Knowledge production is intensely political and defined by the dynamics and hierarchies of power (Oloruntoba, Sithole, & Nkenkana, 2016). Although all societies have emerged through various complex processes of knowledge acquisition, dissemination and utilization, the unequal power equilibrium in the global system has produced a situation in which the powerful dominates the less powerful. Scholars have argued that knowledge production in the post-Enlightenment era reflects the interests, values and epistemologies of the dominant powers, undoubtedly represented by the Euro-America hegemonic world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Santos, 2016, 2018). This epistemic hegemony was achieved at the expense of the epistemic flourishing of non-Western knowledge systems. This is what Santos called epistemicide, or the murder of knowledge (2016, p. 92). According to Santos,
the dominant criteria of valid knowledge in Western modernity, by failing to acknowledge as valid kinds of knowledge other than those produced by modern science, brought about a massive epistemicide, that is to say, the destruction of an immense variety of ways of knowing that prevail mainly on the other side of the abyssal line—in the colonial societies and sociabilities. Such destruction disempowered these societies, rendering them incapable of representing the world as their own in their own terms, and thus of considering the world as susceptible to being changed by their own power and for their own objectives. (2018, p. 8)
Epistemicide, “naturally,” led to the evolution of a spurious universalism that congealed around the fundaments of Western science and Western modernity as the only valid framework of knowledge. And in the consequent struggle to establish this universal framework, especially through the violence of colonialism and globalization, a more accommodating pluraversal epistemic dynamics is lost.
The Euro-American Empire denies or undervalues the existence of other legitimate forms of knowledges, especially those that come out of Africa. Hiding under racist anthropological and philosophical discourses and ideologies, leading scholars and intellectuals in Europe, including early figures such as Kant and Hegel, denigrated the Africans, denied and rejected Africa’s knowledge systems, and theorized the dehumanization of the entire black race. The colonial project in Africa was constructed around the “civilizing” and “modernizing” missions meant to bring light to what Joseph Conrad characterized as the “Heart of Darkness.” To achieve this objective, the West has sustained centuries-long epistemic violence against Africa.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020, p. 2) traces the historical processes through which the subjugation of Africa has been passed in the following way:
The unfolding of modern history some five hundred years ago, unleashed colonialities of space (cartography and settlement), time (cutting it into linear pre-modern and modern conceptions), human species/being (social classification and racial hierarchization), nature (turning it into a natural resource), knowledge (theft of history, epistemicides and linguicides) and power/authority (asymmetrical configurations and legal codification of difference)
Of these processes, the subjugation of African knowledges, through what he calls theft of history, epistemicides and linguicides, is of particular relevance. Apart from the wilful denial of the history of Africa as a legitimate part of world history, there has been a deliberate attempt towards the erasure of African knowledge systems. Colonial education itself obliterated anything that was local or indigenous to Africa both in the design of curriculum and in the language of instruction. Institutions of higher learning that were established during the colonial era were based on the epistemology of the West, and were designed to produce graduates who saw the West as the standard and the ultimate in the production of knowledge. With few exceptions, postcolonial Africa has maintained this trajectory of epistemic inferiorization in both the design and execution of education policy. In the period leading to independence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, centres of African studies were established in universities in the United States and several European countries. Majority of the Africanist scholars at these centres studied Africa from the lens of received knowledge from racist archaeologists, historians and philosophers, who denied the existence of any form of knowledge in precolonial Africa. Africa became the cultural and sociopolitical source of materials for “area studies” that featured in the intellectual contestation between the East and the West during the Cold War. Except for Africanists such as Thomas Hodgkin, Basil Davidson and Claude Meillasoux, the works produced at these centres only served to reinforce what has been falsely advanced about Africa. In other words, the voices of Africans were more or less absent. The end of the Cold War witnessed a massive cut in spending on African studies. Not until the September 11, 2001, experience which shook the foundation of American military and intelligence power did Africa begin to matter again in the foreign policy calculation of Washington. Olukoshi puts this succinctly thus:
If immediately after the end of the Cold War, the prevailing mood that emerged was one of Afro-pessimism that translated into a policy of sidelining countries that were derogatorily referred to in some intellectual milieus as “basket cases”, the period immediately following the events of September 11 2001 resulted in a sea-change in thinking with the result that the very fact of conflict and crises in different parts of Africa became the primary justification for a re-engagement with Area Studies. (2005, p. 9)
Despite the ups and downs in the political economy of Africa, efforts have been made by Africans to study the continent in ways that reflect authenticity of knowledge. At the political level, early post-independent leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and a host of others supported the establishment of universities where decolonization of knowledge and fair representation of the continent were prioritized. Sites of epistemic disobedience and repudiation of false knowledges about Africa were established at Makerere University in Uganda, Dar es Salam University in Tanzania, and University of Ibadan and Ahmadu Bello University, both in Nigeria (Arowosegbe, 2008; Oloruntoba, 2014, 2015). These sites were followed by the establishment of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in 1973. CODESRIA has been at the centre of producing knowledge that is Afrocentric, authentic and resistant to the dominance of knowledge from the West.
