USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology
type: channel
description: Revue scientifique consacrée à l’étude critique des systèmes politiques, des structures de pouvoir et des fondements épistémologiques de la gouvernance africaine. Elle met en avant la pensée décoloniale, la souveraineté intellectuelle et les modèles politiques inspirés du Mandombe.
publisher: Université Simon Kimbangu
language: fr
publication name: USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology
issn: 3107-3190
items: Narcissistic Colonial Inversion
items: From Fracture to Capture final
items: Civilizational Failsafes, Entitlement, and the Adaptive Scaling of Dark Patterns
items: From Capture to Caloric Sovereignty
items: The Tribe Trap and the Muzzle of the Native
items: Border Mythogenesis
items: Kinship, Bridewealth and Scapegoating: The Political Economy of Mothers-in-Law
items: Spiritual Authority and Intimate Control: Churches as Laboratories of Political Obedience
items: From Household Tyranny to State Violence: Narcissistic Micro-Politics and the Architecture of Power
items: Universities as Sites of Epistemic Warfare: The Case of USK, CENA and Kimbanguist Pedagogy
items: From Papal Bulls to Policy Briefs: Scriptural Justifications of Empire Across Five Centuries
items: Kikongo as Prototype Language: Linguistic Sovereignty Against Colonial Lexicography
items: Mandombe as Political Epistemology: Script, Symbol and Sovereignty in Central Africa
items: Pan-Africanism Reimagined

Narcissistic Colonial Inversion
type: item
description: Abstract This paper introduces the concept of Colonial Narcissistic Inversion to analyze a contemporary form of postcolonial domination in which former colonial powers appropriate the vocabulary of liberation while preserving structures of influence, access, and strategic centrality. Using contemporary examples, including Emmanuel Macron's Nairobi intervention and his reported claim that France is the 'true Pan-Africanist,' the paper argues that the incident cannot be reduced to a diplomatic gaffe, rhetorical excess, or isolated arrogance. It reveals a deeper structure in which the former colonial actor, even where its policies, security posture, or strategic interests have undermined sovereignty, attempts to reposition itself as moral author, guardian, or interpreter of the liberation tradition created against colonial domination itself. This mechanism is not limited to France. The United States has frequently used similar framing while strangling Cuba through sanctions, invading or bombing states such as Iraq and Libya, and using covert action, economic pressure, and security doctrine to limit the autonomy of states that challenge U.S. primacy. This broader pattern belongs to the Crying Demon Syndrome: the imperial posture in which a violent or predatory actor presents itself as wounded, benevolent, democratic, or morally burdened while continuing practices of domination [61]. The analysis proceeds through six connected dimensions. The psycho-historical dimension situates the incident within France's longer pattern of colonial centrality, postcolonial rebranding, and unresolved imperial psychology. The cognitive-diplomatic dimension examines how terms such as partnership, youth, reciprocity, security, and Pan-Africanism can become instruments of semantic capture when defined by external powers. The security-strategic dimension argues that symbolic language prepares material access through military cooperation, legal immunity, intelligence relationships, critical i…
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Macron in Nairobi
  topic: keywords
subject: Security Strategy
  topic: keywords
subject: Colonial Inversion
  topic: keywords
subject: Imperialist laundering
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2025
date: 2026-05-11
publication date: 2026-05-11
doi: 10.65439/ffhayc83

From Fracture to Capture final
type: item
description: This article argues that many contemporary African crises should not be read as isolated failures of governance, ethnicity, migration management, or peacebuilding. They are better understood as recurrent expressions of a broader anti-sovereignty mechanism in which colonial injury is softened or selectively remembered, legitimate grievance is redirected inward, local relay actors police acceptable diagnosis, and external powers or aligned interests regain leverage over fractured political space. The article develops a mid-range mechanism theory called the Fracture-Buffer-Capture model and applies it through a comparative historical analysis of South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo. South Africa is treated as a paradigmatic case of redirected grievance under conditions of selective reconciliation, durable inequality, and recurring xenophobic mobilization. The DRC is treated as a paradigmatic case of capture under conditions of proxy war, strategic mineral competition, peace-coded political discipline, and civic narrowing. The core claim is not that every conflict is centrally engineered by the same hands. It is that similar actor-types, discursive moves, incentive structures, and political outcomes recur often enough to justify a unified framework and a continental anti-capture response. The article adopts an assume-compromise, zero-trust perspective: hostile shaping, fragmentation, and strategic interference are treated as standing risk conditions to be assessed through motive, capability, precedent, synchronized indicators, and patterned benefit rather than through self-reporting by the actors involved. The article concludes that Africa requires a Pan-African anti-capture architecture able to defend historical clarity, detect redirected grievance, map buffer actors, correlate conflict with extractive and diplomatic pressures, and train public pattern recognition before crisis hardens into governable fracture. [1-4] A superficial reading would interpret t…
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: colonial amnesia
  topic: keywords
subject: epistemological capture
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subject: redirected grievance
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subject: buffer elites
  topic: keywords
subject: xenophobia
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subject: Democratic Republic of Congo
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subject: Pan-African anti-capture architecture
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2025
date: 2026-04-23
publication date: 2026-04-23
doi: 10.65439/rjhm4t44

