Abstract

This paper examines the intersection of African indigenous pedagogies and modern AI-driven educational technologies. It argues that as AI tools rapidly enter African classrooms, there are critical tensions between communal, contextual knowledge systems and algorithmic, often Western centered approaches. Key themes include the cultural values embedded in technology, the risk of epistemic erasure of local ways of knowing, and conflicts over language and orality when AI models are typically trained on non African data. In African contexts these issues play out in debates over curriculum content, the balance of community versus personalized learning, and the ethics of digitizing sacred knowledge. This paper conducts a qualitative document analysis of recent literature and policy documents and interweaves speculative expert commentary from across Africa. We find that without intentional, decolonial design, AI in education risks reproducing colonial patterns of knowledge dominance. Yet, there are promising movements such as pan African NLP efforts, to ground AI in local languages and values. The paper concludes by proposing strategies to integrate AI tools in ways that empower indigenous educational traditions and uphold data sovereignty.