Knowledge Is Life: Decolonial Reflections on the Epistemic Politics of Knowing

This article advances the proposition that knowledge is life, drawn from the African Ndebele aphorism ukungazi kufana lokufa (ignorance is like being dead), as the conceptual scaffolding for a meditation on what knowledge once was, what was done to it under modernity/coloniality, and what it must become if humanity is to survive its present civilizational crisis. It traces how knowledge was extracted from communal life, redefined as expertise, encoded in inaccessible languages, and commodified within the neoliberal university. It then makes the case for decolonization of knowledge as a fourfold mechanism: critique of Eurocentrism and the cognitive empire; exposure of the global political economy of knowledge; epistemic restoration following colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal violence; and the construction of epistemic communities of resistance. The article concludes with an account of the Africa Decolonial Research Network, formed at the University of South Africa in 2011, whose work prefigured and contributed to the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall movements, and closes with a call for a decolonial theory of re-existence in which knowledge is restored to its original vocation as life itself.