Rebuilding knowledge in African countries
Epistemological questions: what kind of knowledge? How is it produced? For what purpose ? are fundamental for Africans in their struggle for political, cultural and economic emancipation.To imagine and build different futures, it is necessary to question the enunciation of knowledge paradigms. In the context of the need to produce new forms in all areas of social and political life in African countries, the issue of knowledge production is crucial. Not just because the African continent is facing challenges in terms of education, health and well-being in this era of innovation- and knowledge-based economies. But, more fundamentally, because the production of knowledge maintains and reproduces a political order, an economic order and a social order.
In the recent history of the African continent, ethnological knowledge produced about African societies played a decisive role in their domination by European countries in the colonial period. In the contemporary era, knowledge confers control (or regulation) over the understanding of the world as such, it is a space of power and it can be an instrument of coloniality.
To think properly about the challenges that African countries really face, it is necessary to question the geopolitics of knowledge in the context of African countries. In the first section, I will give a genealogy of what Mudimbe called the ” colonial library “, and emphasise the
role of this colonial library in contemporary African positionality. In a second section, I will place particular emphasis on the need for Africans to engage in an epistemic rupture by broadening the vision of what knowledge is and reactivating the resources of knowing embodied in their cultures, but more specifically by producing new knowledge that will be useful for the future of African societies and the world in general. In a third section, I will outline the main avenues for constructing an African ecology of knowledge.
Geopolitics of knowledge in African countries
Violence epistemic and colonial libraries
The corpus of knowledge concerning Africa is largely marked by colonial ethnology and anthropology. Valentin Mudimbe named this corpus the colonial library : since the fifteenth century, the landscape of Africa has been structured by discourses whose aim was to physically dominate the land, to re-educate the mentalities of the native inhabitants, and to integrate ” local economic histories into a Western perspective ” (Mudimbe, 2021 [1988], p. 26). These various forms of knowledge, primarily motivated by the goal of governmentality and aimed at justifying and establishing the colonial enterprise, viewed non-Western countries through the prism of cultural superiority and racial prejudice. Unfortunately, they continue to largely influence the perception of African reality and have become an element in the perpetuation of domination or dependence.
In fact, 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 des
widely shared beliefs in the cultural predominance of the colonisers. It was vitally important for the colonisers to establish this sense of superiority in order not simply to conquer the lands and resources of the colonies, but also their hearts and minds. As a result, the economic and political injustice that is inherent in colonisation carries with it an additional layer of cultural injustice. Rajeev Bhargaba calls this process epistemic injustice. It has taken place in the same way in India and in African countries. It begins when the concepts and categories through which a people understands itself, as well as its universe, are replaced by the concepts and categories of the colonisers.
In this way, the system of meaning and categories taking into account the individual and collective orientationof dominated peoples has been replaced by the colonist’s meaning and categories, and this has been done by denigrating the values of local communities, as well as their production of knowledge. This process of internalising the cultural and epistemic frameworks belonging to the colonised peoples is first deployed in the discourse of the colonisers and is then crystallised within theoretical (ethnological and anthropological) work carried out by the colonisers.
Africanising the sciences social and the humanities
For Valentin Mudimbe, Kwasi Wiredu, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, in order for the African to profoundly recover his sovereignty and fertility, it is urgent to address the issue of liberating African discourse (philosophical and scientific) 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 determine one’s practice in accordance with one’s own norms and criteria.
For Mudimbe and Wiredu, there is a need for a radical transformation of the humanities and social sciences as they are currently taught in African universities. This reconstruction project requires a rethinking 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 applied to African realities. Deconstructing colonial-ethnological reason begins with a radical critique of the discourses produced, their theoretical frameworks and their ideological underpinnings.
For Wiredu and Mudimbe, in order to escape definitively from a scientific alienation that constantly threatens them, African researchers must take on the responsibility of a thought by establishing a scientific discourse that would be the expression of material life within their own socio-political contexts.This activity of thought must be rooted within the present, paying careful attention to its own specific archaeological environment and to the real trends of Africa’s various societies and their fullest and most concrete expressions. It is a question of integrating the true complexity of African social formations, and no longer considering them as carbon copies of Western history, but as having their own cultural and historical specificity.
