Decolonizing the Mind and Epistemic Justice:
Reparation Beyond the Economic Frame

Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, she considers how colonial education, linguistic hierarchies, and Eurocentric standards of rationality contributed to the marginalization of African histories and knowledge traditions. The concept of “epistemicide” names this systematic suppression of ways of knowing, while epistemic injustice describes the resulting harm to individuals and communities in their capacity as producers and interpreters of knowledge.

Decolonizing the mind, in this account, does not mean rejecting Western knowledge or replacing one exclusive canon with another. Oluwagbemi-Jacob instead calls for a “paradigm expansion” grounded in epistemic pluralism and pluriversality. Differently situated intellectual traditions should be able to enter into critical dialogue without any single tradition functioning as the universal measure of validity.

The lecture organizes this transformation around three interconnected demands: recognition, redistribution, and representation. Recognition requires engaging African and other marginalized philosophical traditions as rigorous intellectual formations in their own right. Redistribution concerns the material infrastructures of knowledge production, including research funding, publishing, libraries, archives, and scholarly networks. Representation means enabling African scholars and communities to participate in defining research agendas and determining which questions merit philosophical attention.

Oluwagbemi-Jacob translates these principles into a program of institutional reform. She calls for African philosophies to be integrated into the foundations of university curricula; for greater support for research and publication in African languages; and for investment in African-led research centers, journals, archives, and publishing institutions. She also emphasizes the importance of treating community knowledge-holders as intellectual partners and of connecting philosophical inquiry to political, environmental, technological, and social concerns.

Reparations consequently emerge as a process of epistemic restoration. Financial compensation, the restitution of land, and the return of cultural objects remain significant, but they cannot by themselves repair the damage inflicted on languages, collective memory, educational institutions, and forms of self-understanding. Oluwagbemi-Jacob therefore invites universities, publishers, governments, and international organizations to recognize the cognitive dimensions of colonial harm and to make intellectual sovereignty central to reparative justice.

The presentation concludes with a dialogical understanding of decolonization. Its aim is not intellectual isolation, but a more equal global conversation in which different traditions can think, create, and speak without depending upon external validation. Cognitive sovereignty, from this perspective, is both a condition of meaningful freedom and a foundation for epistemic justice.

About the Presenter

Prof. Dorothy Oluwagbemi-Jacob is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calabar, Nigeria, and a Long-Term Fellow at the GloPhi Center. Her research encompasses political philosophy, decolonial theory, intercultural philosophy, African philosophy, logic, and critical thinking. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy and completed postdoctoral research at Yale University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. She has served as a visiting professor at the University of Pretoria, where she remains a research associate, and participated in the Erasmus+ Mundus Mobility Exchange Programme at the University of Bucharest. She is the author of Rudiments of Logic and Editor-in-Chief of the FAHSANU Journal: Journal of Arts and Humanities.