African Indigenous Knowledges in a Postcolonial World

Essays in Honour of Toyin Falola

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Ngozi Nwogwugwu, Gift Ntiwunka, Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Ngozi Nwogwugwu, Gift Ntiwunka

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000259865
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Black Studies

This book argues that ancient and modern African indigenous knowledges remain key to Africa's role in global capital, technological and knowledge development and to addressing her marginality and postcoloniality.

The contributors engage the unresolved problematics of the historical and contemporary linkages between African knowledges and the African academy, and between African and global knowledges. The book relies on historical and comparative political analysis to explore the global context for the application of indigenous knowledges for tackling postcolonial challenges of knowledge production, conflict and migration, and women's rights on the continent in transcontinental African contexts.

Asserting the enduring potency of African indigenous knowledges for the transformation of policy, the African academy and the study of Africa in the global academy, this book will be of interest to scholars of African Studies, postcolonial studies and decolonisation and global affairs.

1 Introduction

Global Africa, postcoloniality and indigenous knowledges

Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Ngozi Nwogwugwu and Gift Ntiwunka

Précis

This book fundamentally aims to situate the trajectory, conditions and promise of postcolonial African states and societies within the global context of their political development, and in particular, conscientiously link these to the diverse and multivalent indigenous knowledges that have shaped, and continue to define, that trajectory. It engages the central issue of how Africans define their own realities, their methodologies for doing this and the historical and contemporary linkages between these African knowledges and the African academy, and between African and global knowledges. The book relies on historical and comparative political analysis to foreground the past and present global context to the development, recognition and centering of African indigenous knowledges for tackling the postcolonial challenges of knowledge production, conflict and migration, political communication and women’s rights on the continent in transcontinental African contexts from Ghana to Libya and from Sokoto to Sudan. Summatively, the two-fold argument of this text is essentially that African indigenous knowledges can transform policy and practice to address the identified African problems, and that the advancement of such indigenous knowledges can transform the African academy as well as the study of Africa in the global academy.

Unequivocally, extant debates in African studies scholarship vigorously question the continued dominance of white, colonial, even racist scholars, tropes, archives and knowledges in the study of African peoples, politics and societies, and in the neo-liberal and other development options offered for African states (Falola & Jennings 2002; Zeleza 2006a; Mama 2007; Melber 2009; Soyinka-Airewele & Edozie 2010; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). Urgent calls to decolonise the discipline reverberate across intellectual forums and institutions both on the continent and in the Western academy, emphasising the important implications for policy, governance and development. This book makes an important contribution to this discourse and to the wider literatures that foreground African indigenous knowledges as the path to this achievement.

Contending approaches to theorising postcolonial Africa

The African continent consists of the 54 member states of the African Union which include the mainland and island states of continental Africa. These states have often been approached by scholars in terms of their similarities of political history, culture, ideologies, religious practice, social norms, and related cultural markers and political experiences. However, the theoretical approaches to understanding the continent are divergent and yield different foci for study. Nevertheless, these many approaches provide robust frames for understanding the subject at hand. Perhaps more than any other, colonialism and coloniality remain the springboard for theorising the distant African past or its more recent engagement with colonial domination and subjugation, as well as the continent’s postcolonial existence.

One of the debates that preoccupied African scholars of history and politics in the immediate post-independence period was the question of how to write the colonial situation into history. The main contention, not necessarily an oppositional debate by any means, was between approaches which sought to minimise the colonial impact and approaches which sought to elucidate the unending import of the colonial situation. The first influential approach was represented by scholars of the Ibadan school of African history, represented by eminent scholars such as Kenneth O. Dike and Jacob F. Ade Ajayi (see Dike 1956; Ajayi 1965, 1968). These scholars canvassed the view of colonialism as a brief period of colonial subjugation which did not significantly disrupt the long-term ebb and flow of African history. The fundamental concern of these scholars was with debunking the racist colonial position, represented most startlingly by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), that Africans had no history to speak of, and that only a primitive animal darkness existed before the incursion of Europeans who “discovered” the continent and awakened it to civilisation. For these nationalistic scholars of African history, it was necessary to firmly establish the existence, presence, note-worthiness and olden and authentic nature of pre-colonial African history: Africans had existed long before colonialism; Africans had their civilisations pre-dating European imperialism; and Africans had their histories recorded and transmitted as all human societies creatively do to maintain their cultural continuity and social cohesion. From this perspective, thus, African historians argued that colonialism was merely an interregnum, a brief interlude, one episode among many in the long history of civilisations, wars and empire-building, diplomacy, and social and economic development on the continent. In this mould of thinking, African scholars of history and politics deployed significant and commendable efforts to the focused study of the precolonial African past for the purpose of reconstructing that past and restoring African history to pride of place.

