progress. It demonstrates how the practice of development-as-charity is contingent on the perpetuation of one’s own privileges, reinforcing the colonial matrix of power.

Kathleen Lynch, Professor and Chair of Equality Studies 2003–2018, University College Dublin