webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2010
All rights reserved
From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Fri Oct 01 2010 - 16:01:26 EDT
The global capitalist crisis and Africa’s future
Part 2: What is the way forward?
Dani W. Nabudere
2010-09-30, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/498> 498
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67401>
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67401
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/babasteve/2981844874/>
http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/498/67401_women_beach_tmb.jpg
cc B SIf we are to create and provide space and a platform for African
autonomous thinking on issues of the future of the continent, we have to
begin by liberating ourselves from Western ways of thinking and draw
knowledge and inspiration from our own heritages, argues Dani W. Nabudere,
in the second half of a two-part article based on his inaugural address to
the newly formed Nile Heritage Forum on political economy.
The way forward beyond neo-liberal agenda’s is therefore to move towards an
African agenda for social and economic transformation of the continent.
However, as argued above, this requires our linking with the African masses
through learning and unlearning processes, which must encompass both the
African intellectual and the African masses. To move towards the
establishment of the Pan-African University requires developing an
epistemology that can enable us to access the knowledge embedded in our
communities. This is because all knowledge is a creature of languages and
African languages are a store of immense knowledge and wisdom.
We at the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute have been working along these
lines to create an epistemology, which we have called ‘Afrikology’. This has
laid a solid ground for the building of a new African institution, which is
based on the African peoples’ heritage. As the originators of human
knowledge and wisdom, the African people created a basis that enabled other
societies in Asia and Europe to develop a global-universal system of
knowledge that emerged from the first human beings in the Human Cradle
located on the continent of Africa – the original homestead of all humanity.
These activities started with the grassroots research work of Afrika Study
Centre-ASC in pastoral communities in North-Eastern Uganda, beginning with
traditional conflict resolution research aimed at overcoming destructive
cattle rustling that went on between the pastoralists and their agricultural
neighbours. These conflicts had increasingly turned inwards between the
pastoralist communities themselves across the whole region of East Africa.
The research enabled a dialogue to begin within the communities, which later
turned into a questioning of whether the research activities were really
reaching out to the real issues as understood by the pastoralist communities
themselves.
This questioning led to further programmes in the communities and academic
links, including my membership of the US-based Social Science Research
Council’s-SSRC programme on human security and international cooperation in
which I had raised the question of epistemology in dealing with issues of
research and creation of pools of knowledge by scholars and ‘practitioners’.
These ‘field building’ research activities involved new players that led to
a new understanding of knowledge production and application. It was in this
context that the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute-MPAI came into
existence to engage in research at a very high academic level in which we
began to raise issues of epistemology in much more considered form and in
the writing of the first monographs on the issue. These monographs were
later developed into full-fledged monographs on philosophy and epistemology
of Afrikology.
The grassroots research carried out by Afrika Study Centre-ASC produced
results about the way we understood pastoral communities and their knowledge
systems. It led to the questioning of the current Eurocentric
epistemologies, including Cartesian ‘scientific epistemologies’. The second
area of research by ASC was the ‘Field Building’ research activity in which
the challenge made in the SSRC of New York took on a hands-on grassroots
approach in which certain community sites of knowledge were identified and
included in the dialogues. The SSRC idea was to bring together into a ‘pool’
‘all’ knowledge produced by academic scholars and ‘practitioners’ in their
‘intervention’ activities so that such collected knowledge would be
available to all ‘users’. My query was that such a ‘pool’ was not inclusive
of all the knowledge available in Uganda – adding that such a proposed model
would leave all ‘indigenous knowledge’ out of consideration. The SSRC agreed
to the inclusion of custodians of such knowledge in the ‘field building’
activity and it was during this activity that the epistemological issues
became transparent for it turned out that the ‘scholars’ and ‘practitioners’
had long assumed that their disciplines and methodologies covered
‘indigenous knowledge.’ This was rejected by the custodians, who insisted
that their ‘ways of knowing’ (epistemology) were different because they took
into account the communities’ cultural and spiritual values, which ‘modern’
scientific approach ignored and in fact castigated as ‘superstitious’.
