By Luqman Muraina / part of our “Share your Decolonising Story” project
I completed my B.Sc. Sociology in Nigeria with little or no knowledge about alternative epistemologies, coloniality, and politics of knowledge. Like many young graduates fed by modernity’s shine, I was just determined to be successful and contribute positively to societal development and transformation.
My exposure to decoloniality started during my Master’s studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Before taking up my studies, I did not know what decolonization was about. I aspired for higher education and Sociology of Development-related research. Over time, I was influenced by the dynamics of academic conversations and issues happening that time in South Africa – the decolonisation discourse based on the remnants of the #RhodesMustFall movement, which had occurred from 2015 to 2017. It finally took me to focusing on the topic of curriculum decolonisation in my Master’s dissertation.
My encounter with the debates around decolonization, combined with my continued interest in Development Studies laid the foundation for my current PhD thesis at the University of York, UK – Towards Decolonising Development Studies: Teaching Informed by Alternative Development Epistemologies in Nigerian Universities. I consider decolonisation to be ‘the resistance and reversal of coloniality’, which is the ‘discursive terrain within which many forms of domination and exploitation rest’. This domination includes racial capitalism, patriarchy, Western modernity, neocolonialism and economic imperialism, hegemony of Eurocentrism, and Westernisation/Europeanisation.
Lessons from STSM Project in Ghana
As part of my pilot studies proposal to ‘decolonise Development Studies in Nigeria’, I learned about the emphasis on decolonial and indigenous development practice at the University for Development Studies (UDS), Ghana. This practice is implemented through UDS’s community development approach called “Third Trimester Field Practical Programme (TTFPP)”. The TTFPP is an immersive, problem-based and integrated experiential learning programme designed for students to experience and learn about the realities of ‘rural’ Ghanian people.
I received generous funding for a Short-Term Scientific Mission (STSM) from the European Cost Action – Decolonising Development: Research, Teaching and Practice (DecoDEV) to understand decolonisation in practice at this Ghanaian institution and possible lessons that can be framed for my PhD’s research design and subsequent data collection in Nigeria.
My project was based on a participatory observation and qualitative interviews method. I accessed site-specific data such as documentary information including departmental handbooks and had semi-formal interviews/dialogues with faculty members. I also visited two sites where students were posted for the TTFPP programme: – Zugu and Adibo in Yendi municipality in the Northern region of Ghana.
The promises of ‘development’ had influenced the creation of UDS as a pro-poor university dedicated to the ‘total Development of Northern Ghana, in particular, and Ghana as whole’. Despite being a ‘Development Studies’ university, UDS also offers Health, Business, Education, Agriculture, and Physical and Social Sciences programmes. Through TTFPP, the university adopts a community development approach and framed to break knowledge gap with communities.
The TTFPP takes place in the third semester of a tripartite semester system for two consecutive years and is compulsory for all students. The experiential learning programme is preceded with a second semester course and pre-departure orientation. Students learn foundational lessons in community studies and development; community entry stages and approaches; agriculture and community development; participatory community action planning; priority intervention areas; qualitative and quantitative methods; project management (cycle); science, technology, and community development; and culture, politics, and community economy.
During the programme, students are expected to conduct surveys and write a faculty-based interdisciplinary and integrated report concerning the profile of the rural community (first-year) and its development challenge(s) (second-year). This is intended to become useful for government and development agencies, including NGOs. The TTFPP can be likened to the International Service Learning (ISL) usually involving Global North institution students engaging in (community) development activities in ‘poor countries’.
Reality Check: Reproducing Class Dynamics?
While the TTFPP exposed me to how a university can integrate an experiential and community learning approach with academic programs, my objective to learn about decolonisation was not met. Firstly, the programme is not decolonially–framed but rather set up as an indigenous and community experiential learning opportunity for students.
TTFPP prioritises reiterative and long-term experiential and community development learning, compared to short-term in ISL. Meanwhile, the programme is sometimes misinterpreted by university stakeholders, including student and faculty members, as a service for ‘helping others’ and reasserts elitism and upper class vs poor and lower-class power dynamics. This observation is also recorded in Mohammed’s post-TTFPP study as a TTFPP student participant promised to ‘set-up an NGO to take care of the disadvantaged people in rural areas in Ghana’.
Equally, its objectives to ‘introduce students to blend traditional knowledge with scientific knowledge’, was not prominent during the participant observations. Moreover, learning indigenous knowledge including language is usually left to chance by interested and zealous students. Instead, objectives such as data generation for problem-solving, community profiling, and developing favourable attitudes towards living and working in deprived communities were more pronounced. In my view, indigenous knowledge exchange including elementary knowledge about community’s language must be emphasised in the TTFPP.
