Abstract

The ideas of pre-Colombian contact between Africa and the Americas are less explored in American historiography. However, such discussions serve as an important juncture for the decolonizing discourse in education and learning multiple histories, especially in North America. The mainstream history founded on Eurocentric ideals has been criticized for creating knowledge gaps and maintaining the dominant colonial narratives that have distorted the history of Africa and the African Diaspora. Western educational systems transform school curriculum to be uncritical and mono-episteme, glorifying European history and philosophical thought, hence, the need for critical discussion on African literature in a comprehensive manner. African literature and oral history offer important resources for educating all students and building relationships within and across communities to decolonize our educational system. In this chapter we will examine what life was like during fourteenth-century Mali as well as explore the prospect of a Malian King’s voyage across the Atlantic. To support this proposition, the chapter delves deeper into an analysis of the architecture and configuration of current asymmetrical global power structures; unmasks imperial/colonial reason embedded in Euro-North American-centric epistemology as well as the problem of Eurocentrism; and unpacks the Cartesian notions of being and its relegation of African subjectivity to a perpetual state of becoming.