Modernity's Other Archive: African Epistemologies, Humanitarian Knowledge Power, and the Decentering of Global Social Theory

Kelly Jabosung, Kindercare Learning Centers
Mendong Margarate Besin Mengla, University of Buea

Since the nineteenth century, Western social science has treated modernity as a singular civilizational achievement radiating outward from Europe, a framework that rendered African social thought invisible not as an accident but as a structural necessity. This paper argues that decentering modernity requires not only the critique of Western-centric assumptions but the recovery and theorization of what this paper calls modernity's other archive: the epistemological traditions, relational ontologies, and cosmological frameworks through which African communities have long theorized personhood, power, ethics, and social life. Drawing on the intellectual traditions of Ubuntu philosophy, African feminist thought, and the decolonial sociology of Mamdani, Mbembe, Mkandawire, and Zeleza, the paper develops two interconnected arguments. First, it demonstrates that African epistemologies, far from being pre-modern residues, constitute a parallel and independent intellectual tradition whose core concepts of relational personhood, cosmological time, and restorative justice offer genuine theoretical alternatives to the individualist, linear, and juridical assumptions of Western modernity. These are not responses to Western theory; they predate it and exceed it. The paper also argues that contemporary humanitarianism constitutes a structural extension of colonial epistemological power, a system that extracts data from African lives, constructs African subjects through categories of vulnerability and need, and reproduces the colonial gaze under the sign of care. Drawing on field experience in conflict-affected communities in northwest Cameroon, northeast Nigeria, and South Sudan, the paper shows how humanitarian knowledge systems actively suppress the relational and cosmological frameworks through which affected communities make sense of their own lives. Together these arguments advance a new theoretical claim: that decentering modernity is not merely a critical or historical project, but a constructive one, requiring the affirmation of African epistemic sovereignty as a foundation for genuinely plural global social theory.

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 Presented in Session 6. Critical Perspectives on Colonial Projects across the Globe