This is when the creation of the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute-MPAI
became crucial because it was found that research on epistemological issues
needed to be raised at a high academic level to problematise existing
Western academic disciplines and epistemologies. This led to the first
theoretical paper written by me entitled: ‘Epistemological foundations and
global knowledge production’. This paper was published without authorisation
by the African Political Science Association in their Journal of African
Political Economy (AJOPE).
At this point, the issue of the establishment of a Pan-Afrikan university
was raised in a paper authored by me entitled: ‘Towards the establishment of
the Pan-African University’, which was also published by the African
Political Science Association in their above-mentioned journal. Both these
papers led to debates amongst the MPAI research fellows that led to the
development of discussions on ‘Ways of Knowing’ (epistemology) and ‘Ways of
Being’ (Ontology) as well as the role of culture and language in knowledge
production. The first theoretical paper, which advanced Afrikology as an
epistemology that was capable of reaching out to community sites of
knowledge was also produced by me entitled: ‘Towards an Afrikology of
Knowledge production and African Regeneration’, which was published in the
International Journal of African Renaissance Studies of the University of
South Africa (UNISA). This theoretical paper was further developed and
passed through a series of versions of an expanded monograph, which finally
came to be referred to as: ‘Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness’, which is
being published by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) in Pretoria.
A further effort was made to develop this epistemology and relate it to
research and the concept of ‘Restoration’ which emerged out of the research
on ‘Restorative Justice.’ This resulted in another monograph entitled:
‘Research, Hermeneutics, Transdisciplinarity and Afrikology: Towards a
Restorative Learning and Understanding’. This monograph has been taken on by
the UNISA chair, held by Ugandan academic Catherine Odora Hoppers, who wants
to use to create a framework for developing African knowledge.
As pointed out above, the idea behind Afrikology as an epistemology springs
from the fact that all cultures and languages are the producers of
knowledge. As producers of knowledge, all language communities have
something to offer to the pool of human knowledge. Therefore the many
African languages are a treasure trove of knowledge, which must not just be
‘preserved,’ but reactivated and brought into use to promote African
transformation as well as being available to other communities, hence its
universality.
But since the custodians of this knowledge are the ‘uncertificated’ African
men and women living in rural areas, it follows that they alone can dispense
such knowledge through their universities and centres of higher learning, of
which they shall be part. In fact the ‘African Community Sites of Knowledge’
in this sense have become the biggest universities from which the African
intellectuals can derive their discharge their unlearning and promote a new
‘organic’ restorative learning and understanding through their own languages
– learning through research and listening and dialogue.
Nothing demonstrates better the importance of recognising African Community
Sites of Knowledge than the research work that UNESCO carried out in the
1970s to write a ‘General History of Africa’. According to Professor Curtin
in his chapter in Volume 1 of the ‘UNESCO General History of Africa:
Methodology and African Prehistory’, the process of collecting the data and
information to write such a history was a gradual one, so that with the
re-emergence of an authentically Afrocentric history, the need arose to
‘join forces with the movement for an all-embracing social history’ in the
first place through an interdisciplinary approach combining the histories of
agriculture, urbanisation, and social and economic relations, and
subsequently as a result of these advances made in history based on field
surveys. According to him:
‘The latter approach freed researchers from the constraining influence of
archives in which the documents were often unreliable and were basically
flawed because of the prejudices of the people who compiled them from the
time of the slave trade to the end of the colonial period. The first-hand
verbal accounts of contemporary African victims of colonisation have proved
an effective counterweight to the testimony of official papers. Moreover, as
a result of the methodology evolved for making use of oral tradition,
historians of Africa have become pioneers in that field and have made a
remarkable contribution to its development.’
Professor Curtin continues that this approach, which had been adopted by
some ‘far-sighted scholar-administrators in the colonial service’ and which
enabled them to collect ‘accounts of African traditions’, where
countermanded by academic prejudices of people like Murdock, following the
footsteps of the British functionalist anthropologists by ‘bluntly asserting
that “indigenous oral traditions are completely undependable”’. However,
following the publication of Jan Vansina’s book: ‘Oral Tradition: A Study in
Historical Methodology’ (1961), in which he and other scholars, including
Africans, ‘demonstrated the validity of oral tradition as a historical
source, provided that it was subjected to the necessary critical controls’.