Civilizational Failsafes, Entitlement, and the Adaptive Scaling of Dark Patterns
type: item
description: Abstract Comparative analyses of domination often rely on broad categories such as violence, hierarchy, servitude, cruelty, or oppression while leaving the underlying mechanism under-specified. Similar outward forms can arise from different patterned configurations and can generate different trajectories of scale, duration, reversibility, and personhood erosion. This article develops an ecology-psychology framework for differentiating those configurations without collapsing into either moral essentialism or flat universalism. The framework shifts the explanatory center away from dark traits alone toward a broader spectrum of pathological formations organized around entitlement, inversion, dissociation, domination, and the regulation of personhood. Within this structure, manipulative, grandiose, cold, and coercive tendencies function as adaptive strategies rather than as the final level of explanation. Entitlement carries the main mediating weight because it links patterned operation to normalized asymmetry, weakened reciprocity, and the institutional scaling of harm more directly than aggression alone. Social failsafes supply the main comparative hinge, including kinship obligations, shame systems, personhood boundaries, ritual constraints, and institutional checks that raise or lower the cost of destructive conduct. The article also reconstructs oppression as an internal selector rather than as a merely external force. Domination reorganizes the internal field of the targeted population by redistributing reward, elevating compromise-susceptible actors, and increasing the viability of brokerage, mimicry, and selective cruelty. Language enters the mechanism at the same level, since euphemism, irony, bureaucratic naming, and moral inversion reduce inhibition and normalize conduct that would otherwise remain more legible as predatory. Comparative historical discussion, including African adaptive variation, migration memory, personhood coding, and the limits of migrator…
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Entitlement;
  topic: keywords
subject: dehumanization;
  topic: keywords
subject: domination
  topic: keywords
subject: social failsafes;
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subject: pathological formations
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subject: dark traits;
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subject: moral inversion;
  topic: keywords
subject: oppression
  topic: keywords
subject: compromise susceptibility
  topic: keywords
subject: comparative psychology
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2025
date: 2026-01-31
publication date: 2026-01-31
doi: 10.65439/qrtj7y52

From Capture to Caloric Sovereignty
type: item
description: Target audience: African Union (AU) organs, Ministers of Education/Health/Youth/Gender, national curriculum authorities Keywords: agriculture, IMF, capture, Economies of Obedience, ISM,PDI, public health, nutrition in Africa, policy, Africa, caloric sovereignty Abstract This paper uses Burkina Faso’s recent agricultural performance as a test case for a broader hypothesis: that loosening Western institutional capture – military, financial, and narrative – can rapidly increase a state’s caloric sovereignty, while long-term IMF/World Bank structuring correlates with persistent food import dependence and vulnerability. I frame this through the Extraction–Inversion Architecture (EIA): extraction of value, coercive constraint, and narrative inversion that relocates blame to the victim society. Using a simple comparative design, I contrast Burkina Faso (post-2019 insurgency crisis, post-French military exit, AES realignment) with three cases: Haiti (catastrophic collapse under long IMF/US tutelage), Ghana (average “reformer” under a 2023 IMF programme), and Morocco (high-performing but structurally import-dependent “model pupil”). FAO and official data indicate Burkina’s cereal production at about 6.1 million tonnes in 2024 (20 percent above the five-year average) with provisional 2025–2026 figures suggesting 7.14 million tonnes and 126.4 percent coverage of national cereal needs. I show how changes in security doctrine, land allocation, and budget focus translate into caloric coverage, price stability, and space for productive innovation, whereas heavily “programme-managed” states remain structurally dependent on imports and vulnerable to shocks.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: African Union (AU) organs
  topic: keywords
subject: agriculture
  topic: keywords
subject: IMF
  topic: keywords
subject: capture
  topic: keywords
subject: Economies of Obedience
  topic: keywords
subject: ISM
  topic: keywords
subject: PDI
  topic: keywords
subject: public health
  topic: keywords
subject: utrition in Africa
  topic: keywords
subject: caloric sovereignty
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
creator: B Walker
creator: Aly Camara
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2025
date: 2025-12-08
publication date: 2025-12-08
doi: 10.65439/ykn40c95