The initiators of African social sciences (Kagame, Lufuwalbo, Mulago, Mbiti) have been criticised for simply taking over Western categories, concepts, schemas and systems in order to cast African “entities ” into them. These criticisms, according to Mudimbe, are clumsily expressed or unfounded and too easily sidestep a major question, that of the meaning of the difference that must be made in relation to the West and what it really costs to assume that difference.
Really escaping the West presupposes appreciating exactly what it costs to detach ourselves from it it presupposes knowing how far the West, insidiously perhaps, has come towards us it presupposes knowing, in what allows us to think against the West, what is still Western and to measure the extent to which our recourse against it is still Western ; and to measure the extent to which our recourse against it is still perhaps a ruse that it opposes to us and at the end of which it awaits us, motionless and elsewhere. (Mudimbe, 1982, p. 12-13)
The syncretistic temptations of some of those who initiated the African social sciences into the radical demands of a new African science (C. A. Diop, Obenga) are marked, according to Mudimbe, by one constant: the aestheticization of African culture as a function of the singular and proper gaze of the West since the eighteenth century. The order of Western discourse, a space delimited according to an economic structure and a cultural archaeology, only accounts for other cultures or other systems by reference to itself and, according to Mudimbe, in the specificity of an experience that would be irreducible to it.
The limitation of syncretist approaches according to Mudimbe consists in the fact that the Africanisation of the sciences is only thought of in terms of the modalities of application (economics, law, sociology). It is most fortunate that African researchers (C. A. Diop, Obenga) wishing to remake the history of Africa from scratch show in a concrete way how to reconceive the organisation of disciplines inherited from the West, by what skilful and subtle techniques to destructure the control of doctrines and social appropriations of scientific discourse.
One of the ways of Africanisation of the humanities and social sciences would be recourse to the hermeneutic resources of African languages as tools for decolonising thought and reorganising the orders of knowledge. Kenyan philosopher Odera Oruka argues for a philosophical reading of the resources of African vernacular languages. His hermeneutical approach, exploring the oral resources (myths and proverbs) of Kenyan languages, allows him to highlight the philosophical sagacity of thiscorpus. The ” Wisemen-woman ” (sages) studied by Odera Oruka are philosophers, because they are capable of reflexivity and critical distance in relation to their corpus.
Valentin Mudimbe, in L’Odeur du père, questions what the order of discourse is for African human and social sciences. How can we circumvent or overcome the essential paradox that marked the liberation of negro discourse, which had to base itself on the work of Africanist anthropologists in order to construct itself (negritude)… Mudimbe questions how to articulate an authentic African thought that would faithfully account for the order and norms of African discourse.
Mudimbe believes that by undertaking a radical linguistic revolution, the replacement of European languages with African languages, a different order of discourse would emerge. Changing ” the linguistic instrument of knowledge and scientific production would certainly provoke an epistemological rupture and open the way to a new adventure for Africa “, in the same way that ” the promoters of Greek thought, by transplanting into their language, technique, methods and uses of knowledge received from Egypt triggered a reorganisation of knowledge
“.and of life whose essential order is always current and still in progress. ” (Mudimbé, 1982, p. 47)
In any case, a new universe would come into being. And in this perspective, the establishment of truly African humanities and social sciences would be effective, namely practices of knowledge that would be in harmony both with the degradations of African cultures and with the postulates of our modernity.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o also believes that rediscovering the vitality of African languages would not only take into account the decolonisation of minds and imaginations, but would also reveal interiorities and meaningful universes, inscribed within a world order that intimately conforms meaning for Africans. Languages open up galaxies, universes, and worlds that we must explore.
African languages could be considered as privileged points of access to the care to be taken and the management of the cultures in question as well as their contents in terms of thought and forms of knowledge. The work of Alexis Kagamé, Benveniste and Wittgenstein1 has provided some evidence of the link between thought and the syntactic and grammatical structure of languages.
This vision of Kagame and Benveniste is somewhat nuanced and attenuated by the recent development of linguistic philosophy carried out by Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Kwasi Wiredu. Kwasi Wiredu is interested in the philosophical resources of the Akan language while avoiding an ethnophilosophical approach. ForWiredu, language is not supposed to reveal the
1 Émile Benveniste, “Categories of thought and categories of language” (1958), in Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, pp. 63-64. Ludwig Wittgenstein: “the limits of my language are the limits of my world “, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, section5.61, tr. G.-
G. Granger, Paris, Gallimard, 1993. Alexis Kagame is a Rwandan philosopher who has shown how Aristotle’s ontology is derived from Greek grammar.
collective thoughts of Akan culture, as postulated by ethnophilosophers (Kagame, Tempels, etc.) ; it is a hermeneutical resource that takes into account new critical explorations in contemporary African philosophy.
In the same vein, Souleymane Bachir Diagne considers the issues that the diversity of languages poses for cognition. Does each language lock us into an irreducible system of thought ? Can we purely and simply identify linguistic representations and cognitive representations, as cognitive grammars seem to do ? In his undertaking of global cognitive anthropology, he asks does language determine the logical categories we use as well as the fundamental notions we have of being, time, etc.?
According to Souleymane Bachir Diagne, it is no longer a question of criticising ethnophilosophy in the name of philosophy, but of seriously taking up again what was aimed at in the enterprise and which has strayed into the dead end of an ethnic philosophy. He invites us, with Catherine Fuchs, to go beyond the linguistic relativism of Sapir and Whorf, Kagame, and Benveniste. Language inclines to think. It ” inclines withoutnecessity “, as Leibniz says.
Human sciences from an African perspective, the epistemic rupture
This epistemic rupture that I am invoking is not just a better application of Western social sciences (the so-called humanities) to African realities or a better inculturation deces
dernières. Tel is the main argument of Mudimbe. My point is that we must recognise the diversity of approaches to reality according to civilisations and eras, a plurality of means of knowledge, as well as a gnoseological and epistemological relativity.
I propose to rethink the plurality of the journeys of human thought, starting from the idea of an equality ofprinciple of different traditions of thought or discursive practices while acknowledging their incommensurability. This leads us to consider these different traditions of thought in terms of their horizons and the configurations of the thinkable that they propose as unique journeys of the mind that have been constructed concomitantly, shaped by the cultures in which they originate. This does not mean that there is no circulation of ideas and thought across regions and eras.
Thinking about these issues in an African context summons an epistemic break. Incorporating the complexity of African social structures, and embracing them, in their cultural ethistorical specificity, in the production of knowledge, requires a change of position within fields of constituted knowledge and a recasting ; an act of thought that pays particular attention to the current orientations of the societies under examination.
This restructuring project commits us to a complete reconsideration of the social sciences, and requires an epistemological rethinking of the objects, methods and status of the knowledge produced by the human and social sciences, as applied to African realities. The major obstacle to such an approach remains the difficulty of determining an epistemological field, in other words, the specific objects that should be studied, but also the methods needed to do so.
A recurring criticism of the Western vision of knowledge is that it overestimates the prerogatives of the subject by basing itself on the illusion that the latter, by its own means (reason and/or the senses) can produce a thought that reflects the complexity of reality. The pitfall of European methodology consists in selecting a singular criterion to explain reality.
The fruitfulness of the methodological approach based on the principle of the excluded third2 must be reconsidered. This approach distinguishes the subject from the object in order to interpret reality. It makes objects into momentary entities and breaks reality down into small portions that we then try to reconstitute. This residual positivism in the Western epistemological tradition is based on an atomism that dates back two thousand years. This approach has been useful for the development of physics and the natural sciences, but it is far less profitable when it comes to the humanities and social sciences, because the objects of study are multi-stratified and the subject is not separate from the object. In the same way as in quantum physics, the position of the observer modifies the object being observed.
The idea is to be able to go beyond the dichotomy between subject and object by attributing to the subject the realities of an object and vice versa – to the object the capacities of a subject (i.e. to produce knowledge and the ability to change the observer’s point of view). A production of knowledge from a bifocal point of view, through a combination of adequate critical distance and understanding from within.
2 This vision is challenged by Issiaka-Prosper Lalèyê, but also within the Western episteme by proponents of quantum physics and thinkers such as Nicholas Georgescu- Roegen, who promote transdisciplinarity and the principle of inclusivetiers.
But more fundamentally, the issue is to acquire a more in-depth 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, alongside scientific knowledge as it is currently constituted. Exploring the relatively unfamiliar territory of African ontomythologies and epistemogonies allows a more open approach to the different types of knowledge that have helped and safeguarded African societies throughout their long history. These are ways of knowing that have demonstrated their long-term operational attributes in different areas of human activity: therapeutic and environmental knowledge, technical know-how, social, historical, psychological, economic and agronomic knowledge. This knowledge has ensured the survival, growth and sustainability of African societies. In order to mobilise this knowledge, it is necessary to explore the multiple cultural expressions and linguistic resources African.
