Understanding African societies: reopening the path

Felwine Sarr. Duke University. Leiden, 25 October 2024. Gerbrands Lecture.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Wayne Modest for his warm words of welcome, and thanks to Mark Westmoreland for his very generous introduction. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the Gerbrands Prize jury, who this year chose to highlight my work. I am very grateful.

In the context of the need to develop new forms of political, economic and social life in African countries, the issue of knowledge production is of crucial importance. Not only because the African continent faces challenges in education, health and welfare in the era of innovation- and knowledge-based economies, but also, more fundamentally, because knowledge production supports and reproduces political, economic and social orders.

The following epistemological questions: “What kind of knowledge is it? How is it produced? For what purposes?” are fundamental for Africans in their struggle for emancipation. In order to imagine and construct a different present and future, it is necessary to question the enunciation of knowledge paradigms.

 In the recent history of the African continent, the ethnological knowledge produced about African societies played a decisive role in the domination exercised by European countries during the colonial period. In the contemporary era, knowledge makes it possible to control (or regulate) the understanding of the world; in this sense, it constitutes a space of power and can serve as an instrument of coloniality.

To fully grasp the challenges currently facing African societies, it is necessary to consider the geopolitics of knowledge within the African continent. I will begin by tracing a brief genealogy of what Mudimbe has called the ‘colonial library’, and focus on Africa’s contemporary position. Secondly, I will discuss the need for Africans to make an epistemic shift by broadening their conception of what knowledge is and reactivating the knowledge resources embodied in their cultures; but more specifically by producing new knowledge that will be useful to African societies and the world at large. I will conclude by outlining what I call an African ecology of knowledge.

1. The geopolitics of knowledge in African countries

The body of knowledge on Africa is largely marked by colonial ethnology and anthropology. Valentin Mudimbe has dubbed this corpus the colonial library. Since the fifteenth century, the African landscape has been shaped by discourses whose aim was to physically dominate territories, re-educate the mentalities of indigenous populations and integrate local economic histories into a Western perspective.[1]

These different forms of knowledge, motivated primarily by governmental imperatives and whose aim was to legitimise and entrench the colonial enterprise, viewed non-Western countries through the prism of cultural superiority and racial prejudice.

In reality, maintaining an economic asymmetry between the colonies and the metropole implied that the latter exercised absolute political control over the colonies. And yet this control would have been impossible without the widely shared belief in the cultural supremacy of the colonisers. It was vitally important for the colonisers to establish this sense of superiority, not only to conquer land and resources, but also to capture hearts and minds. As a result, the economic and political injustice inherent in colonisation adds a further layer of cultural injustice. This process is described by Rajeev Bhargava as “epistemic injustice“. It has played out in the same way in India and in African countries. It begins when the concepts and categories by which a people understands itself and its world are replaced by the concepts and categories of the colonisers.

As a result, the system of meanings and categories that allowed for the individual and collective orientation of dominated peoples was replaced by that of the settler, and this was done through a devaluation of the values of local communities, as well as their production of knowledge.

This process of devaluing the cultural and epistemic frameworks specific to colonised peoples first takes place in the discourse of the colonisers, and then crystallises in the theoretical (ethnological and anthropological) work carried out by the latter.

For Valentin Mudimbe, Kwasi Wiredu and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, for Africa to fully recover its fertility, it is urgent to address the issue of liberating African philosophical and scientific discourse in order to establish African social sciences. For these thinkers, it is important to become the subject of one’s own scientific discourse and to define its practice according to one’s own standards and criteria.

For Mudimbe and Kwasi Wiredu, there is a need for a radical transformation of the social sciences and humanities as they are currently taught in African universities. This reconstruction project requires an overhaul of the social sciences, starting with an epistemological questioning of the objects, methods and status of the knowledge produced by the humanities and social sciences as they apply to African realities. The deconstruction of colonial-ethnological reason begins with a radical critique of the discourses produced, their theoretical frameworks and their ideological foundations.

For these thinkers, in order to escape definitively from a scientific alienation that constantly threatens them, African researchers must assume the responsibility of thought by establishing a scientific discourse that would be the expression of material life within their own socio-political contexts. This activity of reflection must be rooted in the present, paying particular attention to its specific archaeological environment as well as to the real trends of the various African societies and their fullest and most concrete manifestations.

It is about integrating the true complexity of African social formations and no longer considering them as mere carbon copies of Western history, but as entities with their own cultural and historical specificities.

The question is what to do with the colonial library. Should it be burnt down?

Some African scholars (Antoine Tshitungu Kongolo, Mamadou Diouf) believe that, in order to carry out this undertaking, a critical rereading of the colonial library is a relevant approach for several reasons. 1. The colonial library is the fruit of a co-production, and part of the knowledge generated by African societies is intimately linked to it; this knowledge could thus be rediscovered. 2. A critical reading of this library helps to understand how the Western world produces knowledge about others. 

In *In the Scent of the Father*, Mudimbe shows how scientific productions can draw on categories of thought that are specific to them, but also borrowed from others, and that are part of specific geographical, but also philosophical and epistemological contexts. 

