Decolonising Memory Studies: Remembering from Africa

Abstract

For many years, collective memory has been appropriated and used by social actors for hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces. However, the dominant understanding of ‘memory work’ has largely been based on Eurocentric perspectives of knowledge, while excluding and, arguably, erasing indigenous epistemologies as ‘knowledge on the other side of the line’. This chapter argues that communities in the Global South have pedagogical spaces whose various ontologies are being suppressed, leading to calls for epistemic justice. In structuring remembering and forgetting, ubuntu, idioms and proverbs, for example, are used by communities in the Global South to structure power relations. This chapter theorises ubuntu as an African concept that fosters remembering and forgetting. Ubuntu structures the manner in which the past, future and present are represented. Ubuntu conceives knowledge, that is, it influences what can be said, where and how it can be said, and by whom. In this milieu, this chapter will deconstruct the Eurocentric perspectives on memory, and explore various ontological and epistemological ways of understanding and studying memory in the Global South. Hence, this study forms part of ‘epistemic disobedience’ where it challenges the status quo in memory studies.