The Tribe Trap and the Muzzle of the Native
type: item
description: Context. For more than a century, Africa has been ruled and narrated through a single downgraded category: the “tribe.” Conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, DRC, Nigeria or the Sahel are routinely described as “tribal violence,” implying ancient, irrational feuds. Equivalent conflicts in Europe or Asia are framed as “nationalist,” “federal,” or “geopolitical.” The same empirical complexity is run through different conceptual filters. Problem. We argue that tribe is not a neutral translation of African social units but a muzzle: a technology of epistemic containment that reclassifies sovereign polities as biological specimens. It collapses layered governance (lineage, city-state, alliance, federation) into biology, erases indigenous concepts of state and contract, and triggers In-Group Psychopathy through pseudospeciation (seeing neighbors as another species) (Erikson, 1966; Bandura, 1999). Research question (Singini). Does the imposition and internalization of the tribe label (a) systematically erase indigenous concepts of sovereignty in African political vocabularies and (b) measurably increase zero-sum, dehumanizing framing in conflict discourse, thereby lowering readiness for alliances and federations? Method (protocol, Ma1–Ma2). We specify a mixed-method design: (1) A comparative linguistic audit of political vocabulary in five major African zones (Kikongo, Yoruba, Igbo, Amharic, Wolof) versus colonial translations, coded through a “Disconnect/Muzzle Matrix” (Johnson, 1921; Van Wing, 1921; Vansina, 1990). (2) A framing experiment comparing “tribal conflict” wording to precise mechanism wording (institutions, incentives, jurisdiction) and measuring effects on blame attribution, solution preference, and federation support. (3) A diagnostic tool, the In-Group Psychopathy Diagnostic Protocol (IGP-D), to score media and policy narratives for pseudospeciation and moral disengagement (Bandura, 1999; Erikson, 1966). This is a conceptual + protocol paper: it specifies mechanism…
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Pan-Africanism
  topic: keywords
subject: epistemic sovereignty
  topic: keywords
subject: tribe
  topic: keywords
subject: pseudospeciation
  topic: keywords
subject: In-Group Psychopathy
  topic: keywords
subject: political linguistics
  topic: keywords
subject: Kongo statecraft
  topic: keywords
subject: federation
  topic: keywords
subject: ATSS 1.0
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2022
date: 2022-11-27
publication date: 2022-11-27
doi: 10.65439/q7da6362

Border Mythogenesis
type: item
description: Colonial borders are not only lines on maps. They are jurisdictions that distribute protection, movement, land access, and political voice. When state capacity is uneven and historical literacy is thin, border disputes become ignitable through narrative operations that convert ambiguity into mobilizable certainty, often accelerating coercion or proxy violence. This paper models that ignition pathway as Border Mythogenesis (BM): a codeable set of claim motifs (restoration, priority, othering, delegitimation, and security laundering) that predictably intensify under specific conditions. To remain consistent with prior work, we treat these motifs as a domain expression of the Entitlement Cascade and its allied selection dynamics (ISM/PDI): when beneficiary systems face accountability stress or perceived loss of dominance, they frequently deploy portable entitlement scripts (priority claims, credit seizure, universalization, and victim inversion). We refer to this operational motif family as Colonial Entitlement Rhetoric (CER), not as a separate theory but as a measurable surface form of the same cascade logic across border disputes and privilege‑defense contexts. CER does not replace material drivers such as resources, security fragmentation, or elite rent capture. It functions as an accelerant that lowers moral cost and raises mobilisation capacity, and it becomes most visible under credible weakness signals. Methodologically, we provide preregisterable codebooks, low‑tech replication protocols using public sources (official speeches, parliamentary records, broadcaster transcripts, archived newspapers), and a worked empirical pilot template with falsification conditions. The paper closes with circuit‑breaker recommendations for heritage institutions, educators, and civic actors that increase epistemic thickness, expand non‑violent pathways for boundary settlement, and reduce the conversion of narrative spikes into coercion.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: colonial borders
  topic: keywords
subject: Pan‑Africanism
  topic: keywords
subject: narrative warfare
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subject: proxy conflict
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subject: irredentism
  topic: keywords
subject: epistemic infrastructure
  topic: keywords
subject: colonized dark tetrad
  topic: keywords
subject: entitlement cascade
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subject: diaspora wedge governance
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
creator: Pius Mulaba Lumpungu
creator: Holenu Mangenda
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2023
date: 2023-12-27
publication date: 2023-12-27
doi: 10.65439/276q5079