The seminars held later by historians in Dakar in 1961 and in Dar es Salaam
in 1965 had emphasised the same view, ‘as well as the roles of linguistics
and archaeology’, so long as they were also subjected to the same critical
controls, we should add.
Professor Curtin also notes that it was the process of the decolonisation of
African history that also liberated ‘colonial history’ by ‘reversing’ it,
and did away with the presentation of European conquerors ‘as heroes of
civilisation’:
‘In the work of the historians of decolonisation, the picture was completely
changed and aligned more closely to the facts: the heroes were the African
resistance fighters, whereas the conquerors were the leaders of
expeditionary columns and colonial governors, who equated right with might,
a policy always applied with brutality and sometimes with bloody
consequences. A second step forwards was taken when the spotlight was
focussed on the protest and resistance campaigns which, at the height of the
colonial period, were to pave the way for the national liberation
movements.’
These approaches had rendered outstanding service to the other social
sciences, and ‘what achieved this was not the interdisciplinary methodology,
but that for the first time African voices through their oral traditions had
brought out the facts of their heritage and knowledge systems’. The African
decolonisation struggle had even gone further to ‘reverse’ the way history
was henceforth to be written: As a ‘social history’. Primarily, the results
showed that ‘traditional’ Africa had never been static and changeless, as
the prejudiced Eurocentric historians such as Coupland had asserted in the
‘History of East Africa’. The studies from oral tradition also disproved
those economists, historians, political scientists and sociologists who had
split Africa into the ‘before’ and ‘after,’ implying separation of
traditional and ‘modern’ Africa in which the former was depicted as static
and the later as dynamic because it was said to have ‘jolted [Africa] into
action’, because ‘before’ it was ‘a world that had lain sleeping until
them.’ Curtin ends by observing that:
‘It was the English-speaking anthropologists who were most put out by the
revelation that dynamic internal forces had been at work in traditional
African society. As functionalists, they had taken the structures of that
society and had set about isolating the different agents or groups that had
played a specific role in the original balanced state of things; their
method entailed analysing the real and observable present and sifting out
everything that might have been added since the arrival of the Europeans, so
as to end up with an indigenous “model” in the pristine state, in a sort of
timeless “anthropological present”. It is true that this approach, which was
dominated by the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, helped give an insight into
the workings of societies. But this partiality for an Africa that was as
‘primitive’ as possible and, what is more, was immobilized in the museum of
the ethnological present, tended to strip the peoples of Africa of one of
their most important dimensions: their historical development. Consequently,
historical studies had a positive impact on functionalism by recalling that
the present is by definition transient.’
In his preface to the ‘General History’, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the
director-general of UNESCO, observed that since the European Middle Ages,
which was the drawing line between the European dark ages and the modern
era, the new Europe was used as the yard stick for judging other societies,
although the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, based on oral tradition, were rightly
regarded as essential sources of the history of ancient Greece from which
Europe was claiming its heritage for their renaissance. Much of this source
also contained elements of African history, but this was ignored and African
oral tradition, the collective memory of peoples of Africa that ‘holds the
thread of many events marking their lives, was rejected as worthless.’
But, M’Bow added, African oral tradition and history, ‘after being long
despised, has now emerged as an invaluable instrument for discovering the
history of Africa, making it possible to follow the movements of its
different peoples in both space and time, to understand the African vision
of the world from inside and to grasp the original features of the values on
which the cultures and institutions of the continent is based.
Therefore, we have a peoples’ history as the entry point in going deeper
into the African soul to discover what Africa stood for and what it offers
today. The oral tradition and the hieroglyphs as well as the archaeological
sources, literature, art, religion, philosophy all offer the opportunity to
bridge the confusing ‘paradigms’, methodologies and scientific
epistemologies that have alienated humankind from historical bearings
rendering modern society into a materialistic, greedy and immoral society
that foregrounds self-interest above community. The attempt to bridge these
confusing academic disciplines has been done by Afrikology, which is a
transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production.
The other ‘aberration’ was the ‘ethnographic contempt for the sequence of
events’ and a tendency to concentrate on structures and a certain linguistic
approach that became ‘blind and deaf’ to the dynamics of language, which was
also the weakness of functionalist anthropologists. Therefore, for African
historians, the interdisciplinary approach was not a question of choice, but
one of necessity and in this respect M’Bow regarded oral tradition as a
‘fully-fledged historical source’.
