By Gillian Schutte

I received a response to my essay ReAfricanisation from Gary Duffy—a critique that positions itself as a defence of Enlightenment values and cautions against what he calls a “romanticisation” of precolonial African traditions. Duffy asserts that Enlightenment rationality, individualism, and the scientific method remain valuable and that efforts to centre African epistemologies must avoid anachronism, supernaturalism, or the abandonment of modernity. He invokes Kwasi Wiredu, Amílcar Cabral, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to argue for a hybrid cultural model—one that retains the tools of modernity while selectively decolonising culture. While the intention may be to inject nuance into the conversation, Duffy’s response ultimately reasserts the primacy of Western intellectual frameworks and repeats many of the colonial tropes that decolonial and African-centred thought has long challenged. This essay is a response to that position—and a reaffirmation of why ReAfricanisation matters as a project of epistemic sovereignty, not Enlightenment appeasement.

The critique of ReAfricanisation rehearses a familiar anxiety: that centering African epistemologies may endanger the rational, liberal foundations of modernity. Positioned as a concern for nuance, the argument recoils at the prospect of Africans shaping knowledge on their own terms. It performs an old trick—raising the spectre of authoritarianism, backwardness, and anachronism when African traditions are invoked with serious intent. At its core lies the insistence that Enlightenment rationality remains the gold standard for thought, science, and progress. What Duffy defends is less an inclusive modernity than a racialised hierarchy of knowledge that positions white male logic as the epistemic centre and treats African ways of knowing as secondary, suspect, or sentimental.

ReAfricanisation has been misrepresented—flattened into a caricature of nostalgic purism. Yet nowhere does the project advocate abandoning modern tools or technological engagement. Its premise is altogether different. It calls for epistemic freedom: the right and will to theorise, organise, and build knowledge through African metaphysical and philosophical foundations without having to pass through the checkpoint of European validation. Duffy appeals to figures like Kwasi Wiredu and Amílcar Cabral, but without engaging their positions with depth. Wiredu called for procedural decolonisation that subjects all conceptual frameworks to African philosophical scrutiny. Cabral’s use of Portuguese in anti-colonial mobilisation was a strategic act under conditions of occupation—never a declaration of allegiance to European epistemic superiority. Both thinkers were engaged in dismantling, not conserving, the intellectual architecture of the West.

What emerges across Duffy’s critique is a deep reluctance to move beyond Enlightenment epistemology. Rationality, individualism, and the scientific method are treated as benign tools—neutral instruments for any culture to adopt. Yet these forms emerged from and remain infused with the logics of racial capitalism, conquest, and ontological exclusion. They were not developed in a vacuum. Rationality was used to disqualify the metaphysical. Individualism served the propertied white male. Scientific method advanced in tandem with eugenics and empire. Duffy universalises Enlightenment principles while reducing African political and spiritual systems to superstition and stagnant tradition. This isn’t a defence of intellectual complexity—it’s an act of epistemic policing.

The claim that African political traditions veer naturally toward authoritarianism follows a colonial pattern. Communalism and ancestral leadership are framed as regressive, while liberal democracy—shaped through empire and global capital—is left unscrutinised. There’s no reckoning with how so-called liberal democracies in Africa have been installed through structural adjustment, military intervention, and elite training routes. Duffy deflects from the authoritarianism built into Western statecraft and projects that pathology onto African systems, as though corruption and coercion are African traits rather than global political behaviours.

Burkina Faso under Captain Ibrahim Traoré offers a powerful refutation of the claim that African-led resistance to Euro-modernity leads to authoritarian collapse. Traoré’s governance draws from ancestral political values, collective ethics, and land-based sovereignty, while simultaneously engaging modern military and technological infrastructure. His conscious embrace of both Islam and Christianity—meant to quell sectarian division engineered through decades of foreign interference—is itself a political philosophy rooted in Ubuntu. He represents a form of hybridised modernity that neither mimics European models nor fetishises tradition. It is deliberate, grounded, and sovereign.

China presents another example of how modernity can emerge from local philosophical groundings. Taoist cosmology, Confucian collectivism, and an indigenous sense of harmony coexist with scientific innovation and global economic presence. The Chinese model demonstrates that Western liberal democracy is not the sole blueprint for statehood, technological development, or economic growth. What matters is who defines the trajectory, and from which metaphysical and historical foundation that direction emerges.

Describing African epistemic resurgence as “romanticisation” is both lazy and condescending. The term implies that ancestral knowledge cannot be grounded in rigour, intellectual precision, or political logic. It casts African memory as a sentimental artefact, incapable of serious engagement with the present. Yet no one accuses European philosophers of romanticising Aristotle, or Enlightenment scholars of indulging nostalgia when they draw on Descartes or Kant. When Africans return to ancestral systems, they are painted as irrational. This rhetorical asymmetry is not analytical—it’s a colonial hangover parading as academic concern.

Synthesis is not being rejected. African thinkers have long brought together multiple traditions and schools of thought. ReAfricanisation exposes the imbalance in who controls the terms of engagement. True hybridity requires African epistemes to be treated as equal participants in shaping global knowledge. Duffy’s version of hybridity conceals a desire to preserve Enlightenment authority behind the mask of inclusivity.

There is also a blanket reverence for Enlightenment ideals, as though they exist outside the histories of slavery, genocide, and land theft. Reason and progress, in Enlightenment thought, were never universal—they were deployed to defend empire. Racial pseudoscience, the division of humanity into civilised and savage, and the accumulation of wealth through colonial extraction were all born in the same intellectual womb. To uphold these ideals as neutral today requires a wilful forgetting of the conditions that birthed them.

Framing African resurgence as a “Renaissance” makes it intelligible only by European analogy. It smooths over the break that African resurgence represents. It domesticates resistance. It invites Africa to rehearse Europe’s own mythic return to Classical knowledge, as though that were a universal model for rebirth. Duffy’s response performs the same gesture. It seeks to keep African thought within recognisable, digestible bounds that flatter Enlightenment self-perception.

Monica Wilson’s notion of “small-scale societies” is revived to argue that African traditions cannot manage complexity. But large-scale liberal states have produced ecological collapse, genocidal warfare, and widespread psychic alienation. Size and bureaucracy have never been guarantees of justice. African ancestral systems, rooted in relation, land ethic, and spiritual governance, offer metrics of coherence and accountability that modern states routinely fail to achieve.

When Duffy asks whether the novel or the scientific method can be decolonised, he implies these forms are so culturally neutral that they transcend historical context. But African writers—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o chief among them—have long repurposed the novel, embedding oral narrative, indigenous time, and communal voice within its structure. African scientists and healers operate empirical systems based on plant intelligence, seasonal cycles, and spiritual energetics that Western verification methods often fail to register. These systems have never lacked sophistication—they have been denied legitimacy.

Decolonisation has its place, but it still presumes a reactive stance—an effort to undo what was done. ReAfricanisation is an assertion of continuity. It begins from ancestral alignment, not from colonial rupture. It refuses to centre the West in its recovery, and it doesn’t require Enlightenment consent to become real.

This moment in Africa is not a Renaissance. It makes no appeal to familiarity. It demands no translation into European terms. What is rising is memory, land, rhythm, and spirit—alive, assertive, and uncontained. The world is witnessing the return of an African intellectual trajectory whose interruption never meant disappearance. No Enlightenment required.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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