The question is not if AI will change African higher education, but whose values, knowledge, and futures will be inscribed in its design.

As Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) rapidly permeates global education, it brings promises of personalized learning and systemic efficiency. However, the deployment of these tools often reveals a profound "Design-Reality Gap"—the vast distance between the assumptions built into imported technology and the lived, material realities of the classrooms where they are used.

Leading global AI models, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, are trained predominantly on Western-centric datasets. When integrated uncritically into African contexts, these tools enact "epistemic path dependencies," defaulting to Euro-American examples and pedagogical norms while actively ignoring equatorial realities. This technological bias risks the systemic erasure and distortion of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), local languages, and community-rooted pedagogy. Unchecked, the uncritical adoption of these models functions as a form of digital colonialism, extracting data from African institutions while forcing learners to conform to foreign epistemologies.