In this respect too, Ki-Zerbo placed emphasis on linguistics, which he
regarded a an ‘inexhaustible historical source, for tradition is
encapsulated in the living museum of language’. It is not only a
psychological entity, its vocabulary ‘is like sedimentary layer in which the
realities forged by each people’s history are deposited.’ He added: ‘But
conversely, it is language, the “word”, which conveys the ideological and
cultural or political messages and which makes and unmakes history and makes
it afresh by creating the ideas and rules governing behaviour. Some of the
concepts involved are untranslatable because they bear the stamp of an
entire culture.’
It seems to me that the real problem here is the idea of the academic
disciplines themselves and the epistemology upon which they are based. Once
we accept that we have to operate within these disciplines in order to
‘recreate images of [African] social life’, ostensibly one that projects
their authentic selves, it is naïve, in my humble opinion, to expect that
people who have been trained and ‘disciplined’ to see African society from
the outside and whose disciplinary concepts and ways of thinking are imbued
with prejudices built within the disciplines conceptual frameworks and
language, can abandon these conceptual framework unless they have
internalised another epistemological framework that accords with the
communal and oral character of the African wholeness, which Afrikology seeks
to overcome.
In short, the scholars must be ideological transformed to see through the
conceptual and theoretical frameworks they use and to cope different
meanings that cannot sometimes be not only linguistically translatable but
even epistemologically consistent with the new concepts found within the
African traditions themselves. It is also idealistic and naïve to expect the
intellectuals to just ‘change’ their ‘outlook’ and work coherently with
other equally segmented and academically fragmented disciplined individuals,
whose ideological positions might be incompatible. This is even more so if
new centres of research and learning have to be organisationally structured
to accommodate this fragmentation and compartmentalisation, where the
epistemological and ideological elements are already pre-determined in the
structures to be erected and the individuals to be deployed.
These Eurocentric epistemological and methodological approaches must be
undermined if we are to make any progress in advancing scholarship under
conditions of an African ‘renaissance’ and regeneration. African scholars
together with the African masses have to create a new world by being able to
recognise their existing cosmological worlds. As we move ‘from the outside
to the inside’, we have to define new approaches of understanding that are
appropriate to the African world. Academic disciplines in Europe arose with
the needs of the time to serve particular interests. They were not created
by God for all times and for all societies. They are human creations that
serve particular (class) interests.
Prof Ki-Zerbo himself argues that it is an ‘imperative requirement’ that
African history ‘should at last be seen from within instead of being
interpreted through references to other societies, readymade ideas and
prejudices.’ It is time for us, he challenges, ‘to take an inside look at
our identity and our growing awareness.’ He is particularly bothered by the
fact that ‘our history is being explained by a whole series of words and
concepts that have come from Europe or other continents and that translate –
and quite often betray – realities and structures created in another
linguistic and social context.’ But we cannot do this, if at the same time,
we detach the academic disciplines from their concepts and prejudices by
adopting interdisciplinary methodologies, which he advocated. To do so, we
would be moving in vicious circles with the blissful hope that these same
academic disciplines will deliver us from the problems we seek to overcome.
So long as the ‘scientific methodologies’, that were ideologically
‘constructed’ to animalise the African people are not themselves
problematised, deconstructed and new epistemologies developed based on
African cosmogonies, it will be difficult to ‘domesticate’ these same
academic disciplines to re-humanise the world. Linguistic gimmicks will not
do unless these are built on the principle that African languages are the
tools through which a dialogue is possible that alone can promote their
self-understanding and orient African scholars towards their own societies.
This can only be achieved through a holistic, trans-disciplinary Afrikology
that foregrounds dialogue through African languages, which are holistic and
non-fragmented according to academic ‘disciplines.’
Even in the area of linguistics that we all believe should be at the core of
our work, and it is in fact in this area that we can be inspired to develop
new ways of knowing ourselves, there is a lot of innovative work that has to
be done.