Because of the shortcomings in meeting my STSM project objective, my PhD shifted to learning about critical development scholarship and the praxis of alternative development worldviews in Development Studies in Nigeria. While UDS adopts a community development framed experiential learning to aid development teaching, my PhD interrogates decolonial praxis adopted by Nigerian lecturers identified as Critical Development Scholars (CDS). I have learned how decolonisation is being practiced, negotiated, and contested in development teaching in Nigerian universities.
I consider my story as reflecting a scholarly transition from an empirical, positivist and Eurocentric framework to an advocacy for alternative knowledges, pluriversality, and decoloniality. It also reveals a shift from viewing ‘Development’ as a ‘hot cake’ or saviour discipline to recognizing it as a colonial-baggage. I now advocate for African-rooted and globally pluriversal models of development that challenge hegemonic paradigms and offer more inclusive, just, and humane alternatives.
Luqman Muraina is a Global Development PhD researcher at the Department of Politics, University of York. He researches decolonisation, higher education, politics of knowledge, and post-colonial African development. Luqman is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and a Research Associate and looking forward to research roles in the academia and social justice institutions.
Images by the author
Mary Njeri Kinyanjui’s “Decolonial Turn”
Community and Cultural Educator
marykinyanjui@yahoo.com
Mary Njeri Kinyanjui’s “decolonial turn” represents a profound ontological reorientation, moving beyond a simple academic shift toward a holistic reclamation of the self. This journey is defined by the constant friction between lived African realities and imposed Western constructs, representing a decisive break from “structured living”—the neoliberal routines of the Global North—in favor of African epistemologies, most notably the philosophy of Utu (humanness and solidarity). This transformation is illuminated through four primary catalysts: early village life, transformative communal experiences, the politics of language, and her evolution as a scholar.
The seeds of Kinyanjui’s decolonial thought were sown in Ngethu village, Gatundu North, where her upbringing provided a direct counter-narrative to colonial schoolbooks that depicted African peasant women as docile victims. In reality, she witnessed her mother as an embodiment of resilience and agency. This period exposed the painful disconnect of labor. In contrast, her father labored relentlessly on a coffee farm; the wealth generated by global trade never trickled back to him, highlighting the deep-seated structural inequalities embedded in global commodity chains. This extraction is compounded by erasure in the marketplace, where African branding remains glaringly absent; supermarkets display coffee from global conglomerates while “Gatundu Coffee” remains unacknowledged. For Kinyanjui, this is deeply personal, as the physical scars on her own feet from picking tea and coffee serve as a living archive of labor extraction that sustains the leisure of the Global North while leaving the producer anonymous.
Kinyanjui’s life outside the village further challenged the adequacy of neoliberal development and Western feminism. Following a violent sexual assault in 2004, an assailant’s accusation that she prospered at the expense of others forced an interrogation of whether current development paradigms foster alienation among those on the periphery. She discovered the limits of formal institutions when Western donors, preferring “cleaner” topics like micro-enterprise, ignored her requests for research funding into rape and violence. Similarly, during a personal illness, her university’s bureaucracy offered no aid, yet a chairman from the “Jua Kali” (informal sector) personally intervened to pay for her medicine. These experiences shifted her focus toward an “ethics of care” and radical humanism, moving away from a feminism centered on women “catching up” to men toward the advancement of feminine values such as Utu, nurturing, and collective self-reliance.
Language serves as another primary site of struggle in Kinyanjui’s work, as the imposition of European languages creates a cultural dissonance within the African elite. She highlights the frequent linguistic miscommunications that occur when technical terms, such as the “Likert scale,” are translated into Gikuyu, leading to skewed data because the underlying concepts do not align with local realities. Furthermore, the lack of interest from foreign publishers in independent African academic infrastructure reveals the formidable barriers to building an intellectual infrastructure on the continent. She critiques the dominant global narrative that frames Africa as a “burden” of disease and corruption, arguing that this framing strips the continent of its historical agency and its substantial contributions to global commerce.
Her scholarly journey culminated in a challenge to the “Washington Consensus,” as she realized that “action-oriented” development failed to address root causes. Influenced by the grandmother’s songs of resistance and works such as Who Controls Industry in Kenya, she critiques modern malls as spaces for “consuming the exotic,” where Africans consume Western culture while their own resources are repatriated. She explores how the introduction of colonial currency, as reflected in the song “Mbia Ciokire” (When Money Was Introduced), destroyed the “cultural household economy” by replacing traditional systems of gifting and reciprocity with enmity. Influenced by thinkers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, she calls for a “decolonization of the mind” that includes protecting nascent African industries, processing commodities locally, and formally recognizing the informal sector as a space of creativity rather than a deficiency to be “cured” by capitalism.
In summary, Mary Njeri Kinyanjui’s decolonial turn is a profound act of “remembering”. It is a firm rejection of the neoliberal imperative to “Grow, Conquer, and Change” Africa, proposing instead that the continent look to its “own backyard” for the values and structures—rooted in solidarity, reciprocity, and indigenous knowledge—necessary for a sustainable and dignified future.