Decolonial Philosophy in New Nigerian Poetry and the Aesthetics of Epistemic Resistance

This paper argues that a philosophically coherent strand of contemporary Nigerian poetry constitutes a sustained project of epistemic resistance, one that simultaneously diagnoses the structural violence of colonial knowledge systems and enacts, at the level of aesthetic form, alternative modes of knowing rooted in African lifeworlds.
Drawing on decolonial frameworks developed by Walter Mignolo, Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the study examines selected works by Niyi Osundare, Romeo Oriogun, and Saddiq Dzukogi as aesthetic sites in which the coloniality of knowledge is contested and provisionally dismantled.
Using qualitative close reading informed by decolonial critical theory, the paper develops the concept of “border poetics,” described as an aesthetic disposition that inhabits the fault lines between colonial epistemologies and African ways of knowing in order to generate genuinely decolonial imaginaries.
The study concludes that contemporary Nigerian poetry should not be understood merely as cultural production, but as a philosophically rigorous intervention in the global politics of knowledge, offering alternative epistemic possibilities grounded in African experience.