Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness: An Epistemology

Why Afrikology is different from other African approaches

124 Africa Institute of South Africa Why Afrikology is different Why Afrikology is different from other African approaches We have defined Afrikology as an epistemology – a philosophy of knowledge production – emanating from the Cradle of Humanity in Africa. We have demonstrated that it is not an ethno-centric philosophy but geographical in that it was first located on the African continent and historical in its origins on the African continent. As many scholars have noted, it is from here that knowledge in the form of ‘archetypes’ ‘streamed out’ to the rest of the world [cf. Jung, Massey, Rice]. In fact we have seen above how the Greeks were able to get their education in Egypt, through which modern Europe attained its current status [cf. Diop, Bernal]. In the course of the African people’s struggle to defend their heritage and its universal influence, the African intellectuals, especially the scholars and political elites and people of African descent, have put forward a variety of ‘perspectives’, ‘paradigms’, ‘ideas’ and ‘ideologies’ to counteract the one-sided Western viewpoint about the role that Africa has played in history. They problematised and interrogated this one-sided view of Africa and asserted its originality. These struggles took the form of the early attempts to reconnect Africa with ancient Egypt in the work of Delany, Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Sylvester Williams, Kwame Nkrumah and many others, which culminated in the political philosophy of Pan-Africanism. At the academic level and continuing the work of Delany, Garvey, Du Bois, Diop, Obenga and others, a challenging response to Western philosophical arrogance was checked and indeed halted in the partial victory over the reclaiming of Egypt, a battle which continues. The political struggle that ensued in the process of rolling back the Western, especially Eurocentric, construction of political reality resulted in enhancing the African peoples’ political struggle against slavery, colonialism and apartheid, which led to the Civil Rights Movement in the USA and the achievement of political independence of the continent by the 1960s and 1990s in Southern Africa. This struggle, which had its high watermark around the 1960s, led to the struggle and successful challenge against some of the false academic disciplines which degraded and dehumanised Africans. Academic 125 Why Afrikology is different from other African approaches Dani W Nabudere disciplines such as anthropology and its various sub-disciplines, as well as history, which denied the Africans dignity, were challenged and, in the process, it was discovered that the mainstream and dominant Eurocentric epistemologies in these disciplines had disregarded the existing knowledge and previous civilisational achievements that Africa had played a leading role in creating. The African was found to be not the abnormal and backward ‘others’ but central in the evolution of human civilisation. It was also found that the Eurocentric ‘method’ of writing history distorted the real experiences of the people of the world, including Africans, in that it only took into account the stories of the hitherto Western ruling classes and their institutions and ignored the stories of the oppressed classes and voices in those countries as well. This is what research in African history as a popular history revealed and this, to some extent, helped to liberate history from Eurocentric obscuranticism by incorporating oral texts into sources of history, which were originally rejected. These challenges to Eurocentric epistemology unravelled the academic disciplines by fragmenting them even further into sub-disciplines and new methods and methodologies. This exposure has rendered the field of knowledge production incomprehensible, even to the academics themselves, as knowledge became increasingly compartmentalised. Philosophy, which had been turned into a ‘scientific’ discipline, could not help put these disciplines together again since it had itself become a fragmented field no longer able to constitute a core part of the humanities. The fragmentation resulted in the craze for new approaches such as ‘multidisciplinarity’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’, which were intended to cement together some of the fragmented social science disciplines and humanities. But, as discussed, such an approach also proved problematic and contributed to the disintegration of knowledge into a maze of incomprehension, calling even further for a more integrated approach to knowledge production under the rubric ‘transdisciplinarity’. It is in the context of these developments that African intellectuals have intensified attacks against European ethnocentric construction of knowledge, some of which have called for an African-specific perspective to knowledge production, governance and even economic management. These new approaches are continuing to be articulated, and it is in the course of this continuing search for a new...