Douglas W. Leonard
Description
Engaging with the vision of Africa put forward by a number of prominent, regional scholars in francophone West Africa in the wake of European colonial
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ism, 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.
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