Kinship, Bridewealth and Scapegoating: The Political Economy of Mothers-in-Law
type: item
description: Mothers-in-law are usually treated as stock characters in popular culture, yet their position at the junction of kinship, gender and property makes them key actors in the micro-political economy of African households. This article investigates how bridewealth systems, inheritance expectations and residential patterns shape the capacity of mothers-in-law to scapegoat or protect daughters-in-law. Using life-history interviews and dispute-resolution cases from customary and urban courts, I show that narcissistic configurations described clinically by Kibavuidi Nsiangani in his health-psychology work (2023) are not merely psychological but structurally enabled by economic and legal norms. I deliberately read these micro-cases through the macro lens of Pan-Africanism Reimagined (2010; 2022 issue) and From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets (2016), asking how the same logic that sacrifices one family member for “peace” mirrors the way states sacrifice regions or social groups to maintain international patronage. The article also engages the 2022 analyses of Kikongo and symbolic sovereignty to show how kinship terminology and proverbs already encode models of justice and responsibility that could underwrite alternative, anti-narcissistic arrangements. I conclude that any attempt to reform family law or design Pan-African federations must grapple with this political economy of scapegoating, not only its psychological manifestations.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: bridewealth
  topic: keywords
subject: mothers-in-law
  topic: keywords
subject: kinship
  topic: keywords
subject: scapegoating
  topic: keywords
subject: political economy
  topic: keywords
subject: customary law
  topic: keywords
creator: Marie-Louise Tshibala
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2023
date: 2023-11-27
publication date: 2023-11-27
doi: 10.65439/ayreeg67

Spiritual Authority and Intimate Control: Churches as Laboratories of Political Obedience
type: item
description: This article examines African churches as micro-laboratories of political obedience that subtly train believers in the same dispositions demanded by authoritarian states. Moving beyond crude denunciations of “manipulative pastors,” I draw on participant observation, sermon transcripts and pastoral counselling notes from urban Congolese congregations to show how spiritual authority structures everyday affect. Building on Scripts of Warfare (Nsiangani, 2022), I argue that many church environments reproduce the triad identified in his household analysis: sacrificial subject, charismatic abuser and complicit bystander. However, whereas Nsiangani focuses on family systems, I show how liturgical scripts, confessional practices and miracle narratives habituate believers to accept opaque decision-making, retroactive justification of harm and the redirection of anger away from leaders toward invisible enemies (demons, witches, “Jezebels”) or their own families when internalized bias is at play. I connect these dynamics to the long history of religious legitimation of empire described by Mawete (2022), tracing a line from Papal Bulls to prosperity-gospel covenants. The article concludes that churches can also become counter-laboratories of disobedience when they intentionally re-write liturgical and narrative scripts in the direction of mutual accountability and shared discernment, suggesting a research agenda on “de-imperial liturgies.”
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: spiritual authority
  topic: keywords
subject: obedience
  topic: keywords
subject: prosperity gospel
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subject: narcissistic leadership
  topic: keywords
subject: political theology
  topic: keywords
creator: B. K. Bobet
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2023
date: 2023-11-27
publication date: 2023-11-27
doi: 10.65439/zzjj3c77

