Mama D also was involved as a co-organiser for the visit, to the North East of the UK, of the venerable Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Kenyan author and philosopher whose life and works championed decoloniality in theory and practice.

Our work around decolonial and embodied practice worked well with the approach of RJN to intersectional and decolonial practice and we had many fruitful and interesting engagements throughout this period, including many informal conversations, attending Reparation Groundings together, in London, over the years and attending and contributing to end of year ‘Gather-ups’.

Bayo Akomolafe on Unlearning: (taken from a response given on a social media post)

‘I was recently asked about unlearning techno-rationality and unlearning things in general in a yet-to-be-published special interview with me, conducted by UNESCO (I’ll be giving a keynote on AI and education in Paris this September). Here’s what I said.

UNESCO: You’ve written powerfully about the necessity of ‘unlearning’. in the face of dominant techno-rational utopias. What should education policy makers, teachers and AI developers unlearn in our quest to re-orient education?

Bayo: “Unfortunately, unlearning is not a policy of institutions. It is not something to “do”, something at the tail-end of stable individuals. We cannot unlearn white supremacy, capitalist extractivism, and the phallic logocentrisms that tidily cocoon us away from the animacy of a world too promiscuous for our logics.

Unlearning is a kind of errancy within weather patterns, a syncopating line distressing the monotony of continuity. It is not reducible to intention. Nor is it the product of a good education.

To ask what education policy makers should unlearn is already to presume there is someone to do the unlearning. But we are not fixed selves who choose to unlearn; we are arrangements, gatherings of multiple agencies, and sedimentations of habits and hauntings.

We unlearn when we are unmade – and to be unmade is to be unfastened from the strings that compose our bodyminds as finished subjects. Unlearning is therefore not an act of will; it is a crisis in will. A tremor in the architecture. A fall…of the theopoetic kind that I love to yarn about. It is what happens when our tried solutions fail to grasp the world and our feet no longer trust the ground.

Still, if I must say something to those called policy makers, curriculum designers, AI developers, and pedagogues, it might be this: make room for your failure. Make room for the unknowable. Make room for the fugitive. For the gulp in your throats that comes with entire worlds. And in doing so, become students of what exceeds you. That is, learn to be taught by what unsettles you.

The trouble with techno-rationality is not its ambition but its foreclosure of other kinds of intelligences. It is its refusal to be disoriented. So we might speak of unlearning the following: the fantasy of control, the myth of transparency, the idol of measurement, the hegemony of clarity, and the supremacy of the human. These are not simply ideas to discard; they are gods to dethrone. And that is not something done by decree. It is done through cracks, through composting, through hospicing.

This is why education for our times must include more than lessons and knowledge. It must include ritual. Grief. Pauses. Celebration. It must include communal forms of not-knowing. Places to tremble. Sites to fall apart and be witnessed in the fall. Curricula must not merely teach the world; they must be taught by the world, especially when it stutters and storms. That is how unlearning might begin to take root, I suppose.”’

Báyò Akómoláfé