Afrikology and Transdisciplinarity: A Restorative Epistemology

8. The Deconstruction Of The Hegemonic Undirectional Scholarship

117 Dani W Nabudere 8. The Deconstruction 8. The Deconstruction Of The Hegemonic Of The Hegemonic Undirectional Scholarship Undirectional Scholarship The fundamental weakness to be confronted if we are to move beyond the unidirectional and single level understanding of reality and its ‘scientific’ claims lies in reclaiming the moral ground for all knowledge. This is the issue that Cheikh Anta Diop has drawn attention to in his consistent struggle to recover what was lost of the Egyptian knowledge systems, much of which was embedded in the mystery systems. Since the modern Western grip on knowledge production tightened itself around the globe, all knowledge production has come to be judged for its validity from the Western scientific epistemologies, which has increasingly lost any link with the sacred. These scientific epistemologies and paradigms have increasingly come under critique even within the confines of the scientific community, which as we saw, led to the quantum revolution of the 1920s. But these scientific paradigms have continued to control knowledge production because of its apparent success in developing usable technologies. This epistemology has consistently degraded African history, African society, African civilisation and dehumanised the African person. A. The recovery of ancient Egypt as black civilisation Nevertheless, African scholars, among others, have continued to attack this one-sided academic rejection of the old world, their epistemologies and experiences, which Martin Bernal called the ‘Ancient Model’ [Bernal 1987] and have succeeded in helping to deconstruct these Eurocentric and Western-centric epistemologies and include other achievements. The most consistent attack has come from African scholars and scholars of African descent. Going by Professor Thompson, Jacob Carruthers has classified these scholars into three categories, but to which a fourth and even a fifth generation could be added. The first category, he calls the ‘Old 118 Africa Institute of South Africa Afrikology and Transdisciplinarity: A restorative epistemology Scrapper tradition’ consists of those scholars who, according to Carruthers, ‘without any special training, but with a sincere dedication to ferreting out the truth about the Black past and destroying the big lie of Black historical and cultural inferiority’ and they did this by taking ‘whatever data was available and squeezed as much truth as possible from it as circumstances allowed.’ They also used the ancient European works of people like Herodotus and Diodorus apart from Biblical interpretations, and ‘whatever modern European works they could find’ [Carruthers op. cit. 36]. The second category of scholars, Carruthers, calls the ‘integrationists,’ led by scholars such as George Washington Williams and W. E. B. Dubois, who according to Carruthers, argued that Blacks had a share in building the Egyptian civilisation ‘along with other races.’ According to Carruthers, ‘this strain is completely enthralled to European historiography.’ Some of them demanded a Black share in Greek antiquity, which according to them ‘if properly understood is true.’ He calls this group of scholars ‘Negro Intellectuals’ whom he accuses of lacking a ‘grasp of meaning’ [Ibid: 3637 ]. The third category of scholars is the group whom Carruthers called a ‘progressive extension’ of old scrappers, such as Diop, Obenga, Yosef ben Jochannan and Chancellor Williams. Carruthers says this group had developed ‘multidisciplinary skills to take command of the facts of the African past, which is a necessary element of the foundation of African historiography’ to overcome the colonizers’ historiography, which was fragmented. A central task for these scholars is to purge the African-Egyptian historiography of Khaldunic assumptions according to which the rise and fall of the African dynasties was due to the corruption that arose out of their successes. Carruthers proposed a conference which would deal with this issue including the drafting of a ‘historiographical statement’ on the pre-18th dynasty period of the Egyptian past. Carruthers correctly reminds us that the only correct epistemological approach is the Shabaka Text, which focuses on the heart or mind as the source of the truth and that: ‘it is the tongue that repeats what the mind (heart) thinks, therefore, it is through what the mind (heart) thinks and the tongue directs that the whole divine order has come about’ [Ibid: 38]. We shall come back to this issue below, because it is vitally crucial in reinventing the ancient wisdom. The struggle to restate the correctness of the ancient world of Egypt was joined in 1987 by Professor Martin Bernal, an Oxford Don, who in his book, Black Athena, referred to the above, tried to vindicate the Ancient Model 119 The...