Intellectual Decolonization in West Africa

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A01=Douglas W. Leonard
Amadou Hampate Ba
Author_Douglas W. Leonard
Boubou Hama
Category=GTS
Category=NHH
Category=NHTR1
decolonization
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Family
folklore
forthcoming
francophone
French Colonial
Gender
history of ideas
independence
intellectual history
Joseph Ki-Zerbo
knowledge
linear
philosophy
postcolonial
Sexuality
time
West Africa

Product details

  • ISBN 9781350644762
  • Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
  • Publication Date: 15 Oct 2026
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Engaging with the vision of Africa put forward by a number of prominent, regional scholars in francophone West Africa in the wake of European colonialism, this book shows how their intellectual labour recovered historical, cultural and folkloric materials about their peoples and regions.

This framework of history, temporality, gender roles and political forms challenged Western-centric ideas that had endured into the postcolonial era, offering a distinct worldview in which time, sexuality, gender and community co-exist in flux. In unravelling a non-linear understanding of time, individuals such as Amadou Hampate Ba, Boubou Hama, and Joseph Ki-Zerbo employed a fluid chronology to create the opportunity for a future for West Africa, separate from that which had been laid out by their former colonisers.

Problematizing accepted understandings of post-colonial social and political construction in West Africa, this book shows how key thinkers sought to reclaim their region’s identity and agency amidst wider processes of intellectual decolonization.

Douglas W. Leonard is Associate Professor of History at the US Air Force Academy, Colorado, USA. He is the author of Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa (2019) and specialises in African intellectual networks during decolonization.

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