From Household Tyranny to State Violence: Narcissistic Micro-Politics and the Architecture of Power
type: item
description: This article proposes that the family is more than a mere metaphor for the state : it must instead be treated as its primary rehearsal stage. Building on my earlier clinical analysis of imperial behaviour (The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire, 2014) and the psycho-historical case study of Congolese governance (From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets, 2016), I argue that narcissistic family systems reproduce, at a reduced scale, the same patterns of instrumentalisation, gaslighting and sacrificial scapegoating that later appear in autocratic regimes. Drawing on testimonies and case material analysed more clinically in my separate work on narcissistic mothers-in-law and scapegoating (Journal of Health & Psychology, 2023), I identify three recurring configurations: the sacrificial child, the charismatic abuser and the silent institutional bystander (extended family, church, school). I place these configurations in dialogue with the symbolic and epistemic frameworks laid out in Scripts of Warfare (USK JPSE, 2022), particularly the analyses of scriptural justification of empire and symbolic sovereignty. The article suggests that the colonised mind described there is not only the product of external propaganda but also of internalised, everyday micro-violence. The historical and psychosocial evidence suggest that any serious Pan-African federative project must be accompanied by a politics of psychological demilitarisation at the level of households, or it will simply transfer the architecture of intimate tyranny to the scale of the state.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: narcissism
  topic: keywords
subject: micro-politics
  topic: keywords
subject: authoritarianism
  topic: keywords
subject: colonised minds
  topic: keywords
subject: Pan-Africanism
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2023
date: 2023-11-27
publication date: 2023-11-27
doi: 10.65439/rdexbq82

Universities as Sites of Epistemic Warfare: The Case of USK, CENA and Kimbanguist Pedagogy
type: item
description: Contrary to the polite fiction that universities are neutral spaces of “free inquiry”, this article argues that they are primary theatres of epistemic warfare. Using the case of Université Simon Kimbangu (USK) and CENA as a focal point, I examine how curricula, language policies and publication standards either reinforce or subvert the imperial order analysed by Kibavuidi Nsiangani (2010, 2014; this issue) and historicised by Mawete (this issue). The empirical base includes internal syllabi, minutes of faculty meetings, interviews with students and lecturers, and a mapping of which languages and scripts are authorised in teaching and assessment. I identify three axes of struggle: (1) the fight over legitimate references (who gets cited), (2) the fight over scripts (Latin vs Mandombe) and (3) the fight over diagnostic frameworks (Eurocentric psychology vs DSM-H). The article shows how Kimbanguist pedagogy, grounded in African spiritual and historical experience, offers a counter-epistemic infrastructure that supports the federative and linguistic proposals advanced elsewhere in this issue. At the same time, it critically documents internal contradictions and co-optation risks, warning that even decolonial institutions can reproduce the narcissistic patterns described in Kibavuidi’s later clinical work in the health and psychology journal. The conclusion calls for a deliberate re-weaponisation of universities in the service of African sovereignty.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: epistemic warfare
  topic: keywords
subject: Université Simon Kimbangu
  topic: keywords
subject: CENA
  topic: keywords
creator: Sylvia Wankana
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2022
date: 2022-11-27
publication date: 2022-11-27
doi: 10.65439/mqpc5r48

From Papal Bulls to Policy Briefs: Scriptural Justifications of Empire Across Five Centuries
type: item
description: This article reads a long series of documents – from 15th-century Papal Bulls on “discovery” and slavery to contemporary policy briefs on “stability”, “governance” and “development” – as a continuous scriptural apparatus of empire. Drawing inspiration from Kibavuidi Nsiangani’s clinical reading of imperial psychology (2014) and his re-centring of African federative projects (2010; this issue), I treat these texts not as transparent descriptions of reality but as ritual instruments that license dispossession. The analysis focuses on three moments: (1) theological charters of conquest, (2) colonial “civilising” decrees and (3) post-Cold War policy frameworks around “good governance” and “humanitarian intervention.” Across these moments, I show recurring narrative devices: infantilisation of African peoples, securitisation of European interests and the erasure of indigenous epistemologies such as Kikongo and Mandombe. The article also highlights the materiality of writing: Latin and later European scripts monopolise legitimacy, while African scripts are depicted as fetish or cipher. By reading imperial documents alongside emerging texts from USK, CENA and Kimbanguist archives, I illustrate how a counter-scriptural tradition is forming, one that refuses to accept the moral grammar of empire. The article closes by suggesting that any credible Pan-African federation must not only reform institutions but also repudiate the textual lineage that normalised our dehumanisation.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: discovery
  topic: keywords
subject: governance
  topic: keywords
subject: continuous scriptural apparatus of empire
  topic: keywords
subject: dispossession
  topic: keywords
creator: Cynthia Mawete
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2022
date: 2022-11-27
publication date: 2022-11-27
doi: 10.65439/zwge5321

