The African Pluriversity of Knowledge
The African Pluriversity of Knowledge is a space for research-action-creation, production and dissemination of knowledge that bases its approach on the idea that knowledge, know-how and life skills are at the foundations of human societies and communal life. These underpin and reproduce social, political, economic and ecological orders.
The African Pluriversity of Knowledge starts from the premise of the diversity of modes of knowledge and approach to reality as well as the epistemic plurality of humanity. One of the challenges of such a space is to be able to think about and experience the plurality of experiences of knowledge, while recognising the equality in principle of different epistemic traditions and modes of knowledge, as well as their incommensurability. It means recognising an epistemic pluralism that acknowledges the particularity of science and its effectiveness, while challenging its claim to a monopoly on the capacity to elucidate reality and act on it. This means putting an end to a monoculture of knowledge, by allowing a constellation of different kinds of knowledge, which interact in an ecology of knowledge and which are complementary.
The bias towards broadening the geography of knowledge is based primarily at Pluriversity on the exploration of epistemic resources from African cultures, exploring both its scientific knowledge and its epistemics of the sensible; by considering bodies, the material productions of societies, oralities, music, the vast expanse of the semiosphere as well as tangible and intangible heritage as epistemic sites produced by these societies and which have ensured their continuity.
The perspective of the African Pluriversity of Knowledge is that of post-abyssal research[1]. It is primarily interested in knowledge that emancipates individuals and human groups rather than knowledge that reproduces domination and hegemony. Starting from a reflection on the non-neutrality of knowledge, the aim is to focus on knowledge that positively empowers individuals and has an impact on improving their living conditions. The idea is to make all their epistemic resources available to human societies, to enable them to better respond to their challenges. The priority is to put knowledge at the service of the emancipation of individuals and human communities. A particular focus is given within the Pluriversity to research-action-creation that aims to meet this end.
The ultimate aim of the African Knowledge Pluriversity is to put knowledge to work for the benefit of human dignity and that of communities. To achieve this, it is necessary to mobilise the common heritage of scientific knowledge, but also to explore and sometimes rehabilitate the endogenous knowledge that societies have in abundance, to mobilise the latter in all the work and projects of the Pluriversity, and more particularly, in those that will involve acting on the territories from which this knowledge originates.We need to think about and define the kind of knowledge that will enable us to create free human beings, capable of resisting the de-substantialisation of the human being that is underway. Fabricating dignity means providing the tools to resist this design.
A first factory of dignity and freedom is a transversal education system that includes all the epistemic foci of societies and that ensures the dissemination throughout the social body of knowledge, know-how and savoir-être that emancipate, that maintain worlds and ways of life threatened with disappearance, that restore, repair and heal, that allow communities to re-exist. This knowledge is one side of the Janus of knowledge. The bias of Pluriversity is to consider among knowledge those that emancipate.
Since Pluriversity’s aim is to act on reality and since it starts from the premise that Action requires thought, it has equipped itself with a Philosophy of Action which reflects on the principles that guide it (ethics of action). The Philosophy of Action thus reflects on what acting means, with a view to what is being acted (intentionality) and how to act (method-process).
The ultimate horizon of the African Pluriversity of Knowledge is to become a genuine Factory of Dignity from which the plural epistemic and experiential resources of societies are put to the benefit of the emancipation of individuals and communities. To do this, it is necessary to configure political economies of dignity and to deploy them in concrete spaces of reality.
Concerned with the question of the archive and transmission as well as the preservation of the active memory of experience and its transformation into a potential resource, the Pluriversity produces knowledge intended for academic worlds and different epistemic foci, but also for professional worlds, for citizens belonging to different trades, for individuals for their own edification, in short for society in general by thinking of educational formats and approaches adapted to the different audiences for which this knowledge is intended.
It is a question of rethinking the relationship between knowledge and societies by working towards better dissemination of this knowledge in social bodies. It is also a question of integrating into the corpus, knowledge from the different epistemic locations of African societies by putting it in dialogue with scientific knowledge in trans-epistemic spaces in order to encourage their cross-fertilisation. Finally, where necessary, the aim is to preserve knowledge from the extractivist gesture and enable the communities that produced it to ensure its preservation and choose the conditions for its transmission.
La Pluriversity thus aims to be a resource centre for emancipatory knowledge and know-how, in particular a space for collecting knowledge of dignity. With the ambition of moving from active utopia to the forging of realities, the Pluriversity is a Factory of desirable presents whose ethics it thinks through, elaborates thought and configures engineering.
[1] Boaventura De Sousa Santos, Épistémologies du Sud : Mouvements citoyens et polémique sur la science, DESCLÉE DE BROUWER, 2016.