Intellectual Decolonization in West Africa

Time and the Escape from Empire

Douglas W. Leonard

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350644779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Imprint
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Reworking French Colonial Categories
• 2 Representing, Recollecting, and Reapplying West African Narrative Forms
• 3 Reimagining the Flow of Time in Its Human Effects
• 4 Restoring Divinely Eternal Social Structures in West Africa
• 5 Rebuilding the Social and Political Worlds of West Africa
• Conclusion
• Coda: Researching, Writing, and Teaching Through Discomfort
• Bibliography
• Index