Professor Greenberg adds that the Africa displays a greater degree of
linguistic complexity than other continents and that the classification of
African languages that has so far been carried out by mainly western
linguists have created even more confusion because by following their
individual conceptualisations, ’the linguistic divisions constructed by one
researcher or another are disturbingly reminiscent of the colonial divisions
of yesteryear’ [Greenberg, 1989: 121]. To cure this problem, he calls for
more monographs to be written so that more ‘scientific identifications of
the outlines of the groups that may exist between the major “families” and
the basic units, which are currently the only irrefutable evidence.’ For
this to be done, Greenberg, calls for Africans scholars themselves to do
this work and this cannot be done in my view without the African griots and
other indigenous linguistic experts becoming part of the process of research
and teaching.
This work was in fact begun with the pioneering attempt by Cheikh Anta Diop
to link the Egyptian language with several West African languages followed
by the work of Professor Theophile Obenga in the same field. It was with
their work and struggle that the ancient Egyptian language, which had
previously been linked to Semitic group of languages, was corrected at the
UNESCO Symposium organised in Cairo in 1974 on ‘The Peopling of Ancient
Egypt’ to be part of the family of African languages. This major achievement
brought nearer the acknowledgement of Egypt as an African civilisation and
not an Asiatic one as had been argued by the Eurocentric ‘Egyptologists.’
The essence of the matter is that African scholars must be prepared to do
the kind of research that is original and that can enable them to abandon
Eurocentric clothing of academia and engage in dialogue with the experts in
their communities. They have to admit that in that case, they alone cannot
determine the research agenda from above, but must humble themselves to come
under the feet of the African sages and griots, just like the Greek students
like Plato did in Egypt to learn at the feet of the Egyptian scribes.
The designing of the research is not a top-down affair. It has to involve
those who have the knowledge and information required for whatever is
desired to be achieved by the research. In that case, the methodology cannot
be predetermined. It has to be ‘negotiated’ with those ‘who know’ and during
this process, the problem of the academic disciplines in which the
hypotheses are formulated will be determined by the result of the dialogue
between the researcher and (the researched) – those who know. The crucial
question will be: ‘What is the purpose of the knowledge to be created?’ Is
it for knowledge’s sake, or is it intended to result in some good for the
community who will participate in such a research and knowledge production?
This question cannot be answered in the abstract. It can only be answered
with the people who can produce the knowledge and for whom it should be
produced because they will know what use it is for.
Time has come when the African elites must stop looking down at their
community compatriots as ignorant and illiterate, while the villagers look
upon them as agents of foreign culture and economic interests. Hostility
exists between the two and there is no trust between them since
relationships between them is based on top-down ‘development’ dictates
passed on by the elite to the ‘ignorant masses’. This is the reason why
African cultures and civilisation have stagnated, only changing to
accommodate foreign-inspired solutions.
If we are therefore we are to create and provide space and platform for
African autonomous thinking on issues of the future of the continent, free
from disadvantageous foreign influences that have resulted in Africa’s
weakening, we have to begin by liberating ourselves from the dominant
epistemologies and adopt such an epistemology such as Afrikology that can
enable us to draw knowledge and inspiration from our own heritages, which
our people created through their languages.
This knowledge is a living knowledge and incorporates our heritages. A Nile
Heritage has deep roots in the origins of the Human Cradle, which is located
in the Nile Valley. Ethiopian, Nubian and Egyptian civilisations were its
flowering. Since then, our heritage was invaded and taken over by foreigners
in Egypt and now in the rest of the continent. This injurious invasion must
be fought back as the struggle in the Sudan has demonstrated. It is a long
and arduous struggle, which must not only take an armed form. It has
foremost to take the form of RESISTANCE THROUGH KNOWLEDGE and such knowledge
is to be found deep in our heritage. So let us work on it. We are very much
behind time.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* Read <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67237> Part 1 of ‘The
global capitalist crisis and Africa’s future’
* This paper has been written without references only for purposes of
discussion at the inaugural conference of the Nile Heritage Initiative, held
in Nairobi on 9 September 2010. It is not to be quoted from or extracted
without the prior authorisation of the author.
* Professor Dani W. Nabudere is executive director of the Marcus-Garvey
Pan-Afrikan Institute, Mbale, Uganda.
* Please send comments to <mailto:editor@pambazuka.org>
editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>
Pambazuka News.
