COUNTERCOLONIZE:

errant creation and philosophically childlike (self)questioning. Inspirations in Nego Bispo's quilombola thinking

Abstract

In this text, we analyze an interview conducted in November 2021 with the prominent quilombola intellectual Nego Bispo. In this valuable testimony, Nego Bispo offers an incisive critique of hegemonic institutionalized education, highlighting its limitations and exclusions. Through a moving autobiographical narrative, he invites us to imagine and build a world where pedagogical spaces and relationships can be experienced in a freer, more creative way, and connected to community realities, valuing the cosmoperception of the Afro-confluent and indigenous peoples of Abya Yala and their important contribution to the dialogue on other meanings for education. Thus, inspired by Nego Bispo's reflections and his counter-colonizing pedagogy, we propose the principles of what we call “errant creation” and “childlike philosophy of the question”. This proposal challenges traditional forms of teaching, promoting learning through constant questioning and recognition of collective knowledge, seeking to open paths for new forms of coexistence and learning. As Nego Bispo teaches us, colonial thought and its words dominate us. Thus, it is necessary to create, in addition to a new vocabulary, a new grammar for our imaginations and, along with them, other educational lives. It is in this context that we present an “errant and philosophically childlike creation in the (self)questioning” in the search for new meanings in Abya Yala.