The second and equally influential approach to writing the history of colonialism in Africa was advanced by scholars like Peter Ekeh (1980) and Crawford Young (1994), among others (cf. Falola 2008) who did not particularly refute the assertion of a long duree approach to African history. Rather their central argument was that while indeed the colonial situation lasted but a brief time period of less than a century for most African states, its import nonetheless was epochal and definitive. For these scholars, in other words, beyond the “iron gates of periodization” (Young 1994), colonialism’s brutal character decidedly altered the course of African history and changed the destiny of the African states birthed by it. In this school of thought, the intense exploitation and oppression occasioned by colonialism and its imperialistic philosophy was fundamentally disruptive, upturning long held traditions, displacing social institutions and re-ordering political, economic, religious and social life. No aspect of the African reality was left untouched by the colonial experience, they held, as various aspects of society and life were either removed entirely, or completely unknown European practices instituted, or ancient forms and structures hybridised with alien and colonial ones to produce different and new structures. Indeed, Young (1994) adopts the quintessential nickname of Bula Matari (Kikongo for “breaker of rocks”) to typify the destructive power of the colonial state as it established itself and entrenched its authority.

To reiterate, the core issue in contention in these debates was an evaluation of the potency of the legacy of the colonial situation for African futures. The travails of post-independence African states have therefore been equally scrutinised in an attempt to explain the descent into chaos and underdevelopment that followed shortly after the physical exit of the colonial powers. Similarly, two poles of thought have emerged in this enterprise: one makes recourse to colonialism as the foundation of the vast majority of Africa’s contemporary problems, while the other locates current African maladies within national leadership failures and institutional dysfunctions (Osaghae 2010). We aver here that there is validity to both standpoints and see them as complementary, as continuities in theoretical interpretation and not as disparate arguments. To put it more clearly, understanding postcolonial Africa requires marshalling interpretations of the colonial past as well as the faulty dynamics of the postcolonial present in order to more fully apprehend the diverse contexts for African conditions in the present time.

To return to our starting point, it is necessary to examine a little more closely the vigorous efforts at (re-)constructing a long African history that became the objective of African scholars who sought to deliberately decolonise the academy shortly after the creation of western universities within new African states. While all knowledge disciplines employed by the European imperialists constructed faulty claims about African realities, colonial historiography and colonial anthropologies of Africa were particularly infamous and notorious for the partial, racially jaundiced and distorted views of Africa they portrayed. European explorers claimed to “discover” various features of the African geographical landscape; historical records of colonial officers and others denied the existence of an African past; clergy and missionaries demonised African religious forms and practices, claiming their vacuity; and anthropologists depicted African cultures and lifestyles as backward, uncouth, immoral and savage. No wonder then that one of the most urgent tasks of African scholarship in the nationalist and immediate postcolonial period was to take these colonial knowledges to question: to roundly discredit them, to replace them with more authentic scholarship on Africa and Africans, to reclaim stolen heritages and by all these, to decolonise African knowledges. Regrettably, this task remains incomplete today, as renewed calls in recent times have uncovered the normalisation of the colonial gaze on Africa, the persistent appropriation of African indigenous knowledges and heritages and the marginalisation of African knowledges and academics in a global knowledge-scape dictated by neo-liberal market forces, racially motivated academic practices and a vast chasm of resource inequality between academies and academics in the global North and in Africa.

Nonetheless, efforts at decolonising the academy and African knowledges are traceable beyond the recent past to philosophies including Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and the African Renaissance, among others (Falola 2001; Idahosa 2019). Early pan-Africanist intellectuals including Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois and later ones such as Molefi K. Asante advanced reasoned arguments in this vein. Postcolonial scholarship, which bore kin to the thoughts of scholars from other previously colonised regions of Asia and Latin America, and fuelled by Marxist, structuralist and poststructuralist thought, flourished post-independence from multidisciplinary standpoints including history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, gender, political science, sociology and so on (Arowosegbe 2008). African scholars such as Archie Mafeje (2000), Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986), Mahmood Mamdani (2016, 2019), Achille Mbembe (2001), Claude Ake (1982) and numerous others resonated the anti-colonial, anti-hegemonic, postcolonial and decolonial currents to be found in the writings of Karl Marx (1852/1975, 1867), Frantz Fanon (1963), Edward Said (1978), Homi Bhabha (1994), Gayatri Spivak (1995, 1999, 2006), Robert Young (1990, 2000) and others. These intellectuals critically interrogated colonialism and its legacies for postcolonial societies, as well as the ways in which its imperialistic domination was embedded in its materialities, objectivities and subjectivities of knowledge and culture. Postcolonial...