Decolonizing Education through Immersion: Increasing Intentional Study Abroad throughout Africa

Dear Higher Education,

I am a Black American Assistant Professor at a predominantly White women’s liberal arts college. Hailing from Rochester, New York, with familial roots in Newport News, Virginia, and Montgomery, Alabama, I now move between work on the west coast of America and summers on the west coast of Africa. It is only fitting, for as an only child raised by two dedicated Black educators, my upbringing was grounded in a global Black education. Armed with Black books, Black Barbies, Black names of Black leaders, my meticulously crafted childhood reached a kind of zenith at age 12, when I traveled to Nairobi, Kenya with my father, before traveling to Egypt the following year. Experiencing the richness of the Black world as an adolescent, coupled with the untimely loss of my mother to pancreatic cancer three years ago, have profoundly shaped my present. Both life and loss, have been instrumental in propelling my work as founder and executive director of Rose Pan African Education, an organization committed to fostering decolonial learning throughout the African continent.

Decolonizing education is an active process of disruption and creation; it simultaneously unravels the reliance on Euro-America as a necessary center and point of origin for thought, while generating pathways for us to imagine other worlds of knowledge and possibility (Davies, x). Particularly in our study of the African continent, decolonial learning then, is imperative. For decades after decolonization movements and the rise of brilliant Black thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon, knowledge of Africa remains asphyxiated by an intellectual hollowness. Indeed, it is frozen and forgotten in our Western consciousness, receiving only slightly elevated attention than it did centuries ago when Europe commenced its voracious staggering across Africa’s breathtakingly textured terrain. Centuries have elapsed, and yet we are still guided by Hegel’s blind colonial (justification) formulation made in 1806, that “Africa is no historical part of the world [with] no movement or development to exhibit” (86). Africa in the American educational imagination still struggles to break free from what has become the “common sense” of its place in the world; indeed, Africa remains a series of dead-end tropes—a place of unceasing death, danger, disorder, disease and both literal and intellectual darkness.

The process of pulling Africa in from the abyss that Eurocentric paradigms set into motion, can assume many forms—from offering more diversity on Africa in our construction of curriculum, to structuring pedagogies that reflect African cultural traditions of knowledge exchange. For example, how would student life be enriched across the social sciences and humanities if local African histories, philosophies, cultural practices were integrated into not only specialized or upper-level courses for undergraduate students, but also introductory classes on literature, ethics, political thought? How illuminating would it be for students to understand that Africa is not left behind as Europe violently consumes the world, but at the center of knowledge production and exchange by way of trafficked Africans transported to Europe and the Americas—indeed, by way of Europe and America’s continued colonial extraction of Africa’s material, cultural, and intellectual resources. Further, what of Africa’s myriad indigenous teaching practices—teaching while outdoors, teaching within a circular structure. This and much more. Much, much more.

All of this is necessary for our educational system’s expansion and edification across the United States in public and private institutions. But what I advocate for now, as a faculty member of higher education and the director of Rose Pan African Education, is the power of decolonial learning through global immersion. With only an alarming 2.44% of United States college and university students studying abroad in Africa compared to 66% in Europe, and with two-thirds of 2.44% studying in Anglophone South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya, Africa remains perhaps read, heard, and seen in ephemeral snippets, but largely unfelt, unengaged, unknown. Thus, I turn to global immersion, as a more intentional and rigorous study abroad engagement on a local scale, as an indispensable form of learning in our press towards decoloniality in our higher educational process. Yes, following the Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant, if we want to be global we must get very local. And here, I emphasize the local of African communities. Unlike conventional study abroad programs, this immersive approach prioritizes humility, curiosity, and a meticulous focus on integrating local African systems of knowledge into the higher education landscape. I claim that we must use the resources available to us in higher education, to not only draw alternative systems of knowledge into the university and college classroom, but also connect ourselves conscientiously with Africa, given our historically violent, dismissive, and prescriptive engagement.

