Current discourses on decolonizing the African university have largely emphasized the critique and removal of Western canons, while offering limited engagement with historically grounded indigenous alternatives for pedagogical practice. This article addresses that gap by retrieving what it terms the Sahelian Pedagogy of Being, through an analysis of two eighteenth-century manuscript traditions from Timbuktu: the ethical treatises of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti and the didactic poetry (manẓūma) of Yusuf ibn Said al-Fulani. Rather than presenting these texts as isolated historical artifacts, the study reconstructs a coherent higher education philosophy embedded in pre-colonial Sahelian intellectual life. The article develops a tripartite analytical framework to articulate this philosophy, consisting of an Architectonic dimension, a Discursive dimension, and a Moral dimension. The Architectonic dimension examines the geometry of knowledge through the ritualized ḥalaqa (learning circle), conceptualized as a participatory and relational learning space. The Discursive dimension analyzes the manẓūma tradition as a portable university and a pedagogical technology for memory, logic, and trans-regional knowledge transmission. The Moral dimension draws on Al-Kunti’s emphasis on Adab (refined ethical character), arguing that intellectual authority and moral formation were inseparable within Sahelian higher education, a position resonant with contemporary discussions of Ubuntugogy as an ethics-centered educational paradigm. By synthesizing these dimensions and corroborating them through contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the University of Sankoré, the article argues that pre-colonial Timbuktu articulated a sophisticated philosophy of higher education structured around an ethical–intellectual nexus. The study concludes that meaningful decolonization of the African university requires a shift toward this relational pedagogical model, in which knowledge is reclaimed not as a labor-market commodity but as a communal trust oriented toward social and spiritual restoration.
Hamid Fernana (Mon,) studied this question.