Educational Philosophy and Theory

African philosophy of education: Thinking from the South

Across the African continent and its diasporas, philosophies of education continue to be (re)imagined through creative engagements with local epistemologies, languages, and ethical traditions. This special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), African Philosophy of Education: Thinking from the South, invites contributions that explore how African philosophical thought, opens pathways (both classical and emergent) for understanding education, subjectivity, and social transformation in Africa and beyond.

For decades, African philosophy of education has drawn on frameworks such as ubuntu - humanness and relationality (see Waghid, 2014, 2017; 2018, 2023; Simba, 2024, Ngubane and Makua, 2021), ujamaa - African notion of cooperation (see Mukhungulu, Kimathi and K’Odhiambo, 2017), harambee - collective striving (see Musau, 2014), teranga (hospitality), tiwizi (mutual assistance), and defaya (cooperative labour). These philosophical notions have helped to (re)orient education towards community, relational accountability, and shared flourishing. The work of Ramose (2002) is essential in setting the tone for this investigation; Oruka’s (1990) contributions are seminal to African philosophical thought, as is Mbembe’s work (2015; 2021) on decolonisation and the question of the archive. This body of scholarship also includes Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s meditations on decolonisation (2019; 2022; 2025), Ngubane and Makua’s (2021) explorations of ubuntu pedagogies, and Waghid’s (2014; 2019; 2023) cultivation of ubuntu thinking across various levels of education in and for Africa, among others. Yet, contemporary African (Kumalo, 2020; Davids, 2025) and African diasporic scholars (Da Silva, 2016) are also extending this inheritance by engaging with decolonial thought, feminist interventions, and critical epistemologies that unsettle the limits of postcolonial and other generalised paradigms.

This special issue seeks to gather such diverse voices to ask: How does African philosophical thought, past and present, help us to think otherwise about education? How might it reframe the purposes, ethics, and possibilities of education in contexts marked by inequality, migration, and the enduring coloniality of power?

We welcome philosophical papers - including innovative formats that merge scholarship, narrative, or artistic method - that engage with African philosophies of education as living and contested traditions. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following emerging and interwoven themes:

1. Ubuntu and the ethics of relationality
   How can ubuntu as a framework of encounter and dignity reshape pedagogical relations, curriculum design, and educational leadership? What tensions arise when ubuntu meets globalising, neoliberal educational agendas?
2. Ujamaa, Harambee, Teranga, Igwebuike, Tiwizi and Defaya and other indigenous pedagogies
   What can philosophies of cooperation, generosity, and hospitality teach us about inclusive education and participatory knowledge-making? How might these principles of mutual work reframe the purposes of schooling and knowledge production in contexts of scarcity or inequality?
3. Decolonisation and the question of knowledge(s)
   How are African scholars (re)defining the project of decolonising education, beyond critique, toward epistemic reconstruction and pedagogical invention?
4. The African archive and memory work
   What roles do African archives, oral histories, aesthetic practices and ancestral knowledges play in reconstituting educational philosophy as an act of remembrance and resistance?
5. African Feminisms and the ethics of care, body, and power
   How do African feminist traditions unsettle patriarchal, colonial, and Eurocentric assumptions about reason, autonomy, and pedagogy?
6. Afropolitanism and global African thought
   How are contemporary African intellectuals negotiating the global circulation of ideas while maintaining epistemic sovereignty?
7. Language, orality, and indigenous literacies
   How do African languages and oral traditions function not merely as media of instruction, but as epistemological frameworks that reconfigure learning itself?
8. Planetary issues and the ecology of education
   What insights might African philosophies offer for ecological ethics, interspecies education, and reimagining the human-nature relationship in a time of planetary crisis?

Together, these themes invite contributors to rethink what it means to philosophise education from African locations, through African epistemes, and in dialogue with global thought. The issue welcomes both emerging and established scholars whose work speaks to Africa’s intellectual, ethical, and political contributions to the philosophy of education.