We also engage in a debate around a theory of knowledge limited by the boundaries of the Western vision of knowledge, questioning the exclusivity of logocentric episteme and the arraisal of modes of comprehensibility by the singular mode of written thought. It is a question of reconsidering the question of knowledge in its deep roots.
The aim is to rethink the conditions of possibility of knowledge. ” What can I know ? ” is the question posed by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason pure. ” How is a knowledge possible? ” These questions defined physics and metaphysics in the eighteenth century.
The questions we should be asking ourselves instead might be these: what do non-discursive ways of thinking about reality ; This examination of knowledge will be developed by considering the objects of the epistemological quest as well as its ways of perceiving reality. Since the time of Aristotle, explaining has meant determining the causes or identifying the first causes.The thought of the “causality linear ” has a limit, and it is the first cause. Complex and dialogical thinking (promoted byE. Morin) has made it possible to see this mode of interpretation of reality in relative terms by revealing its limitations.
Constructing an African ecology of knowledge
Reconstructing knowledge in Africa could be done by setting up an ecology of knowledge – in which disciplines, approaches and methodologies are considered in their own integrity, but are inserted into an ecology where they can interact and produce new knowledge.
I borrow from Margarita Bowen and Boaventoura de Sousa Santos the notion of knowledge ecology. While accepting that knowledge derives from experience, the notion of knowledge ecology refers to a much broader concept of experience, in line with a more dynamic ecosystemic conception of the world. Margarita Bowen, the Australian science historian who suggested the term knowledge ecology in 1985, emphasises that all the ideas or actions that emanate from observation are themselves incorporated and form part of the global ecosystem.This evidence suggests a radical break with the established positivist model of the scientific method scientific exact, in which the researcher wasconsidered as independent, at least intellectually, of the objects
of observation, and therefore able to collect reliable data (objective facts) by analysing sensory perceptions to guarantee their accuracy. David Lowenthal (1961) states that perception is not a matter of the senses alone: ” feeling, thinking, sensing and believing are simultaneous and interdependent processes.”
The questions we should be asking ourselves could be these: can we broaden the notion of perception ? Can we envisage an epistemology of the senses ? Can we consider the arts, dance, theatre and bodies as places of knowledge?
The idea is to identify an epistemological pluralism that recognises the particularity of science and its effectiveness in certain fields, while challenging its claim to hold a monopoly on truth, and its aim to disqualify other forms of knowledge. My aim is to challenge the claim of science to be the only legitimate and true form of knowledge, on the one hand, but also the postmodern relativism according to which all forms of knowledge are equal, on the other. My aim is not to attribute the same aptitude (capacity) to all types of knowledge, but to enable a pragmatic discussion between alternative criteria of validity. A discussion that does not immediately disqualify knowledge that is outside the scientific canon. Reconstructing knowledge in Africa means being able to draw on all the types of knowledge produced by African societies through the ages, and to reactivate those that still operate in various areas of life.
This means putting an end to a monoculture of knowledge by admitting a constellation of diverse knowledges that interact and are complementary, and also knowledges that can be translated one into another, avoiding
the fragmentation and non-communicability of various types of knowledge. Furthermore, to go beyond the idea that knowledge is situated and depends exclusively on the conditions in which it is produced. Knowledgeis both situated and trans-situated.
Human intelligence lies in our ability to go beyond the various possibilities of thinking, to understand them and to generate a dialogue between them.
An ecology of knowledge will not be a systematic search for ultimate truth, but rather an attempt to present these possibilities in order to produce something intelligible and useful from the encounters of a plurality of ways of knowing, producing knowledge and discursive practices.The ultimate aim of this epistemological breakthrough is to build a library that embraces all the libraries (libraries of logos and non-logos epistemologies, of ante-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, decolonial and other archives, of thought and knowledge) scattered across societies. This library activates the production of new knowledge and new ways of knowing, as well as an integral recognition of ignorance. Ignorance represents what is ignored (not considered to be knowledge), but also what we do not yet know. It is therefore a space for creativity and innovation. The ambition of such an ecology of knowledge could be, both synchronically and diachronically, to study the life of ideas (their present and future) ; historical variations in the response to fundamental human questions, expressed in the collective thought of large groups of individuals.
