This article uses a dialogic approach to explore the complex state of education in the postcolony. It revisits the subject of educational inclusion (and exclusion) and interrogates different epistemological and systemic framings of what constitutes education and knowledge, and the effects that these have on the postcolonial educational landscape. The authors ask troubling questions of the ways that the largely Eurocentric conceptualisations of these issues, and the baggage of colonial(ism/ity) can and do affect the design and delivery of education in these settings. The use of a metalogue as a methodological approach allows the contributors to jointly ponder the issues from different perspectives and positionalities, and in a way that honours their individual voices.

Decolonising the law school: presences, absences, silences.. . and hope The context Decolonial thought in law acknowledges that the legal history which created our present realities has not always been benign or kind. In producing and maintaining global inequalities, extreme poverty, exploitation of labour, environmental degradation, torture, oppression and oppressions, physical destruction of lives and livelihoods, immediate or gradual death. .. the law has not always been innocent. The epistemic boundaries created by law in the past and present have marked themselves on the bodies of those othered by race, gender, sexuality, class and in so many other ways. We cannot talk about decolonisation without acknowledging the work of Empire and the afterlife of that work, because Empire proceeded by othering, to extract, to exploit. .. to dehumanise. Decolonial thought requires difficult conversations about the ways in which history has influenced what the law is, how law is taught, what law is taught, who the law works for, and who the law does not work for. The conference and the keynote On 13 September 2019, I convened at the Law School, University of Bristol, a conference titled "Decolonisation and the Law School". The purpose of the conference was to bring together some of the vast array of work legal academics across the UK were doing with reference to decolonial thought, in particular how they were bringing this work into their teaching and their research. The keynote address, titled "Cacophony, Autocritique and Abolition: Impression Points on Decolonisation and the Law School", 1 was delivered by Joel Modiri, a senior lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria, South Africa. It was vital for us to include excerpts (with permission) from the keynote address in this collection, as the keynote provided an insightful perspective from a jurisdiction which has gone further with its decolonial approaches in legal education than we have here in the UK. In his address, Modiri pointed out how decolonisation had become watered down/ confused: "decolonisation" has risen to prominence as the supervening motif and buzzword employed by academics and universities struggling to respond to the accumulated contradictions of colonial, imperial and racial histories-thrown into sharper relief by the world-historical students protests of 2015-2017, but always lingering in varied political struggles and intellectual traditions. .. The almost ritualistic invocation of the notion of decolonisation situates it nervously between a 1 The text of this keynote has been published in more detail in "

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Education in many African states is comparatively characterised by inadequate availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability of education. Nevertheless, evaluations focusing on lack of educational infrastructure and personnel usually ignore the contextual inadequacies of educational provision in the region and the inability of such education to equip its citizens to fit in with and benefit the societies they live in. This educational incompatibility has led to a significant level of unemployment/underemployment, underdevelopment and ‘brain-drain’, as well as some erosion of languages and cultures. The colonial experience reduced education to a tool of communication between the coloniser and the colonised. Emphasis on the individual and de-emphasis on community and culture resulted in ideological dissonance. Despite post-independence attempts to reverse this, vestiges of postcoloniality in contemporary education remain and perpetuate a myth of inferiority of indigenous knowledge and methods. This deprives the world of a wider range of ways of knowing, pedagogy and epistemologies. The CESCR envisions education for the full development of the human personality of all people all over the world. Therefore, international initiatives promoting the right to education in Africa should take into account the particular positionality, historicity and needs of populations. Using theories of deconstructive postcolonialism, this article will examine Africa’s education narrative and suggest a critical Freirian approach for decolonising education in Africa. This article contends that undecolonised education results in epistemic violence/injustice and is thus pedagogically and ethically unsound – violating the right to education.

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