Navigating Plural Coloniality: Reflections on the Making of Black Afro-Francophone Higher Education in an Anglo-American Academic World

Abstract This article examines the emergence of Black African Francophone higher education and what it means to navigate it in the broader context of the enduring legacies of French colonialism in an Anglo-American-dominated global academe. Even as fallist movements have revived and recentred key debates and conversations about epistemic decolonisation in the academe globally since #RhodesMustFall, there has been a tendency to construe the (neo)colonial imperial legacies that continue to shape global academe as Anglo-American. As such, the plurality of European colonialisms and the ensuing varied colonialities of power, knowledge, epistemic injustice, and death in the form of epistemicide and otherwise in formerly colonised regions remain under-examined. Meanwhile, these diverse systems have emerged from varied European colonial histories and present academics navigating those systems in decolonial ways with varied neocolonial intellectual and material challenges. Using Ousmane Sembène’s film adaptation of 'La Noire de. . .' (Black Girl) as a metaphor to examine the coloniality of death (neo)colonially in the academe in Black Francophone Africa and its diasporas, I propose the concept of agentic death to examine how death becomes a site of self-reclamation and emancipatory possibilities in the face of compounded (neo)colonialisms.