        How then to get rid of the persistent odour of the father while avoiding the pitfall of questioning his speech with words inspired by him? How to erase his traces after he’s gone, asks Mudimbe. The father is now absent, but he remains present through his smell. The father here refers to a certain epistemological paternalism that has taken hold and infantilised Africa. How can this filiation be broken in order to produce an African order of scientific discourse in tune with African realities?

For Africa, says Mudimbe, “freeing ourselves from the West presupposes measuring exactly what it costs to detach ourselves from it; it presupposes knowing to what extent the West has insinuated itself among us; it allows us to know what allows us to think against the West, what is still Western”. All the ambiguity and difficulty of epistemic decolonisation can be summed up in this quotation. It is the establishment of a fertile gap, which will have made it possible to elucidate the current modalities of the integration of Africans into the myths of the West, while avoiding the need to prove one’s humanity in the face of the ideological, political and symbolic violence that opposes it.

Mudimbe advocates the free assumption of a reflection that focuses on one’s own destiny and environment. In his view, the establishment of an African scientific practice presupposes not only a strategy for decolonising established knowledge, but also the definition of the framework and conditions for a genuine scientific practice that Africa most urgently needs today. What would be the tools, concepts and categories, as well as the methodology, of such a reconstruction-rehabilitation?

 The strategy and method he proposes are part of an approach of epistemological indiscipline. It is necessary to reflect on the basis of the African experience. To do this, we need to question all knowledge. For Mudimbe, this questioning does not mean returning to a pre-colonial state of civilisation or knowledge production. Rather, it is about developing a critical look at philosophical traditions and endogenous knowledge in order to highlight what needs to be preserved or transformed.

The question I wish to address below is how to rewrite what is called the humanities from an African perspective.

[1] Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988).

2. The humanities from an African perspective: epistemic change

The epistemic change I am advocating is not simply a matter of better applying Western humanities and social sciences (the so-called humanities) to African realities, nor of better inculturating the latter. What I mean is that we must recognise the diversity of approaches to reality according to civilisations and periods, the plurality of modes of knowledge, as well as gnoseological and epistemological plurality.

I propose to rethink the plurality of paths of human thought, starting from the idea of a principled equality between different traditions of thought or discursive practices, while recognising their incommensurability. This leads us to consider these different traditions of thought, from their respective horizons, and the configurations of the thinkable that they propose, as unique paths of the mind that have developed in parallel, shaped by the cultures from which they come. This does not mean, however, that there is no circulation of ideas and thought between regions and eras.

Thinking about these issues in an African context requires a change of perspective. In order to integrate the complexity of African social structures and take them into account in all their cultural and historical specificity within the production of knowledge, a new position within established fields of knowledge must be adopted; this is an exercise in reflection that pays particular attention to current trends in the societies under study.

This restructuring project requires us to rethink the social sciences in depth and necessitates an epistemological rethink of the objects, methods and status of the knowledge produced by the human and social sciences, as applied to African realities. The main obstacle to such an approach lies in the difficulty of defining an epistemological field, i.e. the specific objects to be studied, but also the methods needed for this purpose.

But, more fundamentally, it is a question of acquiring a deeper knowledge of African societies and cultures, which are also based on their own gnoseological criteria. To achieve this, it is necessary to adopt other ways of understanding reality, beyond scientific knowledge as it currently stands. Exploring the relatively unknown territories of African epistemogonies allows a more open approach to the various types of knowledge that have helped and preserved African societies throughout their history. These are modes of knowledge that have demonstrated their long-term effectiveness in different areas of human life: therapeutic and environmental knowledge, technical know-how, social, historical, psychological, economic and agronomic knowledge, and so on. This knowledge has ensured the survival, growth and sustainability of African societies. In order to mobilise them, we need to explore Africa’s many cultural expressions and linguistic resources. I also engage in a debate around a theory of knowledge limited by the boundaries of the Western vision of knowledge, by questioning the exclusivity of the logocentric episteme and the framing of modes of comprehensibility by the single mode of written thought. It is a question of reconsidering the question of knowledge at its very roots.

3. Building an African ecology of knowledge

Reconstructing knowledge in Africa could involve setting up a knowledge ecosystem, in which disciplines, approaches and methodologies would be considered in their own integrity, while being integrated into a whole where they could interact and generate new knowledge.

I borrow from Margarita Bowen and Boaventoura De Sousa Santos the notion of the ecology of knowledge. While acknowledging that knowledge derives from experience, the notion of the ecology of knowledge is part of a much broader conception of experience, in line with a more dynamic and ecosystemic vision of the world. Margarita Bowen, the Australian historian of science who proposed the term “ecology of knowledge” in 1985, emphasises that all ideas and actions arising from observation are themselves integrated and form part of the global ecosystem. This observation suggests a radical break with the established, positivist model of the exact scientific method, in which the scientist was considered to be detached, at least intellectually, from the objects of observation, and therefore able to collect reliable data (objective facts) by analysing sensory perception, in order to guarantee accuracy. David Lowenthal (1961) argues that perception is not a matter of the senses alone: “perceiving, thinking, feeling and believing are simultaneous and interdependent processes”.

