Abstract

This chapter serves as a mechanism of recognising and acknowledging the illegitimacy of historic and traditional western approaches to narratives of African feminist epistemology. These approaches have engendered lenses of perspective which are irrefutably skewed by colonialism and whose address is warranted in ensuring both a means of learning about the end of an era and the prospect of a more authentically framed future framed, shaped, and determined from within African culture and context by those. To undertake this acknowledgement and recognition is one of the first and much belated to framing steps in ensuring that the articulation of truth lies best with those whose lived truths they are, rather than any tokenistic perceptions of them, consequently articulated through Western lenses of perspective.
By positioning, framing, and debating notions of doxastic injustice versus hermeneutical ignorance as fundamentally distinct liminal boundaries this chapter encourages active consideration and constructive critique of historical and traditionalist mechanisms of Westernised knowledge construction in relation to African feminist epistemology.
The central tenet of the chapter revolves around the positing of African citizenship, indeed all individual citizenship as fundamentally unique and known authentically only to those who have socially constructed knowledge of it. In doing so, the chapter provides a means of seeking answers to and illuminating key issues of relevance to decolonising the presentation of African populations generally, and African women, specifically.