The global capitalist crisis and Africa’s future

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.

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* Read 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 [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.