Whose knowledge counts? decoloniality, epistemic justice and the transformation of mathematics classrooms in Africa

Abstract

Mathematics is presented in African classrooms as universal, neutral and culturally detached (Bishop, 1990; Orey & Rosa, 2024), yet the knowledge selected for formal curricula, the language of instruction and the examples through which mathematics is made meaningful continue to privilege Eurocentric epistemologies while marginalising African mathematical practices and Indigenous ways of knowing. This theoretical article interrogates whose mathematical knowledge is recognised in African classrooms and argues that the peripheralization of Indigenous African mathematical thought constitutes a form of epistemic injustice rather than a neutral curricular preference. Methodologically, it is a Jaakkola-type conceptual theory synthesis terminating in a model, linking decolonial theory, epistemic justice philosophy, ethnomathematics, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and culturally sustaining pedagogy. Four documented African cases serve as analytical illustrations: South African Indigenous games, Akan cultural artefacts in Ghana, Paulus Gerdes's Mozambican ethnomathematics, and the reconstructed traditional Igbo numbering system of Nigeria. The synthesis yields the Decolonial Epistemic Justice Model for African Mathematics Classrooms, which links four domains of transformation through three mediating processes to four outcome markers. What the model offers that existing frameworks do not is the distinction between mathematical validity and the authority to certify mathematical knowledge, a structure of repair organised by the specific forms of epistemic injustice it names, and observable indicators and boundary conditions for each. The article concludes that transformation requires redistributing epistemic authority rather than inserting cultural examples into an unchanged curriculum. The model is theoretically derived and awaits empirical validation.