ReAfricanisation: Why African Liberation Must Reject the Colonial Term 'Renaissance'

By Gillian Schutte

There is a quiet violence in naming. Words shape perception, condition memory, and lay claim to reality. To describe the resurgence of African consciousness—seen in the Sahel uprisings, the defiance of neocolonial governance, the reclamation of ancestral land and spiritual sovereignty—as a Renaissance traps this political clarity in a European hall of mirrors.

The Renaissance was a European affair. It marked a revival of Greco-Roman knowledge systems long suppressed by feudalism and religious orthodoxy. Its intellectual descendants—rationalism, secularism, humanism—emerged from a framework that centred the European man as the axis of the universe. This philosophical shift ushered in the Enlightenment and the age of conquest. Scientific racism, racial hierarchies, and civilisational arrogance took root in its aftermath.

Locke, Kant, Hume, and Voltaire—widely revered as Enlightenment thinkers—either justified slavery, classified African people as subhuman, or profited from colonial expansion. Their “universalism” excluded those who fell outside the metrics of whiteness, wealth and masculinity. Referring to African liberation using this vocabulary reduces a sacred political rupture to a reflection of European philosophical ego.

Africa’s knowledge systems were never modelled on European traditions. They grew out of cosmology, land reverence, relational ethics, circular temporality and collective being. These frameworks endured, even under violent evangelism, scientific domination, and the extractive missions of empire. The continent was mapped, carved and renamed, but memory survived in proverbs, dreams, oral traditions and the intimate bond between people and land.

Even the name Africa carries colonial residue. It likely stems from the Latin Afri—a term used by the Romans to describe a small Berber tribe near Carthage. The continent’s older name, Alkebulan, has been traced through oral accounts and Afro-Asiatic linguistic roots. It translates as mother of mankind or land of the blacks. This name predates the Greco-Roman lexicon and carries none of the baggage of conquest or imperial cartography. While ReAfricanisation is a politically useful term in the current context—it speaks clearly to contemporary audiences—the deeper vision is one of ReAlkebulanisation: a re-entry into ancestral consciousness beyond the reach of empire.

Consider the city of Tin Buqtū, misrendered in European maps as Timbuktu. The myth of European discovery collapses under the weight of Tin Buqtū’s real legacy—a centuries-old centre of African scholarship, home to vast libraries, sacred geometry, astronomy and jurisprudence. European historians erased this intellectual legacy to preserve the fiction of African darkness. Yet African knowledge had already shaped worlds long before Europe’s philosophical reawakening.

What is happening now in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger bears no resemblance to the Renaissance. These movements emerge from their own terrain, shaped by history, memory, and the long arc of resistance. In Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s Burkina Faso, communities are reclaiming sovereignty over land, rejecting foreign troops and resisting the economic chains of Western capital. Though raised in the Islamic tradition, Traoré has also publicly embraced Christianity—not as personal conversion, but as a conscious gesture to prevent religious division in a country historically targeted by foreign actors seeking to sow sectarian conflict. His spiritual inclusivity is not performative. It is a calculated act of leadership grounded in collective care and political foresight. This ethical stance, which places national cohesion above personal identity, reflects a profound commitment to the principles of Ubuntu.

There is no messianic ego, no personal cult. He speaks with a humility rarely encountered in the postcolonial machinery of governance, where power is so often shaped by performance rather than substance. His vision is anchored in collective sovereignty, not individual glory. This, more than any formal religious affiliation, situates him within an Africanist tradition—one that values the spiritual as lived relation, as ancestor-consciousness, as obligation to land and people. In his posture and speech, one recognises the ethics of ubuntu and the metaphysical clarity of a leader formed through struggle, not seduced by hierarchy.

These revolutions are not secular in the European sense, nor theocratic. They refuse that binary altogether. The sacred exists in the soil, in memory, in collective will. This is ReAfricanisation in its rawest form: not a rejection of spirituality, but a rejection of spiritual domination.

To frame what is unfolding on the continent as a “Renaissance” is not only intellectually lazy—it is a political betrayal. Those who reach for that word reveal their own limited engagement with African cosmologies and liberation theory. They act as ventriloquists for Eurocentric paradigms, flattening African resurgence into something palatable to Western donors and editorial boards. This vocabulary does not emerge from the soil of struggle—it is borrowed, safe, and designed to keep African thought confined within the epistemic fences of European modernity. It turns revolution into metaphor. It reabsorbs resistance into the colonial archive. And it speaks more to the comfort of the Western gaze than to the reality of African reawakening.

Even the term decolonisation, although necessary in certain contexts, remains tethered to the presence of empire. It defines African resurgence through its relation to the coloniser, placing Europe at the centre of the conversation once again. ReAfricanisation—and more precisely, ReAlkebulanisation—emerges from a different centre altogether. It names ancestral continuity, not just departure from oppression. It shifts the gaze inward, toward memory, land, and spiritual self-determination.

African time spirals rather than marches. The epistemologies being unearthed are living systems, never fully extinguished. Where the Enlightenment elevated disembodied reason, African resurgence foregrounds relationship. Where European liberalism isolates the individual, African resurgence honours community, reciprocity, spiritual accountability, and deep interdependence with nature.

Language must serve liberation. Renaissance terminology shrinks the political magnitude of what is underway. It panders to liberal frameworks and the academic lexicon of funding circuits. The use of European concepts to explain African resistance collapses the possibility of naming this moment on its own terms. The people of Alkebulan are not reviving European ideas. They are activating memory that predates conquest.

This is a homecoming. A re-entry into time, lineage and sovereignty. It names the buried knowledge, the dignity of those written out of history, the resistance etched into ritual and the collective body. A rising in the name of Alkebulan.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.