The Codex of African Naming: Cartographic Violence, Epistemological Erasure, and the Restoration of Civilisational Memory

This article examines how colonial naming practices constituted a form of epistemological violence that systematically erased African spatial knowledge systems, cosmological frameworks, and civilisational self-definitions. Through analysis of continental, regional, and civilisational nomenclature, I demonstrate that African naming erasure was qualitatively distinct from the external naming of other continents due to its coupling with ontological degradation, cartographic diminishment, and total civilisational extraction (Mudimbe, 1988). The article proposes the Codex of African Naming as both archaeological recovery project and contemporary intervention in debates over intellectual sovereignty, arguing that the restoration of indigenous naming systems is prerequisite to decolonising African historiography (Wiredu, 1995).