Introduction

Over the last 500 years people of African ancestry have been objects of research. Interestingly, we have come to accept (not all though) the status quo. We have lost most of our languages, our culture, our medicine, our foods, our spirituality, our systems of governance, African Indigenous economics, and even our educational systems. We have been exploited so much that there is vehement denial of this open exploitation. The outcome of all this is what we are referring to as colonial sickness. How do we explain the open self-hatred of how we look, the texture of our hair, the color of our skin? In this book, however, the authors are reminding us that all is not lost. In this decolonial project we have embarked on a journey of healing, reclaiming, excavating, extracting, and reassembling the pieces of our Africanness to recreate our story. We are excavating our past to enable us to deal with psychological sickness as well as the spirit injury. The exercise of excavating information which the colonizers have made every effort to mask is so that our next generation will know who they are and where they have been. At the initial stages of this project, we held lots of conversations and there was a felt need of the importance of an action-oriented project, and in particular the dismantling of colonial structures and creation of new ones. The chapter acknowledges the fact that dealing with colonial sickness is a complex process because it is informed by elements such as unlearning and learning what was/is African. The process is informed by multiple elements such us knowing who we really are; our roots, our Indigenous knowledges, and identifying our lost histories; Indigenous education; science; astronomy; philosophies.