Decolonization, Higher Education & Sustainable African Futures

The Central Question

How are African universities reinventing their institutional identity through decolonial discourse — and what does this mean for sustainable African futures?

My doctoral research examines the ways decolonial thinking is transforming how African universities understand themselves — not just their curricula, but their institutional identity, their relationship to knowledge production, and their responsibilities to the communities and continent they serve.

The colonial university was designed to produce a particular kind of subject: one trained to administer, to extract, to reproduce the epistemological frameworks of the metropole. Decades after formal independence, many African universities continue to operate within those inherited frameworks — measuring themselves against European standards, publishing primarily for Western audiences, and treating local knowledge systems as peripheral to the serious business of scholarship.

Decolonial discourse — accelerated in recent years by movements such as South Africa's #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall — is challenging this inheritance head on. My research asks: what happens when universities take these challenges seriously? How are they rethinking what counts as knowledge, who counts as a knower, and what the university is ultimately for?

Fellowship & Institutional Affiliations

The research is conducted through the Wits–Edinburgh Sustainable African Futures (WESAF) Doctoral Programme — an interdisciplinary fellowship jointly hosted by the University of Edinburgh and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The programme brings together doctoral researchers working at the intersection of African development, sustainability, and knowledge production.

Charlie is currently based as a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the University of Ghana, where he collaborates with Dr Delali Amuzu of the College of Education on qualitative research exploring language, epistemic frameworks, and the decolonial turn in African thought.

Methodology

The research adopts a qualitative, interpretive methodology, drawing on critical discourse analysis and collaborative scholarly inquiry. Working across institutions in Scotland, South Africa, and Ghana, the approach is deliberately inter-contextual — tracking how decolonial discourse travels, transforms, and takes root differently across institutional settings.

A significant strand of the empirical work involves close engagement with language as an onto-epistemic site. Collaborative work with Dr Delali Amuzu at the University of Ghana, including a co-authored article examining the Ewe concept of dziku, reflects a methodology that takes African language and conceptual frameworks seriously as primary sources of knowledge, not merely objects of study.

The theoretical framework draws on decolonial theory — particularly the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Achille Mbembe, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni — alongside postcolonial higher education studies and African development theory. The aim is not to produce a universal model of the decolonised university, but to understand the specific, contextual ways in which decolonial discourse is being taken up, resisted, and transformed within particular institutional settings.

Key Themes

The research engages with several overlapping thematic areas:

Knowledge sovereignty. Who has the authority to define what counts as legitimate knowledge within the university? How are African universities negotiating between inherited epistemological frameworks and indigenous or local knowledge systems?

Curriculum transformation. What does it mean to decolonise a curriculum in practice — beyond symbolic gestures? How are departments and faculties making concrete changes to what they teach and how?

Institutional identity. How are African universities articulating a new sense of purpose — one oriented toward the needs of their own societies rather than toward the reproduction of Western academic norms?

Sustainable African futures. How does decolonisation intersect with sustainable development? What kind of graduates, knowledge, and institutions does a sustainable African future require?

Intellectual Influences

The research is in conversation with a broad body of decolonial, postcolonial, and African development scholarship. Key thinkers include: