Amos Tutuola and the Elusiveness of Completeness (original) (raw)
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The education Black Africans receive is imported and the research they do is to mainly test and validate understandings based on foreign discourses, and knowledge systems. These rarely commit to the African Indigenous Knowledge Systems. I have studied subjects that are not concomitant with my Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS), and so had to emigrate to find work more suitable to my studies. My mind thus became peripatetic being all along confronted by discourses that challenge my origins and make my IKS look inferior and useless. Possibly, other Black Africans have endured similar challenges. So, there seems to be a valid disquiet about research in Black Africa. Some possible spaces to transform discourses to accommodate Black African paradigms are proposed.
Epistemological Issues in African Higher Education
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Introduction: Knowledge and Higher Education on the African Continent Higher education, and education generally, is a prime site for the transmission, facilitation, development and production of knowledge. This is a truism bordering on platitude. Universities, in particular, are defined in terms of the generation of knowledge. The debate over whether knowledge should be regarded as instrumental, for example in terms of personal or social progress, advancement and transformation, or whether it should (also) be treated as valuable in and for itself indicates only one of many epistemologically charged concerns in African higher education. In this chapter, I aim to provide an overview of a few of the epistemological issues that have arisen over the past few decades concerning higher education on the African continent. First and foremost, the ideas of indigenous (local, traditional) knowledge and knowledge systems, and related ideas like African ways of knowing have received a great amount of attention. The claim is that indigenous knowledge, African ways of knowing, etc. have been rejected, ignored, undervalued, or colonised1-that is, exploited for Western (or Northern) ends and purposes. Second, the notions of diverse epistemologies and epistemological diversity have had both broad and deep coverage, especially in terms of the training, the socialisation into research, received by postgraduate, notably doctoral students in African universities. There is some ambiguity here, in that "epistemological diversity" has been employed, variously, to refer to beliefs and belief systems; methodological diversity, or diversity in research method(ologie)s; diversity of research questions; diversity of researchers and their cultures; and varieties of theoretical knowledge, and knowledge perspectives. What is arguably characteristic of African conceptions of knowledge is a strong relational element that is also found in African ontology and ethics. Coming to know is understood as a process of persons developing insights about one another and with all that exists. This indicates not only an intimate relationship between knower and known, between what it is to know and what it is to be known but in effect also a communalist understanding of knowledge: I know because we know. Or, a knower is a knower because of other knowers.