Addressing the Challenge of Coloniality in the Promises of Modernity and Cosmopolitanism to Higher Education: De-bordering, De-centering/De-peripherizing, and De-colonilizing

This chapter addresses the challenge of coloniality in the promises of modernity and cosmopolitanism to higher education in Africa by highlighting that Western higher education was founded under classical modernist and classical cosmopolitan perceptions of how the world ought to be ordered (or modernity) and how to nurture planetary conviviality (or cosmopolitanism). When we conceptualize higher education and scholarship within perspectives engendered by narratives of modernity and cosmopolitanism, even if at a critical modernist level, we rule out the problem of coloniality and fall short of being critically critical. I call for an engagement toward a de-bordering, de-centering/de-peripherizing, and de-colonilizing.