Abstract
This article argues that rather than advancing academic freedom, decolonisation impedes access to a wide range of possibilities accessible to African scholars. Decolonisation, it is often argued, has the prospect of guaranteeing more academic freedom for African scholars. With curbing the ills of epistemic injustice and violence, epistemicide, etc. as its focal point, decolonisation is ideologically resistant; it discriminates against knowledge from certain quarters historically linked to colonialism. Using the Sartrean existentialist framework of freedom, the article argues that true intellectual freedom consists neither in discriminating against other intellectual traditions nor in undoing the past intellectual injustice. Rather, it consists in creatively transcending the facticity of the past, using all means possible. In transcending colonial facticity, the article argues, African scholars must be enabled to freely choose from a range of available choices regardless of their cultural origins or authorship. The article concludes that epistemic decolonisation can only lead to intellectual isolationism, but isolationism does not promote the culture of academic freedom.