Decolonising Mathematics Education in Multilingual Contexts: Translanguaging, Pedagogy, and Equity in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract in languages that many learners do not use most fluently in their homes and communities. This is not a minor pedagogical inconvenience. It shapes who is heard in the classroom, which forms of reasoning are recognized as mathematically legitimate, and how learners come to see themselves in relation to the subject. Recent scholarship has shown that multilingual meaning-making is already a constitutive feature of mathematics classrooms across the region, even where policy and assessment systems continue to privilege monolingual performance. At the same time, the field has increasingly argued that questions of language in mathematics education cannot be addressed adequately through technical responses alone, because they are inseparable from wider issues of epistemic justice, colonial language hierarchy, curriculum design, and educational legitimacy. This paper develops a conceptual framework for decolonising mathematics education in multilingual Sub-Saharan contexts through translanguaging pedagogy and an equity-oriented account of epistemic access. However, while recent scholarship has documented the prevalence and pedagogical significance of multilingual meaning-making in mathematics classrooms, the field still lacks a sufficiently integrated conceptual account of how translanguaging, epistemic justice, curricular design, teacher positioning, and policy structures interact within a decolonial framework for mathematics education. Much of the existing literature has illuminated classroom practices and policy tensions, yet less attention has been paid to how these dimensions can be theorized together in relation to learner legitimacy, mathematical participation, and equity. Drawing on recent research in multilingual mathematics education, language supportive pedagogy, decolonial curriculum studies, and African education policy, the paper argues that translanguaging becomes decolonial only when it is moved beyond ad hoc classroom survival and deliberately positioned as part of a broader educational project that affirms learners as legitimate knowers. The paper proposes a conceptual model linking teacher dispositions, pedagogical design, discourse norms, curriculum narratives, policy conditions, and equity outcomes in mathematics. It concludes by outlining methodological directions for future empirical work and by arguing that decolonising multilingual mathematics education is not only a linguistic matter, but a question of how mathematical knowledge, participation, and recognition are organized in school.