Out of Africa: The journey to decolonise myself

About the author

Dr Davide Bilardi is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, and a member of the senior academic team for the Master’s in Global Healthcare Leadership programme. He supports executive professionals from diverse global backgrounds, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration between healthcare and business education.

His research focuses on capacity strengthening in global health, inclusivity, and equity, including extensive work in Kenya at KEMRI-Wellcome Trust. Davide has managed international research initiatives on infectious diseases, paediatric HIV, and antimicrobial resistance.

Additionally, he advises global research consortia and is training as a Life and Career Coach through the Oxford University Coaching Network.

When I left Kenya at the end of my postdoc, I thought I was closing a chapter. One year of work, relationships, reflection and discomfort had come to an end. I returned to the UK with boxes of books, memories and what I believed were insights into coloniality, epistemic justice and my own privilege. But what I didn’t expect was how loud the silence would be.

The journey to decolonise myself didn’t end in Kilifi.

Looking Back to See Forward

My time at the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme had been framed as a research exchange. But it became something much deeper: an exercise in unlearning. I found myself questioning what it meant to trust, to be trusted and how quickly relationships can be distorted when power – economic, cultural, epistemic – runs silently beneath the surface.

Back then, I wrote my lessons learnt about 'Alice', my landlady, who oscillated between real kindness and understandable but unrealistic assumptions on my financial availability. About 'Juma' and 'Daniel', whose friendships taught me about the impossibility of keeping material inequalities outside the boundaries of human connection. About fellow Italians on the coast, whose generosity came with conditions. And about 'Elena' and 'Nora', two women who embodied opposite ways of surviving the tension of living as long-term guests in a postcolonial space.

But what has stayed with me most is not the intensity of those moments. It is their unfinishedness. There were no clear lessons. Just patterns, entanglements and a quiet, persistent question: how will I carry this new unfinished awareness with me?

Back in the UK: Navigating Familiar Structures

Returning to academic life in the UK has been a moment of recalibration. In Kenya, I was constantly aware of my positionality. I had to be. I was a guest. I was white. I was foreign. The asymmetries were visible, sometimes painfully so. In Oxford, those same asymmetries are often present too, but harder to name. They sit behind polished institutional discourse, embedded in the everyday workings of academia.

Decolonisation is a term that now features in funding calls, reading lists and conference panels. Yet I sometimes wonder whether its meaning is being distorted. What does it mean to decolonise a curriculum if we do not first decolonise ourselves? What does inclusion mean if we continue to centre our own frameworks while inviting others in only as additions?

I have learned that the work of decolonisation can’t be limited to the timeframe of what in research we call fieldwork. In many ways, it becomes more subtle – and therefore more demanding. The challenge lies in staying cognizant to the forms coloniality takes in familiar places, even when they are harder to detect. Self-awareness is the first essential step of this lifelong process (Creating different global health futures, Tagoe, Abimbola, Bilardi at Al, 2025).

Continuing the Work (Even When It's Not Convenient)

The hardest part of decolonising myself has been doing it without external validation. In Kenya, I was visibly trying. People noticed. People challenged me. There was no hiding. Back here, it's possible to slip back into comfort, to be seen as an expert, to publish, to teach – without really having to change.

But I can’t unknow what I know. I can’t stop seeing the dynamics I once only theorised.

So I try. I ask different questions in my research. I reflect more before speaking. I notice who isn’t in the room – and who keeps being expected to explain themselves when they are. I check myself when I’m tempted to mentor in ways that impose rather than listen. I try to honour the discomfort rather than silence it.

And I fail, often. But I fail more consciously now.

A Shared Responsibility

Decolonising isn’t just for those who travel, or who have spent time in the 'Global South'. It’s a responsibility for all of us in global health – because the structures that created inequality are everywhere. They are in the funding decisions, in authorship hierarchies, in whose voices are deemed 'objective' and whose are 'personal'.

We need to stop asking whether we are biased. We are. The question is: how are we biased and what are we doing about it?

Decolonising is not a metaphor, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us in their seminal paper, 'Decolonization is not a metaphor' (Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2012). It is not just a reflective exercise. It is material. It means shifting power. It means giving up space. It means being accountable in how we collaborate, how we teach, how we cite and how we listen.

Human First

One moment has stayed with me more than any other. Near the end of my time in Kilifi, I was sitting on the back of Amini’s motorbike, heading to the office. My usual mode of transportation. No helmet, only trust on the driver to get safely to our destination. I must have looked heavy-hearted that morning. My head full of thoughts trying to understand. He glanced back at me for a moment while I was handing him the wage for the daily ride. Then he said, 'Don’t worry, kaka (‘brother’ in Kiswahili). This ride is on me today. I see it is a difficult day for you.'

In a world where generosity had so often come with strings or it is made impossible by circumstances of subsistence, that moment was different. It was an act of recognition. It reminded me that decolonisation is not only about dismantling systems. It is about seeing each other as human. Fully, vulnerably, equally.

Still Becoming

I am still becoming. I do not claim to have decolonised myself. But I am committed to walking that path with more humility than before. As an academic in the Master’s in Global Healthcare Leadership, I try to translate these principles in my teaching and relationships with students – who are themselves present and future global health leaders. It is a responsibility and an opportunity to keep challenging the ways knowledge is shared, authority is exercised and leadership is imagined.

And again, I’m sure this is not a conclusion. It is a continuation. An invitation. For myself and for others. To keep learning. To stay uncomfortable. To unlearn the rush to fix. To notice the power in the room. To listen longer than we speak. To be aware.

The journey out of Africa was not a return. It was a beginning.

*Note: All names have been changed to respect the privacy of those involved.