Decolonisation or decline? Historical reflections on predatory publishing and the ethics of African scholarship

This commentary reflects on current debates about predatory publishing in Africa by treating them as part of a longer historical and ethical struggle over how knowledge is valued, circulated and judged. It takes as its starting point a widely circulated October 2025 WhatsApp intervention attributed to Professor J. Téjú Ige, which voiced frustrations that many African scholars experience with Western academic gatekeeping, publication metrics, high article processing charges and the marginalisation of African journals. Rather than reproducing the intervention as an ordinary public document, the commentary reads it cautiously as reported speech from a semi-private academic public. This essay argues that the anger behind such interventions is historically understandable, but that decolonisation becomes intellectually dangerous when it is used to excuse predatory publishing, weak review, plagiarism or editorial opacity. Drawing on African intellectual history and moral vocabularies such as iwa, nyansa and adab, I argue that rigour is not a colonial inheritance to be discarded but an ethical resource to be reclaimed. The commentary concludes that African scholarship needs neither dependency nor shortcuts, but institutions that can sustain credible, inclusive and accountable forms of knowledge production.