Beyond these institutions are the seminal works by scholars like Ali Mazrui, Archie Mafeje, Issah Shivji, Claude Ake, Mahmood Mamdani, Paul Zeleza and Toyin Falola, among others. Despite the locations of these scholars in the West, they have concentrated in advancing production of knowledge on Africa in ways that situate the continent within its historical and contemporary realities. Despite the serial denials of self-appointed high priests of African studies, these African scholars provided historical arguments and evidences which demonstrated the existence of massive knowledge systems in precolonial Africa. These knowledges constituted the bedrock for the organization of the society through the establishment of political institutions, justice system, agricultural practices, educational dynamics, religious frameworks and so on. They proved that indigenous knowledge systems were instrumental to state building, economic development and conflict resolutions in precolonial Africa.
Toyin Falola is singularly unique in this configuration of intellectual resistance to Western epistemic violence against African knowledge systems, as well as the consolidation of new ways by which African scholars and Africanists can commence the urgent task of Africanizing knowledge through the demonstration of genuine indigenous knowledge systems and the need to engage with these systems to radicalize Africa’s postcolonial survival. What Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo and Bouaventura de Sousa Santos are to Latin America, Toyin Falola is to Africa. These scholars are all working with an epistemological project that calls for an end to what Santos calls “the cognitive empire” of the West, and the enthronement of the “epistemologies of the South,” to facilitate the emergence of many epistemic centres across the world, built on the ruins of the false universalism of the West. Falola and Mignolo have both championed the arguments for pluriversalism, with their different contexts in mind. In “pluriversalism,” Falola outlines several elements that allow the pluriversal to enable the establishment of an African epistemological intellectual research. According to him,
pluriversalism [refers] unambiguously to an African academic orientation and practices that create their own distinctive methodologies and epistemologies, both driven by Africa’s own clearly defined agenda to attain an intellectual autonomy in the service of economic and political liberation. The final intellectual products of African scholars, even when they combine localism with globalism, will be a distinguishable autonomous hybrid that is African in its imprimatur. We become the center of knowledge, not its periphery. We originate, we adopt and adapt, we invent, we renew. (2018, p. 889)
And in “Ritual Archives,” he further throws the fundamental challenge to Africans about rethinking and rehabilitating what constitutes archives that produce authentic knowledge that could help reconstruct postcolonial Africa. Thus, for him,
By ritual archives, I mean the conglomeration of words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects that document as well as speak to those religious experiences and practices that allow us to understand the African world through various bodies of philosophies, literatures, languages, histories and much more. By implication, ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and Earth-based human beings …. I am deploying the term “archives” in relation to rituals as a means of challenging the conventions of Western archives, namely, what is deemed worthy of preservation and organization as data, whether or not it is interpreted at any given moment. My intervention is not to restrict archives inside the location of the library or university or museum. I am also seeking to apply the techniques and resources of academic archives to rituals so that there can be greater preservation and valuation. (2017, p. 703)
As the debate continues to rage over the decolonization of knowledge in Africa, chapters in this volume engaged with the universe of indigenous knowledge systems in precolonial Africa, the ways in which the works of Toyin Falola have contributed to the decolonization of knowledge on Africa and the alternative futures that exist for knowledge production in Africa. The book has three parts: Reconstructing Indigenous Knowledges for Africa’s Development: Toyin Falola as an interlocutor; the Role of the State and Intellectuals in Knowledge Production in Africa; and Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Precolonial Africa.
Malami Buba explored the cultural brokerage of what he calls Falolaism, within the context of how Toyin Falola’s scholarship has contributed to the centring of Afrocentric knowledges, across disciplines. Buba located the massive works of Falola within his unique style of theorizing and engagement with the West. While not adopting what Mafeje (2000) calls combative ontology, Falola has, through his interdisciplinary approach to writing, contributed to unlearning and rethinki...