In consequence, reflection on social transformations, and the production of knowledge and culture in a linguistic era requires an understanding of the global environment which produces meaning. This isjustified by the fact that
philosophical statements, legal or academic conjectures, or literary processes or recurring poetic images, only really make sense in relation to each other in the interactive topography of the entire social discourse.
From this perspective, an African ecology of knowledge could become a multidisciplinary enterprise that explores literature as well as canonical knowledge, the arts, practical solutions and collective beliefs, material production, theoretical knowledge in its refined and simplistic versions, scholarly or not.
Such meaning cannot be perceived by sectoral studies, which practice a ” division of labour” in a continuous Fordist regime of disciplines. This African ecology of knowledge must go beyond the analysis of defined discursive fields and genres – philosophical, religious, scientific, literary, political. Carrying out such an undertaking, in the context of African countries, raises the question of sources and in particular that of oral sources, bearers, more than any other, of the collective memory and knowledge production of African societies.
It should just be remembered that African societies have known writing systems that have played different roles in archiving and preserving their cultural heritage. Some writing systems were reserved for an elite, while others were more widely disseminated. For us, it is a question of moving away from the scriptural paradigm, which sees writing as the exclusive means of transmitting the collective memory and the cognitive and cultural heritage of a people. Many human groups have not needed writing to transmit their cultural capital.
There is no human group without language, and without a codified means of perpetuating its collective memory, and therefore without a means of exchanging texts
at a distance. West African societies have produced a cultural and cognitive heritage that has enabled them to ensure their long-term survival. To mobilise it, it is necessary to explore their language arts, which include oral traditions, cosmogonies, myths and diverse cultural expressions. The aim is to question these cultures through the processes they have mainly used to transmit their knowledge and collective memory.
In the African context, in addition to exploring written and oral sources, artefacts and objects can also play a considerable role in an archaeology of knowledge. They can help to rewrite history they also include knowledge and reveal alternative epistemological universes.
Any society (culture or civilisation) transmits a heritage and perpetuates a cultural matrix that conveys its identity through time, transforming it as the world changes.
The question is to know how to characterise this transformation.
The task will be to study, in the context of African countries, the elements of this cultural matrix : its various components, beyond the analysis of the constitution of intellectual traditions. But we are also interested in the processes of significant metamorphosis within a culture. This raises the question of how civilisations are transformed (by internal movement or by the reception and integration of foreign influences). In order to study the history of the transformation of the cultural matrix, it will be necessary to resort to transcultural studies. If we open up the methodological field of vision and shift the geography of our Reason, an ecology of knowledge can be a field of study of the major issues of our time, based on more plural archives.
Conclusion
To meet the challenges that the African continent is tackling, there is an urgent need to improve and better appropriate modern scientific knowledge and its technical applications. This creative assimilation is a trendwe are already seeing in many African countries, where new technologies are being used to provide solutions in education, health, etc. But it is also a question of broadening the range of knowledge on which social organisations are based, by incorporating into the repertoire of useful tools the knowledge produced by African societies and inscribed in their cultural matrix and DNA. An additional task devolved to African researchers is to produce the knowledge that African societies will need in the decades to come, in order to better respond to their needs and challenges.
Reopening the future for African countries is a task that first takes place in the space of thought and imaginations. To give birth to a community of imaginaries, it is necessary to reconstruct the narrative around Africa and to produce the knowledge needed for the kind of societies that Africans want to create. We need to move away from the various teleological injunctions (progress, development or modernity) to take into account the unplanned futures that carry the aspirations of African populations.
The African continent is undergoing a cultural mutation. The continent can become a laboratory continent and reinvent on its terrain economic, political and social life. It has all the tools needed for this reinvention. One of the challenges of giving institutional form to this reinvention is the reconstruction of knowledge and imagination. The reason for the African continent is plural. Africa is updating its own syntheses of social, political and cultural spheres. The open sky laboratory that
constitutes Africa has its foundries working at full capacity, feeding them with fuel from every field. Rebuilding knowledge in Africa would make it possible to open up to an infinite universe.
References
Mudimbe, V.-Y., 1982, L’Odeur du Père, Paris, Présence africaine, 1982. Mudimbe, V.-Y., 1988, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and Order of Knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, London: James Currey.
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The invention of Africa. Gnosis, philosophy and the order of knowledge. Translated from the English by Laurent Vannini. Preface by Mamadou Diouf. Présence africaine, coll.” Histoire, politique, société “.