The Ontology of The African Student : Identity, Agency, and Education as World-making

Sammanfattning

This thesis develops an ontological account of the African Student in Western and Western-inspired educational spaces. Drawing on Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy of conatus, affect, and anti-humanism; Frantz Fanon’s analyses of racialisation, colonial subjectivity, and humanism; Johan Dahlbeck’s pedagogical “as if”; and African philosophies of relational personhood, the study argues that education functions as more than just a locus of knowledge transmission. It makes the case that it is also a storytelling practice that shapes recognition, legitimacy, and possibility. The thesis also examines how colonial and racial narratives continue to structure the African student’s epistemic positioning through processes of epistemic invisibility and hypervisibility, affective modulation, and ontological displacement. It argues that educational institutions not only shape what the African student knows, but also how she experiences herself in the act of knowing. In response, the thesis develops the concept of homegoing: a reclamation of conatus through which the African student returns to herself as an epistemic centre and striving subject. Homegoing is presented as an affective, intellectual, and relational practice grounded in self-understanding, active friendship, and communal empowerment. Ultimately, the thesis argues that educational freedom requires more than inclusion within existing structures, and proposes the production of revised educational narratives in which the African student may appear as a legitimate participant in the making of worlds, rather than a peripheral figure in the production of knowledge.