In honor of this deep need in our higher education systems, I have developed a program for students and faculty called “Decolonizing Education”, which commenced in 2022 and has completed three courses with undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. The aim of this program is to decolonize learning of Africa by way of close engagement with African local histories, school systems, ways of life, and spiritual practices—beginning with Senegal, a West African nation. Importantly, a multi-racial, multi-ethnic cadre of students and faculty are not only acquainted with the country’s fairly well-known cosmopolitan metropolis of Dakar, but participants have an opportunity to travel to the rural farming village of Sebikotane and the holy, self-governed and foundationally decolonial city of Touba. All these spaces stand alongside each other as parts of knowledge production that inform Senegal’s rich way of life. Knowledge unfolds with more than a French educational model, but with a multi-faceted spiritual and ecological life. Upon arrival, students may or may not have French language skills, but with an emphasis on the significance of language as an entry into alternative knowledge systems, students participate in Wolof classes—the country’s lingua franca. Learning about the country’s strong leadership with regards to decolonial thought through the works of historian Cheikh Anta Diop, filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, and African feminist Mariama Ba, we then move through various powerful sites including the African Renaissance Monument and Goree Island.

Engagement deepens by walking through cultural textures of the everyday—the salience of the market, the omnipresence of fishing, the paramount importance of farming, the coffee vendor, the restaurant. Students studying Political Science, History, and Literature have expressed astonishment over how little of Senegal was known to them prior to arrival—how the country came alive through walking its streets and speaking with local students, teachers, elders, and citizens in a way that short excerpts, academic readings, and video clips could not compare. Several students were so moved as to express a desire to return for more academic fieldwork. Decolonizing Education Immersion has power as an educational tool; it begins with Senegal and will turn to Ghana and Rwanda within the next year.

I have focused here on the United States’ deep need to bridge thought; however decolonizing systems of knowledge in higher education, is a project for both sides of the Black Atlantic. It is not simply within an American educational frame that Africanness needs critical nuance. Within African educational systems, understandings of indigenous and global Blackness are in want of further curricular integration. In December 2023, I had the pleasure of meeting an astonishing young Senegalese woman finishing her third year of undergraduate study at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal’s cosmopolitan metropolis. Cheikh Anta Diop, for which the university is named, is one of the most important originators of African decolonial thought—famous for shifting our framing of civilization as a distinctly European phenomena, to an African one, beginning with Ancient Egypt. Given the legacy and contribution of this Senegalese pedagogical freedom fighter to not only academic thought but also the global Black community, I was astonished to hear that as an American Literature student, the young student, did not follow a curriculum that fell outside of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I would imagine that Diop is shuddering in the afterlife—that a university in his home country bearing his name could teach a history of American development without centering the impact of African presence in and impact on New World (thought). However, in the least, we had each other to share, connect, and circulate new knowledge.

This is indeed what global immersion opens up; it connects students and faculty in various African contexts to students and faculty from the United States. It illuminates out shared space in the world. And perhaps through the continued intimacy of global immersion for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, Diop’s dreams, and many of our dreams of social justice will finally come true—social justice in education may finally, with our efforts, toward on the ground and hand in hand connection, draw in from the horizon.

Nicole Richards

Founder and Executive Director of Rose Pan African Education

Works Cited

Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and John Sibree, The Philosophy of History, Courier Corporation, 2004.

Davies, Carole Boyce, et al., eds, Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies, Africa World Press, 2003.

Dei, George J. Sefa, Teaching Africa: Towards a Transgressive Pedagogy, Vol. 9, Springer Science & Business Media, 2009.

Institute of International Education (2023), “New International Students Enrollment, 2007/08-2022/23,” Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange. Retrieved from http://www.opendoorsdata.org.

Roy-Campbell, Zaline M, “Promoting African Languages as Conveyors of Knowledge in Educational Institutions,” Black Linguistics, Routledge, 2005, 95-114.