Colonially depicted as a region distinctive for fables and fabrications, Africa has ever since not been allowed to reclaim anything original. Dispossessed of their original wealth, Africans have been forced to live in fabled and fabricated houses, eating fabled, and fabricated food—closer to animals. Similarly, dispossessed of their original human identities, Africans have been forced to adopt fabricated identities. With the 21st century not promising any return to original African human identities, Africans are set to be further nanotechnologically (using tiny nanoparticles) fabricated into cyborgs that speak to ongoing posthumanist and transhumanist experiments with emergent disruptive technologies. Inhabiting not only fabricated houses but also increasingly inhabiting nanotechnologically fabled and fabricated bodies, Africans should learn to, in terms of the Shona (a people of Zimbabwe) proverb, hakuna mhou inokumira mhuru isiri yayo (no cow lows for a calf that is not its own), repossess original mastery over their own lives.

Abstract African development will remain intractable in a world where Africans are conceived as constituting disorganised data subject to the supposedly organising gaze of knowledgeable Others. African people are increasingly datafied dehumanised and denied self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-organisation and data sovereignty. Arguing for more attention to questions of data sovereignty, this paper notes that the Internet of Things and Big Data threaten the autonomy, privacy, data and national sovereignty of indigenous Africans. It is contended that decolonial scholars should unpack ethical implications of theorising indigenous people in terms of relational theories that assume absence of distinctions between humans and nonhumans. Deemed to be indistinct from nonhumans/animals, Africans would be inserted or implanted with remotely controlled intelligent tracking technological devices that mine data from their brains, bodies, homes, cities and so on. Key words: relationality, Big Data, Internet of Things, coloniality, research

Clay feet are heavy and disabling, sadly in the decolonial scholarly battlefield which otherwise requires all-weather feet suitable for ongoing battles. Drawing on autoethnographic experiences in some African universities and drawing on Melanesian cargo cults, this paper argues that to decolonise Africa, African academics should abate cargo cult mentalities which account for pathological and uncritical intellectual dependence on theories, ideas and models from elsewhere. Similarly, drawing on Melanesian bigmanism and drawing on how some academics seek to control how students and colleagues think and write, this paper contends that those that pose as bigmen and bigwomen in African universities are a serious threat to decolonial critical, creative, innovative and original thinking. Thus, populated with some highranking academics who, nonetheless, lack decolonial creativity, originality, innovativeness and critical thinking, African universities are -like in Melanesian bigmen societies -marked by patron-client relations within which students and colleagues are sadly corralled into epistemic clientelism.