Kikongo as Prototype Language: Linguistic Sovereignty Against Colonial Lexicography
type: item
description: This article advances a provocative thesis: Kikongo can be modelled as a prototype language whose phonological richness, noun class system and onomatopoeic logic provide a template from which later, more degraded systems diverge. Rather than a mystical claim, I treat this as a working hypothesis for decolonial linguistics. First, I review missionary grammars and dictionaries, showing how colonial lexicography systematically fragmented Kikongo’s internal logic to make it legible to European categories. Second, I use a set of formal features – tonal patterns, nasalisation, consonant–vowel symmetry – to compare Kikongo with selected Bantu, Afroasiatic and Indo-European languages. Third, I link these linguistic observations to political epistemology: if Kikongo encodes a classification of reality that is more densely structured than the languages of empire, then policy conducted exclusively in French or English necessarily discards part of our cognitive capacity. The article dialogues directly with the contributions on Mandombe and symbolic sovereignty, showing how Kikongo’s structure maps naturally to Mandombe’s geometry. It concludes with concrete proposals for using Kikongo as the base language in regional legal drafting and scientific terminology. I do not place Kikongo as "better than" or "superior to" than other african languages. It is an example of linguistic sovereignty that can be replicated with other languages.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: Linguistic Sovereignty Against Colonial Lexicography
  topic: keywords
creator: Josh Malanda
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2022
date: 2022-11-27
publication date: 2022-11-27
doi: 10.65439/rmr2ge52

Mandombe as Political Epistemology: Script, Symbol and Sovereignty in Central Africa
type: item
description: This article treats Mandombe as a political epistemology: a way of organising reality that has direct implications for sovereignty. Extending the institutional argument advanced by Kibavuidi Nsiangani in “Pan-Africanism Reimagined” (2010), I claim that federative projects fail when they are expressed through colonial scripts whose symbolic logic encodes hierarchy, linearity and external reference. Through close analysis of Mandombe’s geometric base, recursive construction and quadrant logic, I show how the script affords a matrix view of relations, better suited to federal, polycentric governance. The article mobilises examples from grassroots educational experiments at USK and CENA, where Mandombe is used to teach logic, design thinking, innovationand risk modelling. Further, I rely on semiotic analysis, classroom ethnography and comparative script studies, while engaging critically with Eurocentric typologies that classify African scripts as “secondary” or “mnemonic”. In dialogue with the articles on Kikongo, Papal Bulls and symbolic sovereignty in this issue, I argue that script choice is not neutral: adopting Mandombe in core state functions (education, statistics, legal codification) would constitute a concrete step towards epistemic and political independence much like Mvemba Nzinga's adoption of latin script in insitutions cemented western codes and dominion in Kongo.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: political epistemology
  topic: keywords
subject: colonial scripts
  topic: keywords
subject: symbolic logic
  topic: keywords
creator: T Masamba
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2022
date: 2022-11-27
publication date: 2022-11-27
doi: 10.65439/hgjft420

Pan-Africanism Reimagined
type: item
description: This article revisits my earlier programmatic work Pan-Africanism Reimagined (2010) in light of a decade of political stagnation and digital recolonisation. I argue that the traditional discourse of “African unity” has functioned largely as a sentimental alibi: it has masked the absence of enforceable federative mechanisms. Building on my previous institutions clinical diagnosis of imperial behaviour (The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire, 2014) and the psycho-historical case study of From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets (2016), I propose a shift from rhetorical Pan-Africanism to a federative engineering paradigm. The article outlines a modular architecture of Pan-African institutions (family, education, currency, research, cyber risk, health) that can be prototyped by coalitions of willing states or non-governmental organisations, to promote continental adoption. Methodology: I combine psycho-political analysis, institutional design and scenario modelling, propose predictive tools and low-cost interventions. I show how script and language – in this instance Mandombe and Kikongo – provide a cognitive grammar for such federative engineering. Conclusion: The eveidence and analysed corpus show that without binding, testable protocols of cooperation, Pan-Africanism will remain an attractive myth that stabilises the very imperial order it claims to negate.
subject: Articles
  topic: section
subject: political stagnation
  topic: keywords
subject: digital recolonisation
  topic: keywords
subject: African unity
  topic: keywords
subject: The Dark Tetrad Traits of Empire
  topic: keywords
subject: From Mvemba Nzinga to Modern Puppets
  topic: keywords
creator: Kibavuidi Nsiangani
rights: (c) Copyright USK Journal of Political Science and Epistemology 2022
date: 2022-11-27
publication date: 2022-11-27
doi: 10.65439/ek7gjs91