A Decolonial Intent. Lalage Bown and the Emergence of an African Voice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our chapter provides evidence of Lalage’s decolonial intent through two narratives linked to two conferences. First is the story of her work as Secretary for the two sessions of the International Congress of Africanists actually held in Africa. The second is a close-up look of Lalage’s vision of what a truly transformative African approach to education for liberation looked like. Michael Omolewa, with his historical touch, has drawn on documents from Lalage’s papers in the Oxford University archives and elsewhere. The second story comes from Budd Hall’s personal experience working with Lalage on the organising of the 1971 meeting of the African Association of Adult Education in Dar es Salaam. Taken together these stories provide insights into Lalage’s commitment to providing space for African intellectuals and political leaders to rise from the colonial constraints of the day as well as to her ideas about the practical work needed to break colonial chains politically and institutionally. We close with a poem, a tribute to Lalage written by Budd on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".