By Ganiu Bamgbose, PhD
There is something deeply revealing about the manner in which Africans sometimes receive knowledge about Africa. We can hear an African scholar say something for years, debate it in conferences, publish it in newspapers and journals, and teach it in classrooms, yet the argument may remain largely unnoticed. But let the same argument emerge from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or some other prestigious Western institutions, and suddenly our social media platforms are flooded with approval. The argument is shared, quoted, celebrated and presented as a revelation.
This is not merely intellectual admiration. At its extreme, it is an epistemological dependence: the tendency to seek external validation before we grant legitimacy to what we already know.
The recent statement by Professor Irene Tracey, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, is instructive. Speaking at a higher-education transformation gathering in Accra, she urged African countries not to simply follow British, European or American higher-education models but to develop systems that respond to their particular contexts and ambitions. She also pointed to the possibility of African institutions innovating and “leapfrogging” conventional models.
The statement is important. But perhaps the more important question is: why does it sound so new to us?
African scholars have been making versions of this argument for decades. Scholars of Africanisation, decolonisation, indigenous knowledge, epistemic justice and curriculum transformation have repeatedly questioned the uncritical transplantation of Western models into African environments. The continent’s intellectual history is filled with arguments for contextualising knowledge rather than merely importing it. Yet when the message came from the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, many Africans suddenly discovered its wisdom. This should make us uncomfortable.
There is a Yoruba proverb that says, “Àlejò kì í pìtàn ìlú fónílé”—the visitor does not tell the history of the town to its owner. The proverb speaks to the impropriety of assuming superior knowledge in the house of the person who belongs there. Applied to African scholarship, it raises an uncomfortable question: why should Africans require a guest to narrate to us the intellectual possibilities of our own home before we take those possibilities seriously? The irony is even greater because African intellectuals have often been the ones telling us this.
The Oxford intervention should therefore not be treated as a permission slip. It should rather be regarded as an affirmation of an argument that African scholarship has long made. There is a difference between being informed by a foreign scholar and waiting for a foreign scholar to authorise our thinking. The distinction matters.
We must begin to interrogate the foreign frameworks that have become default measures of African intellectual and institutional success. University rankings are one obvious example. Why must the excellence of an African university continually be narrated through parameters designed elsewhere? Why should African universities be perpetually excited when an external ranking organisation moves one institution a few places upward or downward, as though intellectual value itself has been outsourced?
The same applies to theories, curricula, research priorities, language policies, professional standards and even definitions of relevance. A theory developed in a particular historical, cultural and socioeconomic environment may be illuminating elsewhere, but its transplantation should not be confused with universal applicability.
Africa needs the confidence to ask: What does excellence mean here? What problems should our universities solve? What forms of knowledge are valuable to our communities? What should constitute research impact? What should a successful African university look like? How should we evaluate teaching, innovation, community engagement, indigenous knowledge and social transformation? These are not questions that require permission from Oxford.
There is also a lesson in the proverb “Bí a bá ń gúnyán, kòmẹsẹ̀ á yọ”—when the hosts begin to prepare pounded yam, the well-bred visitor knows it is time to leave. The broader wisdom is that a guest should recognise when the occasion has reached its natural end. When western scholars now begin to admonish us to look inward, it raises questions about the ingenuity of our scholarship and sends a subtle message that asks “would you never grow?” But there is another dimension to this metaphor. A guest who waits until the host must explicitly say, “Please, it is time to leave,” has already overstayed the courtesy of hospitality. Perhaps Africa has also overstayed its intellectual hospitality to imported frameworks.
We have welcomed foreign theories, foreign measurements, foreign rankings, foreign curricula and foreign definitions of excellence. There was a time when such borrowing was necessary, useful and even unavoidable. But intellectual borrowing should eventually produce intellectual independence. A mature scholarly community does not spend eternity asking its guests what the furniture in its own house should look like.
The danger is not learning from the West. That would itself be another form of intellectual provincialism. Africa must learn from everywhere—including Oxford. The danger is learning from everywhere except itself.
The challenge before African scholarship, therefore, is not to reject foreign knowledge but to negotiate with it confidently. We should appropriate what is useful, interrogate what is unsuitable, adapt what requires contextualisation and create what does not yet exist.
The Oxford VC’s statement may be worth sharing. But perhaps the greater achievement would be reaching a point where Africans no longer need Oxford to say it before Africans believe it.
The ultimate goal of decolonising African scholarship cannot be to replace one intellectual authority with another. It must be to develop the confidence to recognise knowledge wherever it comes from—including from within ourselves. Otherwise, we may continue to mistake the guest’s compliment about our house for the discovery that we actually own it.
(c) 2026 Ganiu Bamgbose writes from Lagos.
Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose, PhD
Department of English,
Lagos State University, Ojo
[email protected]
08093695359, 07084956118