        Here are some of the questions we might ask ourselves: Can we broaden the notion of perception? Can we envisage an epistemology of the senses? Can we consider the arts, dance, theatre and the body as places of knowledge? Can we also envisage an epistemology of complexity in line with the latest discoveries of Einstein and quantum physics about the reality of the universe, breaking with the Newtonian paradigm?

The idea is to recognise an epistemological pluralism that admits the specificity of science and its effectiveness in certain fields, while challenging its claim to a monopoly on truth and its desire to discredit other forms of knowledge. My aim is to challenge, on the one hand, science’s claim to be the only legitimate and true form of knowledge, but also, on the other hand, the postmodern relativism according to which all forms of knowledge are equal. The idea is not to attribute the same capacity to all types of knowledge, but to allow a pragmatic discussion between different ways of knowing. A discussion that does not immediately disqualify knowledge that falls outside the scientific canon. Reconstructing knowledge in Africa means being able to draw on all the types of knowledge produced by African societies over time, and reactivating those that are still in force in various areas of life.

This means putting an end to a monoculture of knowledge by promoting a constellation of diverse knowledge that interacts and complements each other, as well as knowledge that can be translated into each other, while avoiding fragmentation and incompatibility between different types of knowledge. We also need to go beyond the idea that knowledge is situated and depends exclusively on the conditions in which it is produced. Knowledge is both situated and trans-situated.

Human intelligence lies in our ability to go beyond the different possibilities of thought, to understand them and to create a dialogue between them.

An ecology of knowledge will not consist in a systematic search for the ultimate truth, but rather in an attempt to highlight these possibilities in order to derive something intelligible and useful from the encounters between a plurality of modes of knowledge and discursive practices.

The ultimate goal of this epistemological turn is the construction of a library that encompasses all libraries (libraries of logos and non-logos epistemologies, anticolonial, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial libraries articulating various archives, thoughts and knowledge disseminated in societies). This library enables the production of new knowledge and new ways of knowing, as well as an integral recognition of ignorance. Ignorance embodies what is ignored (what is not considered to be knowledge), but also what we do not yet know. It therefore constitutes a space for creativity and innovation. The ambition of such an ecology of knowledge could be, in a synchronic and diachronic perspective, to study the life of ideas (their present and their future); the historical variations in the response to fundamental human questions, as expressed in the collective thought of vast groups of individuals.

        Therefore, in order to reflect on the social transformations and cultural production of a linguistic epoch, it is necessary to understand the global context that gives rise to meanings. This is because philosophical utterances, scholarly hypotheses, literary processes or recurring poetic images only truly take on their full meaning when they are placed in relation to one another, within the interactive topography of social discourse as a whole.

From this perspective, an African ecology of knowledge could become a multidisciplinary enterprise that explores both literatures, arts, practical solutions and collective beliefs, material production, as well as theoretical knowledge in its sophisticated and simplistic versions, whether literate or not. This African ecology of knowledge must go beyond the analysis of specific discursive fields and genres – philosophical, religious, scientific, literary…

An undertaking of this kind, in the context of African countries, raises the question of sources and, in particular, oral sources, which constitute the vectors of a significant part of the collective memory and knowledge production of African societies.

        It is simply worth remembering that African societies have known writing systems that have played various roles in the archiving and transmission of their cultural heritage. But for us, it is more a question of freeing ourselves from the hegemony of the scriptural paradigm, which sees writing as the only means of transmitting collective memory. Many human groups have not needed writing to transmit their cultural heritage.

        There is no human group without a language, and therefore without a codified means of perpetuating its collective memory. The aim is to examine these cultures through the processes they have mainly used to transmit their knowledge and their collective memory. In the African context, as well as exploring written and oral sources, artefacts and objects can also play a significant role in an archaeology of knowledge. They can contribute to the rewriting of history; they also contain knowledge and point to alternative epistemological universes.

Every society (culture or civilisation) passes on a heritage and perpetuates a cultural matrix that conveys its identity through time, while transforming it as the world evolves. The question is how to characterise this transformation. If we broaden our methodological scope and reorient the geography of our reason, an ecology of knowledge can constitute a field of study of the great questions of our time, based on more plural archives and modes of knowledge. 

In conclusion

To meet the challenges facing the African continent, there is an urgent need to improve and better appropriate modern scientific knowledge and its technical applications. This creative assimilation is a trend that can already be seen in many African countries, where new technologies are being put to good use to provide solutions in the fields of education, health and so on. Above all, however, it is a question of broadening the range of knowledge on which social organisation is based, by incorporating into the repertoire of useful tools the knowledge produced by African societies and embodied in their cultural matrix and DNA. Another mission incumbent on African researchers is to produce the knowledge that African societies will need over the coming decades, in order to better meet their needs and meet their challenges.

Giving African countries a future is a task first and foremost for reflection and imagination.

        The African continent is currently undergoing a cultural transformation. It can become a laboratory for reinventing its economic, political and social life. Giving shape to this reinvention means rebuilding knowledge and imagination. The reconstruction of knowledge in Africa could open the way to an infinite universe