American University of Leadership

The African Leadership College opened in Mauritius in 2015, and began offering Social Sciences as a degree major in 2016. This paper will explore the experience of beginning a new university department from scratch in the context of the current historical moment where decoloniality is a foundational need in terms of curriculum creation. An article we wrote in 2017 describing our ‘7 commitments to decolonial social science' (https://theconversation.com/what-a-new-university-in-africa-is-doing-to-decolonise-social-sciences-77181) went viral, placing our institution in dialogue with many of the top institutions in the world. Since then, we have focused our efforts on building out the program in terms of content, method, and pedagogy, working with students from across the African continent and its islands to develop a program that is both grounded in the rich socio-economic fabric of Mauritian daily life, and in dialogue with Africa and with the world